Episode #3: Erika and Gabe reminisce about SOPA and PIPA and review key considerations in running shoe selection.
Listen to the show here. And send any questions or comments to running@muledesign.com.
]]>
Episode #3: Erika and Gabe reminisce about SOPA and PIPA and review key considerations in running shoe selection.
Listen to the show here. And send any questions or comments to running@muledesign.com.
]]>
Click to see the old MLive.com
Mlive.com is the leading source of news and information for the state of Michigan, incorporating the output of eight local newspapers in towns from Bay City to Grand Rapids.
]]> We collaborated with the Mlive.com team to completely reimagine what a local news experience could be—exciting, responsive, and community-oriented. We interviewed current Mlive.com users throughout the state to find out what mattered most to them. And we explored all the options for what was technologically feasible with available time and resources.The result is bright and bold, a new home page and navigation system with a layout that cuts down on clutter while offering people clear paths to the stories and features they care about. We designed a flexible system to allow editors a variety of options for featuring top stories, as well as breaking news and ongoing series.
You can select and save a local edition to focus on one of ten regions, or stay statewide for broader coverage. No matter which edition you choose, you can filter the latest stories by location or topic, without leaving the page. We strove to create a nimble, app-like experience that enables exploration, and lets content come to the fore.
For quick access to local voices, offers, and things to do, we pulled entertainment and restaurant listings, blogs and classifieds listings together in a convenient Community Center.
The final product is responsive on the desktop and terrific on tablets. We like it and we hope the people of Michigan do too.
]]>
Episode #2: Erika and Gabe discuss the pros and cons of using an NDA to protect intellectual property and debate the necessity of hiding one’s hideous mutilated toenails.
Listen to the show here. And send any questions or comments to running@muledesign.com.
]]>
Episode #36: Mike and Katie sit down with John Gruber himself and discuss the trouble with “booth babes”, conferences, and iconic jerseys from the biggest asshole teams in the USA.
Listen to the show here. And send any questions or comments to makemistakes@muledesign.com.
]]>My boss Wil didn’t even want to have a booth. Those things cost a fortune and require tons of time to plan and operate. But I was a giant nerd, had never been to Macworld, and was worried by the buzz that it was Apple’s last year at the expo. We HAD to go to Macworld.
I did some thinking and came up with a concept to pitch: a booth modeled like a cozy library with bookshelves that look just like the ones in Delicious Library. We could dress as “Delicious Librarians” (don’t tell me that wasn’t clever!) complete with nerd glasses and name tags. My coworkers and I stayed up late one night planning everything out so we could present the idea to Wil. He loved it, and gave us the go-ahead to do the booth as long as he didn’t have to do any work on it; he was busy trying to ship an app, after all.
]]> In the months leading up to it, Maja worked her ass off getting us registered with IDG, coordinating our travel, and handling logistics I still can’t grasp to this day. Terry spent days sewing, grommeting, and fireproofing custom curtains (blood was shed). Come January, the three of us flew to San Francisco. We bought twelve Billy bookcases from IKEA, wheeled them to the convention center, and built them ourselves. I bought 216 books from Goodwill and schlepped them over to Moscone in a crummy old suitcase. We carried a 9ft fake tree up Market street because it wouldn’t fit in a cab. Our booth rocked. After four 8-hour days at the Expo, our limbs were sore and our voices were gone.
And what did we get out of it? Well, we turned a profit for one. But we mostly got called booth babes and asked if our boss put us up to it.
It’s likely that the visitors to the company’s Expo booth might have forgotten all about the finer points of Delicious Library 2 while chatting with the folks hired to promote the software.
Expo Notes: A last look at the weird and the wonderful | Macworld
I’ve spent a few years recovering my reputation, trying to be known more as a fancy business lady and less as one of those Delicious Monster “promo girls”. I especially try to lay low when all these debates about booth babes go down on the internet. It’s embarrassing that I was once one of those girls!
But you know what? Fuck everyone who ever called us booth babes. Fuck everyone who thought that our wearing pencil skirts must have meant everything was some other dude’s idea. We designed, built, and ran everything at that booth and I’ll always be proud of the work we did there.
]]>
Episode #1: In this first episode of Running from the Law, Erika Hall and Gabe Levine discuss some California legislation that could affect design shops and other small businesses, the joys of endurance training, hiring penalties, and Nip Guards.
Listen to the show here. And send any questions or comments to running@muledesign.com.
]]>
Episode #35: In an especially dissociative episode of Let’s Make Mistakes, Mike Monteiro and Katie Gillum speculate wildly about the similarities between design and law. They find a way to do volunteer work that doesn’t have to suck, and Mike ruins a perfectly good anecdote about House of Hose in Spokane.
Listen to the show here. And send any questions or comments to makemistakes@muledesign.com.
]]>Advertising.
Advertising online has been pretty much the same since day one:
The only things that have changed are the size and delivery technologies to take advantage of bigger screens and bigger pipes. And that’s the problem. The general pitch behind web advertising depends on there being a block of certain pixel dimensions that is sold along with position and number of clicks. The web advertising world is not set up to deal in percentage widths, and they’re certainly not going to deal with ads that may or may not show up depending on the width of a user’s browser window.
]]> Nope, it’s going to take a major, fundamental shift in strategy to include advertising in a responsive site. Go look through the sites at Media Queries and count how many have ad space on them. Then count the ones that have more than one or two sizes of ad.Now go look at the current list of IAB ad sizes.
There are ways that we as designers can work around the current limitations in web advertising:
But each of those will affect the sales that a client’s advertising department can make, and they’re not really long-term solutions. Is the client willing to shoulder that burden? A change like this will take clients who are ready to look at the long-term success of their site and who are willing to let the ad revenue dip for a little bit while they figure out a new strategy. And whatever that new strategy is, it has to be something the ad people can sell. (Fellow Mule developer Jim Ray pointed out the example of MSNBC’s ServeView, which takes a sort of Ajax-y approach and serves ads only when the block containing them is actually on screen. It results in fewer impressions, but each impression is more valuable because you know the user has scrolled to where the ad is. While it doesn’t specifically address flexible sizing, this kind of approach makes a lot of sense for a responsive site.)
This is as much a business problem as it is a design problem, if not more so. As a design problem, this is pretty simple to solve, once we have some parameters to work with. But the advertising business is a big ship with a lot of barnacles and doesn’t turn quickly. If we sit around and hope that responsive ads will just show up one day, responsive design will be relegated to the edges of web: company sites, personal sites, portfolio sites.
What we know at Mule now is that if a client expresses interest in responsive design, that client has to be ready to discuss how that design will affect their advertising strategy.
How are you handling the intersection of advertising and responsive design?
Do you know of an ad network that is actively pursuing responsive ad formats?
]]>
Episode #34: Mike and Katie talk about the social skills wrought on the little diamond, hardwood, and gridiron; the problems of Pro Bono work and volunteering; and how one person can start to right a bad design culture. And they want to hear about your mistakes!
Listen to the show here. And send any questions or comments to makemistakes@muledesign.com.
]]>
Episode #33: Forced church attendance, television, the technology of textbooks, trying new things, and designer resolutions. Mike and Katie talk about all this and more on this week’s Let’s Make Mistakes.
Listen to the show here. And send any questions or comments to makemistakes@muledesign.com.
]]>Most people do not just hang out and think about web pages for fun, they’re there to do something, so we need to think about the very specific tasks that they want to do there and the information they need to make decisions or complete tasks.
…I’m engaged everyday in producing ‘research’ and ‘creative’ things like the Let’s Make Mistakes podcast or my own film work or stuff with the Disposable Film Festival, [and] no matter what I’m doing I am trying to make sure that everyone has a totally clear understanding of what and why we’re doing things and that the things I’m spending time on are making things better. So I approach the beginning of a research period the same way I approach production of a film. Obviously there are different tasks involved, but the same themes are there throughout: figure out who the audience is, figure out what they want, agree on the medium and general purpose and then develop an idea with those contraints.
Read the full interview here, which includes talk on the web as a giant system in itself, the relationship between researcher and designer, and the best sum-up/put-down of bad marketing tactics: “A click is not love, despite how much it feels like it at 3am when you’re looking at analytics.”
]]>Designers are, by definition, problem-solvers. And the world has never been so blessedly full of problems. Our infrastructure is rotting, the economy is crap, Wall Street is awash with criminals and millions of people can’t get basic medical care, food, and water. We don’t need another app to rate your sandwich. We don’t need to know when we go to sleep and get up. We do not need digital farms. We need real ones. We need fresh water. We need solutions for the apocalypse.
—Over at .net magazine, Mike supplies a few ways you (yes, you!) can better approach design, shed excuses and doubt, and oh yeah, lay off your mother (for once). As the man says, this year’s gonna be a goddamned golden age. We couldn’t be more excited.
]]>
Episode #32: Mike Monteiro and Katie Gillum spend their last episode of 2011 talking through why Louis C.K.’s comedy experiment works so well, high level and low level mistakes, and saying goodbye.
Listen to the show here. And send any questions or comments to makemistakes@muledesign.com.
]]>
Episode #31: This week Mike and Katie discuss mixing design work and family in a discussion that ends up being about whether you can ever go home again. They also talk about asking leading research questions, using fake metrics, and a little more about bad names for blankets.
Listen to the show here. And send any questions or comments to makemistakes@muledesign.com.
]]>
Episode #30: Mike and Katie celebrate the season of sharing and crying by getting visitors at the annual Mule holiday party to share their biggest holiday mistakes. And because mistakes have no season, they get stories about Christmas mistakes, Passover mistakes, Festivus, Super Bowl, and many other mistakes.
Listen to the show here. And send any questions or comments to makemistakes@muledesign.com.
]]>