out of class today

The images below are listed in reverse from E to A because of the upload order. The only one I really like is the splash page, which is version C. Though it doesn't really look like it, these took an unusually long time to complete.

I'm out sick so I'm not in class, though Im also still trying to make these pages make sense and look good. Not having much luck right now. Any comments are appreciated. I'll be posting more on the weekend if anyone is curious.

thanks,
E

Visual Design Round 2

Image E: Image D, with photography in background position



Image D: Unique Selling Point (Summer Solstice) Sub-Page, Collapsed Nav



Image C: Whole Page as Navigation/Wayfinding





Image B: "Peeking From The Forest" Intro Page





Image A: "Light Pen" header and "Clean Floor" image treatment

A little behind on the videos

This looks like a great weekend to catch up on these videos. Once I started watching the CSS videos, I started to see the implementation flaws in my layouts. I'm reading up on something called the sliding door trick, which is a basic graphic animation technique using CSS positioning, and hopefully it can help me implement ideas C, D, and E in the next post. If not then I'll be depending on really heavy background images to create the final project.

Note to self, concerning photography

We are responsible for obtaining either fully licensed photography or self-generated images for use on our websites. I may have to find a beach campsite that allows campfires or bonfires to obtain the images I want.

A loose development sketch (splash)

This is based on the layout of the first design trial from last week, but represents the shift to the celebration during dusk instead of in the dark. I'm still working on the idea of "standing for the light" and trying to boil it down further.

Stand for the light (a working title): wireframe variations on the website

Accessibility friendly per the NPS.gov style, with touches of my design trial last week:



Flickr-style thumbnail navigation, for user-uploaded photos:



Design Observer-style super-wide sidebar:



A few modifications of my original sketch of the site:

A first pass at a site-map

Early front-page comps for Muir Beach Summer Solstice

Here's a first pass at what the site could look like. I really want to try one this weekend that features illustrations, or hyper-realistic photography in the vein of what Alex was showing in the first week. But I sort of like this first pass with pilfered photos and Gotham text.

Selecting a title for this online experience

While building all the personas and maps for Muir Woods Summer Solstice mini-site, I started to get a better idea of how to summarize the experience for the largest (expected) audience for the site. I've been playing with these phrases, trying to make them into shorter and more precise titles. I'm also struggling to integrate some newer information about my particular event, which is that the event occurs on Muir Beach, and is centered around where Redwood Creek leaves Muir Woods and meets the sea.

There comes a point when brevity is not necessarily wit, nor helpful for that matter. Here is a list of proposed titles/synopses for the MWSS mini-site:

EXPERIENCE FOR YOURSELF THE TIMELESS WONDER OF THE SUMMER SOLSTICE AT MUIR BEACH.

THE LONGEST DAY OF THE YEAR IS ALSO THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY: EXPERIENCE THE SUMMER SOLSTICE AT MUIR BEACH.

SUMMER SOLSTICE AT MUIR BEACH: RE-LIVE THE TRADITIONS OF TRIBES AND CENTURIES LONG FORGOTTEN.

DAYLIGHT TAKES ITS LAST STAND AGAINST THE NIGHT: EXPERIENCE SUMMER SOLSTICE AT MUIR BEACH.

Mood boards, combined

Per Mauro's request, I have combined images from last week's two mood boards, choosing first the images which had some sort of meaningful visual impact, then combing through these images for visual assets like color palettes pictures, and textures. I think these get me closer to understanding how to address the aesthetics for Muir Woods: Primal, earth derived colors, animal and plant textures, and images of people entranced by the ritual lighting of a campfire or bonfire.

New Mood Board


Derived Palette and Textures

Experience maps: version 3 vs. original

Somewhere between the drafts of the first experience maps and version 1, I had managed to complicate things a bit. For (the long lost) version 2 and 3, I reduced the list of audience messages to three. The primary message is meant to appeal to those who want to gather on a day that has been declared important, and almost sacred, almost in the way that New Years' Day is celebrated. The secondary appeals are for volunteerism, and for the NPS' other goal of co-sponsoring summer and winter solstice events in local parks throughout the Bay Area.

Experience Map, version 3:


Experience Map, original:


Experience Map, beta 1:


Experience Map, beta 2:

Khoi Vinh on grids, the web, and standards-based CSS

Khoi Vinh is the creative mind behind subtraction.com, an art and technology blog, and the design director for the New York Times. At the South by Southwest conference for culture and technology, he gave a slideshow presentation that suggested a grid-based re-thinking of the Yahoo.com website. There's all sorts of CSS and standards-based discussion in this PDF. Thought you guys might get some real value out of his presentation.

[link to PDF]

Mood Boards for Muir Woods Summer Solstice 2009

Muir Woods Summer Solstice: Get Connected with Nature
For people who are looking to connect with their place in the big picture, with respect to the sheer magnitude and beauty of the natural environment, Muir Woods Summer Solstice is the event to attend.

Muir Woods Summer Solstice: Explore Your Relationship With Humankind
Muir Woods Summer Solstice offers a tribal look at our relationship with each other as well as nature, with gatherings, stories, and the atmosphere of the woods as the dramatic backdrop.

Experience Map for Muir Woods Summer Solstice Mini-Site

While mapping this out in class, I learned that my initial map concentrated too much on the macro-level effects of the site; that is, getting attendance numbers to increase, managing that information to feed back to the Park Service and the designers, and closing the feedback loop. What I should have been doing is locating and mapping ways to increase levels of commitment for the end user in greater and greater amounts throughout the process. There is a missing component, which allows past visitors to post pictures of previous visits to the event. I left it off this time to reflect the first year of the site implementation, which does not have any photos available to view.

[PDF download link]

pulling the audience into a commitment spiral

The act of securing commitment to attend a national park is far more open-ended than trying to get someone to buy a new car. I keep comparing my experience map to that of Mitsubishi that was shown in class, just to get a grasp of how aggressive I need to be at every stage (and even if there need to be multiple stages) of engagement. After all I'm really only involved in the production of the mini-site, though how people get there and what they do once they arrive are fully in my purview. I'm trying to integrate a small printed brochure, mini-poster or sticker element to close the end of the spiral tighter. Maybe it's unnecessary. Gotta give that a little more thought. More TK.

New Personas

Teresa Morales
20, Small Town Girl in the Big City
She moved to San Francisco to take her creative writing classes. She loves storytelling, because it reminds her of her of family camping trips in the foothills near her childhood home, especially the stories her grandfather used to tell. Teresa is looking to reconnect with this feeling of mythology through the eyes of community. The brands that draw her interests are Sundance and Lands End, mostly goods ordered from mail order catalogs.


Rufino Rodriquez
16, Teen in the Urban Comfort Zone
He lives in the Fillmore District of San Francisco with his parents and a younger brother, and lives a largely urban life of mall shopping and skateboarding. His shopping habits reflect this lifestyle, from his Vans sneakers to his Hurley hoodie. His best friend Paul used to go for short hikes in Muir Woods when he was growing up, and has convinced Rufino to leave his urban comforts and join him and his family for a day. Rufino is a little intimidated by anything outside of the city, and needs some reassurance that he isn't going to be in an otherwise unsafe situation.


Diondra Billington
27, Penny Pinching Newlywed
She's a substitute teacher from Pacifica, who with her husband is saving up for the down payment on a new house. They don't spend a lot of money on entertainment options as a result. Lately, they heard about a special day at Muir Woods which sounds relatively inexpensive and romantic in a fun way. Diondra loves to do small, couple-y things with Bill, but she could use a little more information about what to expect for the whole day of events at the Summer Solstice. They love antiques and DIY, so they read Readymade magazine and shop for handmades on Etsy.com.


Sonny Akhtar
34, FiDi Hotshot headed for Burnout
Sonny is a stock trader, who has seen his client's fortunes tumble, is feeling the stress of the everyday. He keeps a pretty busy schedule but needs to find a weekend getaway to get centered. He is really looking for something that takes just a few hours, as he is on-call even on weekends. The Summer Solstice event looks like a great change of pace for him, but he isn't sure how long it will take or what to expect. This need for efficiency and planning is key in his decision-making. Even in buying clothes, he will simply walk into a single department store and buy an entire season's worth all at once, from a single designer.


Dale Tomlinson
45, BoHo Nature Guide
Dale is a dogwalker, rock climbing instructor, and outdoorsman with a very flexible schedule. He goes on nature hikes everywhere, but likes to take newbies to Muir Woods first, since the trails are more established. He is somewhat likely to attend the Summer Solstice event, but wants to make sure there's something at the event he hasn't seen before that makes the day truly special, since he's at the park often enough already. He can usually be found decked out in REI and Patagonia gear.

Audience Persona Redux: At The Tipping Point

In last week's class, we discussed the shortcomings of the personas I had built. Specifically, these personal models were sub-optimal due to the fact that none of them seemed to have any particular inclination to participate in the Muir Woods Summer Solstice event. The point of the persona development was to necessarily locate and define those individuals who were at the tipping point of the attendance process, or at least close enough to the gravitational pull of the outer reaches of the purchase/buy-in funnel that they would be an easy "get."



So it looks I missed that part the first time around. I listened to a few chapters of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point audiobook, and tried to use his three categories of people who are most likely to spread an idea to the point of marketplace acceptance. He lists Connectors, Salesmen, and Mavens as these categories, and hopefully it will become obvious which of these characteristics my new set of personas are associated with, either as these types of people or the kind to follow their influence.

Photos from Muir Woods

I had the opportunity to visit Muir Woods last weekend. It was a fun hike, and helped me simplify my approach to this exercise. I realized that it wasn't necessary to pull the wool over the eyes of today's jaded youth to get them to enjoy the idea of Muir Woods or of green spaces in general. In fact, they're probably expecting something like that, to be fed some over-hyped yet subversive messaging by a ham-fisted advertising agency. I think that the nature of nature is enough of an appeal on its own, augmented by the mythology of the Solstice itself. From an aesthetic and storytelling standpoint, a very organically (forgive the pun) developed message is almost inevitable.

Persona Exercise

The following profiles make up the group of personas that I developed as potential visitors to my Muir Woods Summer Solstice mini-site. I actively tried to vary their levels of interest in nature, technology, and consumption, to better understand what universal thread could be used to appeal to these disparate types of consumers.

But another take on this is maybe that I don't need to appeal to all of these groups. My contact at the National Park Service indicated that both Solstice-related events are often crowded and sold-out, so they would like to promote thematically similar events at parks inside the city. I think that an information campaign that explains the significance of the main celebration, and borrowing from the high profile that Muir Woods already enjoys would help to drive traffic to these derivative events. 

Teresa Morales, 18, of San Francisco is a fan of stories and mythology. She attends SFSU, taking classes in sociology and English. A fiction buff, she enjoys going to the movies. Teresa hasn’t been camping a lot, but likes the idea of being outdoors. Yoga is a major part of her life, and her choice to be dressed mostly in fitness apparel reflects this. Unfortunately for her social development, she doesn’t know the area that well (being that she is a recent transplant from Stockton, California). A resident of the outer Sunset, she lives in a greener, quieter part of the city but still sees the gridlock along 19th avenue as an unfortunate side effect of urbanism. Her outsider status leaves her wondering how anybody knows what cool stuff is going on in such a busy albeit small city. She misses her friends back home.

Sonny Chiarelli, 33, is a financial planner. He finds himself so busy with work that he has only enough time to take short vacations. This leaves him feeling trapped in an urban jungle, since he only sees the outdoors while walking to and from BART which takes him to his Daly City home. He would love to go hiking in Yosemite, but his schedule means that a day trip to the woods would be far more practical and convenient. Even walking around Golden Gate Park for a short while would probably improve his outlook on life. Given his lifestyle, any simplicity in his life is very welcome. To this end he buys all his clothes at Brooks Brothers twice a year, in the name of efficiency. His social life consists of a weekly visit to happy hour at the local pub, or his monthly poker games. He is starting to find this lifestyle somewhat frustrating.

Rufino Rodriguez, 13, is a carefree teen who likes playing video games and riding his bicycle. The youngest of three sons, he lives in the Inner Richmond. Rufino has never been camping, and only goes to the park for the occasional barbecue. His more oblique interests are graffiti, fireworks and horror movies. Last week, he asked his mother to buy him the newest pair of collectable Vans slip-ons, customized by a famous graffiti artist. She wonders if they are worth the price, or if he is just following the whim of his friends. This is a charge he does not deny. His friends have similar interests and all live on the same street, so they end up joining in with whoever suggests an activity first.

Diondra McKesson, 25, is a substitute teacher for a middle school in Pacifica. She and her husband are saving up money for the down payment on their dream home. Consequently, they don’t go on many trips or splurge on expensive dinners. Instead, they will spend a lot of time at home making dinner and watching Netflix movies. They have heard of Muir Woods but would rather find green spaces within walking distance of their NOPA apartment. They do have the luxury of a small Volkswagen Jetta station wagon, which enables their habit of driving to the Colma Target where they do a majority of their non-food shopping. Neither active followers or leaders of trends, Diondra and her husband would describe themselves as patient, humble, and content.

Dale Marsh, 45 years old, is a lifelong environmentalist who is dedicated to the preservation of public spaces. He loves to go backpacking or on day hikes with his girlfriend. He buys most of his clothes at REI, which suits his vocation as a rock climbing instructor. His time is very flexible. As his job is seasonal, he also has an off-season job as a dog-walker. His friends have similar interests, but they don’t often have time to plan large trips together. Of these friends, Dale is the most bold and confident of his opinion, which makes him the de facto leader of his group.