• Silver for our Interactive for Good Website
• A bronze for Musea Site Design and Development
• A Silver for Jackalope Brewing Co. Website
• Bronze for Artisan Bistro Website

The Horizon Interactive Awards is a prestigious international competition recognizing outstanding achievement among interactive media producers. The competition recognizes and awards the best websites, videos, online advertising, print media and mobile applications. Each year, the Horizon Interactive Awards receives thousands of entries from all over the world. A panel of industry professionals, from diverse multi-media, graphic design and marketing backgrounds, review the entries to determine the work that is to be recognized. Entries are given either a Gold, Silver, Bronze, and in some cases honorable mention award distinctions.

Thanks to Horizon for the honor!

This past spring we designed and developed a fun project called ‘iART Health’.  Sponsored by Health Teacher, iART Health is an art contest that gives students the opportunity to creatively illustrate how to making a healthy choice leads to physical, emotional and/or social health.

Our challenge presented to our team was how to display these hundreds of posters in a creative and organized way without feeling too busy.  As the designer I knew I wanted to incorporate illustrations as well as a grid system to display the posters.  Our developers did an amazing job using Isotope, a jQuery plugin, to create a dynamic and responsive grid system.

To learn more about iART Health and to see the work we created, visit www.iarthealth.com.

Tomorrow at Centresource, we’re turning it red!  Our team is partnering with the local non-profit blood:water mission to ‘Turn It: Red’ on World AID’s Day.

Over 33 million people in the world are infected with HIV/AIDS, and two thirds of them live in Sub-Saharan Africa. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution to AIDS,  blood:water mission is working through partners to address the gaps in HIV/AIDS programs, implementing effective and sustainable solutions including education, treatment and support.  Because of barriers to education and understanding, many of us don’t know anyone affected by this disease. Through their partnerships in several communities, they have been able to walk alongside many living positively and getting to know their stories.  We at Centresource invite you to join us in hearing a few inspiring stories that will help you be able to say “I Know Someone.”

Meet Peter:

Peter and his family live near the village of Kitgum, Uganda. He was just 7 years old when he was taken to a nearby hospital because he was experiencing headaches, stomach pains and had trouble eating. He tested positive for HIV and learned he had contracted the disease at birth. Because little was known about the transmission of HIV in their community, Peter didn’t want to tell his friends for fear they would treat him differently.

Learn more about the HIV/AIDS crisis by watching the video below or visiting http://www.bloodwatermission.com/turnitred.html

Did you know that 1 in 6 Tennesseans struggle with hunger?

Thanks to you, your donations directly benefit Second Harvest Food Bank’s Emergency Food Box program, which serves a crucial role in feeding hungry people during times of crisis.  Just down the road from Centresource, Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee is one of the largest and most comprehensive of over 200 food banks and food distribution centers nationwide. During the 2009/2010 fiscal year, Second Harvest distributed more than 53.3 million pounds of food to hungry men, women and children.  We’re pretty proud to call them our neighbors!

Here’s to a fun year of mixers and we look forward to seeing you at a mixer in the new year!

Here are few ways that unconventionality led to success for Steve Jobs:

• He was a college drop out: At the time, Steve saw no value in attending college because he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. In his own words, “I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.”

He just so happened to drop into a calligraphy class which would ultimately lead to the first Macintosh computer having beautiful typography.

• It all started in his parent’s garage: He was lucky that he found his passion early in life.  Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs created Apple in his parent’s garage when he was 20 years old. In 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of them in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.

• He was fired from Apple: Around his 30th birthday, he got fired from Apple. Steve wrote “I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.”

Starting over was one of the best things he ever did. During the next 5 years, he started a company named NeXT and another company named Pixar (Toy Story) which has become the most successful animation studio in the world.

“I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love.”

• “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”: His ideology to continue to push to find what you love to do in life can ultimately lead to success on many levels.

Although many of us never knew Steve Jobs, I think it can be safe to say that his inventive love for computers has shaped many our lives and will forever be inspiring.

If you look at any web gallery online these days, the most popular colors are most likely mustard yellow and gray.  Look at this google search for example:

This got me thinking about who is responsible for these bursts of popular colors where a whole society will embrace that color scheme and roll with it. It all began in 1963 and it was quite a year for color enthusiasts.  The International Colour Authority was formed by a panel of international color specialists that would gather twice a year in London and select the upcoming color palette for the design world.  Their color selections would be published 22 months ahead to ensure the earliest color trend prediction known to any artist or designer.  Around the same time in the 1960′s, Pantone Inc. was developed and created a a standardized color reproduction system that revolutionized the color trend world.

The ICA believes that color selection is vital to the success of an organization and is a pre-eminent factor in establishing whether a product will or will not sell.  The colors used within your organization has the power to influence whether we feel happy or sad, warm or cold and even stylish or conservative.

Here is a brief video on the effects of pantone colors within our society:

It’s no coincidence that mustard yellow is the hottest color for design this year.

When thinking about rebranding your site or business, try researching the most current pantone colors or the projected colors for the upcoming year.  The Pantone ‘mafia’ can persuade our minds into gravitating to or from a business just by the use of color!

1. The user knew the purpose of the site
2. He or she found the information they were looking for
3. They loved it so much that they alerted the masses through their social networks of this so called ‘said’ site. (Hey @Jimmy!  Check out this awesome site that sold me insurance and looked hip to the jive!)

What might you ask makes these 3 successes magically come together?  That magic would be something called the ‘User Interface Design’.  Good user interface design can make a product easy to understand and use, which in return yields a greater user acceptance.  A designer should make the user’s experience as simple and efficient as possible to accomplish the company’s goals.  A question that stumps me at times is, how can I make this site efficient for a user yet still make it look intricately designed?

Here are a few things to think about when designing a good UI site:

1. Design with a purpose:

Most users don’t read the fine print, they scan the page until they find what they’re looking for.  When designing with a purpose (ie selling insurance, raising money for a non profit, promoting a new record), make that area loud and clear.  Imagine that very important section as a “hey! look at me!” flag on the page. Your job as a designer is to get rid of the question marks and direct the user straight to the point.

2. Use your words:

Much like I’m doing in this post (wink!), make use of different writing styles by using bold, italics, and short segments of text.  Also, talk business.  For example, if you want a user to use your product, apply phrases like “sign up” rather than “start now”.  By using appropriate action words, this will encourage an actual action on the user’s part.

3. White space is your friend:

The human brain automatically compartmentalizes words and images into separate pieces of information.  The use of white space can dramatically help the user’s eye to perceive important information without being crowded and distracted by the lack of space.

4. Usability Testing

After you have completed your designs, usability testing is one of the best ways to quickly test if other people than yourself understand the site.  This will bring to light the most obvious errors that you did not see yourself.

Shoply is an example of a site that has a great user interface.  If you look at the below image, you’ll notice that the design applied each of the 4 techniques I mentioned above.

• The designer designed with a purpose.  Immediately I knew this was a site I could purchase unique items from local businesses.
• They ‘used their words’. I knew exactly what new items were featured, where to search the marketplace, and where to click if I wanted to open my own shop.
• The white space made this site easy to navigate and is super easy on the eyes.

In the end, there truly are a lot of factors that go into making an amazing website.  I hope a few of these tricks can help any fellow designers think about the importance of good user interface design.

Where did Ruby come from?

Like many cool items in Japan, in the early 1990′s, a Japanese developer named Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote the Ruby language to try to help every programmer become more productive and happy. In 2003, BaseCamp’s David Heinemeier Hansson created Ruby on Rails to help develop a website much faster in a simple way.

So what exactly is Ruby on Rails?

In short, developers use Ruby on Rails as a platform to build dynamic websites, web applications and web services. It can be said that Ruby on Rails helps make common development tasks easier for basic websites and thrives on the saying of “don’t repeat yourself”. It lets you write less code by favoring convention over configuration. Who wouldn’t like that?

What does Rails mean?

I once read “Rails is much more than just a tube of glue with which to stick Ruby on the web.” Rails is a web application development framework written in the Ruby language. A framework is basically a frame that you can begin building upon to make a web application. What exactly is a web application you may ask? (Remember, this is for design dummies like myself which is why I’m writing these questions). A web application is more than just a webpage. A web application is more like a normal application on your computer except the difference is that it uses your web brewer as its base. Gmail is a really great example of a strong web application.

‘Ruby on Rails’ Hall of Fame:

Twitter, Basecamp, Hulu, Urban Dictionary, XING and Yellowpages.com to name a few.

Pros to using Ruby on Rails?

1. What used to take a programmer months to complete, can now hopefully be done within a few days.
2. Hundreds and hundreds of available plug-ins
3. Less Coding- RoR requires less amount of code to implement the business logic.
4. Its free to be implemented by everyone

I hope you’re now a little more familiar with Ruby on Rails. Stay tuned for a more in-depth look at Ruby on Rails from our incredibly smart development team here at Centresource!

Designer, Jeremy Mitchell, ROWE’ed from Starbucks this morning checking his email with his baby girl on his lap while his wife Pinned things on pinterest via the iPad.

Janet Timmons, our project coordinator, spent her Monday ROWE-ing with her assistant Charlie.

Designer, Beth Mathews, ROWE’ed all the way from sunny California last week at Intelligentsia Coffee in LA.

Check out where our CEO, Nicholas Holland, likes to ROWE.  Bruegger’s Bagels on 21st.  Free WiFi, Free Coffee Refills, and Plenty of Power at each booth.

Do any of you participate in ROWE or work from home?  We’d love to see your interesting work environment pics if so!

I thought I’d share with you some facts I’ve learned about Google+ since I’m contemplating giving it another shot:

1. Later in the year, there will be a business version of Google+.

2. Google+ has a video chat feature, known as hangouts, in which up to ten people can be included in a video call.

3. Unlike Facebook, there are no advertisements displayed over Google’s social network site, making the load time faster. (3 cheers for that!)

4. With a Google+ account, you obtain an unlimited photo storage on Picasa, instead of the 1GB storage you get without a Google+ account.

What do you think about Google+?  Do you think it will take over Facebook?

To learn more about Google+ and interesting facts, check out  http://www.thefactsite.com/2011/07/top-ten-google-plus-facts.html#ixzz1V8F8tbgn