Robot Creative - Design and Marketing Weblog

Text 2 Mind Map - Visualize Your Website Interactively

Wikipedia says, "A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing."

Does this sound like a sitemap for a website? It sure does!

Visualizing a web site's structure in the early planning stage is a key component of the overall design process. There is organization chart software that you can use to create an in-depth sitemap but for quick brainstorming and visualization Text 2 Mind Map is a great tool.

Text 2 Mind Map is a FREE and simple-to-use online mind map generator. It's as simple as typing. As you type you "TAB" information to create the hierarchy. That's all! You can then click the convert button and your map is built in a flash. Exporting your map as a .jpg for sharing is also a nice little feature.

Logo Trends on Logo Lounge

by Lara August

Logo Lounge just added a report on 15 trends for logos in 2008. Each year, the website publishes this report with trends that they are seeing in logo design. From flourishes to strobes to jawbreakers, this year's report is packed full of interesting observations. The Logo Lounge website allows designers to become members and upload the logos that they have designed. This database serves as a great research tool for designers, with logos searchable by shape, color, and keywords. Logo Lounge has published several printed volumes highlighting the best of logo design, with several Robot logos included in the last edition.

Test Your Corporate Logo Knowledge

- by Alfredo San Martin

We use these products everyday but how well do you really know your corporate logos? Can you spot the fake? Do you know the logo's origin? Test your skill here and let us know what scores you get.

Take the Quiz!

Palette Generator - It's Magic!

by Alfredo San Martin

I just came across this great website ,from Big Huge Labs, while doing color palette research. This site allows you to "Automagically create a harmonious color palette from a photograph". It's great!

When designing web layouts, you sometimes want to create the design around particular styles of imagery. This is perfect for such a task. It removes the need for using the color dropper tool on multiple spots in the image.

It even allows you to download swatches in Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) format for Photoshop or compatible applications.

As a bonus for all you web designers/developers out there like me, it even creates a sample .css file to add to your stylesheets with all the hexadecimal color codes.

In just a few seconds you can have an entire color scheme ready to go for your layouts and websites. It's a great tool to add to your design arsenal.

Fontstruct is fun but limiting...

- by Lara August

Check out this cool online font generation tool.

Check it out >>

It allows users to create their own fonts using a variety of preset shapes. At first glance, I was skeptical. I remembered when CDs came out and real music connoisseurs griped that the digitalization of the music removed the graceful flow of the original tones. I was afraid that this program would create "digitized" and stiff looking fonts, and it does. I haven't gotten into it deep enough to know if it even starts to address kerning or not.

But I will give kudos to the contributing designers that are featured in the gallery. I was actually very impressed with how much they were able to push the package. The program still generates according to a stiff grid. This may be fun, and the fact that it's web-based is cool, but I'll be sticking with more traditional type design tools that provide free range of fluidity.

Pattern Design by Lews F. Day - A Book Review

by Lara August

If you can wade through the language, this book is really worth the read. It is an excellent primer on pattern design, covering the major bases in roughly 300 pages. Get through a few chapters and you will begin to see the world in a different way, and to appreciate the skill required to design patterns well.

The only challenge with this book is that is was written in 1903 by British guy who took his art very seriouslly. The author gets so fired up that you would think he was writing about political issues and not pattern design.

The pedantic speech crosses beyond irritating to downright humorous in parts. A favorite excerpt:

"Plain space or lines of mouldings or mere diaper may be ruthlessly cut short; but it is only the lowest organisms of design which will bear such mutilation."

I wouldn't have wanted to come across this guy wearing the wrong dress!

Apple iPhone - A Wish List

by Lara August

I'm making a wish list in the hopes that Apple product developers, like so many mega-brands, are actively policing their brands and reading consumer blogs to aide in their own product development. So the more I use the iPhone, the more I love the reliability and ease of use, and the more I want to see in v2. Here are a few additions that would change my world:

1. Ability to delete all email messages instead of one at a time
2. Ability to create email folders, even just locally on the iPhone
3. Ability to sync with my webdav-hosted calendar on my Apple Server via the Internet instead of having to hand snyc. This one change would virtually eliminate the need for regular syncing and I could just snyc when I've added new music or photos. The calendar changes by the hour. I only purchase music a few times a month at most.
4. Voice recording
5. Copy and paste (for crying out loud). I hate to admit the Palm OS was better at this.
6. Customizable main menu. I don't use all that junk and wouldn't mind if it went away. Palm OS has the Apple iPhone beat there as well. Yes, apple developers are probably better at this than the average Joe, but Apple shouldn't completely obliterate individuality for the sake of usability. Let's see if they are good enough to combine the two? I am hoping in the future that we'll be able to download iPhone apps online and that will automatically give us an option to add the icon to the main menu. They did leave room to grow.
7. A flash for the camera. Just a little one... tiny even.
8. And video recording would be nice, since this has a larger HD than most cell phones, that should have been a no-brainer.
9. Ability to email more than one photo at a time. Because who takes just 1?

Gods of usability... I hope you are listening!

Nielsen Website Ranking Changes

Nielsen/netRatings announced last month it will change the way it ranks the popularity of Web Sites. Now the length of time internet visitors spend on each page will count more than how many people click on a page. More specifically, Nielsen will rank based on total time spent and total sessions on a site instead of the number of page views on each site.

While this may help measure what kind of people are coming to the sites, I wonder how it will truly measure the amount of information people are gaining from the site. You never know if people are coming to a site, reading for a while, leaving for long breaks and then coming back again. It seems to me this kind of tracking and rating may be a bit deceiving, making even more statistics in the sea of numbers.

Too many people get caught up in the ratings game, and in the end, satisfying the customer should be the main goal of any business...and as long as you achieve that, you're rated #1 in my book!

- Ravpreet Singh

Lara's Color Theme Featured in Kuler Promotion

Lara recently had one of her color themes included in a nifty deck of color cards that was sent out to an international audience to promote Kuler. Kuler is a color forum and design tool created by Adobe as part of their Adobe Labs, a series of communities developed to create design discussions and collaboration.

The theme "East End Boat Park" is a series of colors that Lara discovered on a trip to St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. (See an earlier slideshow from the trip.) In her habit if taking photos of random things with appealing colors, a sliver of a sign that said "East End Boat Park" showed up in the photo and lent a great title to the color theme.

You can check out all of Lara's color themes by visiting the Kuler website and searching for "lara".

Also check out an earlier post about Kuler, and stayed tuned for more updates on how we're using this neat online community.

iPhones are worth the issues

- by Lara August

I waited in line at the Quarry AT&T store for 45 minutes to be one of the first in town for an iPhone. I've never even waited in line for a concert, so I felt like an idiot the entire time that I was sweating in the hot sun in business attire and high heels, holding a lime green umbrella as sun protection. I've never bought into such hype before. But I consider this purchase a salute to the gods of usability design. The "phone", if you can really classify it as such, really is amazing. I haven't looked at the manual - intentionally. And I'm not going to. And I haven't needed to, etiher. They (Apple) really are geniuses. After struggling with a Treo and then the Samsung BlackJack, this is a welcome relief. It sync'ed on the first try, seamlessly, without third party software. I have everything on the phone, including a portable portfolio our design work. This device is the most incredible piece of technology I've ever owned, and my friends on non-AT&T carriers are legitimately jealous.

My only critiques so far:

The interface isn't customizable, yet, but I don't think I could have put things in a better place than Apple did. They have anticipated the most common needs wonderfully. Or maybe I'm just "average". :)

There is a VPN setting, and I was able to connect to my VPN at the office, but I don't know why. There is no way to browse through files. I am thinking (hoping?) that's something for a future update.

Almost every screen has a zoom feature, and yet I am not able to zoom on pictures I took with the camera???

It is really slow on the AT&T EDGE network, but really fast with a wi-fi connection. I have wi-fi at home and at work, but I've also got computers at both places. So, it's slow the only place where I really need it to work... when I'm out and need to check/send email or look at a map.

I emailed myself a new wallpaper pattern, but I wasn't able to download the attachment, which was annoying. I had to load the image into iPhoto and then sync to get it into the photo library before I could get it on the phone and load it up as wallpaper.

With all of the songs I loaded on it, you'd think I could set a custom ringtone from the music library... but I can't. So a photo of my husband barks when he calls.

I'm sure I'll discover more in the coming weeks as I explore the capabilites.

Give me a call and stop by if you'd like to see it!