Coloring Outside My Lines

Accessible design is good design.

- Steve Ballmer

I recently had an opportunity to expand my horizons in the area of design. I was asked to create a strategy for the launch of a social media company called defero. It's a startup communications company made up of individuals from "old media" who want to use their skills in the Web 2.0 world. My job was to create an all-encompassing social media strategy for them.

The first thing I did was decide how I was going to present my proposal to the management team at defero. I decided to use a blog for two reasons. First, it's a great way to show the defero team the power of blogs and how simple they are to create. Second, it gave me a central location in which to present my proposed deliverables: blog, website, wiki, podcasts, and videos. You can take a look at my blog by clicking here.

Once I had decided to create a blog, I then created the logo. I needed to create the logo first in order to establish the design theme for the social media deliverables. In looking at my logo, I believe that I am somewhat of a minimalist at heart. I went with something clean and simple - I chose a sans serif font because that's the preferred type of font for viewing online, and the arcs over the "o" are reminiscent of the RSS feed symbol and imply broadcasting or transmission of information.

After the logo, I next created my proposal blog. I created individual postings for each deliverable so that I could provide detailed information for each item: the blog, the website, the videos, the podcasts, and the wiki. I also created an introductory posting with links to the individual posts, and an overview posting with general strategy information.

In designing the deliverables, I maintained not only the color scheme of the logo (black/red) but also the minimalist, clean look. I felt that defero would beenfit from an uncluttered look so that clients could focus on the particular areas of social media in which defero excels. For example, here is an illustration of one page of the defero website.

I also created storyboards for defero's blog and wiki, and I provided topics for podcasts and videos. I am very excited to be presenting my proposal to defero and I look forward to working with them on this project.

So why did I use the title "Coloring Outside My Lines" for this posting? Because this has all been a new experience for me. My experience in the past has been mainly in product documentation. Sure, I've designed covers for documentation and helped with product packaging design, but I'd never created a logo before, or designed a website other than my own. It was a challenge, and I hope that my design proposal is well received. While it's intimidating to step outside of my comfort zone, it's also been an exciting learning experience for me, and I look forward to more of these types of opportunities in the future.