MAV.ERIC

Illustration for The ABC of Cocktails by Ruth Mccrea

Ruth creates cheerful imagery with the use of soft curved lines, simple colour schemes, and contrast. 

There’s so many ways to tell a story. As long as the story is great, it doesn’t really matter how it’s conveyed. What matters is that it is communicated clearly. However, originality and creativity is memorable. Therefore, I believe telling a story in a…

Habitat 67, by Moshe Safdie 

Having just traveled through India I spent some time in a few bazaars. They are noisey, chaotic, and crowded. The marketers, or hawkers, are aggressive in their approach, hounding you to, 'take a look,' and claiming 'the best price!' even when you aren't interested in what they're selling. They just about strap shoes on your feet when you're really looking for a t-shirt. This is called a push strategy - Mad Men, industrial revolution era marketing. They have a product and they push and promote it AT the customer. You might also call it hustling. 

Modern customers, online customers in particular, don't get hustled. They have an idea of what they want and they search for it. This is why Search Engine Optimization is key. However, there are SEO "experts" who take deceptive approaches in optimizing a sites rank. Exaggerating key words and key phrases, comment spamming, and other dishonest methods might increase the sites rank but the customers who land there won't be interested in the messy content. This is just like sitting outside your store shouting phrases you think your customers want to hear in an attempt to draw them inside. 

I'd like to think that people who read this blog are marketeers, design folks, or just plain old wacky creative types. If you are any of those you may find value in what I have recently discovered. I've been living in an apartment in a small town two hours from Barcelona. The apartment doesn't have wi-fi or any Internet access, so I have to visit the local cafe to connect to the world wide interweb. However, I still work from the apartment. I read and do research, write posts, and work on code and design. By splitting up my online and offline time, I have developed a much more productive work flow.

Before going to the cafe I make a list of things I need to do while connected to the internet which includes things like downloading articles I can read later, uploading finished posts, or finding specific things I'll need to work with (like a desktop server to work on WordPress offline). 

Fast Company published this article on the Healthcare Experience Design Conference. They outlined 5 key themes of the conference:

Get all stakeholders involved 

Design for failure 

Ride the motivation wave

Data + Design + Innovation = Better Healthcare

The patient of the future won't want today's care