So what is this technique?

The Morphological Matrix is a great way for anyone to come up with ideas. It isn’t an exact science, but it will help you to see many different combinations of a logo and ensure that you break out of the first idea you have trap.

There are 6 steps to creating your perfect logo using the Morphological Matrix. Here goes… (we’ll be using Live Aid as an example, as they are one of the most famous case studies)

1. Define the problem. What are you trying to create? A logo for a world-wide music festival, based in Africa as a charitable event.

2. Break the task down into individual components on a grid-list. For a logo this could be things like: Words and Letters, Picture Elements for Intsruments, Pictures of Africa/Music, Pictures of Africa/map/globe, Pictures of African Symbols, Pictures of African animals, Pictures of African patterns – for your own problem, work out the combinations that work best. It may be more text than images, it might be several font variations… be creative!

3. Now make notes of all the various forms which these components could take.

4. Now sketch (roughly) a quick idea of what the element might look like on its own.

5. Now you can start trying to combine a few of the elements and see what fits together best.

6. Don’t just shuffle these ideas and wait for a miracle to happen. These combinations should just act as your fuel for the bigger ideas. This gives you the base to break away from that ‘first idea’ syndrome that we all suffer from.

And that is that – easy huh? Don’t expect a miracle immediately, you have to try this out and have a bit of faith with it. It really does work if you make sure you think YES to your ideas, let your mind move and run around – don’t nay-say any ideas without serious consideration first.

Here is the Live Aid Logo from the Morphological Matrix

Now go try and make a logo!

Social networks have been done to death, they are a saturated market, there must be something out there that hasn’t been done yet and is ripe for the picking!

On top of my client work, I am always thinking and probing at new ideas, both online and offline, but not for the money – money isn’t everything. It is for the sheer joy of creating something so unique and cool, that everyone wants to be a part of it.

When you think of the biggest online ideas and what has bought in the biggest revenues, it has been ideas that have been 100% free to the end user. Google, Facebook, Twitter etc… none of them charged for their service. It wasn’t about money to start with, and that is what makes it such a fantastic business model. If the end use is having something for nothing, they are interested and going to use it more frequently.

So my ideas are currently swimming all over the place, but I plan to put them into practice soon enough – I have one or two nice ideas that could end up being big things, or total flops… only time will tell!

Between myself and another (core) developer of Buddypress, we have made quite the number of changes and custom plugins that make this social network quite unique. Since taking on project number 1, I found myself being very inquisitive, taking things apart, putting them back together, breaking stuff, just trying to see how far I could push it… and I have to say, it is very flexible!

I have since started to get involved in 4 new Buddypress sites of one size or another, from the very basic default theme that needs a nice new skin, to the totally awesome brand new theme. It really is amazing.

I just wanted to put that out there. I have a lot of love for Buddypress!

Last month I picked up a deal with an agency in London to handle a fair bit of their development work, especially all the WordPress stuff, as I usually choose to use WordPress where possible. So you should start seeing some new sites on my folio in the coming weeks, indeed there is Rumba and Coronet already there.

So bear with me, I will post more often in the coming weeks and months!

Other than that, I have had numerous ‘agency days’, where I go into an agency in Central London and work from their offices on their projects and clients, this is something I really enjoy as it allows me to interact with a whole new group of people and really get some variety in my working day.

And as it is coming up to Christmas, I am just working very hard to get my diary clear so I can have a nice relaxing week or two off, just kicking back and listening to Christmas songs on repeat. Heaven!

Stay well everyone, and I promise I will try to keep my blog more updated!

1. Donors

Donors are usually financial, they can donate a one off payment, or set up a direct debit for monthly payments. You need to make this process as easy as possible for the potential donor. Don’t make things overly convoluted, keep it as simple as possible. Ideally, a simple (well designed) button that opens a donation page is enough.

Make the button stand out, but not so much that it looks gaudy. You want to be going for sleek but visual here. Don’t blend it into your navigation or make it small so people don’t notice it. Make it bold!

2. Volunteers

On the flip side of financial donors, you have people who want to donate time to a cause – these volunteers also need an easy way to find all the relevant information they need to get involved and help out.

Don’t just have a page with an email address on it – come on, these people want to help – you need to show them the love! Have a nicely laid out page that lists the ways in which they can help and really try to make it easy for them to get in touch.

3. Fundraising

If people don’t want to give money outright, many of them want to be able to fundraise for their chosen charity. So again, make this section of the site really stand out. You want people to know HOW they can fundraise and what activities they can do for you.

Bear in mind, many fundraisers may not have the same emotional connection to the organisation or the cause that donors or volunteers do – these people could just be serious runners who see the option of entering a race via a charity as a better way to do things – so their first priority is the event, not always the cause. Keep that in mind! Make the event the main focus here, not about how it helps the charity.

4. Make the site’s goal known

There is nothing worse than going onto a site and thinking “ok, what does this organisation actually do?” – scream it from the rooftops! If they raise money for essential research, shout about it. If they support people in need, shout about it. If they actively save a life every day, shout about it! Whatever the goal of the charity is, you need to make it known to your users early. Potential donors and volunteers want to know where their money or time is going – they want to know how they are helping! Shout about it!

5. Make it social

This really goes without saying, but there needs to be as many social hooks into and out of the site as possible – loads of +1′s and share on Facebook or ReTweet this icons – people are more inclined to share charity content than any other type of content, so take advantage of this to ensure that the analytics stay healthy every month.

Using things like Facebook Connect and various API’s to hook into the site will also help – people want ease of use, with minimal amount of ‘signing up’ to things – make it as easy as possible for them with the tools you already have at your disposal.

And finally… 10 fantastic examples of non profit sites

10. Oxfam

9. Breast Cancer Care

8. Action for Children

7. Unicef

6. Shelter

5. Anthony Nolan

4. Give us a Lift

3. Take the Walk

2. NSPCC

1. Comic Relief

I hope you have found this post interesting and informative.

An intranet needs to be so much more than that now. People need to be able to communicate efficiently through their staff intranet for it to really work. Whilst running through the first few documents and specifications that myself and the client had been drawing up, I noted a few things that are really key to consider when building an intranet… and here they are:

1. The user comes first
The users of the intranet will be using this day in and day out for all kinds of important information. If you think user experience is important for a normal website, then you have to double it for an intranet. If the users find it hard to use, or simply don’t like how it functions, you will end up with a switch off, and it will be very hard to sway them back.

2. Content will be changing all the time
This isn’t a static site with one boring news feed, no no… they will more than likely be adding brand materials, new staff, latest news, events and all sorts of things, so the design and development need to reflect that. Make sure you are creating something that is dynamic by nature – something that keeps up with the sheer weight of changes on the site – it is no point having a 3 point latest news feed if 5 or 6 get uploaded every day. Make sure you know what you are designing for.

3. It is a work tool, not a social tool.
Remember, you are developing something that aids work – not allows people to chat inanely about their social lives, or what happened on EastEnders last night. That being said, we can’t make it too boring or who is going to visit it? You need to find a good balance of work and social on your intranet, that way you will keep your staff happy, but also informed about what is happening in their workplace.

4. Be aware of technology
Major pitfall on my part – I programmed the whole thing, only to be told that everyone uses IE7 in the offices, now, don’t get me wrong, I work back to IE7, so it wasn’t a massive issue – BUT, that being said, you should always be aware of the technology you are designing and developing for in advance, that way you avoid a major pitfall and make your life so much easier as you only have to develop for one single browser!

5. Make it easy
Nobody wants to be trawling through pages and pages of waffle and crap to find a logo they really needed for a presentation – so make things as easy as possible for them to find. Perhaps they need a logo, perhaps they need to get the contact details for the nice lady in HR, whatever it is, it should be very easily accessible… this means a good, working search and a simple structure to the whole intranet.

These are just a few little things I picked up from the project – I hope that you find them helpful if you ever work on an intranet project

Good luck

Every bit of design should do a job, and I’m sorry people, but that job is not to look pretty! Don’t get me wrong, it’s a bonus if something looks great, but what is much more important than that, is when a design hits a brief square on. Your design should do everything possible to make the user’s experience better.

Now some people will say “user experience designers do that, we just make it look pretty” – well sorry to say, that is horse-crap! If all you can do is make something look pretty, then you aren’t a designer for modern communications.

The reason I am using this as my quickie today is two-fold. First off, we lost Steve Jobs this week. It is a sad day for technology as he was a pioneer of new things and do you know what he did? He made things work! Being pretty was a by-product of him asking the question of “how can this work better for the user” – after he figured that out, then he went to town on making things sleek, but never at the expense of something that worked really well and was designed with the user in mind.

Secondly, yesterday I had a meeting with a client about a new site. I can’t go into too much detail, but in essence, the site was a place where users can search for locations to stay for a night or two. When we were chatting about look and feel and design – they started to show me a handful of sites that do a similar job, each and every single one of them had about 500% too much content on the homepage. My thought is, strip the page down to the bare minimum first, define what the homepage needs to do and then build it around that.

So that was my suggestion – as bold as it seemed, I asked them if they would be interested in going down a very minimal route where the search was the key focus point. We have had to meet in the middle a bit. My vision was a google-esque site, and they wanted a corporate machine of a site with a small search bar in the top right.

I always try to put myself in the user’s role – what are they there to do? If it is to search for a place to stay, how would I want to do that. Me personally, I’d like to simply start typing a location, an auto-complete suggestion list would pop up, choose my location and then hit go! Once inside, I can start to filter my options down more and more.

But my whole point here is this: if the site is a search site – then surely the search is the most important thing on the page.

Try this: strip the page down to the very bare minimum. Then build it up again with elements in the order of importance. You will find that not only do your designs feel less cluttered, but you will focus much more on the user and what they need to achieve on the site – if you can pre-empt that, then you are already winning.

Final thought – please, design with a user in mind, not just how it can be ‘pretty’ – user experience counts for so much, don’t neglect it – just KISS!

Today, it is all about SEO. This is an area that confuses the heck out of some clients and even some designers and developers too – so let me give you my 2 pennies on what makes a great SEO pie!

Ok – for your recipe, you will ALWAYS need the following:

Great content
This is vital – don’t let anyone tell you that you can get away with sub-standard content and just use keyword stuffing techniques. The better and more relevant your content is, the more likely it is that you site will rank highly. And not only that – if you have relevant and well written content, you will definitely get more click throughs and conversions on your site. Simple.

Title tags
Make sure your page title is relevant to your page – DO NOT keyword stuff your title tag. Google and Yahoo are really into relevance at the moment, so keeping everything simple is the way forwards.

Back links
Yes, these are highly important. But don’t go and try to buy them from a link farm or from some company offering you the earth. You need to get quality backlinks, not loads of rubbish ones. Target some niche sites within your industry (or surrounding industries that would make for a good inbound link) and request a subtle link exchange. Alternatively, try to get some good bloggers talking about you in their posts!

Code structure
This has never been confirmed or denied by Google as far as I know, but a clean, valid code base will usually result in better search engine positions for your website – that is only through experience though. What I am saying is please please please don’t use Dreamweaver’s design view to build your site. Make sure your code is clean and you will surely reap the benefits!

Heading tags
This comes under coding practices a bit, but just ensure that your header tags are used properly in all cases. The H1 tag can be used to either represent the page main content, or the site main title – I don’t see there being a magic solution for this, just keep your header tags structured so that you don’t jump from H1 to H6 and back to H3 etc and you should be fine.

There are an assortment of other factors that affect your SEO, but in all honesty, the most important, by a country mile is your content. Invest in a good copywriter who knows all about writing for the web. This is worth it’s weight in gold. Good content is much more than just getting people to your site – any idiot can do that with a budget – if you want to triple your web traffic in the next month, no problem, let’s chat about your budget and it can be done – but what use is that if your site has a very low conversion rate.

I suppose what I am saying is that SEO is very very important – but you should concentrate on getting a high quality experience on your site for a smaller number of users, than a rubbish experience for thousands of users. Once you know your site is optimised with your customer in mind, then you can really start pumping the traffic to it.

Good luck and I hope you have enjoyed this quickie!

Well, due to my old (he will resent the word old) university lecturer Nik Mahon, I have a handful of solutions that always help me through a creative block, and I would like to share them with you in a mini-series all about Lateral Thinking in web design.

Nik is a lecturer at Solent University, and he specialises in Lateral Thinking techniques. When I was his student, we used to spend whole modules on these various techniques, and it would always, without fail, kick start some ideas from nothing. So thanks to Nik, I have modified some of the ideas and theories he has taught over the years to my own digital style, and that has helped me to avoid creative block in web design.

So, let’s get started with a technique. I won’t bore you with the old standard of mind mapping. If you aren’t already doing it, then shame on you! You should be.

For technique number one, we are going to use the Assumption Reversal method. This is pretty much what it says on the tin, you take some assumptions about a product, brand, service or whatever else, and you flip it on its head, then run with some ideas down that route.

Sound easy? Well that is because it is. But be warned, you have to give in to the power of lateral thinking – this is a bit like hypnosis, in the fact that if you think you will fail, then you probably will. You have to open your mind and have some fun. I also find that working with a partner on things like this can help a bit.

Ok, here is the method in a bit more detail and with an example.

To start with, grab a large (A3 preferably) pad and a marker pen. Now let’s say that we are designing a new website for say, a Removal Company called ‘Dave’s Movers’.

You may have some great ideas on layout right away, but if not, no problem, that is why we are doing this technique.

Now I want you to make an assumption about the site. This assumption can be anything from the serious (I assume that they would be cheaper than the bigger companies as they sound small time) to the down right ridiculous (I assume that they have a talking dog named Jeff that comes along to all of their jobs) – it doesn’t matter what your assumption is, it is all about getting your creative juices flowing.

So now take one of the assumptions, let’s take the one about being cheaper for now, and let’s flip that around. So what are you thinking? All of our minds work differently, some of you will think “Ok, so flipping the assumption means that they are more expensive” – others will think “It means they are the same price” and some of you will think “it means they are a bigger company than expected”. There is no wrong answer – but what you do next is important. You have to take that assumption and have some fun with it. So they are more expensive? Why? Let your mind wander – use the pad, draw a mind map!

Are they more expensive because they are the best? Because they have rocket fuel instead of petrol? Because their staff are so friendly and efficient. You can come up with a ton of ideas. But you have to think outside of the box – this method wont help you come up with a layout (ok, sometimes it does if you use it differently – see below) but what it does, is give you some really interesting ideas about the company that can lead you into a design style.

In terms of layout – I sometimes use this when I immediately see a layout for a site – I make that instant assumption that it should have a fixed width, or a sidebar, or the navigation should be horizontal – sometimes I challenge that by reversing my assumptions, and you know what? Sometimes that works for the best – sometimes my layouts improve dramatically because I challenge the normal assumptions I make about how a site should be laid out.

Some of you will find this post ridiculous – some will find it helpful – some will glance over it. But hey, if it helps one person avoid a creative block, then amen to that!

I hope you enjoyed it

A few common questions are: Why the ninja? Well, I love ninja movies and I also love great illustration – and despite the whole ninja thing being done to death a bit, I still wanted to run with it – it was either a cool ninja or a cute monster, and I thought a ninja was much more manly *grrrrrrr roar*

So yeah, have a play around – please report any bugs and what-not, but make sure you enjoy the site. I plan to write a range of blog posts, from inspirational designs to clever coding practices… I even plan on writing a host of tutorials for design, development and on being a freelancer too. So do check back!

Much love
Rob