1661 Design » 1661 Design

Lorem Ipsum meets Wordle !

1661 Design — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 02:33:19 +0000

Adding custom sets of colors to the Garland theme for Drupal

1661 Design — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 22:18:44 +0000

You can ad custom color sets to your copy of the Garland theme by editing the file color.inc located under your sites/all/themes/yourgarland/color directory.

To obtain the appropiate set, you can first select the values using the custom option and use the values later on the file. A very good way to get an approximation of the correct colors is to extract them from a picture that you feel is representative and use a resource like the Color Palette Generator to extract the main colors.

We support Wikipedia, do you ?

1661 Design — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 20:50:12 +0000

Are you ready for the challenges of Social Media ?

1661 Design — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 20:43:27 +0000

Social media is the latest buzz on the street, but this time it seems that the buzz has plenty of substance. Big companies that relied on mass marketing to sell their sometimes quality deficient products, are starting to re-learn the long forgotten maxim the customer is always right.

And all is due to social marketing, there is an horror story of a lady that was ignored by a big company when she called to complain about a defective washing machine. She happen to be a blog writer and in frustration she wrote a post about their overall experience. As it happens, she had a crowd of thousands that read her notes and very promptly the voice was out about the lack of quality and commitment of such company. And the sales not only of washer plummeted … they ran to fix the problem but the damage was already done.

On the other side of the coin, many companies are enjoying the benefits of social media that is far more powerful that voice of mouth.

Do you remember ?

1661 Design — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 20:20:07 +0000

the last time that you came across something that caught your interest and at the last moment, you didn’t order, due to a dubious interface.

Same happens when a potential customer arrives at your site; it will make an automatic assessment about your company based on what it is presented and it may dismiss your product or service in a flash. The same will apply if your site is slow loading, or is based in technologies that may not work on his device.

Looking to a case that maybe familiar, a site like Facebook that surpassed places like MySpace or HI5 that started way before. Such success is based on several factors, one of them “experts agree” is the use of a clean interface common to all profiles where people have a more predictable experience throughout.

In future post we will be covering more about what is essential to convey a proper image of your company in the web.

Why design matters ?

1661 Design — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 19:12:11 +0000

Whether we are conscious or not design is everywhere we look, the chair you are sitting on, the clothes you are wearing, your glasses, the screen you are looking at, this web page, even the typeface of the characters used to construct the words you are reading has been designed. Our society revolves about design, some good, some excellent and some other just plain bad.

Chris Campbell wrote a fantastic note back in 2007 called “The importance of Design in Business” a must to read piece, full of life lessons. We will only quote a single phrase from it:

Good design in our company doesn’t just sell products. Good design fosters collaboration, communicates strategy, sets expectations, improves the efficiency of a team, and most importantly inspires and motivates like nothing else.

We at 1661 Design try to instill in our work good design, hence our name !