Dave Selden's Blog

The Truly Friendly Skies: Southwest Airlines

Dave Selden — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:35:00 GMT

I love Southwest Airlines. In a time when nearly every other airline is bankrupting themselves, exacerbating their problems with underhanded pricing, starving their customers, and providing Soviet-era customer service, Southwest is expanding their offerings in their typical friendly, easygoing way.

If you've never flown Southwest, try it sometime. It takes a bit of getting used to, what with the un-assigned seating, friendly, sometimes comedic employees and general low-key atmosphere, but I think you'll find it a welcome relief from the cut-rate, commodity service most airlines today provide.

While in the midst of a recent multi-city trip, some personal events came up required me to change travel plans at the last minute. I needed to cancel the Southwest leg of my trip, and buy a ticket on a different airline (Southwest doesn't service the city I needed to reach). Concerned I would lose my ticket, I called Southwest, planning on a long, difficult phone call that would likely end in disappointment. After all, that's what years of dealing with other airlines has conditioned me for.

Instead, on the third or fourth ring, I reached an actual human being, one who spoke clearly and professionally, and one who was extremely sympathetic to my predicament. Not that it mattered - Southwest has an anytime cancellation process. They simply release your ticket so someone else can use it, and you are free to use the money towards any trip in the next year. No fees, no arguing, no special exceptions. Everyone gets this treatment.

Today, I decided to cash in my ticket for another trip (to see the Iowa Hawkeyes play Penn State in Iowa City with my dad). I looked up tickets, found what I was looking for easily (their web site has exhibits exceptional usability), and started the checkout process. I applied the funds from my cancelled trip by entering the old confirmation code in a highly-visible form field, and the price was reduced then and there. No customer service call required. Another airline would probably have wanted a phone call at the least, and might have required an in-person chat at the airport.

After the voucher was applied, there was still a balance remaining, and I reached for my wallet, prepared to get my credit card out. No need! Southwest takes PayPal! I simply entered my e-mail address and PayPal password, and I was done! A confirmation e-mail appeared in my inbox before you could say "tabbed browsing." I have never seen another airline offer this payment option,* and I applaud Southwest for adopting it - PayPal is designed for online payments, unlike Visa or Mastercard (whose cards seem to get stolen with appalling frequency).

So kudos to you, Southwest. You understand that today's influential brands are more than a logo and a catchy jingle. Today's best brands focus on top-notch usability, excellent customer service, and focus on the customer's needs. Done right, you get people like me blogging about you. Done wrong, you have your customers price-shopping on ticket auction sites (Kayak.com is my new favorite).

* I do have one question: what does the TSA think about PayPal? I know paying cash for a plane ticket is a red flag ... I wonder what they think of digital cash?

Behind the Design: the Pop Art Logo

Dave Selden — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:25:00 GMT

In July of 2006, Pop Art’s President, Steve Rosenbaum, commissioned the Pop Art design team to develop new marketing materials to coincide with our move to a new office space. During this process, Pop Art’s existing logo was called into question, and the design team set out to develop a new logo.

The new logo reflects our passion, creativity, style, and attitude as we carry out the principles of the Pop Art movement with a unique brand of explosive creativity.

The first pass was just throwing some ideas at the wall. My goal was to create something cleaner than the existing logo, something that would work better across media, at small sizes, and in different uses (the old one was tough to use on dark backgrounds). Additionally, our new location gave us the opportunity to have a large vertical sign, which the old logo wasn’t well-suited for. I wrote down a bunch of words, but the one that seemed to stick was this idea of “expansion” and that of the logo literally popping from being over-inflated. A personal favorite from this round was logo D. I thought it was clever to use the ® mark as part of the logo as a comment on the commercial nature of our work. Clever, but a little obvious.

In round 2, I refined the exploding/expansion idea further and ended up with logo A. Yes, I know the font is Bank Gothic, and yes, I know what a cliche font it is. The intention was to get an idea across and work on refining things like the font a little later. Ben created logo E, which I thought was a lot of fun, playing on the expansion idea in more of an entropy/Big Bang sense, with concentric rings that could represent sound or percussion waves. The use of Helvetica seems very appropriate to the commercial use of this logo. Intern Tom Solitt threw out something that we all thought was a great idea - a bottle cap logo (C). I liked the idea of opening something to release the good stuff - a pretty good metaphor for what we do. Web projects are often all about getting information from behind the corporate firewall and into the eager public’s hands. Steve’s personal idea (and an interesting one, at that) was to appropriate another company’s logo in a different context as Warhol did in the transition from soup to fine art. Logo B is inspired by Toys R Us’ logo. The old logo (F, if you’re playing at home) was inspired by the Tide detergent logo.

After this round, we sent the contenders out to Pop Art’s entire staff for their thoughts. Each team member was asked to pick their 3 favorites in order of importance. My logo was chosen, with a lot of support coming from our development team (who liked the “high tech” look of Bank Gothic).

For further evaluation, we placed the bake-off winner among some local and national companies in the same mind-space, to use some jargon, and the team felt we were headed in the right direction visually, since the new logo could easily compete visually.

Still, Steve was unsure this version was exactly right, and he asked me to go back to the drawing board for some more exploration. I spent an afternoon at home with pen and sketchpad, and did quite a bit of doodling. Here were a few favorites (or if you’re really crazy, download a PDF of my sketches to the tune of 6.1MB).

Steve, Justin and I all got together to review the sketches I’d done, and selected a few to elaborate further on. All of us were pretty much in agreement on the below sketches and felt we were getting really close.

We selected logos A and E for final polish and elected to view them in context. This seems like a no-brainer, but none of us had really gone through this step in a logo process before and I feel it’s worth repeating. I was initially drawn to logo E, but after seeing it in context on business cards (below) and in other venues (Here’s a PDF of the PA web site and our forthcoming media kit, 884KB), I was sold on logo A. And so was the rest of the team.

With a little more tweaking, a little more kerning, and developing a full range of logo uses, we were finally there. Er … here. Interestingly, Chank’s Adrianna font from round 1 is used in the final logo (a great compromise between business and fun), and I incorporated Ben’s early CMYK idea in some of the identity materials we developed (hence the logo on those background colors.

The Lure of Argentum

Dave Selden — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:34:00 GMT

If you are studiously following PopArt.com's news feed, you probably saw that we've recently launched a new microsite for Leatherman Tool Group, one celebrating a new line of high-end tools called "Argentum." You may have recently seen a link to this site from one of the many blogs that have covered this product launch (Thanks, bloggers!). We named the line, did the logo, did the site, and helped get the word out, and had a lot of fun doing it. So much fun, in fact, that we want to tell you about the process in a little more detail.

When Leatherman came to us with this product, they weren't quite sure what to do with it, and on first glance, neither were we. It's not every day someone hands you a product that fits in the palm of your hand, but costs anywhere from $240 to $40,000. Leatherman's core products are utilitarian, functional, and beautiful in a way that only finely-tuned, highly-engineered items can be. But this was a new level of beauty, one that required deeper pockets, and a richer experience.

When we first thought about the audience for these products, a few personalities came up immediately that just didn't feel right: Paris Hilton (unfortunately, neither the Charge^® nor Squirt^® models include a nail file), Lindsay Lohan (no spoon), and Sean "Puffy" Combs (he would probably dig the Espejo, actually). In short, we concluded: The audience isn't Jay-Z. It's J. R. As in J. R. from Dallas. So we worked up a mood board that we thought J.R. might dig. Something western-inspired. Something that harkened back to the brand's utilitarian, outdoor roots, but that felt comfortable tucked in the velvet-lined top drawer of a mahogany credenza in an air-conditioned office. Next to the cigars, and to the left of the brandy. Something like this:

Since the silversmith was Argentine, we went a little south of the border (south of the Bolivian border, specifically) for our inspiration, drawing upon the cowboy culture of Argentina's Pampas, with its tradition of ornate leather- and silver-work (fun fact: Argentum is both Latin for "silver" and the source of the place name "Argentina") for brand elements. Burgues Script, the typeface used for the wordmark, in an odd case of kismet, was also designed by an Argentinean.

We applied this same thinking to the naming the individual products, working with Adrian Pallarols, the silversmith, to choose Spanish names that would resonate with Argentinians, but still sound nice to native English speakers.

All this focus on the details must have worked. We seeded the site with a few influential blogs like Luxist.com, BoingBoing Gadgets and Gizmodo, and the site has taken off, appearing on 50+ blogs and garnering a review in the print edition of a little magazine you might have heard of called Newsweek, and more importantly, in The Robb Report, the journal of high-class living.

Now, if only I could find something appropriate for the wrap party ... anyone for Perrier-Jouet's Belle Epoque?

Welcome to the Future

Dave Selden — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:36:00 GMT

When the first iPhone was announced, I publicly stated that I would wait for version 2 before purchasing. It took about 30 seconds of playing with version 1 before changing my mind. Holding the slim, elegant device in my hands, I felt like I was experiencing radio for the first time. I didn't want to be the person who waited for FM. I wanted it now, and I marched down to the Apple store at lunch, plunking down my $600 with a smile. Yesterday, Apple announced a new, faster iPhone yesterday at a $199 price point, something I believe will herald the golden age of the mobile internets. Yes, smart phones existed before Apple, but so did MP3 players before the iPod, and we all know how that worked out. Consider this: how MANY iPods does your household own? In Q1 of this year, the iPhone represented 19.2% of smart phone sales, and that was at the $400 price point and sans Exchange support (plus a few supply issues). This new release adds GPS, custom (location aware) apps and games, a new “push” content feature (hence the Exchange mail and calendar support), and a whole lot more. Mike Davidson, former ESPN.com and MSNBC.com designer, and founder of Newsvine.com, has some commentary I feel is pretty right on, and the LA Times has a great writeup of the event for more info.

At the risk of sounding like a fanboy of the highest order, how on earth could the average customer justify purchasing any other mobile device at this point? If you can still get a free phone somewhere and that suits you, then great. But for the person thinking of spending between $99 and $799 on a Nokia, Motorola, Palm, or Sony, how can you even think about those alternatives given where the iPhone just went? The quality/feature/usability gap is so large that even a hatred for AT&T can’t keep people away now.

Things I learned about Steve Sandstrom Last Night

Dave Selden — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:58:00 GMT

Steve Sandstrom likes "verbena" scented things.
Steve Sandstrom also enjoys the smell of his wife's neck.
Steve Sandstrom is married.
Steve Sandstrom became a vegan 8 months ago.
Steve Sandstrom likes marionberry pie.
Steve Sandstrom has a child who was conceived accidentally.
Steve Sandstrom is fond of people who are fond of large belt buckles.
Steve Sandstrom deserves his PAF lifetime achievement award.

Today's The Day: Post It By Number

Dave Selden — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 20:19:00 GMT

Today is our 10-Year Anniversary party, and the office is buzzing with last-minute preparations. The beer, wine, and martini fixin's are here. Cocktail tables are being installed, tablecloths unfurled. The new sign is lit (look for another post, forthcoming, or just take a stroll down Broadway in downtown Portland. And, the makings for our special interactive art project are complete.

Last night, Ben Fogarty, Justin and myself spent hours laying out a 20 foot wide grid of three-inch squares onto the wall of the Pop Art Community Conference Room. Why 3 inch squares? Well, that's the size the good people at 3M decided upon when they began producing the ever-popular Post-It™ note pads. Recently, in their infinite wisdom, they've introduced many more colors to the product line. Plain ol' yellow is passe - check your office superstore for new pads in Fuschia, Burnt Umber, and yes ... Seafoam. And thus, an idea was born ...

For our interactive party project, we've labeled each square in the grid with a number, and we're going to ask party-goers to put individual Post-Its on the wall, with each number representing a color. We're calling it "Post-It-By-Number."

We're going to be filling in some of the hard to reach areas of the grid this afternoon. Later in the week, we'll post a time-lapse of the mystery image coming together, but youcan surveil our progress for the time being with this handy-dandy web cam image, updated every 10 seconds.

The Commitment Cut

Dave Selden — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 04:02:00 GMT

Today, I got a haircut. A big one. My summer chop-off. Buzzville, USA, Population: Me.

I also had a very entertaining barber, from the Bay Area. He regaled me with stories of pimped out Buicks, drug dealers, and a special summer drink his cousins used to make with equal parts Mickey’s and Gallo Sangria. Drink half a grenade, fill with sangria, and add ice. Sounds filthy, but he claimed “some very high class girls” loved it after getting over the initial hesitation. He also claimed the physical limit, “even for big dudes,” was 3 of these concoctions. I think I will take his word for it.

At any rate, before he started, he “triple-checked” that I wanted the buzz, a precaution he’s developed cutting women’s hair. But he also introduced me to a haircutting trick he called “the commitment cut.” After getting the affirmative to cut after the triple check, he does what he calls “The Commitment Cut,” whereby he immediately takes a drastic cut from a highly noticeable area, thereby commiting the cutter and cut-ee alike to the agreed-upon haircut.

I don’t think a lot of clients would go for this technique, but it’s something I think I’m going to start trying in design. With the “undo” key just a “Z” away and immense hard drives offering virtually unlimited versioning potential, I’ve seen designers that get hamstrung by safety. You can always tell a timid designer: his files end in all end with “v9-r12.” Designers like that are afraid to take risks, which I feel limits their creativity.

So I’m making a resolution. Do the “undo-able.” Make the risky design decision. Fail big, because if you’re not failing occasionally, you’re just not trying hard enough. Or, as the fine folks from Mickey’s Malt Beverages say, “Get stung.” I think it might just improve your work.

Designer Movie: Stranger than Fiction

Dave Selden — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 04:55:00 GMT

Every once in a while, I see a movie that excites me as a designer. The opening titles for Panic Room, combined with that film’s amazing camera work. Fight Club, with it’s “IKEA catalog” sequences and David Carson-like typography.

Last night, I saw another such film, Stranger Than Fiction. The great typography and motion graphics first started my design pulse racing, with a great opening sequence.

Harold Crick (Will Farrell) is an IRS agent with a boring life. He has an amazing gift for numbers, and counts everything in his day, starting with the number of times he brushes his teeth each morning.

Type onscreen gives us visual clues to what Crick is thinking as he knots his tie …

… and counts the individual dots on the knot.

It’s a great sequence visually, with simple, bold graphics that really complement the photography. The motion is extremely elegant, with precise movements orchestrated to synch with what Farrell is doing. Hats off to whoever is responsible.

Beyond that, the film has a great 1960s/70s Kodachrome look to it, with rich mustardy yellows and dirty greens. Modernist Architecture is everywhere, and extreme object macro close-ups remind me of my own corkboard. I haven’t heard a lot about this film critically, but I’d highly recommend it. The web site is pretty cool, too.

7 Habits of Highly Annoying Web Designers

Dave Selden — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 04:46:00 GMT

1. “Real World” Interfaces.

Yeah, the menu should totally be on a banner pulled behind an airplane. Get it? It’s a “fly out.”
Leave the real world to the real world. To borrow from Clement Greenburg, “screen is screen, pixels are pixels.” You’ve got a million colors and several million pixels to play with, unlimited fonts, and the only thing you can think of is a coffee table? But the telephone links to “contact us.” Get it? Apple pioneered this interface in 1995, and your idea is neither new nor interesting. Try again.

2. No more popups. Seriously.

And do NOT expand the browser window with javascript to fill my entire screen. Likewise, do not shake it, wiggle it, or otherwise manipulate it beyond changing the content within the browser window. It is my browser, and I have it just how I want it. I am graciously giving you my attention for a few seconds, and if you so much as twitch the screen, I will leave because you have broached my personal space.

3. Buck Conventions.

Like it or not, some web design conventions have emerged over the years, and your mom is just starting to get the hang of it. Search boxes go up at the top right. Navigation on either the left or across the top. And it does not move from page to page, or when your mouse gets close to it. Text links are underlined. Unless you are prepared to retrain my mom, your mom, his mom, her mom, and the millions of other web users who have learned to follow these established conventions, do not break the rules, unless you have a very, very good reason. And no, that reason can’t be “it looks better.” Or “it won’t fit over there.” Make it work.

4. The Filter is the Message.

Just knock it off. Lens flare does not a design make. People who design realtor’s web sites seem especially prone to this. TIP: For an *instant* realty web site, open your realtor’s portrait or house photograph in Photoshop. Play the default action called “Quadrant Colors.” WOW!

5. The Helvetica Goes Up to 11.

Helvetica is an awesome font. Used for your headlines, body text, logo, tagline, bylines, fishing lines, captions, pull quotes, it is boring. It has been used to death by the Web 2.0 crowd, and if I see another all-Helvetica site I will probably look up your house on whois.sc and Google Maps and sign you up for lots of spam and laugh at how tiny your hard drive looks from 100,000 feet.

6. Idiot Quotes.

As opposed to ’smart quotes.’ Even Microsoft Word knows better than to use vertical quotes in setting text. I will forgive you not doing this in HTML text, but when you are using an image for a headline, it’s inexcusable.

On a Mac, get a curly quote with:

option + shift + ]

On a PC, visit Apple.com and order yourself a Mac. On a Linux box, get a real job.

7. Comic Sans.

Greater minds than mine have addressed this serious issue, but with the frequency I seem to encounter it, I think it bears repeating.