Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Congratulations to the Kellogg School of Management on their Site Launch!
The Kellogg School’s new website went live on Friday, 29 July 2008, hurrah!
The project was one of the coolest and most challenging things we’ve taken on as a team--several moving parts including the installation of a content management system, new information architecture and content, a new interface design, and a good deal of multimedia production. And probably the most daunting thing of all: to create a site that lives up to the institution’s reputation as one of the prestigious business schools in the world.
We learned a lot about business school-specific behavior (like the fact that prospectives usually do a great deal of research on third-party sites before ever coming to the business school’s site itself) and expectations (multimedia, good, edgy design, bad). The project also affirmed three tenets that we’ve found true across all of our projects over the years: you need to plan your short-term goals with the objectives of the distant horizon in mind; everything lives and dies by project management; and the best relationships are communicative, collaborative, and unflinchingly frank. Oh, and scones always make meetings go better. A special shout-out to Eric, Dan, and James at Kellogg--y’all are wonderful to work with, thank you for choosing us!
I’m particularly proud of the homepage media picker that brings the Kellogg School to virtual life through videos (many of which we shot with our friends at Olin-Hake Films), slideshows, and profiles. I also think that the faculty site does a terrific job of aggregating a great deal of information in a unified interface and showcasing each of the faculty members at the School. And the design as a whole integrates very well with the Kellogg School’s centennial celebration site and online faculty journal, both of which we helped to conceive and launch.
Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran on 08/27 at 08:40 AM(1) Comments | Permalink |
Friday, August 01, 2008
Creative Team Field Trip
A couple of weeks ago, I followed through on a brilliant idea of my friend and colleague, Patrick DiMichele. We bumped into local artist Nick Butcher of Sonnenzimmer Studio while grabbing lunch and Patrick suggested that we might organize a field trip for the mStoner creative team to visit Nick’s studio. The benefit to us is that sometimes looking at work being done outside of the mainstream design (and outside of the field of higher and secondary education) can be an inspiration.
We took most of the creative team (and some project management types) over to the studio and got to take a look at what Nick’s been up to lately. In addition to his paintings which you may have seen in group shows at various galleries around the city of Chicago, Nick’s been producing work for Threadless and lots of poster, LP, and CD designs for various musicians.
Nick and his girlfriend are heavily influenced by classic poster design, Bauhaus, and Swiss design of the last 50 years, but they’ve managed to fuse these aesthetics with a modern edge that’s more than just a reference to history. The work is totally different from other work I’ve seen done lately on the music scene. You should check out the new stuff or the older posters.
Our thanks go out to Nick for putting up with about 10 people in his studio over lunch.
Posted by Doug Gapinski on 08/01 at 02:04 PM(0) Comments | Permalink |
Congratulations to George School on Site Launch
Congratulations to George School, whose new site launched yesterday!
George School is an independent, coed, Quaker boarding and day high school located in Newtown, Pa. The site launch was the culmination of 22 months of, first, imagining what a new website for George School could be and then realizing that vision on the screen.
Work on the site began in earnest in May 2007 with a series of meetings with a Website Design Town Meeting on the first night of Alumni Weekend, when about 60 stakeholders, including students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents, and others gathered to talk about their hopes for the School’s new web presence. Since then, many members of the George School community have participated in live intake sessions, conference calls, online surveys, virtual focus groups, and a test launch earlier in the week. mStoner partnered with George School on strategy, content development, design, video, testing, and buildout.
Ari Betof, George School’s director of enrollment management & strategic marketing, in an email to the community, remarked:
When you look at the site, I hope you like the design. I hope you find the structure easy to navigate. I hope you find the features useful and fun to play with. But much more, I hope you find yourself looking at a page that reminds you of South Lawn in the spring, of taking a really good class with your favorite teacher, or watching your advisee walk across the Outdoor Auditorium during graduation… AND I hope that you come to know that what will truly make the website a living reflection of George School is if it continues to grow and evolve (just as our community benefits from the arrival of each new member).
Posted by Michael Stoner on 08/01 at 01:18 PM(0) Comments | Permalink |
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Congratulations to William and Mary on Site Launch!
Congratulations to the College of William and Mary on the official launch of its new site this morning!
The redesign was initiated by Provost P. Geoffrey Feiss and announced in February of 2007. Susan Evans, director of web and communication services, led the redesign, dubbed re.web, working with a campus-wide team of stakeholders as well as staff members in IT, university relations, and admission. mStoner is pleased to have been selected to work with William and Mary on this project.
Evans and her team created a Facebook group and started a blog, re.web, which has already been nominated for awards and, in fact, was named a “People’s Choice Winner” from Edustyle on 22 July.
In fact, they’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to keep their campus informed about the project. Here’s why, according to Evans,
“When we first started planning the project … I said that we were going to do this in the most transparent way that we could because I feel like this Web site belongs to everybody. ... We have so many different constituencies that are a part of this project that I wanted people to feel like that had a voice and way to get information. I also knew we would be more successful if we heard from people early on about what they thought was important than if we did it in a much more closed way and tried to launch a site without involving the right people. Because we involved so many, the site truly reflects the special nature of the College.”
Today, William and Mary launched all of the “top-level” pages of the site--including undergraduate admission, financial Aid, registrar, psychology, dean of students, and Arts & Sciences. In the coming months, many other areas of the William and Mary site will migrate to the new look and feel:
The School of Law and Virginia Institute of Marine Science will launch with the new design on Sept. 30. The process of moving content from the old site to the new will be ongoing and will eventually include the site for the School of Education (to be launched in late fall) and the Mason School of Business, which will launch in March 2009.
Posted by Michael Stoner on 07/31 at 03:51 PM(0) Comments | Permalink |
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
University of Missouri Recruiting Information Architect
One of the most fundamental roles in any web team is that of information architect. Though the site design is what everyone sees, if the information architecture of the site isn’t well thought through, the resulting site will be frustrating to visit and may not return the kinds of results you want.
And information architects should play a key role in evaluating a site, tracking searches and monitoring site use to make sure that the site is optimized for visitor needs--and to yield results for you.
The University of Missouri’s web team is looking to fill a vacancy for an information architect. Mizzou’s web team is one of the most progressive campus web units in the country and is blessed with great leadership (in the person of Lori Croy) and a supportive campus environment. In short, a great job for someone with the right skills.
Here’s a summary of the job:
Identify client goals; research audience needs; analyze information and create an overall plan for the layout of information and navigation for a Web site. Work with writers, photographers, designers, developers and programmers throughout the project to ensure that product meets both the client’s and end-users’ needs. Conduct usability assessments (cards sorts, interviews, etc.) and usability testing as needed. Educate staff and rest of campus Web community on current usability concepts. Monitor and analyze Web analytics for user trends that would impact the design and content delivered from sites and make recommendations based on these findings.
And the necessary qualifications:
2+ years of professional experience in information architecture, user interaction design or related field
Excellent analytical and problem solving skills. Ability to analyze and strategically organize large amounts of information.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Ability to work both independently and as part of a dynamic team of Web professionals consisting of writers, designers, developers, programmers and photographers.
Knowledge and demonstrated experience with current usability methodologies and user-centered design processes.
Experience conducting user validation and/or usability testing sessions; evaluating results and presenting actionable recommendations.
Knowledge of accessibility and Web Standards.
Experience analyzing and managing Google Analytics data and presenting actionable recommendations.
Proficiency with documentation tools such as Microsoft Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator and Visio or Omni Graffle.
Proficiency with XHTML, CSS, and cross-browser, cross-platform environments.
Official job description and particulars here.
Posted by Michael Stoner on 07/16 at 11:42 AM(0) Comments | Permalink |
Monday, July 14, 2008
The Future of Alumni Networking is at the Grass Roots
Meet your alumni where they are.
That’s a fair summary of the session entitled “The Future of Community and Affinity in an Online World” presented by Daniel Guhr, Andy Shaindlin from Caltech, and Louis Alexander from MIT at the CASE Summit on 13 July.
Guhr, from Illuminate Consulting Group, provided a fairly high-level view of today’s social networking environment. [I can’t reproduce Guhr’s slides, but a dramatic visual and a graph of activity on social networks is here.]
One of the most telling comments, as far as I’m concerned, is that today’s kids are participating in social networking environments like Club Penguin and Webkinz. They’ll continue networking as they graduate to Facebook (or, more likely, a successor) when they’re teens and ready to apply to and enter college. Then, after graduation, they’ll move into a corporate social network like the ones that are being built by McKinsey & Company and other large progressive networked organizations.
In any case, coming generations will live much of their social life online; the Internet will hold things together.
So in this environment, what use, really, is a closed, proprietary online network? Andy Shaindlin pointed out, “Today’s alumni have demonstrated quite clearly that they’ve decided what tools to use, and don’t care what you give them.” There are plenty of high-quality services that are easy to use, so it quite possible that in the future self-organizing groups of alumni could hold their own reunions without any input from an institution or alumni professionals.
Of course, that happened in the old days, too, when a group of alumni friends called each other on the phone and planned a weekend at the lake with their spouses. But it’s so much easier today.
Shaindlin pointed out that alumni relations professionals still think of alumni as “outside” the institution but now that they are increasingly holding a conversation about the institution without us, we are the outsiders. “They are at the center of the community and we visit them,” he noted.
Outsiders can still play a valuable role, however. A new model for alumni relations may be as the coach that helps these self-organizing groups connect with valuable institutional resources and coaxes them into meeting institutional goals.
MIT’s Alumni Association has worked with entering students through a Facebook presence for four years now (the first class of students with whom the Institute’s alumni office has had a Facebook-mediated relationship just graduated). Lou Alexander pointed out that “we can’t control the content or direction of these conversations, but we do want to be part of them and influence them.”
This past year, the Alumni Association used Facebook to identify leaders for the Senior Gift program and these students made their asks using Facebook. He reported: “In the first year of Facebook, participation in the senior class gift almost doubled (to 51 %). Last year, it jumped to 64%.” Sounds as if meeting people where they are makes good sense.
The primary shift taking place: the university or institution once held the information necessary for the alumni network to scale and the only way that alumni could access that network was to play by whatever rules the institution made up and to use its system. That’s changed: now the power is with the people and the conversations are going on without the institution mediating them. It’s a powerful paradigm shift, and alumni relations professionals need to be prepared for it to happen--and probably sooner rather than later.
Posted by Michael Stoner on 07/14 at 07:38 AM(2) Comments | Permalink |
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Blogging the CASE Summit
You, too can “attend” some of the best sessions at next weeks CASE Summit, even if you’re not headed to Manhattan for the event. I don’t know of plans to webcast or otherwise distribute sessions from the event, but I do know that I’ll be blogging about sessions of interest (to me, and perhaps, you). And CASE has established an official conference blog.
The Council for Advancement and Support of Education’s Summit for Advancement Leaders is CASE’s premier gathering. Unlike the District Conferences and the many CASE discipline-focused workshops and conferences, the Summit is designed to provide sessions that are more big-picture- and strategy-focused. This years topics include a session covering the upcoming election with a couple of heavy-hitting politicos (including Frank Luntz, who provided strategic messaging and polling for many Republicans in the past several election cycles); and many topics related to issues specific to education.
You can find out more about the Summit program here, and follow CASE’s blog until the conference ends on Tuesday. You can also sign up for notification of new posts via RSS. And you can follow my posts here on mStoner’s own blog.
One of the CASE bloggers is Andy Shaindlin, who writes the Alumni Futures blog and is one of the most cogent thinkers about the changing role of alumni relations in advancement and the challenges of communicating with key audiences in the era of wildly proliferating communications (and social networking) choices for everyone.
Shaindlin’s first post on the CASE blog explores the “biggest” risk in social networking for higher ed administrators.
Quick: what would your answer be? What’s the biggest risk in an investment in Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn--or any of the other social network environments?
Here’s what Andy says:
Want to know whether social networks are “worth it”? Try some of them out. Want to know which features will work on your site? Try them on someone else’s site and then make up your own mind. The biggest risk to higher ed’s use of online networks won’t be choosing the “wrong” tools, or using them the “wrong” way. It will be failing to experiment because we’re afraid of making mistakes. That will inevitably perpetuate the usual trend of only doing what someone else has already done, instead of inventing something new that might benefit our alumni even more.
I’m with Andy: stop worrying about making a mistake and dive in. I’m betting that your alumni will be more forgiving than you imagine. And they might even applaud your efforts.
Posted by Michael Stoner on 07/10 at 02:28 PM(0) Comments | Permalink |
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Yes, That Was an mStoner Employee You Saw at the Annual AIGA Members Meeting
One of the things I am trying to do as Design Director for mStoner is increase our visibility and reputation within the design community. I believe that raising the bar for what we do with our own design work will help raise the bar for design throughout the field of higher and secondary education.
To support this goal, I attend AIGA events representing mStoner, such as the Chicago Annual Member Meeting last Thursday, hosted at the Museum of Contemporary Art4. During the reception5 I ran into some old friends including Andrew Dembitz of Unisource (who used to help me out on a variety of print projects), Andy Eltzroth2 of Tandemodus (who I attended IU with), Mike Biersma7 of Biersma Creative (that’s him on the left and me on the right), and last but not least, Joseph Essex6 (former employer and an early mentor of mine) of Essex Two.
Art Paul1, former creative director of Playboy, and Jilly Simons3 of Concrete were honored as AIGA Fellows this year. One of Art Paul’s main contributions to the design community is his very progressive approach to the use of illustration and fine arts as a way of framing editorial content. In over 20 years as principal of Concrete, Jilly has earned celebrity status (at least in design circles) for intelligent, compelling work.
Posted by Doug Gapinski on 06/18 at 04:01 PM(0) Comments | Permalink |
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Obama Campaign Far Ahead in Use of the Internet
While political analysts (and--one hopes--voters) will parse the platforms of the presidential candidates, there’s no doubt which of the candidates is using a multitude of new marketing tools and techniques to his advantage, both during the primaries and, especially, now that he’s entering the general election. Anyone interested in watching the state-of-the art when it comes to using the Internet for campaigning, fundraising, marketing, and PR need look no further than BarackObama.com.
Obama’s campaign has been widely lauded for its brilliant use of the Internet and social networking. And it’s one reason he has such strong generational appeal.
Here’s just one take, by Shelly Palmer, and another by Noam Cohen at the New York Times, dubbing the campaign ”The Wiki-Way to the Nomination”.
Cohen observes,
But at the same time, Mr. Obama’s notion of persistent improvement, both of himself and of his country, reflects something newer — the collaborative, decentralized principles behind Net projects like Wikipedia and the “free and open-source software” movement. The qualities he cited to Time to describe his campaign — “openness and transparency and participation” — were ones he said “merged perfectly” with the Internet. And they may well be the qualities that make him the first real “wiki-candidate.”
In ”The Amazing Money Machine,” Joshua Green notes that the Obama campaign raised $55 million in February, without the candidate having to host one fundraiser. Contrast this to John McCain’s foray to Denver in May. McCain was forced into a tricky dance; while President Bush raised money for him, McCain had to avoid being seen in public with him to avoid too much identification with his unpopular policies, not to mention his person.
Green’s article explores how Obama has managed to take advantage of three major changes since the 2004 election when Howard Dean’s campaign pioneered web-based communications and fundrasing for an upstart candidate. What’s amazing about the Obama campaign is this:
What’s intriguing to Democrats and worrisome to Republicans is how someone lacking these deep connections to traditional sources of wealth could raise so much money so quickly. How did he do it? The answer is that he built a fund-raising machine quite unlike anything seen before in national politics. Obama’s machine attracts large and small donors alike, those who want to give money and those who want to raise it, veteran activists and first-time contributors, and—especially—anyone who is wired to anything: computer, cell phone, PDA.
Green shows how many in Silicon Valley came to support Obama. Engineers, venture capitalists, and others in the Valley are used to smart, young entrepreneurs starting companies that quickly dominate a niche [think Google, begun by two Stanford students]. To them, Obama’s age or lack of experience in Washington wasn’t a put off; they were attracted by his charisma and brains and out their experience and technology to work for him.
Opportunities for engagement
The Obama Campaign’s website offers a huge number of opportunities for engagement. Create your own site; develop a network; join a Facebook group. If you visit the site, you can note all the social networking sites where the campaign has a presence, and then check out Obama’s presence on some of them.
In his New York Times article, Cohen observes,
Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor whose book “The Wealth of Networks” is a manifesto for online collaboration, points out a crucial difference between Mr. Obama’s approach to attracting supporters and that of his chief rivals. “On the McCain and Clinton Web sites, there is a transactional screen,” Mr. Benkler said. “It is just about the money. Donate, then we can build the relationship. In Obama’s it’s inverted: build the relationship and then donate.”
Also, note all the video that appears on Obama’s site. Lots of it. Speeches, policy comments, from lots of venues, on lots of issues. From the candidate (who looks good on TV) and from ordinary people. There’s also an Obama channel on Youtube; on 14 June, there were 1,103 videos posted, with 51,382,633 views. The McCain channel, in contrast, had 207 videos with 3,753,163 views.
Squelching the rumors
As Obama gained more attention in the primary, rumors began to circulate on the Net via emails and in right wing blogs; you may have heard about some of them: Obama is a Muslim; Michelle Obama has called white people “whitey,” and others. The media has reported that the Obama campaign was concerned that these, and even worse rumors, would form the basis for attacks against their candidate a la the Swift Boat Veterans attacks against John Kerry in the 2004 campaign.
So this week, Obama launched Fight the Smears, a site that is devoted to addressing the rumors and lies about the candidate. If you Googled the phrase “barack obama is a muslim” on Friday, the first two links were from Snopes.com and urbanlegends.about.com--both sites that debunk rumors. [A sponsored link by Human Events offers an anti-Obama tract.] By Saturday, the first links for that phrase were to news reports about the Fight the Smear site.
As media outlets and members of the Obama campaign begin to link to Fight the Smear, I’ll wager that soon the first several pages of links that show up for these rumors will lead to the campaign’s own site. You’ll still be able to find the anti-Obama sites, but unless they pay for links, they’ll be buried in the Google results.
Posted by Michael Stoner on 06/14 at 04:43 PM(3) Comments | Permalink |
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Kent Photoshoot: an Exercise in Decentralized Authorship
Legend, clockwise from top left:
Mark Ostow shooting at the Kent Athletic Field
Morning, outside one of the dorms
Student Photo (Charlie Spatz) of another student at Rock Day
Kent School from across the Housatonic River
Photo crew and student take shelter from rain during a shot
Student Photo (Mike Graae) of student production of the musical "Urinetown"
A couple of weeks ago, we had another opportunity to work with photographer Mark Ostow on a project for Kent, an excellent boarding school located in Connecticut. One of the things we were able to try with this photoshoot is an idea that Michael Stoner mentioned to me over a year ago—that we might recruit students to help visually tell the story of a school, and populate the website using student photography. It’s an idea that I kept in my back pocket until the right project came along, and that project happened to be for Kent.
I love the idea using student photos to populate the website of a school they attend because 1) it’s a truly authentic way of showing what it’s like to be at the school - from a young person’s perspective and 2) using multiple photographers supports the idea of decentralized authorship. By having multiple people add to the photographic library, the library becomes representative of multiple points of view, rather than one person’s take on what the school is. To support this idea further, Kent is going to continue to have students shoot the school each year, which means their photo library will be nice and current over the next few years.
The way we managed the shoot: we still had Mark Ostow and his team of photographers shooting professional, magazine-quality shots. Mark also led a workshop with four students who had expressed interest in shooting photography for the website. The workshop involved examining work from each student, giving them assignements, and then collecting images and reviewing them together in a critique session.
As part of this project, and before the site goes live, we’re setting up all of the professional and student images from the shoot in Adobe Bridge with intelligent recommendations for folder structure and tagging images. This method of archiving will mean that our client will be able to easily search and find images by category, year, author, subject matter, and more.
Posted by Doug Gapinski on 06/12 at 02:17 PM(0) Comments | Permalink |
