Hello! I haven’t been able to write anything on this blog for the past few weeks because of the high amount of work and deadlines I’ve been trying to chase. What can I say, I love what I do. I was set to launch two websites in three weeks but I’m basically done with one so my time is freeing up a little.

Back in August when I had just launched my site, I wrote about how Blizzard.com can do better with their website. I talked about how their website inspired me to learn web design and development a decade ago and how they seriously needed a makeover.Last Friday, to my surprise, I get a personal e-mail from the Lead Web Designer of Blizzard.com who told me he found the article I wrote last August and was thankful for the input and thoughts I shared, as well as following their web presence after all these years. Needless to say I was pleasantly shocked that someone from their web team would respond and that e-mail made my day. Talk about reaching out to your customers, a classy move indeed.

Of course, it was no coincidence in terms of timing that they wrote me last Friday. They also wrote to tell me that they had just launched their new redesigned website. Without further ado, I give you a screenshot of the newly redesigned Blizzard.com homepage.

I think their new website is awesome, in a professional sense of course haha. It’s what you’d expect from a 2009 redesign with the corporate color pallete intact and the game-inspired user interface that makes who Blizzard is. The mix of a clean and edgy feel allows them to not only be Blizzard the corporation, but Blizzard the gaming corporation.

I’ve always enjoyed how Blizzard uses flash as a supplement to their pages. With some of the best animators in the world, they have the resources to produce these very creatively done animations. Last time I used Flash, particle engines were picking up steam and usage so I wonder what engine they used to create the effects, if any.

So that’s it, be sure to check out the new snazzy redesign yourselves. Congratulations to the entire Blizzard web team, you’ve definitely moved your website out of the 90’s. P.S., Sorry I have to nitpick a little, there’s no favicon haha. :)

Humor me for a moment as I give a glimpse of my non-professional life. I promise it has something to do with design and development. Last Saturday, I joined the GCF Youth L.I.V.E. Missions team on an outreach to an urban poor area in Quezon City. For one thing, I did not work a lot during the past week so I thought I might as well do something extremely productive with my time.

For one day I served as a driver for the youth as well as handling a group of children from that area. It was a very fulfilling experience seeing how very little things can make a difference in the lives of children, even if it was only for a single day. This was my first time to help in one an outreach so it was surprisingly very fun talking to the kids and playing around with them.

So, what does this have to do with professional designers and developers? Well, I’d like to say that in any profession, I believe there is no excuse not to give back with the God-given talents you have. If you’re a web designer or developer, consider building a website for one non-profit organization a year. If your a print designer, how about designing posters for non-profit events this year for free.

More importantly, if you’re a designer or developer of any medium, without that many portfolio items, giving back pro bono style can provide a win-win situation for both parties involved. The organization get’s free design and more importantly, you get work to display in your portfolio, get to hone your budding skills, make a mark with your style and if you do a decent enough job, may obtain a stream of referrals from that non-profit. As an added bonus, pro bono clients will probably be some of the best clients you’ll ever have. They’re happy most of the time with anything you can give (which means you can experiment a lot) and most of the time, don’t hassle you at any angle.

When I look back at my very short life so far, I’ve always found a recurring theme when it comes to giving back. I’ve found that you always get more in return than what you give. When I was starting out with design, I chose to help out in my local church. Because I could experiment and make mistakes, I was able to grow into the profession I am in right now. Even if you’re an established professional, sometimes you have to believe that work isn’t always about the money or how bigger your pockets will be getting in return. Sometimes it’s about the intangibles in life and getting things of greater value.

As human beings, no matter what the profession, I believe that everyone can make the time to give back to their community, even if just once a year, and they’ll more often than not be pleasantly surprised to find that they get more out of it than they expected.

It’s that time of the year when politicians start ramping up those television ads and candidates start declaring their intent to run for office. Yes folks, it’s election season here in the Philippines and the web has become another battleground and platform which politicians can utilize.

As we saw in last year’s US Elections, the web was a way that candidates could connect with voters (albeit, they had someone handling their internet presence) and was a platform for them to disseminate information. Judging by the highly successful Obama campaign and website, it seems that candidates can no longer ignore the web as a emerging information platform.

I personally enjoyed Obama’s campaign websites. It was very well designed, layed out, and provided a ton of information so I decided to find out what our own local politicians websites looked like. I found a list of websites for presidentiables here and started viewing them one by one.

Scanning the list of websites, I found only two whose design stood out, which is quite sad given the number of presidentiables we have in this country. If I recall correctly, McCain’s website wasn’t badly designed, its just that Obama’s hit a home run.

Senator Noynoy Aquino’s website is probably the best in the bunch. It’s clean, has a good color pallete (obviously yellowish), and uncluttered. It does have it’s problems though. The font is not tight and needs some work in which some pages have font sizes that look awkward. Also, he loses points for not having a favicon and having more than half his main navigation with broken links. Seriously, fix the links.

National Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro’s website is the other one that stood out to me. I enjoy the use of good colors, a modern layout and an appealing header (no matter how cheesy and stereotypical you may think it is, i like it). Unfortunately, I do not enjoy anything else. Again, the use of awkward font-sizes and font-color destroy the website. If the website were the first 400 pixels, this would be considered beautifully designed and well thought out. I also honestly though the text in the Latest News section were Google ads.

In terms of the choice of technology and implementation of websites, I don’t know if we’re really have this sheer amount of backwards developers  or people aren’t just reading and continuing to update themselves with the latest technology. I found a website that uses full flash (OK, he’s a vice-presidentiable but loading time was ridiculously long and good luck with SEO), two websites using *gasp* frames (for a reason I do not know), and almost all of them running on custom built CMS’s. There’s nothing wrong with Custom built CMS’s except that I don’t see much in their websites that warranted having to reinvent the wheel, which most likely means making a worse wheel.

I did see some good stuff though. Senator Noynoy’s website cuts large pictures into smaller pieces for faster loading, a technique that mostly became irrelevant in the broadband age but at least it shows the developer knows his stuff. Erap’s website (for the sake of this article we will pretend he can run) is surprisingly running on Wordpress which for me is a very good choice.

At the very least, I applaud our candidates for leveraging social technologies. In almost all of the websites, I found links to social accounts of the presidentiables. So if they can’t design well, at least they fulfill the goal of giving us, the voters, the proper information.

If I may go back to Obama’s website for a second, there’s no denying the influence it has had on some of the developers and designers of our local candidate’s websites. One website follows the same layout and design elements (even the color, yes, I almost laughed) and another, refers to <candidate> everywhere, similar to, Obama everywhere, when referring to social networks. One of them uses a circle emblem on a line at the footer area similar to what Obama used to do with his branding, but that might be nit-picking on my part.

Maybe it’s because I’m comparing our local websites with that of Obama’s during his campaign that I feel our very own are kind of lacking. If that’s the case, I hope that at the very least all of us Filipinos can utilize these websites to learn more about the candidates for the upcoming elections and be as informed as we can. And maybe, just maybe, they could move some of that enormous amount of campaign money and send it towards some very good local graphic studios, agencies, designers and developers.

Which candidate’s website did you find well or badly designed?

Yesterday, two of my friends and clients Dwight Co and Mye Chung opened their new Photography studio right here in Metro Manila. It’s called the Living Room Photography Studios and it’s located along P.Guevarra. If you are interested in finding a place to shoot, this is a fantastic place to do it and I’m sure you’ll love what they got.

Aside from being a photography studio, they offer photography lessons for all the hobbyists out there. With the dramatic decline in the price of photography gear over the last couple of years, this is an affordable way to finally get the most out of your camera and to hone those budding skills.

You can learn more about the Living Room Photography Studios at their website. If you want Dwight’s insights into the creation of the brand and the studio itself, he has an interesting article about it on his blog.

The website was designed by Dwight, who is an identity and graphic designer by profession, and developed by yours truly. It runs on Drupal with several modules running beside it’s core.

Some interesting modules used were the Nodequeue and Views slideshow for the homepage (they really need to work on preloading those images), Galleria + imagecache for the lookbook, and Webform + SMTP Authentication Support for the contact page. Path Redirect was also used as to keep the URL’s clean and adjustable depending on the initial content of the lookbook and photography lessons page.

Enough of the boring stuff. If you need directions getting there, you can find more details at their contact page or you can ask me and I’ll show you. When the time comes that I’ll need a studio to rent, this will definitely be the one I’ll choose. Oh ya, please help spread the word! :)

We’ve all seen them and admired them, or for many, are annoyed by them. Yes, I’m talking about those HTML e-mails which look like a website has been torn and brought right into your inbox. For many of us we will recognize them as the newsletter we get from our favorite online shops or the nice looking alerts we get from our social sites. Unfortunately, sometimes they take the form of unsolicited mail we get offering us a new product we don’t need.

Albeit annoying, no one can deny that the impact of an HTML powered e-mail can bring to mail we do want to have. If your a  freelance worker or a small to enterprise business operation and have not considered sending out HTML powered e-mails for official business, I give you two important reasons why they should be considered.

1. Your Brand and Image

For most business and one-man shops, the brand and image your project is invaluable to your operation. Having a consistent image is one tip that you’ll here over and over again about your brand. Consistent branding and image through the use of graphics, colors and fonts helps boost your image of professionalism and says that your not just simply a fly-by-night, anything goes, chop-shop.

A typical Twitter HTML powered e-mail

Take the Twitter message alerts via HTML e-mails as an example. They use the same colors, fonts, graphics and layout scheme that you’ll find on a typical twitter website. This helps build recognition to their brand as well as looking professional. When I see the e-mail I instantly recognize it as coming from Twitter and design cues help me remember the type of branding and image Twitter stands for.

2. Readability

Whether or not the e-mails you send out are HTML powered or not, they should at the very least serve the purpose of communicating a certain message. That being the fact, HTML powered e-mails have the potential of making your messages more readable through the use of design cues and layout techniques. Take a look of two examples that I’m sure you’re familiar with:

Facebook notification in Plain Text

Twitter notification in HTML

Both notify you of important events in your social networks. The difference is that Facebook’s is simply a plain message while Twitter’s is HTML powered. With the Facebook e-mail, it’s hard to initially discover what’s important and what’s not. There’s a lot of links, a lot of text that’s all jumbled together in a plain environment.

With the Twitter HTML powered e-mail, we instantly recognize what the most important piece of text is within the e-mail through font-sizes and font-weights. We also are able to quickly recognize who sent the message via an image. Through the layout, we are able to determine what information we can safely ignore such as those undersized elements and those at the footer.

Final Note

I’m sure there are more reasons why HTML powered e-mails are important but these are two of the more important ones that made me decide to use them in my own freelance business. In my next post, I’ll discuss how to design and develop your own HTML powered e-mails and show you some of the ones I use for my freelance business.

What do you think about the importance of HTML powered e-mails for any type of business?

Everyone loves Blizzard Entertainment. They brought us three of the most recognized franchises in the electronic gaming industry in Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo. They own the number 1 online MMORPOG in World of Warcraft. In short, they’re awesome.

So it is to note that I have nothing but respect and admiration for this company. But there’s something else about this website that’s special to me and to which I will forever be indebted to. This very website was the website that got me into web design and development, which in turn, got me into design in general.

When I was in first year high school, I created my first semi-decent website for our class. (No screenshots necessary haha.) Anyways, I furiously copied the color scheme and design elements of the blizzard.com website (the design has not changed in almost 10 years, more on this later) in the greatest form of flattery. Their design a decade ago was stunning and forward-thinking for that era and I adored that website.

Fast forward to 2009 and the design has not changed. There have been certain elements added/changed but the overall look hasn’t. (Changing the sidebar image does not count as a redesign by the way) Think I’m pulling your leg? Well, I used the Way Back Machine to conjure up some screenshots…

February 29, 2000

August 15, 2009

Functionally speaking the website serves it’s purpose. It gives us basic information about the company and its franchise along with news about their upcoming events. But any website can serve information. I simply expect Blizzard to do it with more of an edge. From what I’ve noticed over the years, they started to use their website as simply a gateway to the other websites of their products.

Whatever the goal of their website, they do need to do something with their outdated look. It’s not so much how bad they look now (because lets face it, we’ve seen much, much worse), it’s that we know they can do so much better. If it’s a mere pass through for people looking for their product websites then fine, but I don’t see the harm in maybe spicing it up a bit, even just their landing page.

They have some of the best artists and UI designers in the world. Just look at two of the websites for their products Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 and you’ll see that they’ve got it in them. Those websites make you go “wow”.

On a final note, maybe its because I once looked up to their corporate website and still look up to their product websites that I feel their corporate site has fallen short. Or maybe it’s the caliber and size of Blizzard and it’s internet presence that put its website under greater scrutiny. Whatever their reason may be for not running with the times, their website does a huge disservice to their brand and identity and I humbly await the day I feature their new redesign.

What are some of the websites that you think have the resources to do better?