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The official website of Thinkfinity, an organization founded by Verizon Inc has won the the ‘Best in Tech’ website award for 2010 by Scholastic Administrator magazine in International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE 2010) conference. To read the story behind the success of http://www.thinkfinity.org please download our casestudy pdf.
We recently updated our homepage to make the information more relevant and quickly accessible. One of the main idea was to highlight our newly added case studies and white-papers for our visitors.
We would love to hear your feedback on our new facelift.
Our motto for ultimate User Experience is to make every application Simple, Beautiful and Usable. Beautiful part can be achieved by some Photoshop magic and creative instincts. To achieve simplicity and usability one has to have very good overview of the entire application to make sure that the information architecture caters to easy access of information and also has the intuitiveness to make its adoption easier.
One of the key stages of any good design is its wire-framing stage. This is the stage which really helps you think through the entire application and come up with creative ideas. Recently in one of the Refresh DC’s events I came to know about a library of readily available wireframe templates and libraries named Unify. I encourage you all to explore its videos and try to use it in your design practices.
Few other resources: I Love Wireframes
If you know any good resources on wireframes then please do share them in comments section.
Zigron has grown tremendously over the last two years and during this time we have tried our level best to keep our website up-to-date. Keeping the iterative approach in combination with “market driven design” philosophy,we are now launching Zigron’s new website and brand identity.
Zigron has used its successful approach of “Simple , Beautiful and Usable” methodology to design and develop our new website which will cater to a wider range of our ever growing client base and industry verticals.
I will truly appreciate your feedback or suggestions for our new site.
Enjoy the video of Google’s Data Center tour.
On March 17th 2009 Zigron Inc exhibited its services and products at Norther Virginia Technology Council’s Emerging Business and Entrepreneur Event.
The Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) is the membership association for the technology community in Northern Virginia. NVTC has about 1100 member companies representing more than 200,000 employees and Zigron is its memeber.
Mashable.com recently added Zigron’ s PingMyCompany.com to its list of most underrated websites of 2008.
You can read the the story and the list here on Mashable.com
Recently I got hold of this website which has applied cartogram on the Presidential Election results. It’s a great way to show relevance, visually.
Some of the images are as below.
2008 presidential election results on a population cartogram:
Electoral college by scaling the sizes of states to be proportional to their number of electoral votes:
Based on County-level election returns:
Few days back we had arranged a group competition to save the eggs when they are throw from the roof top in a box. Six different teams were made and each team was given around 1.45 hours and a very small budget to make these boxes. Goal was to safe eggs by adopting creative design concepts.
I am proud to announce that all eggs were saved which shows Zigron team is quite talented . The competition resulted in a tie as all designs were equally creative thus everyone was declared as winner.
Below is the slide show from the event.
This week I had the pleasure to attend An Event Apart design conference. It was a great experience to hear some great presentations and learn new approaches towards design. In next few posts I will try to share all of my experiences.
Starting off the best presentation of the day one was by Jason Santa Maria who is the Creative Director at Happy Cog studios. It was about “Storytelling by Design”. He had raised a very good point that why the design experience on a Wired in-print magazine is so different then Wired’s web experience. The point was that in-print designers try to set the mood around the content but on the web we lose the esence of story telling and just focus on content. Ironically, I think it should be the other way round as we have more tools and independence on the web. The other issue designers face is that we don’t have the control on the medium. Unlike print where the designer can exactly control the layout web designers are at the mercy of browser type, screen resolution and personal settings.
A very interesting book site NoOneBelongsHereMoreThanYou.com 
was shared as a case study for its out of box approach.I agree with Jason that its wonderfully done and it has a very unique approach. The image on the the left is the homepage and you will see that it doesn’t have any traditional elements like About Us or Info rather it has a compelling text which draws you in. Similarly I also liked Jason’s site, which tries to break away from conventional design and take each post as an individual story that’s why you will see different design around each post.
Great visual design which has a story to tell has been around for many years and its very apparent from the below example of Charles Joseph Minard graphic illustration of Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812. If you move from left to right, the design illustrates the size of Napoleon’s army in yellow when he started his march toward Russia and moving from right to left in black you can see the size of his army when he was returning to France. Its amazing to see that how a simple design explains such an dramatic event in history. I think at the end it was just Napoleon and his buddy who reached back.
Jeffry Zeldman also gave an interesting example of how conflict between design and marketing team can result in a funny situation. RealPlayer wants to be a dominat player in media players but on Real.com it seems that someone was able to convience the the company to psuh a paid version of realplayer down our throat by making free version very hard to find. Apparently someone wants us to download the paid version only. Nice job!!
At the end I will also encourage you to viist a design site named Fray.com which has some great visual stories. In my next post I will share some more great snippits on design and in the meanwhile if you know some other great design sites then please share them in comments.
