Why My Kid Shoved His Face in the Snow

It was parent teacher conference day at Owen’s school. His teacher mentioned, with concern, “Owen shoved his WHOLE FACE in the SNOW. I told him not to. Maybe it’s a sensory issue?”

While eating dinner, I asked Owen why he stuck his entire face in the snow.

He simply explained, “I want my snow angel to have a face.”

My New Favorite Phrases: ‘Corporate Underpants’ and ‘Swoop and Poop’

We attended a UIE Virtual Seminar, “The Power of Ad Hoc Personas: Truly Practical Methods to Get Your Organization on the Same Page” by Tamara Adlin. In a nutshell, we learned the importance of creating personas in order to organize and design a Web site that is user friendly. Although the seminar was targeted towards a corporate audience, the messages still apply to higher education.

Twitter Snapshot

Twitter provided an excellent recap of the UIE Virtual Seminar. All of these tweets came from #uievs, mostly from @whitneyhess and @tigerfork.

New Vocab

• “Corporate Underpants: When your org structure shows on your Web site”
• “Swoop and Poop: When executives fly over the project and crap all over it, then fly away”
• “Barnacle Based Design: A few years ago it got designed, since then barnacles have grown on — clogging up the works”
• “Marketing vs. Design Personas: Marketing drives eyeballs to your product, product design moves those eyeballs around once they arrive”
• “Use the term Ad-hoc personas NOT target audiences because marketing tends to get turfy”

Higher Ed Ladies on the Fast-Track

About the Conference

Last week I went to an American Association for Women in Community Colleges (AAWCC) Conference. This has sparked several conversations with friends, family, co-workers and even complete strangers. I thought it would be a good time to reflect on what was discussed and the “golden nuggets” that were found.

Mini Moment: My ‘Nice Things’

I was frantically searching for my phone this morning.

Very seriously, Owen said, “Daddy buys you nice things. And you just LOSE them. Now go find it.”

Pretty PDF’s: Interactive and Online

Using Issuu – You Publish for “Making digital publishing beautiful.”
I designed this career brochure and uploaded it to Issuu…

My boss sent me an email. It went something like this:

“When we complete our new viewbook, would it be possible to create something like this online viewbook?”

I get a lot of these emails, with links to fancy Web sites from other colleges. Although they are inspiring, some of the projects (especially projects that are full of animation, professional video and amazing interaction) send me into a mild panic attack. How is our tiny team of two going to accomplish this task?

Back to the viewbook email… I remembered a link that I Delicious’d almost a year ago. After a 10 minute test, I showed my boss an interactive AlumNews magazine. She loved it! And I loved that it only took a few minutes to create something so pretty!

CLC Web Journal

I’m liking the idea of “transparency.”

So, I started a blog for the stuff I do at work. I call it “CLC Web Journal.”

Why did I start this blog? It’s a good place for…

• Documenting our biggest project ever.. The redesign
• Sharing the tools we’ve used to make our jobs easier
• Introducing the web team to anyone who wants to meet us
• Bookmarking higher ed sites that inspire us
• Showcasing the projects we’ve worked on with anyone interested

‘No War’ Poster on Faculty Door

There are interesting things in the halls of higher ed… Like this “No War” poster.

My favorite lines:

“Feel free to talk to me rather than just vandalize my door.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m Shy “

Fun Widgets to Create Custom Graphics

Thanks to GoogleReader and Twitter, I come across online design tools on a daily basis. I like come up with creative ways of using them in my job as a designer in higher ed, but I have yet to actually use one for work.

Create Custom Word Clouds | www.wordle.net

CLC has More than 200 Degree and Certificate Programs!

Wordle is a fun tool used to generate “word clouds.” You provide a word list (i.e. copy and paste the academic program list) or a link to your favorite blog. It’s all customizable — the color schemes, fonts and layout. Use it to promote academic programs with a typography graphic or to visualize all the news releases from 2008.

Info Sheets for Academic Programs

How to promote nearly 200 degree and certificate programs

one-page info sheets promoting each academic program

OLD: PR created high-quality tri-fold brochures to promote programs.

PROBLEM: These brochures quickly became outdated and were too costly to reproduce.

BAD SOLUTION: Divisions created their own brochures using Word or Publisher. Why so bad? Inconsistent design and content; lack of college identity or no logo (or terribly stretched logo); and other issues that I’m too polite to mention.

AWESOME SOLUTION: One-page info sheets!

Web Requests That Make Me Cry on the Inside

1. Everyone says, “I want a permanent link on the homepage.”
   …Followed by “The homepage is too crowded!”
   
2. “Can you post this 75 MB file on our Web page?”
   …Uh, technically, yeah. Kinda.
3. “Make it *BLING*”
   …What about functionality? Helpful content? ADA accessibility?
4. “Why don’t we have [insert buzz word]?”
   …Why do you hate me?
5. “We are changing our department name and revamping our image!”
   …Followed by “How come no one can find us?”
   
6. “We are buried, look at [insert non-edu site], it’s easy to find stuff!”
   …It only has FIVE pages.
7. “Can’t you just copy and paste [insert other edu site]?”
   …Nope, that would be illegal. Plus, we are in IL. I don’t think we can get away with the giant graphic of the college with the mountains in the background.