ali felski

People love to unwrap things, it just a matter of fact, whether you’re a kid at Christmas or an adult with a new gadget. There’s something mysterious about a new box placed in your hands that makes you incredibly excited to just tear into it. There are a million sites that simply feature people opening up new products, little children shrieking, and adults drooling. Packaging designers know this and take advantage of it, like people at Apple. They know that making a great product is one thing, but a great product with great packaging just improves the overall experience that much more, and that in turn leads to more sales. So as web designers, is there a way we’re able to create this same experience with our websites? At SXSW this year I was inspired to bridge that gap.

Just in case you aren’t one of those people who sees the value in great packaging, here is an example of a fun product I just discovered, SNIF Tag. A SNIF Tag is a transceiver that is clipped onto your dog’s collar so you can monitor your pet when you’re away from home. Basically, it’s a toy for people who treat their dogs like children, and like gadgets.

I can’t say that this is the right time or place for this sort of advertising, with a failing US economy and airline industries claiming bankruptcy, but I can’t get over the beauty of the United Airlines commercials and print campaigns.

So lets start from the beginning. In the early 1900’s United Airlines was formed, and like so many companies, didn’t start off with a solid branding system. As a result, the company drastically changed its logo four different times until 1973, when they hired the amazing graphic designer Saul Bass, who created the simple U shaped logo with the black all caps lettering that we know today. Having this solid base, a logo that has stood up to the test of time, has allowed United to have fun with the rest of its advertising without losing its identity.

With Obama in the President’s seat now, and therefore many new people coming into the government, they now have an opportunity to revisit their presence on the web and explore the possibilities of getting the American people more interested and more informed about what their government is doing. At the Sunlight Foundation we decided to spend a little time thinking about these challenges and came up with a short design exercise that will hopefully get people thinking in that direction.

So two of the questions that I received most are, how I created the background texture on alifelski.com and also if people could outright take elements from my site and simply place them on theirs. With that, I would like to show everyone how I created my background in hopes that people will get inspired and create textured backgrounds of their own.

1. 1.

   Once I established the overall concept of my site and knew I needed to produce a sky background, I set of to find images that would fit into my concept and could be worked into my style. These are the two photos I chose from istockphoto that I felt matched the look and feel I was going for on my site.

   

The response I’ve gotten to my blog in the last couple of months has been so exciting. I really just created it so that I could learn and get better at CSS and HTML after becoming slightly bored of the flash and print worlds. I never dreamed that it would have gotten about 80,000 visits, and almost a quarter million page views from people in over 160 countries (less than 1/3 being from the US). So for this post, I just wanted to take the time to show you what to expect if your site starts gaining popularity, and talk about a couple of things I wish I would have known before starting on this journey.