NEW WORK

Aron Design just completed the design and build-out of a robust e-commerce site for Leslie Linsley Nantucket, a specialty retailer with stores in Nantucket and Boston.

The site launched today following the Spring 2010 soft launch of their new Boston Store. We designed their brand identity, the in-store label and collateral system, the signage and the direct mail marketing.

The assignment included a completely new e-commerce website built using a customized Wordpress backend. The retailer has full control over pages, menus, and blog posts, as well as robust SEO tagged to every page and every image. The product management tools allow the retailer to easily change prices, offer discounts, track orders, interact by email with customer and all payments are cleared through a security gateway.

The project started with a simple sitemap. Then design comps were presented and approved. Once we agreed on the site structure, we decided functionality on a page-by-page basis. Every link action was described in writing before any programming was done. This technique allows for extremely rapid implementation.

Unlike traditional site design/build projects, we did not produce any PhotoshopTM layered files. We created the art to certain sizes as described in the functional spec. That’s it. The pages were composed using Wordpress content management admin tools with very little actual html code. We produced the site in less than four weeks.

Since the site’s design is controlled by css templates and the content and images are manged by a MySQL database, the site is easy to maintain and keep current. The retailer is not html-savvy so the easy-to-use browser-based admin tools allowed for quick training in the page udate and creation techniques.

We produced 20 short video tutorials for the client. That way they do not need to memorize the steps to edit pages. Just watch the video and follow step-by-step.

Visit the site and buy something. The items are all handmade and the designs are one-of-a-kind.

Aron Design has been retained by Davidson Dawson & Clark LLP to design print and online marketing materials. They are the only trusts and estates boutique law firm in the New York metropolitan area, with offices in New York and Connecticut.

When Aron Design creates a website we are intensely aware of cognitive overload—the brains inability to process the chaos of the typical website presentation.

Avoid cognitive overload with well designed pages that promote comprehension and increase effectiveness.

Our methodology:

1. Large, easy-to-read font with plenty of linefeed spacing
2. Lots of white space and generous margins
3. Avoid embedded hyperlinks in body text
4. Avoid distracting animated gifs adjacent to body text
5. Provide video transcripts for video content
6. Make photos large and always include captions
7. Keep pages single-topic—no need to conserve page count on the Web
8. Edit text as much as possible—then cut it in half

What follows is an excerpt from The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.

Back in the 1980s, when schools began investing heavily in computers, there was much enthusiasm about the apparent advantages of digital documents over paper ones. Many educators were convinced that introducing hyperlinks into text displayed on monitors would be a boon to learning. Hypertext would strengthen critical thinking, the argument went, by enabling students to switch easily between different viewpoints.

By the end of the decade, the enthusiasm was turning to skepticism. Research was painting a fuller, very different picture of the cognitive effects of hypertext. Navigating linked documents, it turned out, entails a lot of mental calisthenics—evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats—that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension.

A 2007 scholarly review of hypertext experiments concluded that jumping between digital documents impedes understanding. And if links are bad for concentration and comprehension, it shouldn’t be surprising that more recent research suggests that links surrounded by images, videos, and advertisements could be even worse.

Psychologists refer to the information flowing into our working memory as our cognitive load. When the load exceeds our mind’s ability to process and store it, we’re unable to retain the information or to draw connections with other memories. We can’t translate the new material into conceptual knowledge. Our ability to learn suffers, and our understanding remains weak.

The Internet is an interruption system …we start to read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online. Plus, the Internet has a hundred ways of distracting us from our onscreen reading. Most email applications check automatically for new messages every five or 10 minutes, and people routinely click the Check for New Mail button even more frequently. Office workers often glance at their inbox 30 to 40 times an hour. Since each glance breaks our concentration and burdens our working memory, the cognitive penalty can be severe.

It’s likely that Web browsing also strengthens brain functions related to fast-paced problem-solving, particularly when it requires spotting patterns in a welter of data. A British study of the way women search for medical information online indicated that an experienced Internet user can, at least in some cases, assess the trustworthiness and probable value of a Web page in a matter of seconds. The more we practice surfing and scanning, the more adept our brain becomes at those tasks.

The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the Net’s treasures, we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture.

Adapted from The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, copyright © 2010 Nicholas Carr to be published by W.W. Norton and Company

I was reading the book You Are Not a Gadget by the computer scientist Jaron Lanier and came across this passage: “…there is no evidence that quantity becomes quality in matters of human expression or achievement. What matters instead, I believe, is a sense of focus, a mind in effective concentration, and an adventurous individual imagination that is distinct from the crowd.”

Marketing is a crowded field and as marketers, we strive to have your voice heard above the deafening roar. At Aron Design, we practice the craft of design, writing, and photography with only one goal in mind: connecting with a consumer by telling engaging and persuasive, custom-tailored stories. You need to find that unique selling proposition that consumers will connect with above all others and broadcast it with confidence across a wide spectrum of media. Telling compelling, one-of-a-kind stories is the key.

You Are Not a Gadget is a manifesto that objects to crowd behavior and media mashups in favor of individual expression, especially on the Web. Highly recommended.

For the last several years programmers and typographers have been struggling to create a way to use real fonts like Perpetua for example, not just web-optimized fonts like Times, on public Websites. While the challenges are great, many have succeeded. The trouble is, there is really no standard yet and the lion’s share of solutions so far do not adequately deal with the font licensing issue.

That’s about to change.

Tallys, the display font used on Arondesign.com as rendered by Cufon

I attended a seminar at the Type Directors Club last month featuring the recent work by the magazine designer Roger Black and the font design consultancy Ascender Corporation.

Both agreed that a universal web typography solution is almost within our grasp, however all of sudden the iPad came on the scene, diverting resources and attention from the issues surrounding fonts on the web.

Roger Black is working on a solution with his typography partner David Berlow of the Font Bureau. He demonstrated several terrific solutions, including a new MIT newsletter done in ITC Franklin Gothic. It looked smashing. They are spending a lot of time creating custom-hinted fonts for the web. Additionally he is developing a browser called Treesaver, which will essentially port magazines and newspapers over to the iPad or similar e-readers. About time.

StudioGramercy.com using the font ChunkFive and Cufon

Ascender, designers of many popular web fonts including Verdana, has their own proprietary fee-based web type solution. It’s inexpensive and technologically awesome, but the current font choices are limited. I hope they expand the library to include a wider range.

While this debate rages on, I decided to use JavaScript based Cufón. It is a variation on sIFR, the most popular Web font solution to date. I’m not concerned with the backend of it, I just know that it works. It renders incredibly fast, looks great, handles all kinds of glyphs, and is not a bandwidth hog. It requires no plugin, does not use Flash, and the user experience is seamless. If viewed on a mobile device, it flips back to a default web font you specify in CSS. Perfect.

The New York Times Skimmer using Typekit and their signature font Cheltenham

One important note: do not use Cufón to render all of the text or most of the text on a page. Limit the use to a few key headlines. I am using Tobias Battenberg’s wp-Cufón plugin for WordPress. It was a snap to install and use.

I opted for Cufón over Typekit because I like the idea of hosting the font on my server vs hosting the font on their server. I know that The New York Times uses Typekit for the recent release of Times Skimmer so it can’t be all bad. Your choice really.

The font Bad Dog, offered by Typekit. I'm not kidding. Should be called Bad Font.

For the display type on AronDesign.com I have chosen the font Tallys, designed by Jos Buivenga’s Exljbris Font Foundry. It looks a bit like Perpetua, if you cut it out with a pair of scissors. I like it a lot. He explicitly allows his font to be used by individuals with no licensing restrictions.

I recently finished reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail. I recommend it. He managed to recreate—in incredibly believable detail—the timeline, personalities, and backroom politics behind Lehman Brothers’ demise and the resulting financial market devastation. I was close to the situation in my own way because my employer at the time, Ross Culbert & Lavery, was the design firm that produced Lehman’s annual report and we did marketing and design work for many of the players mentioned in the book. These current and former RC&L clients are mentioned prominently: Lehman Brothers, Citibank, AIG, Evercore, Simpson Thacher, Debevoise, PwC, Och-Ziff, Wiley Rein Fielding, Barclays, Boies Schiller Flexner, Ameriprise… the list goes on.

I especially like the passage when Warren Buffett is trying to decide if he should invest in Lehman. He’s described vividly as paging through our annual report and writing notes in the margin of the book to keep track of his thoughts. Well, he may have liked the annual report design, but he did not like their numbers and passed up the investment opportunity.

The rest is history.

The rust colored Aron Design monogram on the upper right corner of this site is an obvious homage to the world’s greatest draftsman Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). His monogram is artfully etched into most if not all of his works. One might say he was an early proponent of branding.

There isn’t a designer or typographer  that doesn’t owe a bit of gratitude to A. D. His treatise on measurement (Four Books on Measurement (Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt) included an entire book on the geometric construction of the Latin and Gothic alphabet.

Title page of Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion showing the monogram signature of Albrecht Dürer. Courtesy, Wikimedia Commons

The font used for the Aron Design identity, Fette Fraktur is a superb example of how much personality can be packed into a letterform. I modified the “r” for legibility. It is one of my favorite letterforms, perhaps because it was the font used for the masthead of the early Push Pin Graphic. There is also an excellent book on the subject by Paul Shaw, Blackletter: Type and National Identity, which explores the cultural bias against blackletter and its resurgence.

From myfonts.com: