No integrated media project would be complete without a home. OBD designed a simple and easy to navigate website. We then created an on-demand print magazine. This green solution is a cost-effective way to market products to a broad audience.  We looked at a numerous web-based magazine offerings but  MagCloud had us at hello. We are very happy with the service –especially with the print/paper quality of the actual magazine.

As you can see, social media is only part of the integrated media story. The other part is the device the information is served on. ART of Precision works everywhere. All the time. Here we show it on a laptop and an iPad.

Moving forward and inventing integrated media solutions doesn’t mean we ignore the past. This Micro Spring photograph illustrates clean, classic,  black and white never goes out of style.

When we talk about integrated media most think about “social media”. This an important element because more people will do searches and find information through Facebook and Twitter than Google.

Twitter is an amazing way to reach an audience. Just do the math. If you have 1000 followers and they tweet to their 1000 followers you can potentially reach one million people with one tweet. There are a number of appliances like TweetDeck that help keep accounts organized and allow you to follow more people.

Facebook fan pages are also a great way to grow an audience and to track your followers.

LinkedIn has a number of manufacturing and medical device groups. More than just a place to post your online resume, it provides qualified leads in very specific areas.

Braun Citrus Press User Manual ~1960

The great functionalist designer Dieter Rams gave us ten provocative definitions for good design.

• Good design is innovative.
• Good design makes a product useful.
• Good design is aesthetic.
• Good design makes a product understandable.
• Good design is unobtrusive.
• Good design is honest.
• Good design is long-lasting.
• Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
• Good design is environmentally friendly.
• Good design is as little design as possible.

]]> http://outoftheblue.com/blog/2010/02/the-essence-of-good-design-is/feed/ 0 http://outoftheblue.com/blog/2010/01/happy-new-year/ http://outoftheblue.com/blog/2010/01/happy-new-year/#comments Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:13:54 +0000 DesignBlues http://outoftheblue.com/blog/?p=179 Every year, we express gratitude to our friends and colleagues and point out exciting events from the previous year. 2009 was an extraordinary year. Our clients kept us on our toes—inspiring us and helping us see old things in new ways.  We continue to focus on medical device clients and were fortunate to work with amazing teams developing some really outstanding products for asthma, cardiovascular, diabetes, HIV, and ophthalmic diseases.

Because of our strong social agenda, our favorite product in 2009 is an HIV test that makes testing as simple and portable as a pregnancy test. It was developed by a brilliant German team at ZYOMYX. We believe this will have a tremendous impact on the developing world; saving lives and reducing human suffering. The underlying technology will have many applications and we expect this team to win the medical device Olympics.

As you might have guessed, the most recent marketing developments have not been lost on us. We have been following closely the FDA and its decisions on search engine optimization, social networking, and online advertising. It is a gray area that requires some finesse but it does open new doors for the health care industry. We see social media as an area of tremendous growth during this decade. Our @readtoday Twitter alias has drawn more than 2600 followers making us a leading Tweeter in the area of literacy and teaching us a lot about what works and what doesn’t in the Twitter sphere.  We have also been developing appropriate blogging and online advertising strategies. On demand printing is another big development. Not only is it a green solution it is also much more cost-effective. We expect to be designing more online magazines, eBooks, and brochures.

Our medical device photography has drawn such a popular audience that we are now working on a book. Several companies have asked to participate. We will keep you posted but it is safe to say Wolfgang Hahner is poised to become one of the most recognized photographers, in this particular area, during this new decade.  His eye-of-the-needle photographs are so stunning many have actually put them on canvases and hung them in public spaces.

On the technology front, we are very proud of Whiteboard Selling. These are the guys to watch. They have impressed a host of clients with their unique selling methodology and helped us discover that we still hold an edge in the technology design space. This year, we designed and built an innovative platform for IBM Whiteboard TV that includes six videos controlled by a dynamic Flash Whiteboard. It is a cool application that holds a lot of promise for distance selling and corporate training.  In 2009, HyperRoll (a client we have been working with since 2004) was purchased by Oracle laying our big cat campaign to permanent rest. Our big cats had a good run.

No year-end review would be complete without mentioning our non-profit organization. Last year, our LiteracyCenter.Net had more than 1.5 million visitors and 35 million page views. We launched a new companion site called ReadToday.Net which is growing its own base. Over the holidays, we designed and launched e-books that use fruits and vegetables to teach preschool age children words even as they instill a love for healthy foods. Our Eater Reader(TM) e-books were a terrific success with parents and teachers and are still available from our websites.

So, that was our year in a nut-shell. Like all of you, we are looking to 2010 to bring peace and prosperity to the world. We thank each and every one of your for your continued support! We couldn’t do it without you.

Best wishes for a wonderful New Year!

out of the blue design

Transform your PowerPoint slides into flexible, engaging and business value-oriented whiteboard stories.

Canson PAPERSHOW™ is the new digital writing kit for digital flipchart work and interactive presentations. The kit is ideal for meetings, conferences and collaborative work.

Simply write on the Canson PAPERSHOW™ digital paper and see your notes projected onto your screen via a Bluetooth connection between the Digital Pen and USB Key.

Big cats are compelling; they convey strength and agility. Their colors also work really well with blue.

The highlight of the conference was the new application launch pad. Klout is an application that will allow Twitter users to determine the success of their campaigns. Tidy Tweet will have a big impact on our clients. It allows approval of Tweets, bad word filtering, competing product name filtering, black or white listing, and auto spam rejection. It has a very intuitive user interface so clients can control their own campaigns. Justbought.it is going to be another big winner. This is customer driven purchasing or Twitter on steroids.

Guy Kawasaki is a nice guy full of enthusiasm for new media. He also gets the dad-of-the-year award for carrying around a skateboard with a pen taped to it so he could get Tony Hawk’s signature for his son. He has a very clever Twitter strategy: every link he posts to Twitter is posted to his Alltop website. This drives traffic to his site even as it helps him grow his Twitter follower base. You can guess his demographic when you see his bright orange logo and plastic business card sticker meant to be stuck to an Apple laptop. (Guy is not a PC.) He is also not very keen on health care as a business opportunity. It is too vertical for him.

No event would be complete without Gavin Newsom being beamed in on Skype. Running for governor against the former CEO of Ebay can’t be easy for a non-technical guy but this really had a very Fahrenheit 451 feeling to it.

The panel called Media Integration Strategies: Incorporating Twitter into your Existing Properties was quite good.

The Sharon Heights Country Club is an elegant place to do business without really looking like you are doing business.