What I particularly love about Tom’s perspective is the way he conveys an appreciation for the very processes he deflates with his insightful and delightful eviscerations. Used properly, Tom’s work is a great reality check for whether you are truly innovating and accomplishing, or just going through the motions.

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The landscape of company Intranet solutions has changed significantly over the last few years, from self-hosted technologies managed by local IT support teams, to cloud-hosted web-enabled applications with centralized technical support. Usage and setup has become easy and intuitive such that business users can manage the “who, how and what” of the intranet themselves. Even small companies, for whom the costs and hosting issues associated with early Intranet solutions were prohibitive, can easily select a cloud-hosted service and reap the benefits of a shared and structured workspace that fits their business requirements.

A quick review of available products suggests that there are three key design intentions that distinguish these products from one another: Social Business, Project Management and Collaboration, and traditional Information and File Sharing. Although there is significant overlap among these platforms, they are designed to support and enhance a specific work type.

Social Business platforms (Jive, Salesforce) are structured around the concept of the community – whether a community of work peers or a community of subject matter experts – who communicate and collaborate with one another and with customers and partners within the framework.  Integrated with CRM, these platforms focus attention on engagement and relationship management in a business context.

Project Management platforms (TeamLab, Huddle, Basecamp, Podio) are built around the shared team or project workspace, with tools to manage milestones, deliverables and tasks as the key components of the structure.

Information and File Sharing platforms (Igloo, OfficeAbility) are more reminiscent of the traditional Intranet with files and folders of information as the cornerstone, although these modern versions incorporate some of the features of the all of the other platforms such as streaming conversation, team workspaces, and shared contact management.

Typical features of these intranet products include:

Costs run the gamut from free to thousands of dollars per month, depending on the number of users to the integrated features and add-ons one requires. But in the array of options, there is one to fit almost any business, large or small, simple or complex. Establishing your business goals for a new work platform and understanding the type of work processes your business engages in are the keys to selecting an “Intranet” solution that can support and enhance the activities of effective and productive work teams.

Yes, video chat has been around for quite some time, now, with services like Skype setting the bar for quality and ease-of-use. But the availability of video chat on websites as a customer service option has only recently emerged as practical option. Land’s End is one of the early adopters.

The market for website video chat has exploded in just the last 6-12 months. As a technology, online video chat capability is not new, but the underlying infrastructure to support it – speedy bandwidth, in-line video windowing, tools for tracking and transferring of video sessions from one agent to another – have improved significantly in just the last few years, making it possible for organizations to consider adopting it successfully for customer service applications.

There are two models of video chat implementation available:

1. self-hosted video chat, and
2. cloud-hosted video chat.

Depending on the nature of the resource engaged to install and configure it, a self-hosted solution might appear, at the outset, to be the more economical choice. However, conventional technology issues such as browser updates, bandwidth changes, infrastructure versioning, and a multitude of other factors create ongoing maintenance, upgrade and troubleshooting requirements resulting in mounting costs and, more often than not, service interruptions. Moreover, the dependence of a self-hosted system on local, on-site IT personnel is such that the organization is a virtual captive to such resources.

A number of cloud-based options are already available for deploying your own video customer service, including Vee 24 and ClairVista at the high end, and Netop Live Guide and Chat& on the more moderate side of the price spectrum.

Here’s a quick breakdown of primary features:

Now rapidly emerging as one of the leading-edge features of premium customer service, the ability to instantly connect with – and see – a real live person adds a distinctly personal feel, a human touch, to what might otherwise be remote and impersonal communications. This can be critical – game changing, even – to an organization whose brand value is dependent on, or even significantly amplified by, a human connection.

And really: What brand isn’t?

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An Arch digitals DPA is a great way to get the conversation started – both internally and externally – about the opportunities, challenges, and potential directions for growing your business online.

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The marvelous art direction is done in that enduringly popular mid-century style, perhaps best exemplified by one of the iconic animated shorts of the era, the legendary Toot, Whistle Plunk and Boom from Walt Disney Productions, first released in 1953.

Decades of budding artists and  musicians in darkened elementary schoolrooms throughout the country were blessed with this masterpiece, which contains some remarkable design work headed by director Ward Kimball and storyboard artist Tom Oreb. Sketches and concept art samples from this production, such as those in the gallery below, are now coveted artworks.

Using technology that only recently became available, HD images of the Great Barrier Reef will be accessible on Google Earth and Google Maps, allowing even those who can’t swim a virtual dive. Approximately 50,000 panoramas will be available on a new Google feature called “Panoramio” which links photos to locations. A prototype of the project, called the Catlin Seaview Survey, launched Thursday in Singapore. The project will also have a dedicated YouTube channel, and will broadcast Google + Hangouts, which involve group video chats, on-air – allowing viewers to watch livestreams of the expedition from the ocean floor.

It would difficult to calculate how much favorable brand value initiatives like this bring to Google, but suffice it to say it is substantial. As long as the company continues to balance what some characterize as nefarious neglect of its users’ privacy concerns with good-will projects that (not coincidentally) highlight their technological leadership and media innovation, Google will handily retain its substantial brand luster.

A major new trend will change not only what the Internet looks like, but how we interact with it.

The seemingly sudden emergence of responsive web design over the past year reminds me a lot of how social media finally delivered on the long-held promise of the Internet as a place where human interaction and transaction would be fully enabled. Before social media, the Internet was always talked about as something truly new and different because it was the first mass medium that wasn’t passive, but interactive. Or at least potentially so. Problem was, few people really used it for anything other than passive purposes such as information gathering. Social media changed all that by giving users easy ways to broadcast themselves; to publish, comment, and truly interact online.

Although unlikely to be the paradigm shift that social media was, responsive site design also delivers on an Internet promise: that of giving users a truly unique way to consume and interact with content.

The vast majority of web pages today are based on print models: large headers across the top for cover story content; secondary sections for regular features, and the rest falling into table-of-contents style lists and columns. When arriving on interior article pages, the dependence on centuries of print layouts becomes even more obvious. There’s nothing wrong with this, people are accustomed to it; these layouts didn’t evolve arbitrarily. But information consumption online overall – across websites, social media networks, and on the range of devices we now use – is changing the way people want to select and engage with content. And site design is now starting to respond.

Strictly speaking, responsive design wasn’t developed to address user interest in alternative or more contemporary ways to consume content, but to make site display more efficient for the variety of devices now being used to access it. From Smashing Magazine:

Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries. As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities. In other words, the website should have the technology to automatically respond to the user’s preferences. This would eliminate the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market.

The consequences of this quite practical requirement, however, are more far-reaching than just reduced development cost and greater consistency in brand experience. The display flexibility that is an inherent aspect of responsive site design is deconstructing the print-based layout model and replacing it with something more like having multiple windows open on your laptop screen. The flexible grid structure even allows for user-controlled display options based on interest (see the services page of this site for an example of this).

As you’ve probably started to notice, websites are rapidly jumping on the responsive design bandwagon, and Arch Digitals is no exception. Even as we launched an initial site just a few months ago, we were already in the concept stages of the fully responsive design you can now explore.

above: Thirteen Rectangles by Wassily Kandinsky, 1930

The truth of the matter is we’ve needed a high-design, spot-on depiction of the Brand Strategy practice for quite some time, now. Not quite an infographic, this work nevertheless conveys some of the key elements and outputs that the process involves.

More about our brand strategy services, plus some sample work → More

This one from Smart Insights in the U.K. is a happy balance – a great-looking visual (well, after some desaturation, but that’s just personal preference) of some very well organized information. It’s difficult, even for those of us who are involved in it all the time, to visualize the entire inbound marketing process. Smart Insights has not only made the process succinct and comprehensible, they have depicted the flows, sequences, and interdependencies very clearly and with great style. Kudos!

I think the reason retro design sometimes suffers from a bad rap is because it can so easily tip over into kitsch if it’s not done with enough sophistication. Great retro design is a very delicate balancing act because it marries an expressive, maximal design approach with a streamlined, ultimately minimalist aesthetic. That is one tough combination to pull off successfully.

Mark Weaver does it with enormous intelligence and style. Check out Mark’s website here.