Mint Digital

Following the recent launch of IT'S MY TIME for Benetton, I wanted to give a little insight into our UX process with snippets from our approach and how we've tried to apply this thinking to IT'S MY TIME. I'll start with the obvious...

There are two very distinct phases to UX design:

A few months back, I read Visual Decision Making. It's all about the role of visual aesthetics in web design. The author, Patrick Lynch, talks about how "classical aesthetics stress orderliness and clarity in design", and "expressive aesthetics emphasise originality, creativity, and visual richness".

I'm a huge advocate of the classical aesthetic. In fact, I believe it's the best aesthetic model to adopt when designing a social website. Here are four reasons why.

Unlike the world economy, Mint's design team has increased in size over the past few months. This has allowed us to spend some quality time focusing on refining the Mint 'brand'. Clearly, the first step in this process was to ask everyone at Mint their favourite anagram of MINT DIGITAL. Some highlights include:

It a Mild Ting
Man Id Gilt It
Tim Gitin' Laid
Giant Tim Lid
Militant Dig
Tidal Timing
Dig Latin Tim

Aside from some great anagrams, this may appear like a bit of a waste of time. However, it was useful in helping set the tone in how we approached standardising and unifying exposure to the Mint brand.

After learning that this year's New York Future of Web Design Conference would land on election day and be situated right next to Times Square, I expected a rather exciting and inspirational atmosphere.

My personal highlights were...

Yesterday Utku and I popped down to the Future of Web Design conference in West London to learn things, meet people and set off fire extinguishers.

Yet again, Carsonified put together a strong line-up of speakers covering a wide range of topics themed around where design on the web is currently heading. After the pre-conference party the night before we made a slightly slow start to the conference but soon got to hear some great talks.