Mint Digital

At Mint we spend so much time in the digital space, it's a breath of fresh air to take a step back and embrace the permanence of print.

The end of 2010 represented a suitable opportunity to re-vamp our business cards so I thought I'd share a little about how we set about refreshing the design.

(This is the third post in a series documenting the making of our Android concepts. Catch up on the first and second. Look out for the fourth installment tomorrow.)

Having lived in the US for about a year now, it felt about time I started learning a little about the fundamentals of American sport. A New York brainstorm topic, 'Enhancing sporting events through mobile', led Mr. Corrigan to step up to the plate with an exciting germ of an idea named 'batting scope'. A promising concept and an excuse to learn the rules of baseball? How could I not develop this idea?!

Mint projects often have the following things in common:

1. Tight design & build deadlines
2. Live for a short period of time
3. High user engagement
4. New technical challenges
5. New lessons learnt

Our portfolio hasn't always been the most effective way of showing off these attributes. In an attempt to increase awareness of the more intricate details of our projects we had an experiment and put together a statistical case study for IT'S MY TIME...

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:

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.

So, I spent the last couple of days learning about 'the future' at the Future of Web Design conference in wonderful New York City. It was great fun. There were lots of interesting topics and inspiring people. Here is a brief run down:

Day 1

There were talks on a wide range of topics including designing for mobile, flash design, AJAX, finding inspiration and CSS3. My personal highlights were Ryan Singer's (37signals) talk on web usability, Ryan Sims' (Virb) and Keith Robinson's tag team approach to redesigning a site like IMDb. Also Jeffrey Kalmikoff skinnyCorp had an excellently presented chat about community-centred design.

The evening finished off with a Media Temple hosted party in the heart of NYC offering free booze and three floors of DJs. I chatted to, amongst others, Tyson an awesome designer at Virb and Keegan from The Big Noob.

Day 2

The day was made up of two workshops. In the morning Ryan Singer talked through his approach to usability for web apps. The main theme was focus on keeping the design as close to reality as possible. For instance, no lorem ipsum, keep the content real.

In the afternoon, I went to Lea Alcantara's branding workshop. This touched on many things I was already aware of from the web design sphere, but it was interesting to hear it from a branding perspective. A highlight was having to interview her as an Italian chef.

All-in-all it was an inspiring couple of days. I look forward to future events arranged by Carson Systems, along with getting back to a good round of Photoshop back in the UK.