1. Back to Sensory Basics: When people put down their phone and pick up a an old-fashioned object they can see/hear/touch/smell, the impression can be increasingly indelible.
2. Branding from the Inside Out: Some of today’s best brand work shapes companies through hiring and training the people most responsible for creating the product and experience.
3. Quiet is Speaking Louder: When everyone else is shouting, we see tremendous opportunity in a more confident whisper that truly stands out.
4. The Un-Commodification of Design: To cut through the proliferation of tools and platforms, focus on custom interactions, insight-driven design, content strategy/IA…true solutions to your actual brand challenges.
5. Honest Branding: In today’s “post-truth world”, brands have a unique opportunity and play a larger role in upholding a sense of truth and a sense of values with which people can align.
6. Being Useful is More Valuable Than Ever: Don’t sell simple practicality short; it’s harder (and more compelling) than you think.
7. Commoditizing Disruption: Ironically, there’s a particular look to the much sought-after “disruption.” Rather than mimic this superficial style, look deeper at what makes your brand truly different.

Read the full article here.

Originally published at www.wearefine.com on September 14, 2017.

FINE’s 7 Brand Trends was originally published in WE ARE FINE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the interest of today’s digital consumers’ waning commitment to content, here are the 5, easy-to-digest, skim-if-you’d-like, skip-entire-sections, takeaways consolidated from 18-hours-worth of insights.

1. Content Strategy means different things to different audiences.

Beyond the blank stares content strategists might receive upon mentioning what they do (“oh, so you fill in the empty bits?”), the team in which they work all interprets the content strategist’s purpose in a way that best translates to their own role. And they’re all right.

● Sales is looking for the right message delivered to the right audience at the right time to drive leads. To win here, rate business goals against messaging ideas to see which has the most potential impact.

● Design is looking for the content requirements so they can create a visual solution that tells the story. To win here, produce a content hierarchy template (big message => secondary => support) or a one sheet of different page types to provide the outline they’ll creatively solve.

● Development is looking for content patterns and rules to most efficiently create page types and determine how often and when they appear. To win here, organize and emphasize content types, not their minute details, listing what we’re making, how they relate, and which information they’ll contain.

2. Content strategists are translators.

Content strategy is the organization of all your thoughts; it’s taking inventory of everything that exists to plan for what matters in the future. To do this:

● Ask smarter questions. Clients and stakeholders need a structure to hold onto to stay focused on the objective.

● Clarify goals and challenges. Figure these out first, and let the deliverables stem from there.

● Think about content’s real use case. What’s the purpose it’ll serve? Does it require substantial effort, maintenance, resources?

● Set basic rules. Once the work is done, make sure it stays that way by documenting voice and tone, naming conventions, frequently used terms, and channel-specific content components.

3. Content should come first.

Ok, ok. Settle down. We’re not saying it’s the egg. Or is it the chicken? But there’s a strong argument to be made for putting content ahead of design.

● “So, what do you imagine going there?” — content person to designer. Sometimes, you can’t avoid design coming first. So if it does, interrogate the mockup. Design is beautiful and expressive, but like content, it needs to serve a purpose, and that purpose is communicating the message.

● “Some [insert content type here] are really long. They’re not all uniform.” — content person to designer. We create better design by having an idea of what the content will be, even if it’s not “written,” because we can plan for best- and worst-case scenarios.

● “This looks great, but it doesn’t really ‘fit’ with the content.” — content person to designer. Design should serve content and vice versa; they should amplify each other. That’s put at risk if design moves before you’ve mapped the territory.

4. Digital readers want the point, not the prose.

And writers’ hearts everywhere broke in two.

● People don’t want to spend time with your content. Users fail on the web from confusing navigation and links; they want a singular direction, simple structure (notice these bullet points!), brief phrasing, and common language.

● Digital readers skim. Usually in an F shape. Make headlines clinical so they can easily find what they need, and then inject voice into the body copy, where they’ll likely spend more time with it.

● In digital, we have diminishing control over the context of content presentation. Take an image away, or stack blocks differently on devices, and suddenly your clever headline could be about home repairs or the House of Representatives.

5. Write content that completes top tasks.

Once you know what the reader needs, wants, or is looking for, give it to them.

● Ask clients questions that force them out of Subject Matter Expert role and into their users’ mindset. In digital, begin with basics and build into complexity.

● Readers want to finish what they came for as quickly as possible. From headlines to CTAs, copy should express that THIS SECTION HERE IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU NEED.

Thanks to Confab Events for a focused three days on critical content strategies and practices for a shared understanding. And a special thanks to John Ryan of Sitegeist for breaking my spirit with this, “Content people are too in love with their words,” before engaging in a sidebar and promising me that finding the balance is just as much art as is “writing pretty.”

Originally published at www.wearefine.com on September 19, 2017.

5 Content Strategy Takeaways from Confab Intensive 2017 was originally published in WE ARE FINE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

People are rightfully distracted by the craft and magic of designing and coding things on the web. But information is what drives it all; every company and brand is constructed of topics, messages, data, and impressions, all looking for an online destination to connect with an audience.

Deciding what “buckets” of content a sitemap and design affords, and then filling them, will test you across the entire spectrum of your business’s value proposition.

That’s because “content” isn’t just something that goes into a bucket. It’s pretty much why the bucket exists.

If you dissect a single page, you’ll find it needs to contain just about everything you need to know about your brand:

Look at the anatomy of almost any website’s home page. From the highest-level brand concept, to the most granular of utilitarian language, that single page may well display every conceivable kind of commercial content and copy you could use to communicate your company. What’s more, the information architecture that determined how it’s patterned, organized, and even how the database behind it manages updates, all comes from a careful understanding of the information your brand needs to convey.

So take a look at a simple wireframe of a web page. The next time you visit a brand website, or undertake the creation of your own, you’ll see what a world of content thinking it really requires.

Originally published at www.wearefine.com on July 19, 2017.

How a Single Page Contains the Whole World of Brand Content was originally published in WE ARE FINE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What is Net Neutrality?

Internet service providers (ISPs) control what and how you access websites and services on the Internet. Net neutrality is the principle that ISPs should treat all data equally, rather than prioritizing or blocking your access in order to charge premiums or reduce competition.

Why Net Neutrality Matters

ISPs and the FCC, under the Trump administration, are looking to gut the current net neutrality rules so they can have wider latitude to engage in practices that stifle competition and cost consumers. They claim that concerns over what would happen are only hypotheticals, and that ISPs will treat services fairly even without being legally required to do so. It seems highly unlikely they’d be spending millions toward an effort to overturn laws they plan to abide by anyway.

In fact, history has shown that ISPs have already breached net neutrality rules for their own benefit:

• Between 2011 and 2013, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon blocked Google Wallet, to favor their competing service.
• In 2012, AT&T announced it would block FaceTime to customers unless they subscribe to more expensive plans.
• From 2007 to 2009, AT&T forced Apple to block Skype and other VOIP services on the iPhone because they were direct competitors.
• In 2005, Comcast was caught blocking or slowing peer-to-peer services.

These are a few examples of what ISPs are doing while net neutrality rules are still in place, demonstrating what these companies have in mind when they invest big money to remove them. With the FCC open to public comment before rolling back the 2015 regulations, it’s time to demand an open and free Internet.

Visit www.battleforthenet.com for more info on how to take action and share with others.

Defend Net Neutrality was originally published in WE ARE FINE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Technologies change, your company changes, and in the end all websites have a useful lifespan of perhaps 5 years or so. So the question to ask is whether now is the time for a tear-down and do-over, a minor remodel, or a little tidy up?

We’re here to help. View our super simple Responsive Website Decision Tree to help figure out your best course to address the new responsive web world. Check it out; give us a call if you want to talk it out.

Originally published at www.wearefine.com on March 29, 2016.

Responding to Responsive: Is Your Site a Tear-Down or Just a Tidy Up? was originally published in WE ARE FINE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’ve been saying it for awhile. Others have, too. But we thought it time for us to say it in slides. So the latest in our series of 20 FINE Slides is “The Trouble With Spec Work.” It’s got a friendly face, but a serious message — asking for free work doesn’t help clients or agencies. There are better ways to court a creative partner.

Check it out. Share it. Live it.

Spec work is free work used to “test” or “pitch” an agency’s chops. It’s a holdover from the days of Madmen, when agencies used creative as a loss leader for obtaining big media buy revenue. Today, it’s a bad idea for clients and agencies alike because unpaid work rarely gauges the quality of an agency’s paid effort, can eliminate the agencies that are in highest demand and don’t need the work from a client’s search. More to the point, there’s no such thing as “free” work; it’s just a matter of who pays for it.

Imagine the analogies in other industries: have 3 CPAs do your taxes free but pay for the one that gets a refund, order 3 free sandwiches and pay for the one you finish, have 3 lovely massages but pay for the loveliest.

There are better ways to pick a partner.

1. Know what you want. Think it through or pick someone who can help.
2. Review the portfolio. Look for proven greatness. Look for challenges like yours, not always in your industry.
3. Call some references. Ask them about collaboration and working relationship most.
4. Talk to the agency at length. See if they seem excited to work through things with you.
5. Pay for a test. If you want to see some you-specific work before committing, carve out a small test and pay for it.

If you abolish spec work, your work, your agency partners, and the world, will improve.

Read more on spec at nospec.com

Or find some good articles with perspective on choosing an agency, like this one.

Originally published at www.wearefine.com on August 17, 2016.

The Trouble With Spec Work | A Better Way To Hire a Digital Agency was originally published in WE ARE FINE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Old Perception. New Reality.

A couple of months ago, one of our colleagues overheard a conversation about “smoking weed” while gathered with some friends at a pub in Portland. This may not be surprising: the stoner subculture in Portland is big enough that “Potlandia” is nearly as popular a nickname for it as “Stumptown” or “City of Roses”.

But these folks weren’t stoners. They were a husband and wife in their 40’s — a graphic designer and an academic administrator, dressed in jeans and flannel, sipping a local craft beer and a pinot noir. Their conversation, about favorite varieties, new producers, and recent acquisitions, could have just as easily been about what they were drinking. They were connoisseurs, discussing a shared pleasure.

Oregon is the fourth US state to legalize cannabis, along with Colorado, Washington and Alaska, and together they’ve opened an unaddressed market several million customers strong, which stands to quadruple in size if (as seems likely) California follows suit. Many of these new customers never identified with weed-smoking subculture; they’re simply open-minded, professional urbanites who are intentional about the things they enjoy, be it food and drink, travel, or new experiences. For many, cannabis is an obvious next step.

This poses tricky branding challenges. Two of FINE’s new clients (like Prūf Cultivar) are startups, and our biggest task has been figuring out how to distance their brands from old cues of stoner culture, and embrace the larger audience exemplified by that couple in the pub. Cannabis is that rarest of things: a genuinely new industry with a new consumer base — it’d be a mistake to see it as just a refined version of the age-old underground pot economy. Some dispensaries have defaulted to the obvious “jam bands and Ziploc baggies” aesthetic, but plenty more are gearing up for a market where Cannabis Enthusiast isn’t a consumer type, anymore than Beer Drinker is. A quick survey in Portland and Denver turns up cannabis dispensaries highlighting provenance and organic offerings, a gentleman’s club vibe, or an atmosphere as minimal as an Apple store.

Branding Helps Commercially Legitimize The Industry.

Who’s right? They all might be, if they’re responding to real customer needs. As with most anything customer-facing, the key to getting cannabis branding right is paying attention and avoiding assumptions. We’ve long seen marijuana as the domain of a fringe consumer, but that was mostly a function of its illegality. As that barrier crumbles, the branding task boils down to two things: giving “permission” to customers by establishing it as a safe, legitimate pleasure; and treating them like actual human beings with diverse values and preferences. A few grams of cannabis flower, packaged and displayed with the same care as craft beer or handmade beauty products, can transform consumer perception. A brand strategy and expression that resonates with the customer makes it not just accessible, but legitimate.

The word “stoner” seems like a vestige of high school, when stereotyping was how we dealt with the world: everyone was a jock, a nerd, a punk, a stoner, or something else. None of us really fit any of those descriptions, of course, and one of the joys of growing up was ditching those coarse descriptors in favor of richer, more nuanced ones. Now that “stoner” culture is becoming a subset, and cannabis just another interest, maybe it’s time for our branding approach to grow up, too.

Originally published at www.wearefine.com on September 12, 2016.

Cannabis Branding Grows Up: A New Strategy for Cannabis Brands was originally published in WE ARE FINE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

That’s all changed for the better in the past few years as a number of new prototyping apps that help make it easier to express interactive design and behavior flooded the market. At FINE, we’ve embraced prototyping and made it an integral part of our workflow. It’s transformed our design thinking, our collaborative process, and the manner in which we present our work.

Prototyping Pros and Cons

For purposes of interactive design, a prototype is a brief, animated demonstration of how a web or app design is intended to behave once coded into its final, digital form. These types of prototypes have been impactful for us in three main ways:

1. They put power in the hands of designers to execute interactive concepts and give them a test-drive before they go into development. That’s huge. In a few hours or less, a designer can put together a prototype and see how it looks and functions in the real world. No more guessing and assuming.

2. They bridge the gap between design and development. Previously, a designer would articulate their interactive ideas to a developer through static designs, rather than through their intended environment. Then, they’d have to wait until the developer coded it before finally seeing their concept in action. During this cumbersome process, any number of things might have been miscommunicated or interpreted incorrectly, resulting in wasted time and effort. Prototypes have changed all of that. Now, a developer can quickly assess a prototype, expose any usability flaws, and get a firm grasp on what they’ll be putting together.

3. They’ve made a huge impact in the way we pitch our interactive ideas to clients. Gone are the days of awkwardly explaining our concepts and intentions through static mockups and wordy descriptions, which often lead to confusion. Now, we can show our design intentions in action, providing clients with a more accurate vision of how their site will look and behave.

Naturally, there are a few disadvantages, mainly having to do with making sure clients understand the nature of a prototype. While prototyping gives designers a whole bevy of tools to replicate animation and functionality, they’re not without their limitations. They might not necessarily behave or animate exactly how they will on a website.

The effect is the finished product might not match expectation, for better or worse. Clients can be misled into thinking that a prototype, which is intended to get an idea across, represents exactly how the finished product will perform or function. They may be distracted from the core “look and feel” and other approvals required early in a project flow.

Tools of the Trade

At FINE, we use prototypes primarily to demonstrate specific interactions on a particular page, not an entire site. Focusing their use in this way helps to direct client attention and communicate the idea effectively. For example, we might do a prototype of a homepage to showcase parallax scrolling, transitions, animations, or fading. We’ve tried a number of tools to show these kind of focused, but complex interactions.

We found there are many great prototyping tools on the market right now that help in this process, each with its own distinct merits. A quick Google search for design prototyping tools reveals countless options, a few of which we’ve looked closely at, including Framer, Atomic, and Protio.io.

So far, Principle is the one tool that meets all of our particular prototyping needs. It’s super easy to use, utilizes timeline animation, doesn’t require coding, and integrates seamlessly with tools like Sketch. With Principle, we’re able to simply generate a prototype that expresses the design intent, without all the paper sketches and wild gestures.

Prototyping has been a game-changer for us. Are you using prototypes in your workflow? Share your thoughts — we’d love to hear what works for you.

Joe is Digital Director at FINE in Portland, Oregon.

Originally published at www.wearefine.com on April 6, 2017.

Prototyping’s Big Impact on Digital Design was originally published in WE ARE FINE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s never a time when one business literally speaks to another. It’s not even useful to imagine how silly that would sound. It’s much more useful to imagine what it would sound like if one human spoke to another. Because that’s what should be happening. It’s either humans engaging other humans, or it’s not engaging at all.

It’s always H2H; it’s never B2B.

Using that logic, there’s no such thing as B2C, either. Something about the word consumer at least implies a real human and keeps you from going too far off the rails. But take care: if you’re like most humans, “consumer” is probably pretty far down the list of ways you’d describe yourself.

Why is all of this important to keep in mind? Because good branding and marketing depend on understanding audience, on empathizing, on connecting. Anything that creates distance or artifice between you and your customer increases the risk you’ll speak in platitudes, mimic competitor imagery, parrot industry speak and buzzwords, or be plain boring. And let’s be honest — a large percentage of B2B branding and marketing ends up right there.

Are there differences in how you might communicate with humans in their professional roles? Definitely. You’ll be looking for more practical proof points sooner; you may be more methodical given the scale of the purchase; and, you may have to build consensus within a larger group.

But the best B2B branding always communicates — through look, feel, and message — in more human ways that begin with emotional impressions. When you do that, you might find:

The humans at these business are showing and telling humans at other businesses, using design, imagery, and words in ways that almost look, dare we say it, B2C (because they’re so H2H).

Perhaps the most insightful cliche in the history of B2B branding is the old saying, “No one ever got fired for choosing IBM.” It reveals the drivers behind decisions may sometimes appear practical, but behind them are very human, emotional considerations.

It’s as if to say, “Thanks for the extensive list of superior features you offer, but I’m gonna go ahead and hire the firm that my boss can’t possibly yell at me for hiring.”

Empathy is the best strategic springboard. It starts by remembering that behind every B or C is always an H waiting for your attention.

Originally published at www.wearefine.com on March 27, 2017.

There’s No Such Thing as “B2B” was originally published in WE ARE FINE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Behind every viable, modern website is a content management system (“CMS”) — technology that helps administer ongoing updates that extend the useful life of your website.

Your customers will never see your CMS. But it can have profound impact on their experience with your brand. It can significantly influence the workload in creating your website or application, and in making sure your site (and therefore, your brand) doesn’t erode under the pressures of upkeep.

We’ve learned a lot about CMS’s over the years. And what we’ve learned is on display in Fae, the technology we use to create most FINE sites today. Fae’s mission is to wreak havoc on onerous CMS platforms and feeble brand websites; to improve the Internet, one brand at a time. To that end, we’re setting Fae free, open sourcing the technology and (written below) much of the wisdom that inspired it.

What We’ve Learned
We’ve been making websites for about as long as anyone’s been making websites. We’ve trialed-and-errored myriad platforms and technologies from fully custom, to off-the-shelf. We won’t name names, or try and break down all of the technology choices you have. But setting aside licensing and fee concerns, the three major flaws we found in most of the fully-baked platforms are that they:

1. force you to conform to their structure, therefore restricting customized brand experience, and
2. involve more work in integration and workflow training than the work involved in creating a custom CMS from scratch.
3. make you micro-manage content page-by-page instead of macro-manage content objects that appear in multiple places

These three things are critical for clients — if you’re adopting a CMS that limits your ability to differentiate, and one that is costly to customize and maintain, it’s the worst of both worlds. At the same time, re-inventing a custom CMS for every instance is laborious and inefficient. So our quest has been the balance of creating an engine that offers some efficiencies in deployment, while not handcuffing our creative process. It only took about 20 years to get it just right.

Enter: Fae
As we thought back to all of our trials and tribulations, we knew a few key things were critical to us in a CMS, because they’re critical to our clients as brands. If we were going to have a CMS, it would be the core UI of a CMS that meets 5 requirements we think benefit our clients at the highest level wherever it goes:

1. flex to fit a wide variety of front-end designs across brands and industries
2. be free of onerous licensing charges and contracts
3. centrally manage object-oriented content, not page-by-page
4. plug and play with an easy client workflow, requiring little training
5. manual override with the ability to radically overhaul the base system where something even more custom is needed

That’s the conceptual DNA that created Fae — an open source, Rails-based CMS for websites and applications. Technically, it’s a “gem,” which means it’s more of a module that helps to spawn, customize, and continuously upgrade website CMS’s than it is an “off-the-shelf” CMS platform.

After a decade of exploring different application frameworks across multiple programming languages, we developed a preference for Ruby on Rails. It’s become the programming language of choice for the world’s leading open source developers because it’s a simple, elegant solution that’s been proven and production tested — mature rather than bleeding edge. In other words, something reliable that preserves standards.

Features. Or, “Faetures.”
When it comes to features, we’ve always advocated 80/20 thinking. Many platforms make it conceivable to handle any task you can conceive, but aren’t particularly great at any of them. We focus on expertly handling the things that brands must tackle most frequently and to most effect. Beyond all the basics to get you up and running, we defined a set of Faetures that are readily customizable and make the job of creating and maintaining your brand site easy, like:

• Global Search — The ability to jump directly to any object or navigation item, throughout the CMS.
• Complete Data Flexibility — Nothing need be pre-assumed about content needs, it’s all about the quality of execution and strategy and the data management and business rules follow.
• Filtering, Sorting, and Pagination — Easily filter rows and sort columns of any list view with Fae’s filter helpers. Paginate long lists. Navigate to the content you want, faster.
• Ordering — Objects with a position attribute are orderable in list view by default, offering the flexibility to update rank position.
• Change Tracker — Changes are tracked by default, visible in the form view or activity log. See who does what, when.
• Cloning — Clone repeatable items without repeating past work.
• System of UI Components — support dozens of field types, page structures, list functions and workflows to cover the majority of content management needs.
• Automatic Slugs — Automatically create slugs based on content from one or more other fields in a form.
• Language Navigation — Manage content in multiple languages. Toggles language-specific fields and remembers your selection across the admin.
• Image Uploader and Processing — Built-in image and file uploader to easily create multiple versions or sizes (to support responsive sites and site performance).

Open Sourcery: Fae Heads are Better than One
Perhaps mostly importantly, we believe in open source. One reason is obvious — it’s free of license fees and you aren’t “locked in” by onerous contracts or terms. You have an extended universe of people with the skillset to help you maintain these technologies. But it’s more than that; when an application is open sourced, it means a large community of developers is contributing to its improvements, additions, fixes. It adds up to a larger and more motivated group of contributors than you’d often find working on a single platform. With Fae, we’re actively engaging developers to contribute to the benefit of all. It’s like FINE’s credo — “Bring Friends.”

Some of Our Faevorites
Perhaps the greatest test of a CMS is whether it’s tested — can you point to real-world deployments that reflect the brand sensibility you seek? You’d be surprised at how many big-name, grandiose-sounding CMS’s have very little real-world adoption. If you press for examples, you’ll get a handful of obscure, workaday brands being used as case studies to “sell” a platform. But Fae’s not a product we made and now are trying to sell at scale — it’s a technology we iterated over 2 decades and now we’re setting it free. It’s evolved, so your brand can, too. It’s a proven CMS that’s being used to dozens of diverse brand sites, like PAE Engineers, Anchor Brewing, TA Associates, Charles Krug Winery — the list is long and starts on our website.

Make Your Monster
These are the things that led us to make and release Fae. If you’re a client, we’ll likely use Fae to make your site so that we can focus on your brand and data requirements, not some unwieldy technology. If you’re a developer, maybe you’ll be using Fae to create your own monster. You can see more details on our Fae website, download your own version, or tour some of the world-class websites built by on Fae.

Just as a website is a brand’s expression, the system it’s built on should be expressive. And in our case, a three-headed, formidable beast of an ally.

Read what Techcrunch has to say about Fae.

Originally published at www.wearefine.com on April 5, 2017.

Fae. More than a CMS. We’ve Created a Monster. was originally published in WE ARE FINE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.