Method

Designer/maker/seller of good design for the home, Heath Ceramics launches an all-new, redesigned website! Method worked with Heath to create a new online visual language and back-end structure that brings Heath’s brand offering and story into a cohesive online experience.

Focused on lifestyle and curating beautiful, as well as functional products, Heath needed to translate the essence of their company from their retail environments to an ecommerce experience that retained the same brand value.

Method saw an opportunity to integrate the stories and inspirations behind the products to create a digital showroom that would educate, inspire, and guide visitors. Method Design Lead, Adam Weiss adds:

“Heath Ceramics represents a lifestyle dedicated to creation, sustainability, and timeless classics. The Heath brand is larger than just ceramics; embracing this fact, Method updated the typography on the site and created a visual structure that complements – rather than duplicates – the eclectic and personality rich product and lifestyle content.”

The result is an all-new modular system that is organized around use cases as well as product categories. The site focuses on highlighting the aspects of Heath that speaks to their appreciation for lifestyle, aesthetic and functionality. Placing what Heath makes at the forefront of the web experience, the new site reiterates Heath’s look and feel, giving its customers the opportunity to explore and discover in a delightful and simple ecommerce platform.

In a recent article, Mashable evaluates the success of Instagram as a mobile app and asks a few experts to share their opinions on Instagram and whether mobile-only is really the next frontier for social networks.

Method’s own Interaction Design Lead, Jennifer Brook shares her insights:

“Instagram made a smart bet that we currently have more spare attention — more emotional and cognitive bandwidth — while using our mobile phones than we do when viewing a website on a desktop browser.

My iPhone gives me superpowers. My computer needs things from me. A kind of emotional transference then happens when looking at content on my mobile phone, it’s a treat to stay a little longer. I feel like I’m being let in on a secret. If you’re trying to discern a launch or product strategy, the baked-in intimacy and ubiquity of mobile shouldn’t be ignored.”

Read the original article here.

Forbes recently featured an article on “Steve Jobs and MTV: Nine Steps to All the Power You’ll Ever Need”. The article discusses the importance of communication and story telling, and details how to become a more effective and compelling communicator.

The article also goes on to cite Method Principal, Paul Valerio, in his 10×10 Raiders of the Lost Overture:

“I’m a huge fan of Paul Valerio who heads up the Customer Insights team for the design and innovation firm, Method. As I noted in a previous article, Building Brands by Killing Frogs, what I like best about Valerio is his ability to write creatively about creativity. He takes examples from everywhere and applies them to business and the black art of branding.

Valerio is as entertaining as he is enlightening and his article 6 Secrets to Branding, Ripped From “Raiders of the Lost Ark” is no exception. Here he applies an iconic movie and the amazing power of storytelling to super successful brands like IKEA. His overarching theme is that powerful communication means Show, Don’t Tell.”

Read the full article here.

Chris Downs has joined Method as Principal to lead Method’s global service design practice. Bringing to Method his vision for creating next generation of integrated brand and product experiences, Chris sheds some insight into where he hails from and why he made the move to Method:

I have always been fascinated by the tension between the tangible and the intangible. While training as a product designer, I was uncomfortable with the impact my work might have on the environment; I didn’t want to create future landfill.

This is why when the web took off, I went straight into designing for it. The possibility of creating and making things that were intangible was a blessing. I am lucky (and old enough) to have seen the transition from the physical to the digital world as it happened, and it was fun.

At that time, the web was transforming the way people lived and businesses worked. Digital has shifted our needs as consumers from the ownership of tangible goods to the desire to have access to services. Following my time at the Royal College of Art in London, I came to the conclusion with my great friends, Lavrans Løvlie and Ben Reason, that we should stop designing products and instead design services.

This was 2001, and we were so determined to explore this idea, we built a new agency around it. We founded live|work, and it was the world’s first service design agency. Our purpose was to use design to promote access over ownership. We also wanted to create a new design discipline – with point of view, processes, and the academic validation that would question our approach and push our thinking.

However, after eight years, I felt the itch to go further. I became very interested in the impact data could have in creating future services. I built a big data and open data start-up, which released £5MM worth of business data from public records on companies in the UK and exposed it to Google.

That’s exactly were I was when I bumped into Method and saw the talented team and their work. The type of strategic, systemic thinking combined with refined design execution at Method is unique and well positioned to grow an integrated service offer.

Looking back, I think that service design achieved a re-calibration of the design industry by contributing new thinking, processes, tools and a new purpose to existing disciplines. But that re-calibration has now happened and it’s time to move on.

The next generation of business success will be the result of a well-designed blend of brand, product, and service. And for me there’s no better place on earth to deliver that than here at Method.

You may remember that Method London recently moved into a new (and incredibly cool) studio in the TEA building, located in the trendy heart of East London. With all the boxes unpacked and computers plugged in, there was one thing left to do…party!

On March 28th, we hosted an amazing night of live music, cocktails, and creativity. Method CEO Kevin Farnham worked the bar, mixing three signature cocktails, while our friends from the design industry and companies like Nokia, Vodafone, Skype, Sky, Samsung, BT, and Thomson Reuters mingled and enjoyed the creative installations.

That’s right, creative installations. It wouldn’t be a Method party unless there was a healthy dose of geek love mixed into the festivities. Check out the inspiring technology we set up for the occasion:

LED Lights. When thrown onto a metal surface, these tiny LEDs created light graffiti.

SoftKinetic DanceWall. This next generation 3D camera game, produced by SoftKinetic Studios, had us moving and shaking.

Photobooth. Pictures taken in the photobooth appeared on our tetrahedron light sculpture!

Sunset Video Projection. An installation of a 4-hour-long film–the sun setting over East London instead of the West that night.

Party Monster. Deep from the depths of design, emerges an all consuming monster called Dohtem. An animated creature, Dohtem grows and changes shape based on the amount of drinks consumed at the party.

Check out more party pics below!

We’re very proud to announce that our work with TeachingChannel.org has been selected as an Official Honoree of the 16th Annual Webby Awards in the Education category.

With nearly 10,000 entries received from all 50 US states and over 60 countries, the Official Honoree distinction is awarded to the top 15% of all work entered that exhibits remarkable achievement.

To learn more about our work with TeachingChannel.org, read our case study here.

One of the best things about living in San Francisco is the ability to drive three hours in order to get from the bay to the snow. That’s exactly what a group from the SF studio did a few weeks ago when they rented a house at the Northstar mountain resort in Tahoe.

The weekend started off icy, but by Saturday afternoon fresh powder covered the slopes making for awesome skiing and snowboarding. With skill levels ranging from “bunny slope lover” to “black diamond daredevil,” everyone had great days on the mountain, followed by delicious group dinners and general shenanigans in the evenings. There was even a snowball wake-up call, and that’s all we’re going to say about that.

Daniel Nacamuli is an Interaction Designer out of Method’s London studio. We’ll be pulling in some weekly posts from his Tumblr showcasing his thoughts around various user interfaces.

This week, we’re featuring his thoughts on Instapaper, an article filing service for browsers, iOS devices, and the Kindle. Daniel highlights some of the common interface problems he experiences with Instapaper, and how he imagines things could potentially be improved.

I was having a think about how to improve Instapaper’s article filing process on the iPhone. In this post I’ll go through some of the problems in the current implementation, and at the end offer a potential workaround.

Instapaper is a web service that saves articles for later reading on browsers, iOS devices, and Kindle. The service saves articles via its “Read Later” bookmarklet and presents them using a clean, minimal layout. On portable devices the articles can be read offline in the associated app. It’s a fantastic piece of software.

Articles appear in a Read Later folder, and from several places in the app can be deleted, moved to user defined folders, or archived. For the rest of this post I’ll refer to moving, archiving and deleting as ancillary actions or filing.

Filers become Pilers

I spoke to a few people and they all have a common problem with Instapaper: even though they can file articles from the reading view, they do this far less often than they would like to. This could be seen as a user problem, but if people use a feature less than they want to, I prefer to see it as an interface problem. I’ll be focusing on how we can improve the filing process when we have finished reading an article.

How filing is currently done

In the next three screens I’ll illustrate the user flow for filing articles from the reading view and highlight some of the problems along the way.

Access the ancillary actions using the Action button.

This feels a bit awkward: our thumb’s dominant role on this screen is to scroll, therefore it rests naturally on the left hand side of the screen. Accessing the action button requires that we aim for and tap the bottom right corner.

An action sheet gives access to ancillary actions.

Delete and Move to Archive can be done in one tap. The apparition of the modal overlay jars with the reading experience, and visually feels heavy compared to the app’s flat UI. Previously hidden, the status bar also drops into place for no apparent reason (though this may be a property of the action sheet).

Move to personal folder.

From the action sheet, tapping the Move to Folder… button enters another mode from which we choose which personal folder we want to move the article to.

So in the current implementation the use of an action sheet for ancillary actions has a few problems:

• Accessing it does not feel like a logical next step after reading
• Hidden behind a button its function is invisible to the user
• The filing actions take two to three taps to complete
• The transitions are visually noisy

How filing could be improved

Let’s take a look at an easier way to file when we have reached the end of an article. Going back to the first screen, if my thumb is here…

…maybe the ancillary actions could appear here too: inline at the end of the article.

This gives us a few advantages:

• With my thumb near the controls, filing feels like the next logical step after reading.
• Filing becomes modeless: no more noisy animations.
• Everything can be done in one tap.

The existing action button still gives us access to the share features and lets us file from anywhere in the article; so this isn’t mean to replace it.

Interested in interning at Method? Catch us at these college campus visits, as we’ll be looking to hire interns across disciplines – from visual and interaction design to client services – to help out in our studios. More details to come.

March 29th-30th – Carnegie Mellon
Creative Arts Opportunities Conference
More info

March 30th – California College of the Arts
Career Expo
More info

April 13th – Parsons School of Design
Branding, Graphics, Media & Technology Career Day
More info

April 20th – Rhode Island School of Design
Graphic Design Portfolio Review
More info

April 26th-27th - University of Cincinnati
Campus Visit

May 4th - Minneapolis College of Art and Design
Emerging Talent Showcase
More info