[MUSIC]

I'm very excited to be back in New York, where I lived for about a decade.

I don't miss the summer weather.

But, I'm happy to be back here.

yeah.

So I'm Jon.

I live in Los Angeles now.

I'm a designer.

And I've spent I've spent the last two or three years at Media Temple

working as Creative Director and before that I did a lot of brand work.

I used a say and most of the work that

I've done over the years, which is probably similar to a

lot of the work that you guys have done if you

are designers and developers are it's in the realm of redesigning.

Probably 75% of the work I've done have been redesigns.

You know, people hit you up for to

redo their brand, redo their packaging, redo their websites.

Redesign logos, collateral, all that stuff.

It's real fun.

And big brand overhauls.

And I think as designers we can look at a

website, and almost instantly we see what we want to change.

And we go down this path where sometimes we, we go right into this.

And so this talk about is, is about not doing that right away.

Which I've made that mistake a lot of times,

and it's about stopping, thinking, reassessing, and thinking strategically.

And this to me, over the years, has really become

the part of the creative process that I enjoy the most.

Maybe it's because I'm older, and maybe it's because everyone that works for me is

so much better designer than I am, but this is really what I enjoy doing.

So, today I want to talk about four main aspects of this.

Number one is, simple solutions and solving problems.

How do we design to solve problems quickly and effortlessly?

Number two is focusing on content.

We are constantly seeking out content and devouring content, and

let's look at why creating and understanding content is so important.

Third, creating experience.

How do we create memorable experiences online and offline

that make our content stand out from our competitors?

And finally, putting the story before design.

Importance of doing the diligent work to figure out

our story before we leap right into the design.

So, this is a quote that I would imagine everyone in this room knows.

You've may have even tried to use it on a client before.

And this is a lot more than just as you probably all

know, Helvetica light at 24 and white on a light grey background.

To me this is about using design to solve problems, and

a little bit of design can help solve a problem very quickly.

And I want to show you a real world example of

a problem that I solved with just a little bit of design.

It's not elegant, it's not beautiful, but it improved my life and my wife's

life a lot, and it has to do with these two machines in my kitchen.

So this behemoth on the right is what an espresso

machine used to look like if you bought it in 2005.

Still works fantastically by the way.

And that's a cheap toaster from Target.

And they look different enough.

And what happens in my house, is at 5:45 every

morning, my six year old wakes me up and wants toast.

And before can do that, I need to make coffee for myself.

And I'm usually not wearing my glasses or

my contacts, so is usually looks like this.

Still pretty easy.

Then I grabbed the plugs and they look almost identical.

And actually more so like this.

And so, now granted there are some major problems in the

world right now, even in the world of design there are problems.

This is not one of them.

This is an insignificant problem to everyone else in the

world except myself but I still wanted to fix it.

Because what happens is, I would plug in this plug, and it takes like,

because the machine is old, about ten seconds for the red light to turn on.

And it wouldn't turn on, so it was

like this Russian Roulette of, of morning appliance working.

so, there's obviously some easy solutions, but I'm not the only user.

And just like designing a website or, or

anything else, you can't only design for yourself.

You may think you know what to do, but you have to think about the other users.

You don't want to disrupt anyone's workflow.

What seems better for you could be worse for someone else.

And I, my wife is my most important client.

She has the power to make life more

unpleasant than any client we've ever worked with.

And the problem is, is that we only have one outlet.

And she's a painter and she's a night person, I'm a morning person.

I get up at 5:45.

She goes to sleep at like 2:45.

And so her phone's still charging, and God forbid I remove that.

So, my simple solution was this.

I put a little piece of red tape on there and

sticker and it was great and it solved the problem for me.

But I got some user feedback.

And this was, I can never remember if the sticker is for the coffee or the toaster.

It drives me crazy.

And so, just like in any design process,

I iterated and improved and came up with this.

Not beautiful and not elegant solution.

But, [LAUGH] a solution that works really well.

There's never a mistake anymore, and the sticker is now you know a shade of beige.

But it stills works.

And, and this is a sample of something

that's designed, but, but it's not designed, right?

It's, it's missing the pretty, and it's missing what,

as designers and people that love beautiful things we do.

And John Maeda says, design makes what feels complex

simpler, and what is simpler, simple, simpler feel richer.

And I love this quote, and it makes me think this sweet spot

of simplicity and experience that I feel is like the nirvana of design.

If you can hit that, and we, we have a lot of this right now.

There are some great simple experiences and many of

this, of these are happening in the mobile space.

If you think about some of the apps we use, like I

think a weather app is really an example of a beautiful, simple experience.

It's a location, it's a number, and sometimes it's an icon.

And there's tons of different weather apps, right?

Sometimes you have a picture, sometimes it's snowing, but it's simple.

Instagram, such a simple, simple tool.

Take a picture, share it, write a caption.

Sometimes write a caption that long.

And I love things list which is just a nice way to

keep track of, of your content, with a little bit of polish.

It's super simple.

and, you know, on the subject of content it, it really is all about content.

We're doing all of this for content.

And for me content is about experience,

it's about stories, and it's about understanding.

That's what we are creating.

And I want to show you this

website, that's called the New England Soup Factory.

And Dan Cederholm who created Dribbble and

has a great website, SimpleBits, posted this.

And this is one of my favorite things

I've read in, I don't know, couple years, maybe.

And he said this about this website.

This is my favorite website.

I visit it almost every day.

It's not responsive.

It's not optimized for iPhone.

It looks blurry on a retina display.

It doesn't use the latest HTML5 CSS3 framework.

The fonts are nothing special.

It's neither schemorphic nor flat.

It doesn't have an API or VC funding.

It hasn't been featured on a prominent tech blog or won an award.

He tells me the soups of the day.

And he concludes by saying, freely distributed information that's

relevant to the person reading it, that's web design.

And I started in newspapers, and this really resonates with me.

That's why I wanted to go, maybe it was a poor financial decision, in the mid to

late 90s in San Francisco, to go work

at the San Francisco Chronicle instead of a start-up.

But it was something that meant a lot to me.

And I still feel like this is why I'm in this.

And I think content, as many people say, wins.

I think trends do not.

Like parallax scrolling is going to get boring, right?

More boring.

So it doesn't matter how fancy, cool, and trendy your

sites are, if your content sucks, no one's going to care.

So.

So when we talk about content, you know, it, it's so many different things.

Content is vast.

The dictionary will tell you content is the principal substance.

And we know that content is much more than what's it gonna say.

sorry, we'll go back one.

Avinash Kaushik from Google said, content is

anything that adds value to the reader's lives.

It can add value by making them smarter, making them laugh, making them do their

job better, rush to their child to share the video, make a contribution to charity.

And I agree with all of that.

I think that's a really beautiful way to put it.

And content comes in so many different shapes and sizes these days.

Right?

From, you know, Messages we have, tweets

newsletters, video, blog posts, etc, etc, etc.

And the good content makes us feel

something, connects with our emotions, resonates with us.

We don't even have to fully understand it, but we get that feeling of connection.

And I wanna show you one of my favorite commercials ever.

And I'm a big fan of commercials specifically ones in Europe.

They seem to have better commercials than us.

And this is a Nike commercial and it came out in about, I think 2011.

So the French national soccer team, after the

2010 World Cup when France didn't win match.

They were caught on camera fighting in training.

When they got back to France, they had to go

in front of the prime minister and explain their actions.

And this is a beautiful piece that is like a rallying piece for the nation.

And to get behind this team.

And it's completely in French, I didn't understand any of it when I first saw it.

It is an example of beautiful

cinematography, powerful voice over, great music.

And it's definitely content that makes you feel something, it's about a minute long.

[MUSIC]

[FOREIGN]

[MUSIC]

[FOREIGN].

>> I think that whole campaign is stunning, the print work is amazing.

And the, and good content makes us a part of something.

Even if you have no interest in, in Soccer, French Soccer or whatever.

When the crowd stands up, and those chairs

flip up, there's that sense of anticipation of

something that's gonna happen, and, and we really do a lot for the content we want.

Online and offline.

You know, we go stand at shows around hundreds, almost thousands of

people all holding up their iPhones while you're trying to watch a band.

When I used to live in Brooklyn for some reason my wife

and I would take my kid in a stroller on the subway

in the weekend to go to a museum and deal with this,

just because we wanted to see the Calder show or whatever it was.

We traveled the world to experience the content of foreign lands.

And in Los Angeles around the corner from where I live, a bunch of people

stood in line for hours to go buy coffee that was four times the price and

pastries over four times the price, that was actually from a grocery store at a

place called Dumb Starbucks, just because it was

a thing and they wanted to experience it.

So we do a lot for the content we want.

So where do you get your content?

You know sometimes we have tons of options and sometimes we have not so many.

Then there are many factors in why we decide where we go.

For news sites, it's, it's a really good example.

I mean, a lot of news sources publish the same stories at the same time.

So why do we go read specific news sites?

Is it the design?

Is it the layout?

Is it the certain political voice?

Is is the one that works best on our device?

Is it the one with the least ads?

And buying physical products, you know, why

do you choose some sites or rather sites?

I can buy the exact same pair of shoes at Zappos

than I can buy at Adidas and Adidas makes those shoes.

So that I should be buying it from

there, but the Zappos experience is so much better.

And I know I'm gonna get it in 24 hours.

And so, when we talk about experience, creating the experience in this unique

story of your content and how people are gonna experience it is so important.

And you know, so back to the initial point of this, like, we'll, we dive into

redesigns and we need to step back and

think about things, like specifically who are we targeting?

Who is the audience?

And the good thing is most of the time you get to define this.

And if you're working somewhere or for a client and it tells you

that their audience is everyone, that is going to be a really impossible task.

You can't design for everyone.

You have to be targeted.

You know, Apple doesn't even design for everyone.

So I want to look at an example

of differentiating your product and service and experience.

And I want to talk about music, cuz music is a really interesting case.

Nowadays we can get music online in so

many different places and it's exactly the same.

Right?

We can stream it from a variety of services.

We can buy it from a variety of services.

The song sound the same.

They are the same length.

You know, so, so I wanna step back and I wanna

think about where, where music, where we used to get music.

And and if anyone's old like me, you have been

in one of these places which is called a record store.

And this is Amoeba Records in Los Angeles, which

is arguably the best record store in the world.

There's one in San Francisco and the original one's in Berkeley.

And I grew up in the Bay area, and I spent pretty much every weekend of

my high school life going to Amoeba in Berkeley, because I was a big music geek.

And the experience of going to a music store in the 1980s and 90s was, you get

in the car with your friends and you put in a mixtape and you talk about music.

And you talk about something you heard,

something you read in NME or something like

that, and you'd go into the record store

and you would divide and conquer and discover.

And you would flip through crates like this and you'd

pull out a Smokey Robinson record you didn't know existed.

Or some old Echo and the Bunnymen thing.

Or you'd grab like a record and show it to a friend and say have you heard this?

It sounds like Joy Division but if they had a female singer.

And that was, that was part of going to your record store.

That was the experience.

And it was going home and going through your loot.

And this of course is the cover of DJ Shadow's Endtroducing

album which I think is like the quintessential record store photograph.

It's this thing that kind of pains me deep inside that

I think my kids are never gonna experience stepping into the

small town record store, with the record store cat, which I

think is getting cut off by this four by three but, anyway.

And we'd go to people's houses and

we would see walls of vinyl and be envious of that,

and have an immediate visual connection to like a John Coltrane record.

And, we know the music by just seeing the cover.

And, we would create mixtapes for people, and I believe that

mixtapes in my mind were really the first form of social sharing.

We would create these mixtapes, and we spent, endless amounts of time on them.

And you would cater them for a specific person, and there

was a diverse message that you were putting in these things.

And then, all of, then one day, ya know, this happened.

Right?

And this is Napster, and if you're old enough like me to

remember using Napster, it was brilliant and horrific at the same time.

All of the sudden anything you wanted was there.

And this is Metallica's ...And Justice for All album in Napster.

And when I think of that album, I think of this.

That brutal, powerful, testosterone-driven typography.

In Metallica and that statue being ripped apart

and this cover scared me when I was younger.

I would see guys in the record store with this on the back of a jean jacket and I

would hide the Morrissey album that I was holding

cuz I thought I was gonna get my ass beat.

[LAUGH] And this cover and this band like it meant something to people.

If you google Metallica tattoo, you're gonna see this.

Right?

And, there just isn't that association here.

And over time, this, you know, became this.

And Spotify is an incredible service.

When it started here in the states I was all over it.

I was searching everything I could.

But I, I felt like it was like this forced discovery.

It wasn't the same feeling I had of going to a record store

and you know, when I think about like, a band like Arcade Fire, right?

I have immediate reactions to their covers.

And this is their discography displayed in two different ways.

Text version, and a visual version.

I can see Funeral, I remember being on Bleeker

Street and buying that in a record store, and

I see the Neon Bible album and I remember

seeing that behind them at the United Palace Theatre uptown.

And it means something to me and I don't

have that, that kind of attraction to those words.

And, that's why I have been an audio user for a long time.

I don't work for audio and they are not paying me to say any of this stuff.

But I, I love this service and what I love about it is that they've

some how captured the feeling of going into

a record store with friends again for me.

When I log in here, I see everything that all the people I've

chosen to go to the record store with what they are listening to.

And I'm reminded of things that I haven't listened to in while like, Nick Caves

The Boatman's Call which I haven't heard in

years and I'll add that to my collection.

And then there's new albums that I've heard about,

that I don't know if there any good, but

I see like this little icon of one of

my friends who I know has really good music taste.

And so that, that's sort of like a nice passing suggestion

for me and I can click to see what's in his collection.

It's like going to his house and looking through his music,

and I can even sort it by what was purchased most recently.

What he's listened to the most.

I can easily add it to my collection, borrowing music.

And then, as far as message diversity goes, they've made it so easy for you

to share music, and it's not just liking it, right, cuz liking stuff is bullshit.

and, and it just becomes completely, like, white noise.

So this is an email I got from my friend Hamish about this record and it says, I

love this perhaps a little more than I should,

and I'm on the fence as to whether you'll dig.

We'll see.

A Swedish female teenage fan club perhaps.

And that's exactly how music geeks used to talk.

And this is a great, great, great email to receive.

And I went and listened to it, and I did

like it, and I probably wouldn't have listened to it otherwise.

I would not have found that searching through text links.

so, and these guys have thought about it just

a little bit more, like how are people discovering music

today, and a lot of people are discovering music with

Shazam, so anything after Shazam goes right into my playlist.

And I think they're understanding of who their user is, their

not going for everyone in the world to listen to music.

Their going after music geeks.

And I think they've nailed it.

And they've taken their service and differentiated

it to a point where it's not

just a service to listen to music online, but it's a service to discover music.

And that's what I think a lot of a

lot of streaming sites are missing, missing these days.

So, I want to change paces a little bit and talk about

another aspect of, of getting your story straight before you jump into design,

and I want to talk about some of the work that I've

been doing with my team over the last couple years and Media Temple.

So if you're not familiar with Media Temple it's a web

hosting and cloud services company based in LA, been around since '98.

I've been a customer there for like seven years.

And I left working on sexy brands to go work in web hosting, and everyone

said what the hell are you doing, it's like going to work at a power company.

And but I loved this service and they've

always been the host for, like, designers and developers.

So all the designers I knew hosted there.

That's how I ended up there.

And so when I started there, my, my task was to redo the website.

So I stepped back and said, let's, let's take a deeper look at this.

So, first I kind of had to figure out what web hosting was.

And we all know what web hosting is, but I didn't really understand it.

And what it is, is web hosting is essentially a utility.

Right?

I would imagine everyone in this room has electric, running

water, heat, hopefully insurance and some kind of cell phone plan.

Right?

And if you have a website, it's hosted somewhere, even if it's a Tumbler.

It's hosted at Tumbler.

Or probably Amazon, wherever they do all their stuff.

But you know, and if you're working for someone, at some point they

had to make a decision about where to host their website and it's easy

and, and what's interesting and is, you don't think about Con Ed if

you live in New York as your power company until the power goes out.

And it's kind of the same with a web host.

You don't necessarily think about the web host until you have a problem.

So it's easy to choose a power company because in your

power company there in your city there's generally only one power company.

And in web hosting, there's like over 40,000 web hosting companies.

And since I've been up here three or four have probably started.

and, it's not a joke.

I mean, it's kind of a joke, but, it's true.

So, when you look at the competitive

landscape of web hosting, it's pretty crazy.

There's Gators, Hulk Hogan, Clouds, 99 Cent Signs.

Even this fake one that one of my guys who works for me called Host Chopper.

The only web host with a chopper.

And when I started at Media Temple, this is the site that I inherited and this

is the site that made me and pretty much every other designer I knew, a customer.

And it really stood out.

It was very high touch, it was polished and

I did a lot of user testing on the site.

And a lot of the things that I thought instantaneously, like you

probably are thinking is that it feels technical, and we heard that

from people, and these big logos here felt like someone running a

small design studio or a freelancer, this wasn't the right place for them.

And if you talk to people that are customers

you hear how great the support is at Media Temple.

And this was the support page and the help page.

And, so, as I dove a bit deeper into the brand assessment

I showed this to the CEO of the time and I said,

this Under Armor add feels like what Media Temple feels like to me.

And this Nike women's running ad is what it actually should

feel like, because as a customer, that's what that brand feels like.

Whereas this one is tough, metallic, dismissive, machine-like, and elitist.

That's kind of what that site felt like to me, and as

a customer I know to be

elegant, conditioned, inviting, human, and approachable.

And so, this sort of set the groundwork to, to personify the products.

Right?

Instead of these literal interpretations of hosting products

with these best of class server renderings, we switch

to focusing on the people who are using

the products, because I can relate to this dude.

His name is Shelby White, he runs a great site called Designspiriation.

The mood board, the, the desk, the camera, his equipment.

It's, it's everything that, that I understand.

And we kept hearing from people that, it

always felt like there was an army behind you.

And, so we have support icons up there and then guys who, you

know, frankly look like guys who'd be really good at helping you with computers.

And they are.

And so back to this idea of message diversity versus message discipline.

You can only see the, if you have a little like simple

and you have 30,000 next to it, does it even mean anything anymore?

Is it almost expected?

And the I love this, I love this, it doesn't really do it.

So, one of the things I wanted to do was tell

the story about the company through the eyes of our costumers.

And I wanted to and I pitch this idea to do

this thing called Made on mt when we where featuring our customers.

And, what I didn't want us to be were, our costumers talking about Media

Temple, because I find that to be

disingenuous, I don't like those kind of videos.

I just, and frankly if I'm a designer and I'm

watching another designer being profiled, I don't wanna hear them

talking about their power company or their water company, and

I kinda don't wanna hear them talk about their web post.

I just want to hear about their day to day, their struggles, where they work.

I wanna see their process, and so I wanna show you some clips of these videos.

It's about a minute and a half long.

[MUSIC]

>> I personally don't know how it's possible to

be a surfer and not be sensitive to the environment.

It's totally impossible.

>> It's been adapted and changed and grown all over

the world to this beautiful movement on breast cancer prevention.

>> I didn't like having to be creative at 9 a.m.

to 6 p.m.

[MUSIC]

>> Everything we do is real.

So when you see somebody jumping off a bridge or

you see somebody doing something, like, they're actually doing it.

Like, I've pushed people so far.

[MUSIC]

>> It's that moment in sports when you go live or active or you're sparring.

That's when you know what you know.

The original goal for the film was to raise $25,000 for Ken's scholarship fund.

And the next day we raised over $60,000.

>> It really was a series of, of irresponsible decisions

that lead to us being successful at what we do.

>> It's off the beaten path, you know, it's in the middle of this neighborhood.

You know, you walk in and you can just have a simple plate of pasta.

Or you can walk in and have, like, a pretty mind blowing meal.

>> There's and extraordinary amount of experience

and passion for what is done here.

>> Sat down, and started talking about it, and he saw how excited I

was about the idea of like, elevating,

a common hot dog, to something that's gourmet.

[MUSIC]

>> Butter knife is, ya know, how, you get paint

out of the can, and how you mix it up.

It's just all about like, it, it's about hustling, really.

>> This is the way that newspapers

were printed, books were printed, pamphlets were printed.

Anything that was printed was printed on a press, much like mine.

>> All the the old-timers talking about how great Gansett used to be,

came the idea that, you know, it'd be cool to bring back grandpa's beer.

[MUSIC]

>> And I think if you contrast those videos

with this site, it's almost like two different companies.

Right?

This visual patchwork of people that I would

imagine are, are relatable as opposed to this.

And, and so those videos, we worked with them for about a year

and half before, started those almost a year and a half before we finished

our, our new site which, which looks like this and that really paved

the way for what we were gonna do because they were so well received.

So, and we kind of overnight went from a company just

selling a product to company selling a service that's powered by people.

And we put all our people upfront and we put our customers upfront.

We made a big bold response that we kept it geeky enough for a lot of our

customers with these sci-fi images that were made by a studio called DK & G in LA.

We worked with a company called Character in San Francisco on the design.

And it's been, it's been great for us.

And we also, you know, are trying to have a better voice in our community.

And we're inviting people from our community to participate in this blog of

ours and, and write stories that are, that are relevant to our audience.

And the results so far have, have been great.

The message diversity that we're getting from people has

been excellent, and one of the things we wanted

to do was we wanted to bring older customers

out of the woodwork to talk about us again, right?

Cuz people don't talk about web hosts unless there's a problem.

So it was nice to hear stuff like, you know, loving the redesign, being so

proud to host desktops and multiple other sites with you for the past few years.

Cheers.

and, some nice recognition.

Dudes writing blog posts about why after these years they're still customers.

We have a little survey after you purchase something, why did you join us today?

And we hear a lot of these kinds of things, the features for the price,

but also the site design and blog posts appeal to my sense of design aesthetic.

Seem to be interesting, useful articles, gives

me sense of professionalism that I liked.

We weren't hearing that before, and we're under a great amount of pressure to get

this site done and out mainly not so much internally, but

on my team of 12 to get this done because our audience is extremely critical.

These are the top tier designers and developers out there

and this is my favorite comment we got on the website.

Media Temple, annoying white pixel on your new website.

So that was kind of what we were up against.

And so we actually have this printed out on the wall,

and it's means and we gave one to our qa department, too.

so, anyway it, it, it's really important to extend

this experience like past just the website design.

Right?

There's tons of touch points in the company.

What's it like when you get on the phone?

How are we on Twitter and how do we portray ourselves as a company?

And this redesign did it as much for us externally as it has internally.

You know, our people that are on our, the 120 some odd people we have that are in

our support department are really like the engine that

drives the company and gives us our great reputation.

And so we wanted to really showcase our workplace, which

no one had ever seen inside and we wanted to showcase the day to day there.

And you know with 40,000 web hosts and everyone's talking

about pricing and tech specs and et cetera, we didn't

want a talking heads video, you know, of just people

rambling on about products and culture and all that stuff.

So, we did something that was a little bit more

stripped back and it's been super successful for us and just

telling this story of the company has brought so many people

into the brand that maybe wouldn't have, have come through there.

So I'll show you that now, it's also about minute and 20 seconds long.

[MUSIC]

>> All through the night,

and every single day.

We get together and get to work.

[MUSIC]

We come from different directions,

with different talents, and

different points of view.

Designers, musicians coders,

parents, foodies, geeks,

gamers, inventors, people who

build things, share things.

People who believe in the power of ideas.

That's why we're always here, day or night, rain or shine.

Because it's our job to make sure your ideas always have a place to shine.

We're Media Temple, we host great ideas.

And the last point I'm make on video.

And I love making videos, and they're actually really easy to do.

I always thought that they would be hard and about five

years ago I started working with a guy called Chris Gibbod.

He taught me how to make videos.

Properly.

And they're really easy.

And you know, this is my, and nowadays you don't need a lot of money.

I mean, we made that video for 1500 bucks, maybe.

We had a 5D.

My video producer, Levy, is super talented.

That foot belongs to Ian who's one of my front-end guys.

The voice over is done by someone in our marketing department, we wrote

a really simple script and I hit up a friend, and make some music.

So you can do this and it's a really, really great

way to tell your company's story and stand out in a crowd.

So.

Where do we go from here?

I fer, I from here would suggest that you kinda

pause and I suggest you look what you are working on.

And ask yourself have you really thought about your content?

What's on your website?

Have you thought about how someone will experience the site?

Not just how they click, but why they click.

Is it substance over style?

It should be.

And you know, don't forget, right?

Simple solutions and solving problems, focus

on content, create an experience that differentiates,

and put the story of your brand or your client before the design.

Your big spark is not a wireframe, it's

a story, it's a solution, it's an experience.

You're all talented people.

And designs will come to you.

That, that's not gonna be the hard part.

and, you know, it doesn't matter how fancy and cool and trendy the

sites are, if the content sucks no one is really going to care.

So thank you so much.

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