Design Blog

Creativity is everywhere; it is part of our everyday life. From brewing a cup of coffee in the morning to getting our job done at work everything somehow has a touch of our creativity. However, when we need to design something properly it requires that we do it consciously. As a designer, if we are to solve a visual problem, we would need to provide an effective and timeless solution.

At work, often times there are projects that demand fresh concepts and at the same time has a short deadline. A designer could start designing with the graphic software to try to create a final version at one go, without reasoning why certain elements have been used like font face or a certain image/clipart on the design. The designer creates one design after another to know what works or not. This unorganized workflow sometimes put a lot of pressure on the designer and could lead to a creative block. Therefore, the output produced is not as expected and fail to satisfy the designer or the boss. In this scenario, designers should have some design process to accomplish the task in an organized and timely manner. The Design Process could be defined as “a linear sequence of events that has a starting and an end point. (Sometimes you have to go back a stage if new information comes to light. In certain cases you may only look at one or two stages)”*. This process is structured around ensuring the client gets the highest quality solution and service appropriate to their business, marketing or communication problem.

Let’s consider one of our projects, The Therap Rap animated video, as an example of how we have applied a design process during its development. The rap video informs about Therap and it’s significant modules.

Here are the steps that have/had been followed:

1. Define the problem/understand the requirement. You would only be able to come up with solutions if you could clearly define the problem. It is important that we gather sufficient information about the project and know the main objective. As for this rap video, our main goal was to create something fun for our customers and to see if we could have the video go viral. Something that would inspire the user to spread this over facebook, youtube etc. Other requirements was to make it 2D animation, create a cartoons of Jeremy, the rapper, our CEO, Richard Robbins, and Anna Keith, National Director of Business Development. We also incorporated, Therap’s virtual trainer T-girl and made her do few break dance steps.

2. Researching. This involves looking for existing solutions for such projects or getting inspirations by looking at others work. So we went through few jibjab style videos to see how their message has been conveyed through funny ideas. We also checked out lot of break dance videos to get some steps for T-girl.

3. Brainstorming. After getting inspirations we sat together to brainstorm how we want the video to come out. We went thru the lyrics of the song and examined how or what best ways could be used to present the ideas thru animation.

4. Storyboarding. While brainstorming we came up with lots of ideas and we sketched them out. After determining the final concept we started with storyboards for each stage of animation. We divided the lyrics into slides. We sketched the placements of graphics/objects for each slides. We also determined how the animation transitions would be.

5. Execution. In this stage we start with the graphic software and begin creating the stuff.

6. Feedback and Modifications. While developing, portions of the animation were reviewed by our marketing team and necessary changes were made.

7. Final output. Check it out!

This video was moderately successful, since it was done in 2009 and during that time, we had only few facebook friends and youtube followers. In 2012, we will try our hand at making a viral video one more time.

Though not mandatory, it is recommended to follow some rules when designing. The practice of having some approaches would help us simplify our workflow and let us spend more time being creative.

Conclusion

Instead of designing subconsciously, let us design consciously and be able to explain every element used in the design. It would not only help us achieve the goal of the design but also improve the quality of the design. A design process will save a lot of time and energy and most importantly help the designer produce more samples for revision in a short time. A good plan would also elevate company’s branding value in terms of stability and reliability. As for personal growth, designer should not just sit in front of the computer to generate ideas rather go out in the environment to get some inspiration. They may also revisit old works once in a while and think of other alternative solutions to improve it.

* http://www.techitoutuk.com/knowledge/designprocess.html

As promised, here are animated new year/seasons’ greetings from our Design Team. Enjoy…

Seasons’ Greetings, Short and Sweet:

A Lookback at 2011, and a New Year’s Wish:

As we come close to 2012, we have some things to look back on, and some things to looks forward to, like Therap Version 2012!

There is also some celebrations coming up before the year ends that we hope everyone has a merry time at those! We believe we’ve had a good year, we hope we’ll transcend that next year, and we’d like to wish everyone the same!

Have a Happy and Successful New Year and Happy Holidays!

We’ll be back soon with an animated version of this card! *smiley*

Every now and then, the design team gets a chance to take a break from the tasks related to support materials or marketing stuff like catalogs or fliers. These are the holidays! If you browse around the site you will find a splash for Christmas or Hanukkah. This year, we did our first Puja card. Puja is a Hindu occasion for prayer, and a week ago, it was time for Durga Puja which is a week long prayer. Many of Dhaka city’s fields are decorated and special houses are built for the deities and the people who will come for prayer. Our card features the likeness of Durga, and she is the center of this puja as you can tell by the name! Here are our two designs.

Our conferences are generally useful for all our existing customers, plus those who wish to learn about our services. Since the splash goes out to those currently using the system, the design and style of it is to provide a lot more information about the training that will help their staff ease into Therap’s software system.

On the other hand, for reaching those who might be interested in getting to know Therap or trying it out, we try other styles.

Agencies all across USA have celebrated the heroes of the disability industry – the direct support professionals or DSPs. We had also wanted to show our respect and the design team prepared a graphic that we put up on our site to salute the DSPs.

TRC (from New York) who is a long time Therap user has also created a video that they spread around their agency using SComms to mark the week:

Feel free to share how your agency celebrated the week on our Facebook page.

If you would like to download a larger version of the image we created saluting DSPs, click here (actually, right-click, and then select the option to save link or target)

Or, Ctrl-F?

If you are using a Windows PC, knowing this saves a lot of time. Whenever you are using their File Manager or Internet Explorer, pressing down the Ctrl key, and then pressing down the F key at the same time brings out the Search window.

Using Therap requires you using the browser and you might be looking at a long list somewhere or a pretty long form. You can use this combination of Ctrl and F also on your browsers to bring out their search facility. They can be pretty handy when going through long lists and forms! If you know you want to access the Review or Comment portion of a General Event Report (yes, be sure the word is there in the form, and you have to make sure you type it in right), you could Ctrl-F and type in the word “Comment” and hit Enter and the browser will take you down to where that word appears. If the word you are looking for appears more than one time, like 3 “John”s in a user list, you could click F3 and the browser will move to the next appearing match, and so on till you get to the right one. However it can’t help you if the word doesn’t appear on the page itself. When dealing with lists, it best to check if there is a second page to it, page numbers appear either above or below a list.

Firefox users can fortunately take this further, and this is something I personally use a lot. Go to the Tools > Options > Advanced, and look under the General tab. If you check the box beside “Search for Text When I Start Typing”, from then on, you wouldn’t even have use Ctrl-F to search on your Firefox browser! Any time you are on any webpage, simply start typing and the browser will look for tha word on the page and take you there! You can learn about more Firefox fun things from their pages.

Hope this helps!

If you are not already aware of it, Therap National Provider Administrator’s Conference is coming up in February 2012! Register for it and come attend to meet the folks and attend sessions on how make the most out of using Therap in automating your processes.

Related:
Administration Guides
Enhancements in Therap 9.1
FAQs

We thought green this time and here is what we ended up with –