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I’ve learned a great lesson from doing the Create Conference 2008: you never how how valuable the various design artefacts you come up with will be during the life of a website project. Your throw-away thumbnail-dipped-in-tar scrawls may well lead the way to other areas of creativity and visual assets for the website that you hadn’t anticipated.

When I was first thinking about the visual concept of the Create Conference 2008 website (read more in the work section if you like), I was combining their existing visual ideas of an airship and a clockworky steampunk theme into some pretty scratchy concept sketches, with notes and call-outs all over them.

I showed one of the pages to the client. She loved it. But the thing is, it wasn’t just the concept, it was the actual ‘look’ of the scratchy sketching as well that fired her imagination. And boom: thus was born the visual concept for the print brochure.

I didn’t know at the time that the client was working on the print brochure for the conference, but that one sketch launched a series of extra sketches I did, all around the same theme, and centered on the airship theme. The client ran with the sketch idea, and wanted to convey a ‘Leonardo da Vinci’-esque theme, which actually fit in very nicely with the creative spirit of the conference, and with the playful ‘bygone grandeur’ visual theme I was originally after.

What’s more, once I started thinking about what I could sketch of this thing, the whole contraption under the airship came alive in my mind; I could see it in 3 dimensions; I could see where people moved around on top, and the living quarters in the hull… everything. Now I’ve never been into model ships or anything like that… but suddenly i wanted to build this thing!

I’ve put a few of the sketches in this post. Looking carefully at the Create Conference website and the brochure, you’ll see how they’ve been knitted in.

“Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.”

Jeffrey Zeldman, Understanding Web Design

Screenshot of the Workforce Guardian home page

Workforce Guardian is an online application to help businesses hire, manage and exit employees. The production of this website was by-the-book in terms of audience analysis (carried out by PTG Global), stakeholder consultation, rigorous information architecture, website optimisation and content strategy. The visual design and W3C standards-compliant XHTML was outsourced to Reactive, who really knew what they were doing. The website has also been tuned for best search engine tastiness by another external partner, who also perform ongoing search optimisation.

Update: after the website was first launched, I re-did the Products/product options index page with an accordion-style product comparison feature, which opened up the details of the features much more efficiently for people to view and decide which edition was best for them.

Another note: the website - especially the home page - has changed quite a lot since it was first launched.

Go to: workforceguardian.com.au

Screenshot of the World

Update: World’s Greatest Shave has (to date) raised over $12 million - and they were hoping for 9! All up the campaign this year had over 15,000 online registrations, nearly 14,000 uploaded photos, over 5,000 blog posts and over 11,000 online comments.

Background: the 2007 design is by Known, and Catch Media looked after the development. It includes some new features, like a blog (with comments) and photo gallery for every registered participant, and even easier online sponsorship.

Go to: worldsgreatestshave.com