Digital Design Blog

The Lost Posts: Adweek and Ad Age Weigh in on Future of Digital Design

At this point we’ve just about given up on retrieving our lost data from earlier this week. Here’s a quick recap of what we covered:

• Adweek’s Brian Morrissey nails a number of key trends shaping the digital design landscape in Form + Function — a must read. Quick excerpt:

Funny microsites are giving way to useful, sometimes entertaining applications; the showing off of flashy technology is yielding to design geared towards generating sales; and crafting for social interaction is replacing one-way experiences. Now that digital points exist far outside the browser, designing for the Web is passe, with digital design chasing the elusive goal of designing experiences that wrap all of the above together.

“When you create a utility, you’re creating something that gives people time back,” said Nick Law, CCO for North America at R/GA. “It becomes less about information as pollution and more about information to help people get through life.”

• Adweek also names our Digital Design Blog as one of Top 5 design blogs in the industry. Rounding out the list are 37Signals, Nokia, Logic + Emotion and Organic.

• Ad Age puts out their big digital issue and names Microsoft’s Ad-Solutions VP Brian McAndrews (ex-aQuantive CEO) Executive of the Year.

• Ad Age provocatively suggests that Maybe The Web Isn’t the Place to Stick Your Ads. Choice quote from web usability guru Jakob Nielsen:

His skepticism about ads is based on eye-tracking studies demonstrating “banner blindness,” which describes the tendency of the eyes to ignore content — whether ads or noncommercial information — contained in banners on websites. He submits that search-engine and classified advertising work because people who come in contact with those ad forms generally are looking to buy something, which is why they searched in the first place. The same isn’t true of display ads, which Mr. Nielsen concludes “aren’t very well-suited for the web” and are holdovers from a way of thinking best applicable to other, older media.

“People don’t recognize the distinction between modes of engagement,” he said. “Most of the times I use the web, I go to get something done, and I don’t want to be distracted. With television, I might want a more relaxing, absorbing experience.”

That may change as the consumer experience of video on the internet continues to improve and becomes more like TV. But even if it doesn’t, you can be sure advertisers will continue to pour more and more money in there, almost regardless of whether there’s better way to spend it.

“There’s huge financial incentive to say advertising works,” Mr. Nielsen said. “To say that it doesn’t work — I don’t get anything out of that.”

• Silicon Alley Insider weighs in on Ad Age’s Digital issue and Mr. Nielsen: Certainly banner advertising had been hit by the perception that it is roundly ignored, but a raft of research concludes that video advertising — even annoying pre-roll ads — has some of the highest recall in the business.