Picking peaches was great–we talked to the owner of the small orchard for awhile about what to look for in a good peach, and I of course asked about proper picking technique (which annoyed my more experienced wife). Anyway, we picked our peaches, drove to their house to pay, and had a short conversation about finding something to eat in the nearby small town. The daughter who weighed our baskets was pretty sure we could go to the cafe on Main Street, so we paid, thanked her, and went on our way to find the restaurant she had described.

As we were driving, I got a phone call from a strange number. It was the owner of the orchard calling to tell us that she had heard we were looking for something to eat and her daughter had been unsure if the cafe she had recommended really was open. So the owner took it upon herself to call all of the restaurants in the tiny town to check their hours. Sure enough, the recommended cafe was closed, but the next door pizza place would be happy to stay open for us if we were already on our way.

Wow. Talk about amazing customer service. Both businesses went out of their way to work together to accommodate us out of town strangers for no good reason. We weren’t asking for anything special and we weren’t spending much money at either place, but both made an incredibly strong impression by making a small and inexpensive but valuable (to the us, the customer) extra effort. It made me want to give them even more of my business and promote them to everyone I see for the rest of the picking season.

Pretty powerful stuff. I sure hope our company is doing one-tenth as well in serving our customers.

Oh, and if you’re anywhere near Whitewater Kansas, be sure to stop at Entz orchard off of Hwy 196 and Webb road, and then head down to Whitewater Pizza for dinner….

(website) wireframe

- a basic visual guide used in interface design to suggest the structure of a website and relationships between its pages – Wikipedia

Wireframes are a great way to get ideas out into the open quickly for discussion.  You obviously don’t need anything fancy to create a basic wireframe or idea sketch (heck, a stick and patch of dirt work fine!), but we’ve found that adding a little browser chrome really helps to facilitate the process and communicate the rough ideas more clearly to a broader audience.

You can download our tool for creating wireframes for free here:

FHD Wireframe Tool – PDF

And here are a few basic principles for creating successful wireframes:

• Take a layered approach. Start by thinking about the general flow of your website or application, outlining the main actions and user experience first. Then move to more detailed sketches, creating basic layouts for each of the individual pages.
• Don’t be too literal. Your wireframes will provide the most value if they are quick sketches done in succession–broad strokes to capture main ideas, not detail oriented designs. Your pixel-perfect designs will come later.
• Embrace the power of iteration. Paper is cheap, and although you don’t want to be wasteful, going through a few sheets at this stage of the process will save boatloads later on in the process. Don’t be afraid to sketch out a half-baked idea to see where it leads.  Ask for feedback, then incorporate that feedback into your sketches. Read about usability, and follow best practices for those techniques which are commonplace and need to be recognizable and easy for users. Build upon early sketches.
• Remove all unnecessary elements. Once you’re happy with the direction things are headed, look back over the designs to see if you really need every part of the design. Chances are you have an unnecessary feature or two that doesn’t add enough value to justify keeping.  If this is the case, remove it early on (trust me, it will be much easier to start development, and, surprisingly, your users will thank you later when you give them a simple interface!).

So start sketching! You don’t have to be an illustrator, or even in the design business to gain from sketching out your ideas. If you’ve got a website and sense that some aspect should be made simpler or easier to use, use this basic wireframe tool to communicate your idea to your web developer!  They’ll thank you for the clear communication.

Today we’re proud to introduce fhdMail, a new email marketing campaign manager from Flint Hills Design.

We’ve been doing HTML email campaigns for a while now, and they’ve been great. But, being the perfectionists that we are, we started wondering if there was a better way.  And so we created fhdMail.

We invite you to read about why fhdMail is better than your standard email campaign delivery service by visiting the website.  But we’ll give you one concrete reason why fhdMail is better right now: the cute, furry little prairie dog character that we’ve affectionately named Flint.  I mean, who wouldn’t enjoy being greeted and guided by this fun little guy in the midst of serious marketing work?

To learn more about how Flint and fhdMail can help your organization do effective email marketing, give us a shout. We know you’ll enjoy it.

We were able to successfully pull in an existing RSS feed within five minutes of skimming the documentation. It then only took a few minutes of tweaks to the PHP and CSS to get a finished product. Wow. Maybe the name comes from being “easy as pie?”

Need to incorporate an RSS feed into your website? We highly recommend you check out SimplePie!

Phoenix felt like a place with way too much money that grew far too fast. Companies sprung up all over the place but were firecrackers then fizzled. Acres upon acres of car lots seemingly overflowing with the latest and most expensive models sitting full but lifeless, abandoned. Endless office buildings with for sale/lease/rent signs posted on all sides, competing for space with the ancient saguaro cacti relegated to narrow patches of immaculate landscaping. It made me wonder why we try to force so many things that seem unnatural and out of place with the environment.

For the marketing purposes of my trip, it made me realize the importance of highlighting a good company’s history and vitality. Those companies which are doing good work and thriving, even in this down economy, would benefit from not hiding this fact. Likewise, companies with long histories and scores of satisfied customers might benefit from making their history known.  They should be proud, and their customers should be proud, that the products or services they sell were valued in the past and still are today, despite all the economic ups and downs…

What Are You Talking About?

For those of you who have no idea what we’re talking about, we decided to have a little party.  We invited around 150 of our close friends to come check out our new building and see what we were working on.  We sent out the invites through nicely designed HTML emails and by creating a Facebook event:

HTML Email Invite

Facebook Event Invite

Tracking and Reports

We also decided to track the activity generated by the process, and then turn that into a very brief report that we could give to interested attendees, to show one aspect of the work we do.

Tracking Report

1. No work.  She claims I have been working too hard for some time now, and it is time for a break.
2. Anywhere in the United States is fair game (but beyond a 200 mile radius from our home and office).
3. The hotel must have a swimming pool.

Well, she didn’t really list the rules explicitly, but I pieced them together from ever increasing vacation conversations in the few weeks preceding our departure.  With a kid on the way and neither of us having been to Las Vegas, we decided that we should at least experience this place that all visit but few tell about. So we went, we experienced, we watched, we laughed, we gambled ($11 dollars worth on slot machines) and we actually had a great time. We chose to stay at Caesar’s Palace, which I had read was archetypal Vegas at its best (and it had five huge pools satisfying rule #3 quite handily!).  As I reflect on our trip, three ideas seem worth sharing.

Vegas is Ridiculousness

In front of the Bellagio, Caesar's Palace in background.

Hotels in Vegas are designed with the sole purpose of outdoing one another. The unwritten motive seemed to be that the person with the most ridiculous, outlandish idea would attract the most visitors, and therefore money, and should be built no matter the upfront cost. Forget simplicity, and ideas about making sure that everything in a design performs a useful function.  The function of most elements in Vegas design is to be ridiculous–to exist merely to draw attention (and paying customers through the front doors!). The funny thing is that in most cases it seems to work.  We were constantly being asked whether we had visited the volcano in front of the Mirage, Treasure Island’s pirate ship battle, the Venetian canals, Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace, the Wynn, Mandalay Bay, and the “dancing water fountains” as my wife called them in front of the Bellagio.

So for much of our time in Vegas I was left questioning my basic design principles.  I was taught, and still mostly believe, that every piece of every design must serve a purpose. But when is it ok to add decoration or eye candy for the sole purpose of pleasing the viewer/user? People like things that look pretty or intriguing or outlandish–surely there are times that it is appropriate to add extraneous elements to dress up a design, even if they aren’t totally necessary.

Hoover Dam

Looking out over the hoover dam from the Nevada side.

The Hoover Dam was an amazing example of good design followed by lots of hard work (and great project management skills–the dam was built on time and under budget!).  The scale of the project was obviously impressive:

• An entire city (Boulder City) was built nearby to house all of the workers
• The project was such an undertaking that six construction companies had to band together to build it (they cleverly renamed the conglomerate group “Six Companies, Inc.”)
• “When completed in 1936, it was both the world’s largest electric-power generating station and the world’s largest concrete structure” (Wikipedia).

But even more impressive to me were the innovations created to facilitate the process of building such a massive hunk of concrete–the canyon-spanning crane system used to deliver fresh concrete to the 5′ x 5′ forms; diverting a river as big as the Colorado from its natural course; and especially the refrigeration system used to cool the concrete in a reasonable amount of time (it was calculated that the concrete would take over 125 years to cool/harden because of the amount of heat generated by the curing process so they built a massive refrigeration unit and used it to circulate cold water through pipes embedded in the concrete to speed up the curing process).  The entire visit left my work feeling tiny and insignificant when compared to these history changing projects, but perhaps there will be time for those later in life!

The Lion King

While in Vegas, we decided to go see The Lion King at Mandalay Bay.  The show was fun and the actors were decent, but some of the costumes were examples of design at its best.  The cheetah and giraffe costumes were ingenious–I was amazed at how they could mimic the movements of these animals despite being so different from the human form.  Photographs don’t do the costumes or acting justice, and I didn’t take any video in the theater, so I guess I’ll just have to recommend that you go see the show!

All in all, we had a great time in Las Vegas. We were able to relax and enjoy ourselves away from our work and I was inspired to think about old design problems and principles in new ways.  It’s always good to experience other places!

After graduating from Bethel College (KS) with degrees in mathematical sciences and physics, Joel went on to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to earn a Masters of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering degree. He then spent a year in Monteiro Brazil, working with the Mennonite Central Committee’s Serving and Learning Together (SALT) program.

Joel brings an amazing analytical mind to the Flint Hills Design team, and will be in charge of taking our web analytics work to the next level. He will also be working to help us to design more effective marketing campaign strategies, structured for easy measurement and analysis.

We’re hopeful that the new space will give us a chance to bring a new level of attention to our work and facilitate some of our larger collaborative projects.

Oh, and we love to grill for all of our friends and clients so please stop by to see us!

The Process Communication Model (PCM) acknowledges the idea that different kinds of personalities respond to different styles of communication, and provides the tools necessary to identify those personalities and deliver your message in a way that recipient will respond to.

As a skeptic of most personality models, I went into the training with a relatively closed mind.  But through the course of the week I became increasingly convinced that this model has much to offer for practical application, whether or not you believe all of the tenants set forth (I should say that at this point I have no reason not to agree with everything that was taught!).

One of the most intriguing aspects of the model is its ability to predict behavior. It was amazing to witness everyone in the room light up when one person would start to explain scenarios from their personal or professional lives and the rest of the participants would be able to essentially finish the story for them, having never met any of the characters involved!

I would recommend working with Nate Regier of Next Element Consulting to anyone who is interested in improving their communication and relationship management skills.