When was the last time you experienced environmental design on a first-hand basis? Chances are, it’s happening to you right now. From our workspaces to the interiors of the cars we drive, environmental design is all around us and can range from a simple paint scheme to motion-activated lighting and aromatherapy.

But what does it mean to the marketing of a brand?

Most would agree that environmental design is more than simply structural—it’s emotional. Joy, tranquility and pure inspiration can all be elicited within a space, whether in storefronts, restaurants, hotel chains or airports, and then tied to their corresponding brands.

Products of the environment

At Gerard Design, we’ve enjoyed the opportunity to create one-of-kind experiences that grab attention and leave audiences with lasting impressions. And while it’s one thing to impress at a tradeshow, it’s quite another to create a sensory brand experience at a hospital.

That’s right. We said, “hospital.” For many, it’s not the first place that comes to mind when one thinks of environmental design. Far from the glitz and glamour of Manhattan storefronts or Swedish ice hotels, hospitals are often stereotyped for stark walls, white floors and sterile rooms—facets many hospitals have already veered from or are in the process of transforming.

When Elmhurst Memorial Healthcare was looking to facelift their transitional care hallway—a passageway designed for patients transitioning out of the hospital after surgery/rehabilitation and for those walking/exercising during their hospital stay—we looked beyond the walls, floors and location itself

We looked at the brand overall.

Elmhurst Memorial Healthcare is known for its mantra, “caring that shows.” Their brand is about personalizing experiences, treating patients like individuals and being advocates to everyone they serve. Put simply, this called for more than a fresh coat of paint. We needed to connect their brand within the environment and leave a series of positive lasting impressions far beyond the hospital visit.

Through the use of cheerful lighting, custom photography, soothing music, etched glass and motion-activated light boxes, we were able to transform the once-grey corridor into a spa-like healing passageway—an “out-of-hospital experience” that let people enjoy nature indoors, even if just for a few minutes.

In the end, it was a holistic experience that connected with people on a personal level. It created a personality for the space while reflecting the personality already established by the brand, and was in tune with the aspirations of that particular audience—patients looking to heal and get back to enjoying life.

Most importantly though, it gave the location a soul. That may seem silly or exaggerated for a simple corridor, but the soul was already there in the brand itself. We simply carried what Elmhurst Memorial Healthcare stands for into the space and gave it room to live and breathe.

Putting your space to work for you

So what does this have to do with marketing considerations for your brand? Though beauty is more than skin deep, it’s a great place to start. Far beyond having things look nice for nice-sake, the initial vision your brand conveys will often be one of the first—and most lasting—things audiences will take away. Since many people are visual and emotional (in other words, human), this is an important consideration when promoting your brand, no matter what the space.

We think there are three key components when designing your environment:
(1) Vision: What’s the potential experience this will have with your customers?
(2) Story: What’s the story, message or visual? Does it have a soul?
(3) Emotional connection: Whether it’s safety, success or style, how does this share the same values as your customers?

Once your vision is established, it’s important to maintain and carry out your brand presence in a consistent fashion. Even if it’s unexpected and innovative, it still needs to hold true to your brand essence. Leveraging bright purple walls and poetic quotes on signs may create an experience in your space, but it won’t do anything for your brand (except confuse and dilute it) if it’s not based on the original essence of what your brand stands for.

In the example of Elmhurst Memorial Healthcare, we can honestly say that their brand lives within print, online and even their corridors. Though all three are great mediums for audiences to encounter and interact with the brand, its when patients recognize and remember the brand on their own—away from hospital grounds or medical brochures—that we know that their brand essence goes more than skin deep.

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Nearly every online marketing plan out there includes e-mail marketing to some degree. But more often than not, people could get be getting so much more from their e-mail campaigns with just a bit more time and effort. Here are a few quick tips to make the most of your e-mail marketing efforts.

Use autoresponders

Autoresponders are, quite simply, e-mails that are sent automatically—based on some activity set up within the e-mail marketing service. The most popular examples are welcome e-mails sent to people who have joined your e-mail list. Welcome e-mails can set the tone for your e-mail efforts, establish appropriate expectations with the individual and promote key messages that may otherwise go overlooked. Other examples include sending a personalized message on someone's birthday or on their anniversary for enrolling in an online service.

Testing more than subject lines

Nearly all e-mail marketing services have some level of A/B testing that allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of options for subject lines, senders and layouts. When reviewing your current processes, ask yourself: With how affordable e-mail marketing is versus comparable tactics, are you making the most of these testing features? For many of our clients, even modest changes can result in 10%-30% improvements in open rates and conversions. Try changing up offers and messaging priorities to make sure you’re getting the most from your campaigns.

Segmentation and personalization

Ever wonder how much information you have about your audience, and what you could do to make your e-mail more relevant to them? With just a bit of information about their location and levels of previous engagement with your campaigns, you can send out more targeted communications that will connect more deeply with your audience. If you don't have this information, take the time to ask recipients on your list how you can make your e-mails more relevant to them. You can even ask them to provide a few pieces of information about their preferences, so you’ll have the tools you need to make your campaigns more meaningful.

Metrics: Beyond open rates and click-throughs

Most of us watch open rates and clicks from our campaigns, but what about metrics that extend beyond a single campaign? Look for trends in your campaigns to find individuals with high levels of engagement and send them a special message they can share with others. In your reporting, try going the other route: look for individuals with very low engagement levels. Once identified, you can provide them with a special offer to activate their engagement, or ask them how you can make your communications more relevant to them.

Social sharing

Though "Forward to a friend" links have been common in campaigns for years, many have found that actual use of the feature by audiences has been minimal. The truth of the matter is, it's just easier to forward an e-mail than use the e-mail forwarding features we provide. However, many campaigns see significantly higher use of social sharing links that allow a recipient to post a link to the campaign on Twitter or Facebook. This is quickly becoming a standard feature in many e-mail services and does not require that you have a presence on these social networks to leverage social sharing.

Change is good

As the world of online marketing expands, so do the capabilities and behaviors of our target audiences. It’s not enough to sit back and think that in all instances, what was effective two years works just as well now. Fortunately, unlike the somewhat permanent world of print, e-mail is a flexible medium that makes it easy to test, test, test. You can try one of the tips above, or all of them—it’s up to you. That’s the beauty of online marketing.

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As you may have heard, our new Woman’s Business Enterprise (WBE) certification is sure to change the way we do business for good. But how?

First off, we’re happy about our WBE status for feel-good reasons as well professional ones. Not only is fostering diversity important to core business, but key for providing new opportunities and allowing fresh ideas and points of view. At the end of the day, it’s sure to help us open more doors for your business and serve you in ways we weren’t able to before.

So just what does being “WBE certified” mean?

Think of WBE certification as the UL seal of approval for electric appliances: In essence, we’ve been "tested" so you can be confident that we’ve met all requirements for being a Woman’s Business Enterprise.

And what does our WBE certification mean for your business in particular? In addition to helping you meet diversity requirements, we can help your company achieve procurement goals, foster value-added relationships, support alternative business models and demonstrate a positive impact on the community.

What’s more, your company may be eligible for tangible monetary benefits. You’ll receive tax incentives and improve your chances of winning government contracts if you meet federal mandates by spending a percentage with diverse enterprises. That’s not only great for the economy of your business, but for the nation as a whole.

Lastly, working with a WBE-certified enterprise isn’t just buzz-worthy, it’s literally press-worthy. Businesses who have partnered with WBE organizations have reported receiving increased positive PR and favorable publicity. We think that’s good news for everyone.

We look forward to this exciting new chapter for our business—and all the opportunities it can bring to yours.

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I've been using Adobe Fireworks since it was Macromedia Fireworks 1.0. At first, I had a bit of a difficult transition from Photoshop to Fireworks. Fireworks is really half Illustrator and half Photoshop, entirely geared towards web design. For example, it only operates in RGB - no CMYK. You won't be creating print layouts in Fireworks. But the ease of which you could export web-optimized slices won me over, and I've never looked back. I still use Photoshop for working with photography, or to create specific visual effects - but hardly ever for creating web comps. Here's a few reason's why:

Fireworks plays better with Flash

Since Fireworks is vector by default, that means that objects you copy and paste into Flash tend to stay vector objects. This keeps your Flash file lightweight and editable, instead of bloated with bitmaps that you have to rework in Photoshop.

Find and replace with Fireworks

When you create a bunch of screen comps and then the client wants to change details across them, that usually means a lot of lost time to busywork. But with Fireworks you can find and replace 10pt Myriad with 12pt Helvetica Neue across a folder full of comps. If you'd like to create two sets of comps with different color schemes, that's easy too. Just duplicate your folder of Fireworks PNG files, and run a series of find and replaces on colors instead of fonts. I can't even tell you how much time this has saved me over the years.

Fireworks can save as PSD, AI and more

Let's say the client loves your screen designs, and now they want the final files as Illustrator files instead of Photoshop files. If you made your comps in Photoshop, you've got a long week ahead of you remaking them in Illustrator. But not if you created them in Fireworks - just export as Illustrator. Changed their mind again? Export as a layered Photoshop file instead. Just because you work in Fireworks doesn't mean everyone else has to.

Fireworks can use your Photoshop filters

Most Photoshop filters work just as well in Fireworks too.

Fireworks has layers and frames

Fireworks has layers just like Photoshop, but it has frames and pages as well. Want to create all your comps in one file? Just put all your global items (your masthead, for example) on a shared layer and then create your individual art on frames. When you're ready to export all your comps, choose "Export Frames" and Fireworks will save each frame as it's own image. This feature makes Fireworks a natural for creating web application wireframes or Flash animation storyboards.

There's a ton more timesavers like these

I could go on all day like this, but I'll stop here for now. If you're looking to work more efficiently on your screen designs, you owe it to yourself to check out Fireworks. Besides, Fireworks works hand-in-hand with Dreamweaver to make your web workflow even more seamless.

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Sorry for the delay on this post, but the bad thing about leaving town for a week is that the work you would have been doing patiently awaits your return.

One of the things that has never quite sat right with me about design, is that it's all so awfully subjective. Sure, you can point to universal design principles, competitive analysis, heuristics and all of that - but when the rubber meets the road there's a certain lack of teeth to explaining to someone why a design is not only good, but why it's right.

That's one of the many reasons why I'm been making efforts to become more than a web designer, but an experience designer as well. Knowing that this transition takes more than reading Boxes and Arrows and subscribing to UIE's Spoolcasts, I decided that I needed some hands-on training. So recently, I was able to attend Cooper U's 4-day Interaction Design Practicum.

Central to the course were personas - archetypes of actual user interviews, used to guide the design of a product or web site. Over the four days we discussed preparing for user interviews, interviewing techniques, methods for interpreting interview notes, creating personas from user interviews and making design decisions based on personas.

The best part is that the course was very hands-on, and each day I got an opportunity to actually try out what we were talking about. It's one thing to read about interviewing, and an entirely different thing to interview the guy next to you. But I pushed myself to get out of my comfort zone, and  volunteered for anything that was offered in class. I figured if I were going to fail anywhere, this was a great place to do it. As a result, I got some great experience from the course - and I'm excited to try some of those techniques on my next project.

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The kind folks at Gerard Design sent me to Webvisions 2006 last week in Portland. In particular, I was excited to be able to attend Jared Spool's all-day session on "Design and Usability Techniques for Successful Websites". He discussed a variety of subjects, but I was particularly interested his thoughts for designing for scent, writing for trigger words, and using design patterns in web design. It reminded me that I received the book "The Design of Sites" for Christmas, and hadn't read much of it yet. It gets into the details of design patterns for web sites, which basically boils down to "here's what people expect - here's what we know works". He also got into the details of a variety of usability and user research methods, which I'm particularly excited to start using in my web projects. In the past I've been a bit intimidated to attempt user interviews and ethnographic research, but I think through this session I've found a new enthusiasm to use try and use them both.

Day two was a little less exciting. The first session of the day was Mark Wyner's "Building Better HTML E-mails", which was useful information, but not particularly exciting. Next up was Garrett Dimon's "Improving Front-End Architecture", which seemed like it was taking a long time getting to any kind of useful information. So I left 20 minutes into his session and finished out the hour in Kelly Goto's "Designing for Lifestyle". Her talk dealt mostly with Web 2.0 applications and the mobile web, so didn't have a lot to do with my immediate web projects. But it was an interesting view into what other people are doing, which I'm sure will come in handy in other ways.

I had to catch a flight back to Chicago, so my last session for day two was Christopher Schmitt's "Unleashing CSS: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love WinIE7". That was a particularly helpful session, because I've been a little concerned about the clearfix method I've been using to clear floats in all my site designs. So I was relieved to find out that I only have to change one line of CSS to make my sites work as expected in IE7.

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