Talking to Designers and Developers

Design Action is a co-op design shop in oakland

• Development = coding
• Design =visuals
• DA does both

Case Study of process of development (slides) Causa Justa

• How design helps tell your story

• Causa Justa is a collaboration of Oakland and SF groups working together around housing rights and Latino issues

• DA was hired to create a website and branding to communicate the combination. Ultimately selected bridge as motif on logo

• Website: CJ's website includes several distinct types of content incuding know your rights articles, organizing projects such as turn out the vote, a blog with perspective on news, etc.

• Step 1 sitemap of basic areas of site
• Step 2 wireframe. (blueprint of each portion of site)
• Step 3. Colors, themes, typography etc for the ultimate design

• CJ ended up with a logo and color themes that have been used and adapted in many forms -- newspaper, banners, poster series, etc

Q & A

Q .how often rebrand to update the look? Classic or trendy/fresh?

A. Balance but no logo lasts forever. For the fairly frequent refresh, might change the h type or modify the image but keep concept and or color. Sometimes a big change is used when organization is making a fresh start

Q. How long is the design process?

A. It is a long process to develop logo/site from scratch, quick if it's a new poster for existing client with existing assets. When first starting with an org, takes a while to learn about the orgs goals. Creating a website with input from clients through several iterations can take months.

Q. How to explore what your org needs in design and development?

A. DA uses an extensive questionnaire (can provide on request)

Q. Guidelines for doing design yourself?

A.Org shoud not need to hire someone to do content updates. use standard CMS such as WordPress Lynda.com is a good resource for education

Q. Resources for beginer designs.

A. WordPress theme library, code for instructions. Key issue is consistency between pages, materials elements of typographicstyle (book)

Did not get to talk about...

• communicationbetween clientand designers

Q.how many wireframes?

• Each page?

A. each typeof page ie Homepage, content, blog,mighteach get a wireframe.

• However many wants to use.