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The American Association of Political Consultants held their annual conference and awards ceremony last week, and chose The Bivings Group for their Best Pro Bono Campaign for TBGives.

We were recognized for our work with DC-based youth arts education program, Critical Exposure, and are currently in the process of providing $10,000 worth of website strategy and development.

This is the second major award for the TBGives campaign, which also picked up a Communitas Award for excellence in community service earlier this month.

TBG was also honored for our work with The Pickens Plan, which picked up bronze Pollie Awards for Best Use of Facebook and Best Use of Twitter.

In 2009, The Pickens Plan picked up the Pollie Award for Best Public Affairs Campaign.

Like them or not, interstitial ads, which are advertisements that appear before visitors arrive at the expected site content, have become a part of our day-to-day web browsing experience.  I personally don’t mind interstitial ads all that much, as I’ve gotten used to them and have gotten pretty good at locating the skip button as a way of quickly getting to the content I’m actually looking for.

With all online ads, there is sort of a battle between publishers and site visitors.  As site visitors get better and better at tuning out advertisements, publishers get more and more creative (and desperate) in their efforts to grab readers attention.  An interstitial ad campaign ESPN.com ran yesterday is a good example of the push/pull between visitors and publishers. 

ESPN is a site I’ve visited on just about a daily basis for as long as I can remember, so I’m pretty familiar with how its design has evolved over the years.  Yesterday, when I visited to the site I was taken to a page that looked like the homepage of the site from 5 years ago.  Indeed, the top story on the page referenced a 2004 MVP race.  Below is a screen grab.

I immediately recognized this as an old ESPN.com homepage design, and later confirmed this by poking around the Wayback machine (see here and here).  I was honestly confused, wondering if ESPN was having some sort of technical problem.  Then I noticed the Lexus ad at the top of the page, and a split second later the ad expanded to show a full page ad promoting Lexus as the first company to launch a luxury hybrid.  See below.

At this point I opt out of the ad and move on to the main ESPN homepage. 

Honestly though, the whole situation left a bad taste in my mouth.  I understand that ESPN.com needs to pay its bills, and that as a reader of their site I’m obligated to view my fair share of ads.  That’s fine.  But I think ESPN is hurting its brand by allowing advertisers to essentially trick visitors into thinking they are viewing editorial content when they aren’t. 

In the world of website and graphic design, image is everything, and with it, the art accompanying the project just as significant. While businesses frequently face the challenge of finding images that appropriately represent their organizations and/or services, it is not to say that success will be found 100% of the time. Surprisingly, the most important aspect of their presentation can often times appear rushed, or other times under cooked.

The entire concept of image retouching is similar to that of a magician: The viewer should never be in on the trick.

Image manipulation is truly an art, and nowadays when a 15 year-old can remove a lingering pimple before posting party pics to Facebook, everyone is in on the act, albeit with mixed results.

I am always on the search for examples of what I’d like to call "photostopping,” where both the photo and reality end, leaving you wondering why an effort was made at all.

I find myself endlessly entertained by the website Photoshop Disasters, featuring examples of poorly implemented designs that actually make it past the cutting room floor. Viewing the site, you would be surprised at the epidemic of models missing limbs in advertisements.

This example comes from the Polish edition of the Microsoft website. While it is not uncommon to come across websites using the same stock images, it would seem that there are only so many of the standard “diversity” business shots available.

In the image, one businessman is clumsily swapped for another, going as far as neglecting the color of the replaced man’s hand. While you could potentially excuse other companies for shoddy design, please remember— this is MICROSOFT!

And I haven’t even touched the subject of the obvious white MacBook prominently featured in the center of the shot.

Source: Photoshop Disasters

Further reading: Joe Wertz: The Politics of Photoshop — 10 Historic Doctored Photos

As part of my research for a project we are working on, I recently looked at the websites of around one hundred U.S.-based think tanks to see what the best practices are.  All and all, this was an inspiring set of websites and not nearly as extraordinary as the list of best university sites I put together recently, but there are a few that stood out.  Below is a list of the five best of the ones I looked at, in alphabetical order.

Aspen Institute

This site has a very cleanly designed homepage, and I really like there interactive top story feature.

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Check out Ning CEO Gina Bianchini being interviewed by Charlie Rose.  It is a good interview, made better by the fact that one of our clients, the Pickens Plan, is mentioned as an example of how custom social networks can be used in the public affairs / political space. 

My colleague Andrew MacDowell pointed me to this interesting BBC data visualization of the 100 most popular sites on the Internet.  Check it out.  Interesting thing I learned: Facebook appears to be more dominant in the social networking space than Google is in search.  Interesting thing I learned number 2: MySpace is no longer a top 100 site. 

Job Seekers: Q&A with Gary Bivings, Owner of The Bivings Group

Mark Story of the Intersection of Online and Offline interviews our very own Gary Bivings about what we look for in potential employees.

Last week, I wrote a post about Georgetown University’s process for redesigning its website.  As I drafted the piece, I developed a working thesis that university websites are sort of like government sites, in that they have to do so much and serve so many audiences that the designs end up being utilitarian and bland.  This lead me to spend a few hours going through the websites of the 100 best universities in the country, as ranked by U.S. News and World Reports, in an effort to prove my theory.

Turns out I was wrong.  It turns out that despite all that they have to accomplish, lots and lots of universities have produced websites that are both beautiful, and immensely usable.

Following is a list of the 11 best best designed websites from the U.S. News World Reports list, as judged by me with input from some of my co-workers here at The Bivings Group.  Please note that I only looked at the top 100 on the list – I’m sure there are websites from schools outside the top 100 that are equally impressive.

Take a look, and let me know what you think in your comments.

(11) Virginia Tech

I like the look and feel here a lot, as well as the use of photography.  It isn’t higher on the list because it is just a little too busy for my tastes.

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