iStrategyBlabs

iStrategyLabs Portfolio Review, Powered by Behance.

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iStrategyLabs is hosting Washington DC’s first ever Behance Portfolio Review on May 14th, and we’re inviting creatives from all over the region to come be apart of it!

We’re stoked to host such an awesome event. So, to make it even more awesome the iSL design team whipped up a fun, fully-responsive, parallax microsite to promote it.

Check the site for all the details, and make sure to join our meetup page if you plan on attending, or if you just want to see yourself as a Space Invader on the website :)

Click here for the full experience.  Be sure to check it out on mobile as well!

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Below is a quick photo tour of the process, from sketching/wireframing, to design, to development.  ScottRoberto, and Mike were involved in the process from conceptualization to deployment.  Zach and Sarah also provided a great assist.

As Scott scaffolded the architecture of the project, Mike and Roberto created some digital assets to be scattered throughout the site.

We had a blast firing up After Effects and conceptualizing animations and sequences for the first scroll event.

Below is an internal favorite that just narrowly missed the cut.  Excuse the low quality of the GIF – a high res version is available here.

And finally… Credits.

Major props to Chetan + Nathan—our developer senseis—for some late-in-the game assistance when we were scrambling to launch this bad boy.

Content Strategy: Tips for a User-Friendly Web Experience

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As part of our eternal quest for knowledge and glory here at ISL, we hold a regular internal series of staff-led professional development classes known as Battle School. It’s serious business.

Recently, I had the pleasure of leading our troops through a course on Content Strategy – thinking about how we approach our web projects systematically, and help guide our clients and projects to greatness through excellent web content that fulfills both business and user needs.

The presentation covers high-level basics like defining content and content strategy, and gets deeper into the details like processes and page tables (which we refer to as Page Guides, for those of you who are already initiated).

A few key highlights you might not expect:

No shortcuts! Your create-content-quick-and-easy scheme is useless.
Goals: Useful web content must meet user needs and business goals.
Less, not more! You think more content is better? It’s not. Read why.
Content creation gets you half way. See how it all comes full circle.

What do you think? Leave a comment, or tweet us @iStrategyLabs to give us your take.

New Infographic Examines How Much We’re Really Paying in Taxes For Cell Phone Service

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In the spirit of tax season, iStrategyLabs created an infographic for Mobile Future revealing just how much we’re paying for wireless broadband to power our mobile devices. “Wireless Taxes” highlights the latest stats and facts around tax rates and economic growth as they relate to US taxes.

Some key stats included below:

  • In the last 10 years, wireless taxes grew almost 4x faster than general sales taxes.
  • If wireless was taxed like general goods, American wireless users would save a whopping $15 billion in taxes each year.
  • Tanning and beer — taxed at 10% and 9.2%, respectively — are taxed at lower rates than wireless.

Full infographic below:

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Want to see more? Check out some of our other mobile-focused infographics:

 

Props to Sarah Sugarman for the incredible infographic and to Zach Kahn for helping us out!

March Madness Final Four Basketball: Twitter Mentions Over Time

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The NCAA Championship game is upon us tonight, and believe it or not, 3 of us ISLers have Louisville winning it all in our own brackets. Not too shabby for a bunch of nerds!

Although none of us could craft the perfect bracket, we were able to find some interesting Twitter data around mentions of Final Four teams from the past 3 years.

2011 March Madness Final Four Mentions

Although Cinderella story Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) couldn’t muscle up enough prowess to beat Butler and move on to the championship game, it surely won on Twitter. Mentions of #vcu peaked at a whopping 124,187 tweets during the tournament – an 8,000% increase from its typical monthly showing.

Not surprisingly, the month of April saw UConn, the inevitable champion, and Butler, the runner-up, as the tweet leaders.

2012 March Madness Final Four Mentions

Kentucky stayed on top on and off the court during the 2012 March Madness. Led by Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Kentucky won its six tourney games by nearly 12 points per contest. Nothing could stop them and the mentions just poured in, garnering almost 150k mentions by championship time – more mentions than all of last year’s Twitter activity combined.

2013 March Madness Final Four Mentions

If Twitter mentions is any indication of future success, as it has been for years past, it looks like the Wolverines may take the cake this year. They rocked almost 400k mentions during the month of March, which is twice what Louisville pulled in.

Some lessons learned:

  • Hail to the victors: Winners get more mentions than losers. Since 2011, winners of their Final Four game as well as the championship games scored the most mentions. One exception: VCU, an #11-seed Cinderella story who won the hearts, and tweets, of Americans across the country.
  • Football schools get a little bit more love throughout the year. Look at Ohio State. Look at Michigan. Where other Final Four team spikes come March from an otherwise non-existent fan base, schools with prominent football programs see a steady level of activity 6 months out of the year.
  • Twitter is still gaining popularity [#duh]. In 2011, we were seeing 230 million tweets per day. Last year, it went up to 400 million tweets per day. So although it looks like March Madness keeps getting more popular – especially with more than 2 million #marchmadness tweets seen over the past 30 days – it’s really Twitter in general that is the popular one.

Mentions of March Madness #marchmadness 2011 2012 2013

Data collected with Topsy Pro <3

Ben’s Chili Bowl: A Whole New Website For Half-Smoke Heaven

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Screen Shot 2013-04-01 at 11.27.19 AMWhen I first heard that I was going to manage Ben’s Chili Bowl’s website redesign, I was ecstatic. As one of the rare D.C. natives in this city, I’ve known about, and loved, Ben’s since I was a young kid. As I got older, I began to learn about Ben’s historical legacy and the cultural impact it had on the U Street neighborhood and DC as a whole. Whether it be as a pre-jazz club dining spot during the “Black Broadway” days, a safe-haven during the 1968 riots, or a stalwart cornerstone that helped keep a neighborhood alive during the early 80′s, Ben’s is, as Mayor Adrian Fenty once said, “one of the greatest treasures in the District of Columbia…[it's] the soul of a neighborhood and the pride of our city.”

When we were tasked with modernizing Ben’s website, that legacy was in the forefront of our minds, and during an exploratory trip to the Bowl (that included a few half-smokes and chili fries, for research purposes), we remarked at how visually stimulating the Ben’s Chili Bowl experience is, whether it be the famous mural, the charisma of the building itself, or the overwhelming amount of photographs of famous patrons tacked to the wall, Ben’s is just as much a feast for the eyes as it is the stomach.

ISL was fantastic in that they created a site for us that perfectly captures the classic look and feel of Ben’s, but in a clean, up-to-date and fully functional package.  We can now display pictures of each menu item, tell our story in a visual timeline, blog about the latest happenings at Ben’s, and sell our products to everyone in the U.S. in a visually stunning way.  Thank you ISL!

Nizam Ali

When designing the site, ISL designer, Scott Simpson, wanted to “give it a vintage, 50′s diner theme, but incorporate more modern aspects as well. There is a deli-paper style, vintage americana in terms of the signage.” Our goal, in essence, was to capture the character of Ben’s while giving it a 2013 facelift. Scott relates, “It’s such a unique place. I wanted to use a lot of large, full-screen images to get across the feel of being at Ben’s because the only way you can really get that feeling across is to see it and experience it.” Our wireframes reflected that kind of concept well.

 

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For those perfect large, full-screen images, we reached out to Joshua Cogan, an award winning photographer whose work has been featured in the New Yorker, Washington Post, GQ, Travel Channel, and Discovery Channel and whose Masters in Anthropology showed us he understood the importance of capturing the nuances of a culture.

The color choices and typography reflected Ben’s existing scheme and were influenced by old-school vintage diner menus and signage. However, as a nod to modernity, the navigation icons were hand-drawn by iSL designer Mike O’Brien in order to highlight the kitschiness of the restaurant as well. That modernity is also shown in the layout of the page. Scott admits, “The blog and the timeline are my favorite pages because the content floats on top of everything, and it’s an interesting way of laying things out.”

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What truly helped modernize the site, though, was the work of our Dev team. ISL developer Megan Zlock describes, “We wanted to make the homepage responsive so that people trying to get to Ben’s (even if they weren’t exactly coherent) could get the information they want, especially the location and hours (even on mobile) without any difficulty.”

The true test for the Antimatter team, though, was the incorporation of the Ben’s Chili Bowl store, one of the most popular features of the site, and a huge source of income for Ben’s. For this part of the project, we worked with UltraCart, and made sure to focus strongly on the user experience, specifically how things would transition from WordPress to UltraCart and back again seamlessly.

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The final product is a website that we are incredibly proud of. It was unbelievably exciting to work with such an established piece of DC culture, and we consider it an honor to collaborate with the Alis and the rest of the Ben’s Chili Bowl team.

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