Time to Jam: Why Rethinking Your Process Leads to Big Creative Payoffs
What does one do upon the introduction of a new component library into daily work practices? Set up a super fun, “Great British Bake Off”-style Creative Jam, of course! Come again? You may be thinking. That’s right. We decided to shake things up one day by taking an afternoon to create and learn together. Inspired by the Adobe Creative Jam that we attended earlier in 2018, we split up into four...
Creating a Media Cropping Experience in Drupal Using Lightning Media
Working with media has long been a thorn in the side of developers working with Drupal, but with the incorporation of DropzoneJS and Lightning , we’re getting closer to a smoother, user-friendly solution. This post provides a step-by-step tutorial for setting up a manual media cropping experience — a process that we have successfully tested in Drupal 8.5.x. The advantages? Uploading images via...
It’s Not Personal: The Art of the Design Critique
As an experienced design professional, part of my routine each day consists of giving and receiving design feedback. It’s such a regular part of my job, in fact, that it has become second nature to me. But that wasn’t always the case. As a young college student facing the prospect of hearing opinions about my work, I used to take critiques really personally. It wasn’t something I was used to, and...
Incorporating Motion Into Design Systems
During the past decade, the role of designers has changed dramatically. We’ve largely shifted from print to digital media, from designing desktop experiences to responsive mobile-first websites — and from a static environment to one that is quite dynamic. Throughout this evolution, we’ve had to adapt to several very different roles and expand our skill set and vocabulary in kind. While designers...
Building Component-based WordPress Sites
What Are Components? Components can be thought of as discrete, reusable building blocks that make up larger design systems for the web. Because they are developed with modularity in mind, editing or even removing a component will have a low impact on the rest of the system. This makes our Wordpress sites easier to test since we’ve developed each component independently of one another — and also...
Email Personalization and Segmentation: How to Maintain Relevance
As we prepare for our participation in the Greater Philadelphia Culture Alliance’s Annual Meeting, the focus of this year’s meeting, relevance, got us thinking about how organizations are ensuring they’re staying relevant with their messaging, specifically in their marketing. As I dug in and thought about all of the ways that email, in particular, can be relevant (topics related to specific...
Three Steps to Creating a Rad (and Realistic) Digital Marketing Plan for Arts + Culture Organizations
A few weeks ago, I had the very exciting opportunity to accompany one of our Partners and Strategy Director, Mark Gisi, to Pittsburgh as he led a digital promotion and UX practices training workshop. He shared his insights gained from years of working with clients in the arts and culture industry. Not only was I exceedingly stoked for this occasion due to the nature of the workshop, but also...
Download This: Eastern Standard’s Guide to Design Systems for the Web
At Eastern Standard, we’ve spent years refining our approach to designing and implementing content-rich websites — transitioning away from a “templated” approach and toward systems-based design with flexible modular components that can be combined, re-used, and evolved as our clients’ needs change. Clients often ask us to explain our approach and walk them through the work we’ve done in this...
Is It Done Yet?: My Journey Into Digital Project Management
I have been a Project Manager for as long as I can remember. My career started by accident (as many PM’s stories go), but here I am. I’ve been managing design projects for almost 10 years, from Philadelphia to New York and back to Philadelphia again. I’m here today to tell you about my transition from managing those design projects to managing the development of a website. My inherent optimism...
To Manage Agency Life, Work Like a Chef
Before I was a producer and living the agency life, I worked my way through a few restaurant kitchens, and I now find myself relying on the skills I picked up along the way on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Cooking is a job that is well-known for being intense — requiring long hours under near-constant pressure — but one that mixes self-reliance with strong professional connections in a...
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