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After the Jump: event rewind.

On June 7, 2013, we welcomed creative professionals to “After the Jump” – a day of ideas and inspiration presented by Sullivan and the Type Directors Club at New York’s Cooper Union Rose Auditorium. The question of the day? How are rapid advances in digital communications changing the world of design? Our notable panelists brought fresh thinking and a variety of perspectives to some of digital design’s key domains: user experience, typography, prototyping, and data visualization.

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“This is a discussion, not a presentation,” said Sullivan’s Cassandra Zimmerman (Creative Director) as she kicked off the five-hour symposium. Some of our industry’s best thinkers (and doers) took the stage to share their ideas, insights, and creations through presentations and roundtable discussions hosted by Sullivan’s Richard Smith (Creative Director).

Say goodbye to mockups

The days of prototyping with wireframes and Photoshop are over. Good riddance, says Jamie Neely (above) of Typecast. The browser is where it’s at for users. For true high fidelity it’s also the medium of choice for designers and developers. That’s just common sense. You don’t need a lot to get a feel for whether or not something is working. “You need just enough content that you can provoke an emotional reaction in someone,” noted Neely. That’s good to know, because it’s important that you preview your work in as many browsers and on as many different devices as possible. Fortunately, development tools are catching up, so moving to live prototyping is now becoming easier and easier. (Watch video)

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Typography is critical

Type’s pervasive online presence makes it a key component of a brand’s ability to elicit an emotional response. Contrary to what your instincts, human brains like imperfection. That was the advice from Information Architects’ Oliver Reichenstein, as he led us through his, at times surreal, personal voyage on becoming a designer of responsive fonts. His self-described “Alice in Wonderland”-like journey began out of boredom, blossomed into discovery, obsession and, ultimately became a passion for type design. “A simple app with great typography and few features will be more widely adopted than a complex one with bad typography,” Reichenstein asserted. Coming from Switzerland, a country in which “even a butcher cares about his logo being set in the right way,” we’ll take him at his word.

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Collaboration: saves time, reduces headaches

Designers and developers: let’s make more love and less war. If you’re hearing the words “we can’t do that” too often, maybe it’s time to rethink your collaborative process. TypeCode’s Andrew Mahon, Zeke Shore, and Ian Lord (above) showed us why it’s worth the effort. “What’s the least amount of development we can do before getting it into users’ hands to validate and break it?” This is the question TypeCode’s team asks every day. By nailing the nuances of collaboration, and giving everyone real input throughout all stages of product development, you can make everyone happier: coders, pixel pushers, project managers and, of course, your clients. The bonus? Shorter schedules (and less broken crockery to sweep up).

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Raw data meets good storytelling

The devil is in the details, but all too often, an organization’s foreboding landscape of dense data obscures rather than reveals the value of what they do. That’s where data visualization can help. There’s treasure buried in all that data. Bloomberg’s Lisa Strausfeld showed us how good data visualization allows users to forge a clear, direct path to that treasure. “Our skills slice across media: type, identity, composition, interaction, information, storytelling,” she observed.

Good storytelling saves you the trouble of making sense of the data you find, by revealing the meaning behind the numbers. Deroy Peraza (above) of Hyperakt illustrated how pairing a number with effective type and imagery can resonate in ways that raw statistics simply can’t. “The web is our loudspeaker. The potential to reach a good percentage of people in the world is there,” he said. The lesson in all of this is if you can combine the two – data visualization and storytelling – effectively, then you’ll have rabid fans among clients and users alike.

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Users know best

We’re now living in a world where users often decide what your app is good for, said Andy Mangold (below) of Friends of the Web. “If you design the next Future of Publishing app and people use it just to post cat photos, then you’ve designed a Cat Photos app. How people use something defines what it is,” he said. The tides of the marketplace are strong indeed. Rather than fighting against them, try riding the waves instead, by paying attention to your users’ habits and desires.

Originally published on www.sullivannyc.com