Last year we designed a unique airport portal concept (see draft) for one of the leading travel search engines. The idea was to create a content hub for business travelers that would bring together all the relevant travel information by focusing on their point of departure and their final destination – airports. The airport portal would provide information on average check in times, flight delays, security alerts, airport productivity tips, airport maps and other information, as well as access to airline flight schedules and reservations.

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During the design process, we tried to incorporate as many Web 2.0 portal best practices as possible, some of these include:

• Enabling Personalization and Customization
• Integating Ecommerce
  In today’s web economy, monetization is key. Incorporate as much revelent ecommerce and advertising in your portal.
• Incorporating User Generated Content
  User-generated content can key to a successful web-based community. Having travelers blog about their airport experience in real-time provides other travelers with important, time-saving information about what is going on the ground.
• Mashup, Mashup, Mashup
  Mashups allow you to deliver compelling applications quickly and cost effectively.
• Keeping it Graphic
  There is nothing more boring than an all text portal. Try and tell your story using more graphics and less text.
• Using Free Content
  There is a lot of free content either in the public domain (airport information), from the government (airport updates), or generated by users (forums, blogs) than you can incorporate in your portal. Identify it, make sure its free, and incorporate it properly into your portal.
• Using Widget and Portlets
  Packaging applications and information as widgets, modules or portlets not only makes them easier to develop and deliver but also allows users to better customize their online experience.

We recently helped our client The Printed Blog with the design of their website and corporate brand.  The Printed Blog, currently in beta, just got written up in the Wired Blog in an article that talks about the site’s unique approach:

As old media races to catch up with the Web and figure out how to successfully monetize print content online, one publication is taking a drastically different approach: web to print.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Joshua Karp, The Printed Blog essentially wants to bring “the Best of the Web to your newsstand” by publishing a regular newspaper featuring news and editorial from popular blogs.  In designing The Printed Blog corporate site, we tried to go for a very clean consumer-ish look that would appeal to potential advertisers, partners and press – yet at the same time would remain distinctly Web 2.0. Tell us what you think of the design!

After my post on Hillcrest Labs, one or two clients mentioned that they didn’t realize we were such big Adobe Illustrator users! I am not surprise since its not common knowledge that in addition to our core business of web and social media application design and development we provide a broad range of other service to clients including infographics and other information-driven communication. Most of this work stems from our web design group who help clients better communication aspects of their technology or architecture visually. In the process we have developed a growing library of “object-art” that helps us in the story telling process.

Here are a couple of examples of some past infographic work:

• Nanosolar (Solar Paint)
• Nanosolar (Process)
• SearchForce
• Cingular GoPhone
• Concursion (Process)
• Bevocal (Storyboard)

Tags: infographics, diagrams