Martin & Gavin just graduated from Texas A&M University and are designing their way across the country. On the road for 4 months now, they are fully transitioned from recent graduates to full on traveling design firm.

It is a pretty great testament to the power of social media. Two strangers can travel across the country, city to city, and make a living building a new business. All through the connections they kick off through Twitter. I wish these guys luck as they finish up their trip and look forward to how they use their lessons from the road.

DriftingCreatives.com – Follow them on Twitter: @driftcreate, @martinhooper, and @gavinbraman

AIGA Design Conference October 8–11, 2009 Memphis

Kluster is a cool crowdsourcing community that launched at TED 2 years ago and fosters community collaboration on a unique level. Members submitted problems, suggested solutions, and voted to guide the creation of all kinds of products.

It was wide open, with little direction, creating everything from copywriting to website design to industrial design and more. Since then kluster has tried to focus on more niche collaboration communities and today their newest effort, quirky, went live.

Quirky is focused on industrial and product design, and takes design collaboration to a new level. Creating new products, designing that next cool gadget, is how kluster started. Quirky builds on that idea, the thought that a group of creative people can combine unique ideas to solve simple problems, and profit from them together.

Got some undervalued  design skills? Constantly writing down ideas for inventions or new products? Give quirky a go and share your ideas with the world.

Their first product, the slingback, is already for sale. They describe it as the first universal cord retractor. I personally could use a half dozen of these. If industrial designers and idea folk embrace the concept of this community, the possibibillities seem very cool for quirky.

Kluster also brought us the copywriter’s playground that is NameThis.com, another favorite collaboration community.

I dig quirky because it brings an idea platform to the masses, a true outlet. Anyone can take an idea that may better the world, or maybe just improve the modern mousetrap, and share it with the world. Our collective intelligence gets a little more collective with sites like this.

And just imagine what they can do if they team up with charities, helping to design that next great mwater purifyer or mosquito deterent.

Social Media and the Designer’s Perspective

What can social media marketers learn from designers? Isn’t social media business primarily for marketing or PR people? Not necessarily. Social media is an indispensable tool for anyone looking to communicate and engage with others, especially designers.

The designer’s ultimate goal is not just to make things look pretty, but to be communicators – to communicate ideas, brands, products, and information creatively, clearly and visually to targeted consumers. So, as a social media strategist, why pay attention to what designers are doing?

1. Designers Connect Emotionally With Their Audience

Effective designers seek to understand the needs and desires of their customers, then meet those needs through conceptual design. Designers don’t just make things look cool in Photoshop; they establish an emotional connection with the audience.

Apple is a great example of a company that utilizes a design-driven approach to connect emotionally with their consumers. Design does matter.

A great book titled Do You Matter: How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company, co-written by Robert Brunner, Apple’s former Director of Industrial Design, explains these emotional connections more thoroughly.

Take these design goals of brand building beyond just visuals. Part of that brand building is the emotional connection you can make through social media.

A great example is using the search function of Twitter for customer service. Whole Foods does a tremendous job of this on Twitter. They utilize Twitter’s search functionality and interact with their consumers or potential customers. Using social media, you can ask your customers questions and respond to them, engage them, or simply listen to them.

2. Designers Realize They Are Not the Only Driving Factor Behind Business

A business with a bad business plan cannot be saved by great design alone. Savvy designers know and understand this. Plenty of companies have invested in great design, but ultimately failed because of the way they ran their business.

The same goes for social media. It is not the only answer, but when pieced together with great design, advertising, SEO, and PR – social media can produce big results in terms of building businesses, brands and niche communities.

What good is a website with great PR if the user cannot navigate it easily? All the pieces must work together. Do not rely on one to replace quality in the others.

Harley-Davidson is an example of a company that uses many of these techniques (HD on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube) and is very involved with their community. Randy Sprenger, Manager of Electronic Advertising and Direct Promotions at Harley-Davidson recently sat down with BrandWeek to discuss some of their marketing and social media strategies.

3. Designers Stay Trendy

In this information age, trends and techniques can advance quickly. Part of a designer’s responsibility is to keep up with it all, to know what is going on in pop culture, the design industry and the technology world.

Most designers are constantly reading, researching, learning and evolving so they can stay ahead of the curve and not fall behind. The design archives of AIGA, the professional association for design, is a good place to spot design and advertising trends of the past or present.

Social media marketers must be constantly learning as well. With the growing number blogs, social networks, and expanding social tools, we need to always explore new ways to use social media effectively.

The bottom line is, design and social media are complementary ways of communicating with consumers, so designers and social media marketers would be foolish not to harness the power of both.

Special thanks to Jason Keath for allowing me to post my thoughts here.

SERIES Social Media Skills — Advertising, SEO, PR, Graphic Design, Copywriting, and more…

The day I put the new Twitter background up, it got posted to TwitterBackgroundsGallery.com, where you can rate backgrounds in different categories and find resources for creating your own or find someone to put one together for you. Pretty cool little niche site, check it out.

The side effect of bumping up the quality of my Twitter background is that the design changes I had yet to get to on the blog here are now glaring. I could not have that so, as you may notice, the blog now reflects my Twitter page in many ways. The theme I chose is the now retired Wordpress theme, WP_Premium. The theme is a little intricate, so design changes can take some time, but I think it will serve me well for a little while here at JasonKeath.com. Now I just need a personal logo.

This typeface was a great passion of mine for a short period of time. Medieval inspired, I wanted something Gothic, with age, but that did not go over the edge as a display font. It is a little less subtle than I had originally envisioned, but I am very happy with the product. If you are interested in using the typeface, hit me up on the contact page for purchase options.

Here is one of the mock ups I did using the typeface.

When I worked for my fraternity I was in charge of “expansion” which is basically starting new chapters (or franchizes if you are unfamiliar with the fraternity world). One of the chapters I got to help kickoff was our University of Wisconsin guys. A couple years later I was lucky enough to be hired to design and develop their website. The site just recently won our national fraternity’s award for “best website”.