In an effort to bring more recognition to Long Island City, MSLK has been working with the LIC Partnership on a master plan to foster growth. Our design and marketing efforts are helping to bring attention to the thriving economic, industrial and cultural developments that are occurring, making LIC truly a great place to live and work. Like the revitalization of Grand Central Station and Times Square, the visual component of these plans plays a large role in shaping the experience of these places. The main streets and intersections are now branded with bold banners welcoming the public. Read more
Challenges
With over 300 styles for all occasions, performance sock manufacturer Wigwam Mills has the most extensive product line of any sock company. As part of our 2012 packaging redesign, a reevaluation of their overall brand hierarchy was needed. Besides their popular hiking and running socks, Wigwam makes a number of fashionable, style-driven socks, which were being marketed in the outdoor category. Sales were stagnant as these socks got lost among their high-performance athletic counterparts.
If your brand’s core presence is online, you may have heard about Google Panda, a code name for their new ranking algorithm, still very much a work in progress. With all of the conflicting literature out there, I’m hoping to cut through the clutter, so you can understand what you can be doing to better optimize your site. At its most basic level, the aim of this update is to lower the rank of “low quality” sites and raise the rank of “high quality” sites. Google’s spiders are more “human” than ever and can detect many things they couldn’t previously. So you might be asking yourself, how do I become a high quality site in the eyes of google? Read on to learn about the three big ideas we’ve gleaned from our own research. Read more
MSLK Creative Director and Co-Founder Marc S Levitt was quoted in a recent Atlantic article, speaking about the design profession’s critical — yet largely unsung — role. The article aims to draw parallels between wide-ranging professions from fact-checkers to anesthesiologists, describing them the “Invisibles.”
Citing examples ranging from book design to the now-infamous Palm Beach County “butterfly ballot” in the 2000 presidential election, Levitt describes the careful role designers play in shaping others’ content:
While some may think that the best design always grabs our attention, Levitt counters that great design often shouldn’t call attention to itself. “I’m not as concerned with prettying things up as I am with the end user being engaged in the right way.”
The article seeks to draw a connection between various professions, finding common traits:
Meticulousness, savoring great responsibility, and seeking only internal satisfaction are a trifecta of traits—a near antithesis of our societal ethos of insouciant attention-cravers—as a culture we’d all do well to follow.
Full article, by David Zweig, can be read here: http://mslk.co/zFPIm2
