ali felski

First of all, let me say that I know I haven’t written on my blog in ages, and I apologize. There have been many changes in my life, and I’ve gotten a little wrapped up in them. There will be much more to come in the new few weeks, I promise.

Right now though I want to talk about something really exciting I’m doing at work that I haven’t promoted much, but really want to push. In case you haven’t glanced at the rest of my site, I currently work for the Sunlight Labs section of the Sunlight Foundation, promoting government transparency. A good chunk of my job is to help grow the community of designers and developers that are willing take government data we collect and help do useful things with it. The other side of my job is to push the government to take a more critical look at their site designs and to rethink them not only visually, but to rethink the user experience as well. Right now on many government sites it’s too hard for citizens to find what they’re looking for and that shouldn’t be the case. It’s challenging work, and I very often get government employees who aren’t very happy with me because let’s face it, change is scary. So… the solution? I believe we need to overwhelm the government with good design. Us designers need to come together to show the government that even with 508 compliance rules the products they push out can be amazing. To promote this idea Sunlight is putting on a contest, , to bring together designers to produce some design for good and maybe even win a little bit of prize money in the process.

People love to unwrap things, it just a matter of fact, whether you’re a kid at Christmas or an adult with a new gadget. There’s something mysterious about a new box placed in your hands that makes you incredibly excited to just tear into it. There are a million sites that simply feature people opening up new products, little children shrieking, and adults drooling. Packaging designers know this and take advantage of it, like people at Apple. They know that making a great product is one thing, but a great product with great packaging just improves the overall experience that much more, and that in turn leads to more sales. So as web designers, is there a way we’re able to create this same experience with our websites? At SXSW this year I was inspired to bridge that gap.

Just in case you aren’t one of those people who sees the value in great packaging, here is an example of a fun product I just discovered, SNIF Tag. A SNIF Tag is a transceiver that is clipped onto your dog’s collar so you can monitor your pet when you’re away from home. Basically, it’s a toy for people who treat their dogs like children, and like gadgets.

I can’t say that this is the right time or place for this sort of advertising, with a failing US economy and airline industries claiming bankruptcy, but I can’t get over the beauty of the United Airlines commercials and print campaigns.

So lets start from the beginning. In the early 1900’s United Airlines was formed, and like so many companies, didn’t start off with a solid branding system. As a result, the company drastically changed its logo four different times until 1973, when they hired the amazing graphic designer Saul Bass, who created the simple U shaped logo with the black all caps lettering that we know today. Having this solid base, a logo that has stood up to the test of time, has allowed United to have fun with the rest of its advertising without losing its identity.

With Obama in the President’s seat now, and therefore many new people coming into the government, they now have an opportunity to revisit their presence on the web and explore the possibilities of getting the American people more interested and more informed about what their government is doing. At the Sunlight Foundation we decided to spend a little time thinking about these challenges and came up with a short design exercise that will hopefully get people thinking in that direction.

So two of the questions that I received most are how I created the background texture on alifelski.com and also if people could outright take elements from my site and simply place them on theirs. With that, I would like to show everyone how I created my background in hopes that people will get inspired and create textured backgrounds of their own.

The response I’ve gotten to my blog in the last couple of months has been so exciting. I really just created it so that I could learn and get better at CSS and HTML after becoming slightly bored of the flash and print worlds.

As some of you may know, I recently left my government job for an opportunity to work for the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit here in Washington, DC. The Sunlight Foundation works to promote transparency in the government, and the Sunlight Labs group, in which I work specifically, focuses on making government data more interesting and accessible through APIs and web apps exposing the data in unique and insightful ways.

I find that I get most of my inspiration from things around me. I love CSS galleries and seeing all the amazing things other people around the world are doing, but I find that when I am just looking at and being inspired by web sites, all I can think of are elements that other people have created. So I just wanted to share ten things that have inspired me that are at least somewhat non-web related. Some are new, some are old, but all are things that I think are amazing.

Welcome to the third version of my site, the cleverly named, alifelski.com. Finally, after years of having disposable sites I am tapping into my eco-friendly side and making a site that down the road I will be able to, as Cameron Moll said, realign instead of redesign.

While walking through the amazingness that is the Wegmas grocery store looking for something to clean my wood furniture I found an interesting looking mop. I feel like I am always in search of a decent mop especially since I have hardwood floors in my apartment.