Graphic Design Blog

When I was designing Make A Dare, I really wanted to highlight the major features and let the new user know what they were in for right away on the landing page. On its homepage, I put in a big banner the general concept of the site.

Watch – Check out the crazy things our members are doing everyday!

Join – Why just sit there when you can be a part of Make A Dare?

Dare – Got something you want to see? Dare someone to do it!

Vote – Like what you see? Hype it! Think it’s lame? Diss it!

Compete – Earn streetcred by completing dares and impressing your friends and fans.

Beneath the banner I placed a large featured video section to give a general sense of the type of dares one could expect to see/complete on Make A Dare. This is followed by a featured user and the most popular dares on the site. Upon seeing all of this, I believe it is immediately recognizable just what kind of a fun, addicting site this can be.

The second likely landing page was the individual dare video page. On this page we see clearly in the title what the dare is, how much streetcred has been earned so far and who completed the dare. We also have social sharing buttons in the title section. On the right side we put a section for “more about the dare” which explains the dare more in depth in case it wasn’t clear from the title, as well as a section for what the user had to say about the dare and which other people had completed the dare previously. There is also a related media section at the bottom of the page which encourages deeper site navigation for a new user and fuels addiction to the site.

Although typically referred to as “Jackass meets YouTube,” we really wanted to emphasize in both the design and concept that this was not just a site to show how much pain you could withstand, but was also a site about how much fun you can have out in public or in your own bedroom. In reality, the dares range from the funny, humiliating, gross, off-the-wall, to painful. Because of this, the design really stays away from being really crazy and all over the place and really sticks to clean and fun.

Sign up at Make A Dare and find out for yourself just how fun and addicting this new social network is.

Last weekend I had a really interesting project. I redesigned and developed an existing site called MakeAGif.com to make it more user friendly and to give it a nice boost in traffic. MakeAGif is a clever site that was started by my favorite partner in crime, Troy Osinoff, that lets users create an animated .gif online out of still images they have on their computer in just 3 easy steps. The main problems with the old version were that it was hard to figure how to make a gif and once you had made it you were redirected to a page that was only temporary. Check out the old site by clicking the picture to the left.

I read this Tom Geismar interview on Logo Design Love today and I suggest anyone interested in logo design read it, too. Tom is truly one of the great logo designers of our time and his firm Chermayeff & Geismar, inc. is responsible for some of the most icon logos of all time including Chase, Mobil, the Rockefeller Center and my personal favorite NBC. The firm’s logos are a testament to the fact that a good logo does not and should not require the use of photoshop or illustrator filters in order to be unique.

One of the hardest things to do in design is to create custom typography. There are a lot of pieces that need to come into consideration and it takes a lot of talent to do it right. Having recently started to develop my own typographic skills, I was starting to get a little cocky. In those prolific moments when I find that I am starting to lose my humility I usually find that browsing Behance is a nice cure. It was there that I stumbled across most of these brilliant examples of typography and I figured I’d share them with you in case you hadn’t seen them.

Minima is my under construction Logo Design Portfolio where I will showcase the design elements of my job in a more in depth and creative way than is possible on this site.