The Lux Life - Designing for a luxury market.

Luxury brands are associated with the core competencies of creativity, exclusivity, precession and craftsmanship. Designing for these product attributes can be a challenging yet satisfying experience. From golf & country clubs to luxury handbags, the demographic challenges associated with each sector are specific to consumers on the top end of the wealth spectrum.


The Creative Challenge: Understanding your Target Audience:
Your target audience is looking for you – they just don’t know it yet. Your brand can position itself to the front end of their radar through design.

Be Consistent: Crossing Mediums
Websites, blog’s, business cards, brochures, the list of your creative mediums can span across an endless array of mediums. Keeping your brand image consistent, keeps it memorable. That being said, creatively updating your brand image can strike new relationships with your current target audience as well as new prospects.

The Listening Creative

I am always astounded by the amount of pressure to be creative I am as a “Design Professional”. In my schooling I found myself painting, drawing, doodling, in a seemingly endless bank of creativity. However with deadlines and a variety of clients, I’m constantly challenging my creativity and left to wonder where my inner creative lives. I compare creativity to a bank - sometimes you make deposits – and sometimes you make withdrawals; finding that beautiful balance of more deposits then withdrawals is rare. However here are a few sound techniques I find that help the creativity flow:

Meet the Audiobook:

If you like to listen to music while you work, a nice change of pace may is the audio book. Now you don’t have to treck down to the bookstore and spend 40+ dollars for 6 cd’s of ( insert book title here ) sites like “www.audible.com/ can bring you everything from romance to suspense. Listening to these while creating - help me think of new concepts and idea’s otherwise not apparent. Sometimes hearing a description in a book can stimulate your brain to visualize color, placement, variety, and perception. Not only are you partaking in the arts, but your adding variety and learning at the same time - a little multi tasking that will not only help expand your brainpower, but also jump start your creativity.

Here are a few of my favorites:

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Outliers: The Story of Success

Both by Malcolm Gladwell

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia

Elizabeth Gilbert

Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides

Water for Elephants

Sara Gruen

The Last Lecture

Randy Pausch, Jeffrey Zaslow

The Podcast Prevails: Tune in and listen to a variety of creative podcasts, news, music, and stories. Staying informed and an open mind is key to creativity. Podcasts are a series of digital media files, that can be in either video or audio form, which are released through web syndication. The vast market of podcasts can bring you creative inspiration from a variety of angles.

Here are a few of my favorites:

This American Life: You can download each episode for free weekly on itunes or stream it directly from their site http://www.thisamericanlife.org/ where you can also listen to a library of their older episodes.

Radio Lab: Hosted by WNYC this podcast gives an interesting look into science – everything from sleep to the afterlife. http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/

The Accidental Creative: http://accidentalcreative.com/ solutions to creative problems, and several unique perspectives on creatives. This is the best blog to keeping your creative mind healthy and taking responsibility for your work.

CSS Peer Recognition!

I am pleased to announce www.ambermiro.com has been featured as design of the day on both cssbased.com as well as csschick.com. There is a plethora of amazing inspiration sites and I am incredibly honored to be a part of this unique and elite crowed. I hope that I can lend to inspiring other designers as well as my creative peers as they have done for me for so many years.

Saying connected. “For a Better Tomorrow”

Every industry should have a board, a way to connect with your fellow peers with a witty repartee. Mine is www.qbn.com. It has been an excellent resource to talk about the creative industry and also share new work. Here are some other great creative blogs to connect and stimulate your inner muse.

www.qbn.com
http://www.makefive.com/categories/news-business/design
http://designobserver.com/
http://www.ideasonideas.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://ilovetypography.com/
http://www.swiss-miss.com/
http://www.notcot.org/

Inspiration - I need it, I crave it, I want it.

Racking my brain and CSS design award winners can land me right back to the age old problem. Staring at a white paper- with no design plan. With this problem on my mind I have compiled a few websites, artists and design work that rattles my brain and gets my creative mojo back.

Break Down http://www.ianwharton.com/
The best part of this design is the design breakdowns. As an art director so much of your work relys on communication. I think this is an excellent example of communicating print, web, and design campaigns to the viewer.

Virgo it out
No sense in viewing the same websites over and over again or saying to yourself. What was that site that the client mentioned? Screen Shoot and organize your favorite inspirations for your sites. You can use them over and over again and see them at the click of an arrow rather then with load times and flash distractions. Its an amazing way to see the bones of a website and combine your inspirations into one place.


Watch
Movie Trailers and Opening Sequences - there is more to them then you might think. I am so inspired by the opening sequence of movies like Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, and Stranger then fiction. Designers like Danny Yount have a way of telling a narrative but keeping intrigue with in an opening sequence. In the end is'nt that the point of design - to tell a story?

Stranger than Fiction: Opening Sequence
by Razorbuzz

Put Wallpaper Up
I am always amazed when i see working design professionals with a standard apple or windows desktop, i know you want to be at the beach right now, but lets be honest that palm tree is'nt giving anyone a "warm and fuzzy feeling". ::yawn:: When i have a new client or i am in a design rut the first thing i do is grab a new wallpaper or make my own. I find it important to put something on my desktop that makes me think and give me a "virtual ambiance" the more whimsical the better. I love these wallpapers from vladstudio : http://www.vladstudio.com/home/ and from desktopography : http://www.desktopography.net/

Get the Info
By Fueling my Starbucks addiction i have noticed an interesting info design series called "Good", each week there is an amazing info graphics piece breaking down everything from fuel to the economy in an compact easy to read chart. Information graphics is the hardest thing in my arsenal of things that a designer has to do (hats off to you!). So when doing info graphics i need more then a kick in the pants to get a great design completed. I am inspired by Edward Tufte yes, but more so but his protege' Megan Jaegerman her work is clever, conveyed and inspirational!

Free CMS!

Designers near and far know that 2008 and beyond brings a new era for client interactions. Clients demand CMS, and while it may take a few minutes to set up blogging sites like Wordpress and Blogger are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to building incredible blogs, websites, and flexible interactive pages.

I have been testing several free CMS systems and here are 2 of the best, easiest and most importantly free results.

Idiot proof CMS: Cushy CMS
You don't have to download anything, the client does'nt have to touch things they are not suppost to and you can just worry about editing div tags to say "cushycms". This site is intellegent CMS that is both easy for the clients to use as well as the designers.
www.cushycms.com/

Under a rock?: WordPress
Okay so i admit, i have been under a rock with the wordpress phenomenon. A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. This is blogging software so flexible and easy to use - several top companies and design blogs are using this SQL blogging system to produce up to the minunte updated beauitufl sites. There is some small download time and confusion with the SQL databases. But once your on! your up and running. They also have an incredible user based documentation from other users for troubleshooting. Its well moterated and well documented! Finally - if your feeling a little lazy there is a plethora of incredible wordpress themes out there to get you started. Use em' and tweak em'.
http://wordpress.org/

Colour Lovers Muse

Is your creativity tapped out? Every designer has had the expereince of your muse seeming to vanish. I found this helpful little site, colourlovers.com where you can view web samples, and umptine amounts of colour swatches to look at to your hears content. You can put your pantone book away, and create combinations at the click of a mouse. Then you can post them to your profile and have people comment. Who knew colour could be this much fun?