Like so many interesting and productive collaborations,
this one started with what Andy Epstein,
formerly with Gund and now with Bristol Myers
Squibb, dubbed a “blind date.” According to
Glenn John Arnowitz—creative director at Wyeth
in Madison, N.J., as well as cofounder and vice
president of InSource—when a vendor heard him
complaining about the difficulties of running an inhouse
corporate graphics department, he suggested
Arnowitz meet Epstein, who had been lamenting
the exact same issues.
“Despite the differences in companies—Gund
is a soft-toy company and Wyeth is a pharmaceutical
giant—we had similar departments and faced the
same challenges,” Arnowitz notes. “We thought, if
we feel this way, there must be other people who feel
this way, too. Our first idea was to have an event.”
Epstein and Arnowitz organized a roundtable for inhouse
creative folks with assistance from Peter Philips
from the Design Management Institute. A few phone
calls and some effective word-of-mouth later, the
blind date had grown into a network of dozens of
people who wanted to keep meeting, talking and
sharing information. Thus was InSource born.
THE WISH LIST
Because the mission of this nonprofit, completely
volunteer organization is to “enhance the understanding,
impact and value of in-house design” by
sharing expertise, ideas and support, getting a presence
up on the web was an obvious first step to connect
all the people who were popping up and raising
their hands from the back rooms of in-house creative
departments across the country. The fledgling
group developed a board of directors and, working
with Lakefront Media, created a website.
Martin Shova—current president of InSource,
formerly creative director at Kraft Foods and now a
partner at One Flight Up Design & Innovation in
Boonton, N.J.—notes that the group quickly recognized
its potential and outgrew this first effort: “We
needed a more dynamic site where we could post
more content and provide more value and build an
interactive community of creative professionals.” And
because the organization was growing rapidly, it also
needed a website that could be easily expanded and
managed by InSource member volunteers, without
having to constantly return to a web design firm to
post new content.
The team pulled together a request for proposal
(RFP), the drafting of which provided an opportunity
to get very clear about wants, needs and expectations—which, as Shova points out, “was a long list.
It got longer, too.” The RFP listed the basic needs
as “leveraging technologies to provide richer content
and enhance the online experience for community
members.” Project scope included the following:
• Site redesign
• Functionality enhancements such as crosslinked
and integrated content, quarterly
updates, a content management system and
message board, as well as member registration
and showcase
• Site hosting and e-mail services
• Site management and marketing consulting
Community
But even more important than providing these hard
assets were the softer concerns of the team. “The
key was to build and drive that community feeling,”
notes Shova. “Internal design organizations are
kind of sequestered from the larger organization.
There’s always that sense of alienation because we’re talking ideas and design rather than marketing or
other functions core to the business. You’re a support
organization, but there are very few people who
share your language.” The other omnipresent challenge
is self-justification.
“The design business is intangible. It’s hard to
put your finger on the value of design, so it’s hard to
talk to management because they’re all about value.
There are tons of different questions that come up
that all in-house designers wrestle with, but there’s
typically no one in the larger organization that you
can turn to for help,” says Shova. This is where
InSource wanted to come in on the web, offering
that critical, yet mostly absent support system.
The web design and implementation task was
given to Morris! Communication, a cross-media
branding firm. Principal Steve Morris explains that
he had some personal connections to the other
designers who were, or had been, on the InSource
board of directors. “There was a bit of history there,
and with it came a truckload of empathy,” he notes.
“As we began to look at the RFP and talk about the
challenges and the design and how we wanted the
site to function, we kept coming back to the idea of
community and communication and the question of
how do we build it as a pavilion for ideas and information
to be exchanged.”
On the old site, members could only communicate
with InSource itself, not with each other. The
team quickly came up with the idea of setting up a
forum. “The initial need for the forum came out of
our desire for the organization to foster community,”
notes Morris. “On the agency side, there is a kind
of luxury in that we have the possibility to build our
culture around our business, whereas on the in-house
side, that is much more difficult, as the culture is
driven by the organization. It’s harder to build your
own internal design culture.”
Design(er)s
The other immediate challenge was the actual
design of the site. Lex Talkington, a graphic
designer and site architect, and Aaron Grossman,
another graphic designer with InSource, were
keenly aware that they were designing for their
peers. Talkington recalls, “The design process was
a little intimidating, knowing we were designing
for designers and knowing how subjective we all
are. You kind of wince a little bit when you put the
comps out.” Morris notes that he kept wondering
if his team was going to be up to the task: “Are our
solutions going to be good enough to speak to the
organization? It was a great test of personal confidence, an honor and a challenge.”
To meet that challenge, the team came up with
a range of options. “The first designs that we created knowing that we were designing for designers, were
pretty out there,” explains Talkington. Working with
nothing more than a logo and brand colors of black,
white and red, “We took the brand’s new look that
Glenn and Marty provided, and we pushed it pretty
far to establish the online brand look and feel. Then
Aaron and I went back and forth and peeled away
the layers until we got to a look that fit the look they
had established—one that fit the online environment
and still had a corporate look and wasn’t overly
artsy.” Adds Grossman, “Marty and Glenn kept coming
back saying that it had to be warmer and have a
more community feel.”
In truth, input was coming from more than just
Shova and Arnowitz. As if scripted from a graphic
designer’s worst nightmare, the InSource team was
a committee of 12 in-house designers reviewing
and commenting on the presented work. “All these
corporate designers got a sick pleasure in doing to
Steve and Aaron and Lex what our internal clients
do to us,” jokes Arnowitz. Morris protests, “And you
guys pulled the classic move to take parts from one
design and add it to another direction!” Arnowitz
laughs, “Yeah, those were the things we swore we’d
never do.” He then explains, “While we didn’t want
to create a Frankenstein site, there were things from
concept A we liked, and so we combined those with
concepts B and C.” Talkington gets in the last word
by noting, with mock exasperation, “We were just
very thankful that we didn’t get digital JPEGs cut
and pasted and redesigned. I’m guessing that there
were people in the group that were itching to get
their hands on the Photoshop files.”
When trying to incorporate so many different—and strong—opinions on creative direction,
there is always a risk that the end result will be
reduced to the lowest common denominator. To
ensure this didn’t happen, Morris kept his eyes on
the larger goal. “You have to keep the big picture and
all the checks and balances in mind, and keep asking
yourself, does it pass the litmus test of creating the
bright, warm inviting website that we want to create?
The core common denominator is that we wanted
to create a look that had real respectability, was welcoming
to any designer from any organization, but
also had a sense of strength and legitimacy that felt
sophisticated, elevated the profile and increased the
credibility of the organization.”
Ultimately, this was accomplished primarily by
letting the core brand attributes stand out. The site
uses the strong, vibrant, simple InSource colors of
red, white and black—white provides a background
respite, black brings attention to the logo and allows
easy readability of type, while red draws attention to
links and other critical information. These confident
graphic treatments are balanced by a liberal use of photographs that depict people and settings that
could have been plucked from any design department
in the country, complete with comfortable
furniture, team sessions, cool eyewear and lots of
black clothes. And if that’s not enough to create verisimilitude,
a photo and link to a real member profile
appears on each and every page. Grossman points out
that the end result is “very unique and stands apart
from other sites like it. You go to this site and you
immediately identify it with InSource.”
THE COUNTDOWN
As if there weren’t already enough challenges, a
crunched time line that overlapped with the endof-
year holiday season added its own element of
excitement to the project. Shova explains, “We sent
out e-mails to members saying we were launching
January 2, and then we had to tell them we were
pushing it a week. We didn’t want them to see the
same old site.”
Morris’ team came up with the idea of using
a timer, both to give members something fresh
and tantalizing to see when they came looking for
the new site and to keep the team on schedule.
Talkington remembers, “The minute that I pushed
the countdown timer live, I sat down and realized
what I had done, and that this meant we had a real
time line. This timer was not well received by the
technical team,” he deadpans.
However, it worked. The site went live almost
perfectly on time—there were just a couple of last-minute
technical glitches—and it has been extremely
well received by the membership, which has grown
from 750 members early last year to 1500 members
at the launch of the new site in 2007. Of course,
now that everything has been checked off the original
wish list, a new one has taken its place. “We’d like
to have the ability to update all the pages ourselves,”
notes Arnowitz. “We’re going to have a guest forum
to give everyone the chance to chat with an expert,
and give members the opportunity to post content,
as well as case studies. And, down the road, we’d like
to sponsor an in-house design competition.”
But for now, the site is achieving its most
important goal of creating a community. “The heart
of the site is the forum,” notes Arnowitz. “Every day
there is a new posting and really cool threads happening.
This is breathing life into the site.”
