This is a little off topic, more marketing than design. Just today Papa Johns is selling large pizza’s in the greater Cleveland area for only 23 cents. It has something to do with insulting LeBron James, you can read about it if you’re interested. They are selling the pizzas so cheaply to make up for a marketing gaffe last week when they insulted the basketball fans of Cleveland. It’s been fun to follow the pizza story online today. People from all over town are buzzing about it. Here are some of the things overheard on Twitter:

DJLitten: For those thinking about getting Papa John’s $.23 pizza in CLE today, some already have 200+ people in line and it doesn’t open until 11 am.

AngeloMandato: Trying to order a PapaJohns 23 cent pizza, line is busy

jason_z: My coworkers have already started dialing Papa Johns. Phone is busy. I feel bad for the people working for them today.

bethdean: At Papa John’s in Shaker Heights there were 1,785 people in line for 23 cent pizza. Seriously?

I decided to make pizza for lunch instead, I hate waiting in lines. Everyone I hates waiting in line. Papa Johns has done a great job drumming up all sorts of publicity for the event. They arranged this to make up for a mistake they made by insulting LeBron James. Not a bad idea but I think the execution is terrible. People waiting in lines for hours? You can’t place orders over the phone? That’s a bad user experience. A bad user experience that will be associated with the Papa Johns brand. What if someone wants something other than a one topping pizza but can’t get through? They might try another chain and find out that they have really good pizza too. How many people got psyched up for a free lunch only to find out they have to wait in line for hours.

What would have been a better user experience? You could have mailed coupons to everyone in the area for the same deal. That would have spread out the demand over the life of the coupon instead of it all happening on one day.

While working with Smucker’s I would always marvel at how closely they guarded their brand’s image. Everything from the way the packaging looked to how it was presented on the store shelves was thought through to the most minute detail. They even put a scent in the jelly jars so that when you first open a jar you get a burst of fresh fruit smell. Now that’s a brand experience.

Maybe when the dust settles Papa Johns might be ahead of the game. Creating a one day event might turn out to be better publicity than a coupon would be. But they have to be careful not to alienate more people than they already have and long term hurt their brand even more.

I register for way too many websites. I probably average about two a week. Usually I register to leave a comment or just to see what they are all about. I get a kick out of checking out other people’s interfaces and sign up processes.

There is a standard sign up process out there that most sites follow and it’s not really a good one. You get to a page that collects a bunch of personal information and then asks you to enter a code, usually a string of nonsensical characters to ward off spam bots. Then they dispatch an email to you so you can click on a link to confirm that you are a human.

This may prevent sites from receiving spam, but it also puts up a major roadblock for users. I signup for a site without thinking twice because that’s what I do. I also know that I am not the average user. The average user hits the back button or goes to another site. This has been the challenge of starting any kind of site for years and a lot of smart people have been doing a lot of interesting things to improve the sign up process. One of which, open ID, aims to become a universal login name that can be used on multiple sites.

A recent A List Apart article by Luke Wroblewski talked about best practices of sign up forms. More specifically he talked about why sign up forms must die. A lot of sites require a user to sign up to participate when they really don’t have to. That is the fastest way to set your site up for failure.

The site that got me thinking about all this is called Kaboodle. There was a box to leave a comment and so I did. When clicked submit it made me sign up to leave a comment, something a vast majority of blogs out there don’t require you to do.

I have to admit this was a little obnoxious, but this obnoxiousness was done very well. It didn’t take me to a separate page, just a pop up that asked me a few questions. After clicking sign up it left my comment and I was a member. Only after becoming a member did I look to see what the site was about.

The next Cleveland Web Standard’s Association meeting is coming up on Tuesday May 6th. Joe Fiorini will be giving a presentation on basic programming for non programmers (translation: people like me). Joe is going to cover the basics using Ruby on Rails examples, I’m looking forward to the presentation. Everyone is welcome and it doesn’t cost a thing.

Web 2.0 means a lot of things to a lot of people. Since I’m a designer I tend to think of a certain set of design styles when someone mentions Web 2.0. I also gag from hearing the term all the time.

A staple of web 2.0 design are reflective surfaces. You see them everywhere. When done right it’s a cool looking effect, but there are some simple rules to using the reflections effectively. I stumbled upon the Playstation Store graphic and it looks a little off.

This doesn’t look like a real reflection, the bag is way off, it’s not realistic. It’s best to stay away from images that drop below the baseline of your reflection.

Here are a couple examples. Sample A has a descender (the lowercase p) and it takes away from the effect. Sample B changes that by aligning the bottom of the p with the baseline. That makes it look realistic but it also changes the effect. Sample C is in all caps and it gets rid of the descender that was giving us so many problems. The Playstation Store logo suffers from the same problem that Sample A does, the image drops below the baseline. So if you have an image like that bag how do you make it look good? Below is a quick and dirty step by step on how to fix it.

First, in Photoshop, I cropped out the bag and put it on it’s own layer, then I duplicated the layer and reversed the image (edit > transform > flip vertical). Then I positioned the flipped back under the original like in step 2. Next I used the polygon lasso tool to create an outline of the left side of the bag in step 3. Next I needed to transform the selection, I selected the Move Tool (V) and hit ctrl+t. When you transform something you will see small boxes appear around the image. I grabbed the one the left side in the center and moved it up (a little tip, if you hold the shift key while moving things in Photoshop it moves just on the x or y axis). I repeated these steps on the other side of the bag so it looks like step 6. Now we have a more realistic looking bag reflection so I set the layer transparency to around 20% and added mask to the layer and used the gradient tool to make a smooth transition.

Bad reflections are a pet peeve of mine. Now that I’ve pointed them out, you’ll see them everywhere and you can be annoyed too. You can thank me later.

Most people won’t find this as cool as I do, but I happen to think it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

Episode Four: Gimme S’more from Threadless.com on Vimeo.

I’m pretty excited, my S’more 101 t-shirt went on sale on Threadless this week. That’s all I really have to say about it.

Last weekend was the CSS Off, where front end designer/developers have 24 hours to slice up a design into crisp and clean html. Judging is getting underway and we got some pretty sweet submissions. I designed the comp for the contest so it’s only fitting that I post the working PSD here for anyone who missed it on the CSS Off site. As a bonus I’m putting up the illustrator file with all the critters in it.

Download the Photoshop file

Download the Illustrator file

Nope this is not a post about how you can now post videos on Flickr, this is a post about people’s reaction to the new feature. On the surface it just seems like an added service, but it really changes the way people can use Flickr.

I was talking with Eric Wiley about what this means for other online video services like Vimeo. As we were discussing he sent me to a petition that someone posted against video. I wasn’t surprised that there would be backlash, I just didn’t understand why there is backlash. The petition states:

We the undersigned members of Flickr, free and pro, agree that video has no place on Flickr. Other sites on the web accept video already, but do not accept photos. We all joined Flickr because of it’s dedication to photography and photographers, and we want Flickr to remain true to this dedication. It is our request that this feature and addition to Flickr be removed.

Flickr isn’t dumping you. Flickr isn’t saying you can’t hook up anymore. Flickr is just having a baby and there is room for all three of you. Did people freak like this when Amazon started selling things other than books? You can still buy books there and you can still use all the features the way you want to use them, Flickr can be used the same way. If you don’t like the video sharing, then don’t use it for video. Am I missing something?

Is this just snooty photographers upset about the unwashed hordes pouring into Flickr to post videos of gentlemen suffering groin injuries and young ladies trying in vain to get a record contract? I can see how this dramatically changes how Flickr will be used in the future. I don’t see what adverse effect this has on the way people use the service. If you want to just use it for photos, then just use it for photos.

It’s clear from the execution of this new service that this wasn’t an experiment with video, it’s was a well thought out feature. They aren’t going to throw it away cause you don’t like it. Here is my advice. It’s in your best interest to come up with real grievances, like you want to be able to sort photos from videos. Maybe a video filter so you never see the videos similar to the way it sorts out adult content. Community sites want your feedback, they want to improve and they want to keep you there. Channel your dislike in a positive direction and you will be taken seriously.