The pulse of Alexander Interactive

While I was sitting on the couch at my family’s house last Friday casually surfing the sales online via my iPad, I realized that I was having a lot of trouble processing what offers were “Black Friday” deals and what purchases I should wait on until the real sale kicks in. Should I buy it now and get free shipping, or wait until Cyber Monday to get it at a deeper discount? Would it be discounted? Would there be any left? After asking family members about their online holiday shopping strategies it became clear: nobody knew what to expect when it came to Cyber Monday sales.

It appears that it is intentional on the part of retailers. Rather than playing the “compete on price and discount” game with other retailers wherein they slash their margins just to steal eyeballs, they are choosing to encourage and reward their most loyal (and patient) customers with more specific offers in the days that preceded and followed Cyber Monday, as Alex highlighted this Daily Reflector article yesterday.

Even more, the walls between the physical store and the “cyber” store have evaporated for most retailers. No longer is it relevant to have separate sales in-store for “Black Friday” and online for “Cyber Monday” for the same products. Empowered with smartphones, the mobile price check has become the weapon of choice for price-conscious consumers who will often carry the Cyber Monday deals into the store to garner the same discounts on the same products by the method that’s most convenient for them. This realization Alex also discusses in AOL Daily Finance reinforces the idea that consumers see one brand across all shopping channels, forcing the physical/digital price parity that is apparent this year.

As for me, I’ll just wait and see what special tablet-only private deals I can get from my favorite stores through their iPad apps.

The Font-Bot Project is something I started for a couple of reasons. The first reason was I wanted to design a site with new HTML 5 markup and CSS3 properties. The second was, as a designer turned full time Front-End-Engineer, I needed a creative outlet.

I didn’t really just want to markup a site for a fake company or a new design portfolio. I wanted to create something that people would enjoy, and visit and maybe even use. As the web is going through somewhat of a type renaissance with the adoption of @font-face, I have become increasingly interested in learning more about typography and how I could use it in my pages. I am also very interested in robots. I have no idea when this started but probably around the time of Transformers and Robotech.

This is where the idea was born – when I was in art school I remembered doing exercises where we would have to design things using only type. So I decided to make the world my classroom and ask my students to create robots out of type.

But what good are dangerous looking robots if they are just standing there?

I figured that since I couldn’t actually make the robots fight that a voting system with a damage bar would bars would be a great addition.  I built the site on WordPress and used one of the many polling plug-ins out there to create the damage system. I also added the comments section so people could talk about the robots they liked and why, or so they could just talk trash about the one they didn’t vote for.

For me Font-Bot is just an ever evolving personal project. I am constantly making small tweaks to it with the feedback I have received from other designers in the community as well as the participants.

It has given me a lot more than I ever thought it would. I get great emails from people who have visited the site and enjoy it. I just received one from a college student in Tennessee who said his entire typography class is making font-bots as a project. I have also been lucky enough to receive a pretty steady stream of submissions. I even get submissions from non-designers, which is great. Just recently I received a submission from a writer. It has also been linked to in several online publications, most notably the recent mention in Smashing Magazine.

I realized the importance of personal projects through this experience. The site was not only fun to build, but also a lesson in design and development for me. It was one of my first experiments with the Modular Scale by Tim Brown. (You can also read more about the scale and Tim Brown here) It was also the first site I ever built using HTML 5 markup, and it built completely on WordPress. Although it’s not the first site I have built on WordPress, each one ends up teaching me valuable lessons.

I encourage other designers to create something for themselves and give it to the world. Doing so keeps your skills sharp and keeps you on top of your craft.