Not surprisingly, this week we’ve been talking about the election and, no doubt, will be doing so until November and beyond. This week saw a number of links sent around, but this one in particular hit on some themes that really aren’t discussed enough, like service and experience design. Please forgive me for getting personal for a few moments — I spent a year in the Oregon Elections Division working with officials and vendors on improving ballots in that state, so I have opinions. Oregon and Washington State both vote-by-mail and are lightyears ahead of some other states, and even their ballots need a lot of work. Outdated equipment, legal restrictions, and so much more prevent the voting system from being ideal in this country, and we should talk about it more. Forum One designers are proud members of AIGA — the professional association for design — and they have been working with officials for several years to tackle some of these problems with their Design for Democracy program. Help is out there, and designers are a bit part of the solution!

An oldie-but-goodie came up this week when this piece on Herbert Matter from last year popped up my feed. Now that much of the design world — but not all! — work in digital, we sometimes forget about the great print designers from the last century. Matter is certainly one of my favorites — I mean, look at this poster! This is an excellent reminder that we shouldn’t just be limited to looking for inspiration from our peers, but should take some tips from the classics as well.

Speaking of inspiration, we read this article about five actual web design trends from 2016. The “actual” is important, because often these kinds of lists focus on what may be rather than what is really happening, or things that are already dated. These five trends are pretty on point from what we’ve seen lately, and the examples are particularly helpful to check out for inspiration. His “bonus” trend is definitely something that we’ve been discussing here at Forum One — what happens when you’re on a huge monitor, and how does that change your browsing experience? As we design and build out new sites, this is definitely something that we’ve been paying attention to, so check out some of our newest launches on those mega-monitors!

And finally, how good are you at guessing the Kolor?