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Years ago, while I was studying art at the Baskin Visual Arts Center, we were tasked with constructing an on-the-spot, interactive art piece. We had about 20 minutes to come up with a compelling art piece that embodied the fundamental principals of interactivity.

For this project I partnered up with one of my classmates. Five minutes later, we had our masterpiece. It was simple and direct. We stood before the class with two cardboard signs, a box of chewing gum and a stack of singles. The sign around my neck read, “Scream in my face for a dollar.” The sign by my partner read, “For a dollar, I’ll put another stick of gum in my mouth.”

It was the most beautiful play on an age old child’s game. We started out with 100 $1 bills and finished with close to $160, not that that was our aim by any means. Don’t ask me how he fit all that gum in his mouth; I really couldn’t tell you.

The reason I bring this up, is because this silly little piece has a lot in common with web design. Don’t believe me?

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Earlier this month I posted a short Photoshop tutorial about the ever changing header on this site. It’s a quip study into the nature of evolutionary branding, from an absurdist’s point of view - in my opinion, the backbone for viral marketing. The tutorial was not designed to actually help anyone who wants to learn Photoshop, so much as it was to manhandle this message.

This morning, however, I woke to find this lovely message in my inbox:

Hello Jeremy,I’m Julia Agnes from Tutorial Kit.There are some nice tutorials on your Repeatpenguin.com website, so we dared to create your author account at Tutorial kit and submit it (www.tutorialkit.com)…I hope you won’t mind listing your tutorial at Tutorial Kit. Please let me know what you think about that.

So I had to check and there it was.

Is the virus spreading? It’s a brilliant tactic in viral marketing, if I don’t say so myself. A tutorial teaching others to create your logo. Spread virus, spread. I can’t help but wonder if there might just be one kid out there, making a ‘penguin’ turkey card for Grandma this Thanksgiving.

Bon-Appétit:repeat

There is one common and fundamental key to good user experience, the user should never have to guess. This becomes even more important when you are asking the user to divulge personal information by creating a user account. A few months ago, I wrote an article on the importance of branding and design for registration forms. For an industry growing around web applications, user interaction has taken on a new role. Those points of interaction within a website, the programming and scientific elements have also taken a new role. In essence, this challenges the user. As a user interface designer, I want to reduce that challenge and make the experience as seamless and direct as possible.

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