design42day

Josh Hepworth Biography

Josh Hepworth is a front and back-end developer from West Chester, Pennsylvania. He currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland where he is a Partner at Friends of The Web, an interactive design and development studio. Friends of The Web specializes in building websites and mobile applications.

Andrew Mangold Biography

Andrew Mangold is a designer, pursuing authorship and the power of ideas. He is originally from West Chester, Pennsylvania, but is currently a proud resident of Baltimore, Maryland. He works side–by–side with some of his favorite people at Friends of The Web, to make the internet a better place, and also pursues self–initiated projects that he is passionate about.

Description

Crowdstorms is a tool and an online community, that helps its users get past creative stalemates, through social mind-mapping. The design affords an individual user all of the advantages of brainstorming within a large team community, by allowing them to strengthen their creative process with a diverse set of backgrounds and perspectives. Additionally, it carefully tracks and catalogs all of the associations created on the site to build an associative reference tool, that can be used as a hive-mind for rapid brainstorming.

Communication objective

The goal of Crowdstorms is to provide the user with all of the benefits of working within a large creative team, but from the comfort of their personal web browser. The design team seeks to communicate the feeling of collaboration, the efficiency of words, and the power of randomness, inspired by John Bielenberg’s “Think Wrong” model. The design of the site is based on the concept of an active and dynamic tool, that offers immediate assistance to a user that is having difficulty with a particular subject matter. Crowdstorms offers an ever-growing reference tool that works like a dictionary or encyclopedia, but draws on imperfect, human associations, instead of factual information. The content of Crowdstorms enables the user to feel how ideas and words are linked in our culture, giving them the power to manipulate various associations when they are designing, illustrating, writing, or creating.

Tools used

All of the designs for the web pages were created in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Fireworks, The logo of Clowdstorms was drawn in Adobe Illustrator. Adobe InDesign was incorporated to create presentations for marketing opportunities and events. A few of the early pages for Crowdstorms were also developed in Adobe Dreamweaver.

Adobe Tools

Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop

www.crowdstorms.com