Thought & Theory

Jacksonville has a certain charm. While its not the bustling hub of culture and commerce like other major cities like NY, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, London, etc, it is on a slow upswing. Excuse me while I get on this soapbox, but I think one of the major reasons this city feels so small and behind the times is that real design is not embraced by the community. Real design in all aspects of life be it how our airport works, how the downtown experience feels, how our central community website hubs work and other common city experiences. All these experiences help shape our perspective on how we both view and enjoy Jacksonville. And at the moment, its a pretty average experience at best.

Targets

While most of these articles will focus on those community website hubs of our city (mainly because that’s our specialty), we will also concentrate on simple user experience cases as we come across them. Here is the first set of things that we want to touch upon in hopes of sparking a change.

• Jacksonville.com
• City of Jacksonville
• University of North Florida
• Jacksonville Transit Authority
• Jacksonville Courthouse
• Art Institute of Jacksonville

Why do this?

I want to write these articles because I think 95% of people out there don’t understand what the word design means. They still think we’re glorified wallpaper artists. They rarely come in contact with real designers, and in their world design really does mean decoration. Its unfortunate, but hopefully these articles shed a little light on what design really means and more importantly what a designer can do. Design is about communication, shaping of experiences and simplifying complex things and these articles will reveal some of the processes we use to reach those goals.

These are not bitch sessions or swipes at the people who originally designed these things (hell, we all make mistakes). Its more of a way for us to suggest things in hopes of sparking a change.

So stay tuned, Jacksonville.com is up first.