We here at the AIM have gone a little sticker crazy lately. Its an easy and arguably smart thing to do. Stickers have legs so to speak. For a relatively small amount, you can get a batch of 500 to 1000 stickers printed in a very short amount of time (less than a week it turns out). You can fit them in your suitcase with ease (unlike a box of T-shirts) and bring them with you to distribute at events like we did recently at SXSW in Austin. You can casually hand them out to people you meet, leave them on a table for people to pick up (or throw away) or stick them around town and document via photography as AIM design team member Justin Kirk did. Seeing them perpetuated on laptops the way we used to for skateboards and surfboards is how the stickers grow legs. We nerds take these back to our cubical farms and ride the ‘geekboards’ all day long meeting after meeting thus exposing others to our super cool way of life manifested as individual expression in the form of a collage of mass-produced stick ons.

Days prior to the event, AOL announced that Open AIM would go even more ‘open’. In doing so, the design team was asked to explore logo options for the program. In the end, it was decided that there were some clever ideas that would make great stickers. And so… stickers we made…

<AIM>
Inspired by Julie Bethke, this design represents the use of an ‘open’ tag with the word AIM inside of it thus implying ‘Open AIM’.

Sticker and mark design by Tom Osborne (me speaking in third person). Mark inspired by Julie Bethke.

Skatewing
By taking a bite out of the traditional AIM bubble (creating an opening in it) a new form takes life. Most people think this looks like a hawk or skatewing. Cool how it takes on different meaning based on your own perspective.

Mark design by John Clarkson. Sticker design by Tom Osborne.

Come On In
Taking a cue from storefront neon signs, this design displays the word ‘Open’ in neon style lettering inside the AIM bubble shape to welcome in people to the Open AIM program.

Sticker and mark design by Tom Osborne.

Pixnay
One of our newest experiences is Pixnay, a vanity competition pitting profile photos in a head to head competition. This project was brilliantly conceived by some talented interns this past summer. Post your photo and take your chances of becoming ‘Hottie of the Day’.

Sticker design by Valli Ravindran.

Come see us at the next big conference where we’ll be sure to have some stickers to give away.

Special thanks to Gian Cruz, Alisa Schadt, John Clarkson, Mike Macadaan, David Robinson, Chris Dargis, Greg Cypes, Andy Wick, Robert West and Jill Carillo for ideas and contributions along the way.

Originally posted on design.aim.com on April 17, 2008.

In July of this year I joined the AIM application design team who were already well on their way to being ready for the public release of AIM version 6.5. One of the more exciting contributions I was able to make prior to launch was to help give names to our 20 new color themes. We didn’t want to settle on obvious color names so we solicited name submissions from those interested in participating from within the company. For each color combination we received approximately 10 names varying from expected names to some that were really out there. I narrowed the list down to about 3 per color and ran them through our legal team to check against copyrights and ethics. Several of our favorites were dropped along the way due to inappropriateness and conflicting use elsewhere. In the end, I’m pleased with where we ended up. Here’s the full list of names. You can find them by installing AIM 6.5 and selecting a new color in the pull down menu at the top right of the Buddy List. Hover over a color to see the name appear in a tool tip.

• Orange/Silver: Love, AIM
• Pink/Silver: Superstar!
• Purple/Silver: Royale
• Green/Silver: Ooze
• Olive/Silver: Mulligan
• Light Blue/Silver: Calypso
• Navy/Silver: Boot Cut
• Chocolate/Silver: Hooptie
• Gray/Silver: Maverick
• Gold/Silver: Big Money
• Orange/Black: Smashed Pumpkin
• Pink/Black: Hot Little Number
• Green/Black: Venom
• Light Blue/Black: Skinny Dip
• Gray/Black: Gothica
• Purple/Black: Grape of Wrath
• Olive/Black: Kabillionaire
• Navy/Black: Midnight Storm
• Chocolate/Black: Well Done
• Gold/Black: Bling Bling

What’s your favorite?

We recently helped to launch a new Social Media Blog to talk about all things having to do with AIM and social media. It comes by means of aggregating a few previously existing blogs namely the AIM Buddy Blog, AIM Pages Blog and some of Joe Loong’s long running Magic Smoke. The premise will be to inform AIM users of new features, known bugs and running discussion points as well as looking at the landscape of social media and its impact on the community space. I’m proud to say it was designed by the AIM Product Design Group’s very own Justin Kirk master of pixels and style sheets.

Originally posted on http://design.aim.com

This desktop wallpaper design was largely inspired from a brief conversation I had with Bert Arians, an AIM tech manager, while in the lunch line today. He was explaining to me how he felt that many people confuse “community” with “social networks” and how they are not necessarily synonymous. He described to me a meadow full of flowers where a community of bees networked from flower to flower. To be honest, I’m not sure I understood the analogy completely but for some reason the conversation stuck in my head and served as good inspiration when I needed it. So for that, I thank you Bert (but I may need you to walk me through that one more time).

In addition, I wanted to design something that evoked Spring and what better to do so than cherry blossoms, bees, pollen and springtime colors. Ahhh chooo!

Download the Pollen Nation wallpaper for your desktop:
Large (1600×1200)
Small (1024×768)

Thanks to the following people whose photos were available for remix via Creative Commons: tanakawho, *vlad*, bulletproofbra and TeraRoop11. Font used: Helvetica Neue.

-Tom

Update:
Bert just informed me that “bees are social networking with each other; flowers are the communities”. Now, I’ve got it. Thanks, Bert!

NOTE: originally posted on the AIM Design Blog.

Thanks to the hard work of many folks, People Connection (our hub for chats, message boards, blogs and more) has added 4 additional skins to bring the total to 6 available choices. You can now browse through the site with your favorite design applied. Choose from new skins ‘Dragon’ (Shadia), ‘Princess’ (Justin), ‘Music’ (Jenna) or ‘Wildflower’ (Elsa). And, of course, the original skins, ‘Default’ (Elsa) and ‘Classic’ (Justin), are also still available. Keeping the focus on design for the purposes of this blog I won’t go into details on everyone involved but a sincere thanks is due to all whom were a part of this effort. Special thanks to lead designer Elsa for her hard work bringing these designs together for our development team to implement.

Stay tuned, we hope to add more to the People Connection catalog over time. Here’s a sampling of the new skins:

Dragon

Princess

Music

Wildflower

-Tom

NOTE: originally posted on the AIM Design Blog.

Originally posted on Design.AIM.com

I know what you are thinking. Something like “Tom, are you excited about the big game this weekend?”. You haven’t been able to sleep you are so curious. My response is “Heck yeah, I’m excited about the big game. Aren’t you?”. If you happen to live on another planet, please allow me to explain. This weekend the mighty Florida Gators play the feeble UCLA Bruins in the 2007 NCAA Basketball Tournament Final Four Playoffs. It’s a rematch of last year’s final when the Bruins of course decided to spend time making sure their baby blue uniforms looked good instead of playing hoops.

What does this have to do with design you ask? Well, not much other than the fact that the University of Florida is where I received my degree in graphic design. To celebrate the big game I decided to scurry together a desktop background in honor of both teams (though primarily the Gators) and this soon to be historic event. I hope this will be the first of many desktop designs my AIM design peepz will make available in the future.

Now, I didn’t want to pick on the poor little Bruins any more than I already have so I’ve taken some liberties and changed their name to Bears. After all, a Bruin is a “baby” bear. And after the they loose, we can go back to calling them Bruins as we watch them wipe the tears away for the second time in two years.

Now, talkin’ trash is fun but in all due respect to the Bruins and their fans I wish you the best of luck. Your team will be looking for revenge which ought to make for an exciting game. May the best team win.

Without further ado, here are the desktops available for download:
Big (1600×1200)
Small (1024×768)

Special thanks to the folks who made their photos available for remix on Flickr. Here are their due credits:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lausanne/342796608/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackcustard/98691713/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/davemorris/26347864/

Fonts used: Rusted Plastic, Trashed, Brody & Arial

Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0

One of my latest projects is a new product at AOL/AIM called AIM Pages. Its a system that allows anyone to create a web page in a matter of minutes. Not only can you set up the page quickly but you can choose a variety of themes and content blocks to express yourself however you would like. The pages are built upon the Buddy platform that is built into AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). For clarity, the Buddy platform is a network of buddies or friends that you chat with via the application. I found that once I had my own AIM Page created, I was getting contacted every now and then by people I didn’t know. I wanted a way to learn more about the person who was contacting me without having to engage in conversation or chat. If I could simply type in a screen name and search AIM Pages, I could see if the person had a page to see if this is someone I already know. Better yet, if the search were built into the browser, I could perform this search in a just a few seconds.

I’ve been wanting to do this for some time but didn’t know how. After floating the idea around the office I received some information and encouragement from at least a couple developers to tell me that it was easy to do (easy for a developer at least). Development of this type is certainly out of my comfort zone but I’m dangerous enough with code to at least give it a try. It turns out that the most difficult part is simply figuring out how to decifer the search parameters. Once you’ve got that, it is quite simple in fact.

Long story short, after a few tests I created my first browser search plugin. Once I figured this out for AIM Pages I wanted to see if I could replicate it for a few other sites that I search quite often where a plugin. Those sites are AOL UnCut Videos, a user-submission video site I just helped get out the door, and Twangville, a music blog I administer. Here are links to all three plugins for you to try out yourself. All you need to do is click the title of the plugin to install. The browser will ask you what you want to do with it. Just click ‘OK’ and then you will see the search selection in the upper right corner of your browser.

Browser Search Plugins*:

• AIM Pages
• AOL UnCut Video
• Twangville

*requires a Mozilla-based browser (Firefox, Flock, etc. Not IE)

Thanks to Paul Petty and Shawn Carnell at AOL for giving me the info I needed to make this happen.

We recently made some improvements to our UnCut Video product (7/11/06). Some of the highlights include:

• domain name updated to reflect brand from communityvideo.aol.com to uncutvideo.aol.com
• improvements to the tagging database
• improvements to search
• improvements to the video playback ui and visual design
• search results filtered by time

See for yourself at http://uncutvideo.aol.com