Today marks Elsa’s last day as an AIM Product Design Team member. She’s been a tremendous asset to our little team and AOL/AIM at large. Internally, we said we would shed no tears today, but I think maybe a few sniffles are probably acceptable. We’ll remember Elsa for her funny personality, her quiet wisdom and her unmistakable charm. Along the way, her creative mastery has been seen on People Connection, AIM Today, UnCut Video and much, much more. She’s not only taught us how to expand our creative minds but has shown us how to do it. We are so lucky to have been on Elsa’s path of life and wish her the best of luck ahead. To honor our dear Elsa, we’ve used some of her design work on People Connection to assemble a tribute. From her wacky ‘wit’icisms on Twitter (she calls it “Twig it”) to her crazy little Oddzballz, this is all (or at least much) of the enigma of the Elsa.

-Tom

NOTE: originally posted to the AIM Design Blog.

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.

Inspired by flash mobs that have been occurring around the world, our design team has decided to offer our own take on these. As defined in Wikipedia, a flash mob is “is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, do something unusual for a brief period of time, then quickly disperse.” While some of the better known flash mobs have brought people together for absurd events like pillow fights, clapping and chirping, we thought we could use the concept for applied design efforts. Though you never know, maybe you’ll see us impersonating chickens on the front lawn some day. We are kinda crazy in that way.

In the coming hours and days you will see the fruits of one of our first forays into the crazy world that is flash mobbing … albeit … AIM design team stylie.

Here are the rules and guidelines for this one:

Assignment

• Design an AIM desktop wallpaper.

Rules

• Must include AIM logo
• Use 1600×1200 palette
• Don’t use rights protected photos, fonts or other proprietary content.
• Give credit where credit is due for photos, fonts, etc. (Creative Commons).
• Spend about 1hr to a 1.5hrs on your design only exceeding that if you have to do some finishing touches.
• Write a blog post to design.aim.com about your thought process and include your desktop for viewing and download.

Guidelines

• Its all about AIM, however you want to interpret that.
• Try to reflect some personal style into your design.
• Have fun. Be creative.

-Tom

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.