Visit Barack Obama’s home page this week and you’ll find respectful appeals to Hillary Clinton’s supporters, news, videos, inspirational quotes, and a variety of effective calls to action.  Take a look at John McCain’s homepage and you’ll see (amongst other things) a well-placed promotion for McCain golf gear.  Really.  

This kind of comparison should help explain why I predict that Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States. 

The Obama web team also does a great job of spreading the message all around the web. As the module on his blog page says, Obama is “Everywhere.”  There are readily accessible links to Obama connections and content on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Twitter, Eventful, LinkedIn, Blackplanet, Faithbase, Eons, Glee, MiGente, MyBatanga, AsianAve, and DNC Partybuilder. At Johnmccain.com if you dig deep enough, you’ll find links associated with myspace, facebook, and youtube. 

Click through to McCain's Myspace page and you’ll find that he has a respectable count of 53, 218 friends.  Obama, on the other hand, has 391,834 – and his myspace page – typically some of the crappiest looking pages on the web, even looks well-designed and, dare I say, presidential.    (For a good laugh, take a look at some of the 62 "friends" on Bush's MySpace page.)

Kudos to the Obama team for recognizing how times have changed and for mastering the use of interactive channels for the good of their cause.

- Jon Fox

This summer, companies throughout the world will be headed to the Olympic Games in Beijing to take advantage of opportunities to build brand awareness by attaching via sponsorship to national teams, sports, and athletes. Major brands use the exposure to reinforce their presence worldwide, while up-and-coming brands may use the opportunity to gain entry into the global marketplace. At the center of this whirlwind of the corporate sponsorship lie the games themselves, and the unique design systems which are employed to symbolize and commemorate the event, usually chosen from hundreds of entries in competition for the distinct honor. The design of emblems, posters, and most recently the event locations all bear a task in common with brands seeking to reach the global market: the ability to precisely communicate your message across geographic and cultural barriers.

The modern Olympic games offer us a wealth of inspiration and guidance for creating design which can pack a wide variety of meaning into a singular visual statement: National heritage, global diversity, sportsmanship, and tradition. Add to that the task of having appeal to the world audience, and you've got quite the design challenge on your hands.

The following are some of the more successful designs employed for past games:

The emblem of the 1964 Tokyo games, designed by Yusaku Kamekura, shows gold Olympic rings superimposed on the emblem of the Japanese national flag, representing the rising sun. The use of repetition of the circular forms creates a harmonius and ingeniously simple visual symbol which is loaded with significance.

For the 1968 games in Mexico, a team of three artists created a logo which is a combination of the five Olympic rings and the year. The repeated outline recalls the patterns of the Huichole Indians, combining national heritage and tradition while advertising the global event. 

Back in the day, our general modus operandi was to listen to a client or prospect's wishes and try and deliver a product that met their goals and expectations.  All well and good, but apart from delivering a good-looking, usable web site, we weren't necessarily adding a lot of value.

Nowadays, we try and approach our client engagements asking questions about how we can really provide value and drive business for our customers.  We do our best to use our seasoned,  strategic knowledge of best practices for web design and development to make client sites as successful as possible.  Hopefully, this site, will meet those same kinds of goals for us. 

They may sound like no-brainers in 2008, but this time around, we started with copy, site structure, meta data, and page titles that would be optimal for search.  We integrated Google Analytics for traffic metrics and routed our email sign-up form directly through to Exact Target (our email service provider) via their API.  We utilized open source software (like blogengine.net) to streamline our development process and deliver a best-of-breed feature set. We even shot some video on a shoestring to help get our points across.  Together, each of these steps should contribute to getting the Flightpath message out to the right people as effectively as possible.

I'd like to congratulate all the members of our staff that did such a great job contributing to this web site and welcome anyone who's reading this to Flightpath's new blog.  I hope you'll check back with us regularly and see what we're up to and what we're talking about.

- Jon Fox