MOMENT

After months of incredible effort and detailed planning by Abby, Anne, and Calli, we set out on an adventure. Last Friday afternoon we boarded a bus, left our Crosby Street home, and headed for Manchester Village, Vermont for our very first retreat. We wanted to get out of the office and away from our projects to recharge and refocus… So that’s exactly what we did. Read More »

2012 has been a busy year for us so far here at Moment (and we’re not complaining). We just keep growing; so we thought we’d take a minute to introduce you to the latest additions to the Moment gang.

Jose Manuel Villanueva

Meet Jose Manuel, our newest experience designer. Joining us from Barcelona, Spain, previously Jose was an art director at Golden Gekko, working on mobile products for clients like Diesel and Aljazeera. Outside of Moment, this graphic-designer-turned-experience-designer is training for the New York City Marathon (just as a hobby), traveling or turning ideas into tee shirt designs.

Alex Voorhees

We’re excited to have Alex join the graphic design crew here at Moment; the native Baltimoreian joins us from The Lathe, where he worked on mobile applications and web design. A design-lover from the start, he earned his BS in Graphic Design from Drexel University. Outside of the Moment world, Alex is a diehard sports fan and especially when it comes to football. When he’s not watching, he’s playing in a flag-football league in NYC.

Tim Rodriguez

Since we design digital products, we rely on our technology; so we’re especially delighted to welcome Tim, our new IT Associate to Moment. Tim joins us from the consulting and freelance side of things, running Epistech Consulting, helping small businesses with all their IT needs. Tim is a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, holding both a professional certificate in product design from NYU and a BS in Food Science from Cornell. When he’s not making our lives easier at Moment, Tim’s either coming up with his own product designs, new games (‘Feed the Birds’ anyone?), cooking something delicious or playing rugby.

Welcome gentlemen!

Not many people possess the obscure, but charming talent to recognize Casio watches by their model numbers, but Yixiu Wu does. Her favorite is currently the MTG-1100B. Obvious from her watch collection, Yixiu, an experience designer at Moment, loves her physical products (likely because she is a trained industrial designer), but now loves the digital ‘hardware’ that embodies almost everything now.

The native Singaporean moved to Chicago to get her Master’s in Design from the Institute of Design at IIT, looking to learn more about product strategy and research. Read More »

via Flickr

Since Apple debuted the New iPad, complete with the stunningly sharp retina display, the entire design and tech industries have been buzzing not only about potential for on-screen visuals, but also what this means for the future device landscape.

At Moment, we’ve been discussing the wondrous display, and following the discussion throughout the design community about how this is impacting digital product design. The full impact is far from settled, but what is clear is the future of digital design is now. We’re in a transition period, getting used to working with relatively low-resolution comps for something that will be produced at a much higher resolution.

But should we get stuck on that little hiccup? We think no. The retina display doesn’t change how we design for the fundamental interactions with devices, but it certainly impacts the finish quality, of the product we are creating. When thinking about the craft of creating things for onscreen, this is a different consideration than it was before the retina display. Working at this new resolution standard for the iPad is obviously not totally new because we have dealt with this iPhone’s retina display and several high-res Android devices. It’s just a continuation of the evolution and how we approach designing these products, and there’s no going back now. Read More »

via picassa

It’s that time of year again; it’s time for tech nerds, fanatics, and lovers of all shapes and sizes to descend upon Austin, Texas for 4 days of parties, panels, keynotes, workshops, meetups and so much more. We’re busting out the cowboy boots and Stetsons because next week; we’re heading to Austin for SXSW Interactive Festival. Branson Lundemo, Cassie Matias, Shannon O’Brien, Drew Gold and Anne Aretz will represent Moment down south, taking in all that Austin and SXSW has to offer. Read More »

One thing we’ve been working on (and getting very excited about) for the last couple of months is redesigning our website. While in the process, we realized it’s not easy to sum up our company culture in a paragraph, giving visitors a complete idea of what it’s like working with, working at and visiting our offices. For us, we prefer to show, not tell; we want to show what it’s like to spend a day here at Moment. So photographer and friend-of-Moment Jacob Murphy spent a couple of days with us, capturing the normal goings-on around the office from eating lunch, a meeting or two, drowning in Post-Its, or enjoying our fully stocked kitchen (and beverage fridge, yes, we have a fridge just for beverages). So here’s a little sneak peek:

We’re back in our Crosby Street office, getting back to work and thinking back to the whirlwind 4 days spent in Dublin at this year’s Interaction12 conference. It was our first year sponsoring the event and it certainly won’t be our last. The Moment crew on the ground in Dublin, including John Devanney, Yixiu Wu, Izac Ross, Leah Shea and Mia Bohleman came back swirling with ideas, inspired by the people they met and the content they consumed. Read More »

Image Credit: Andy Mangold

It all started with Jonah Lehrer’s article in the New Yorker that bluntly stated, “brainstorming is dead.” But is that really the case or do professionals just need to give the idea an update? As described in Lehrer’s article, brainstorming was born in the advertising industry, the brainchild of Alex Osborn, one of the partners of B.B.D.O. Although brainstorming was a hit, numerous studies came out following that offered evidence that it doesn’t work. So why didn’t brainstorming die if there was evidence that it didn’t work? Why do so many creative companies hold fast to it today? Read More »

This year we are excited to announce that we are Bronze sponsors of IxDA’s Interaction12 conference in Dublin. After years of attending this amazing conference, we decided that it was time to get more involved (not to mention we were looking for an excuse to travel to Dublin).

Now, a trip to Dublin would not be complete without a sampling of the local beverages like a pint of Guinness or maybe a nice glass of whiskey in an authentic Irish pub; so, we decided to make exploring all that Dublin has to offer a little easier by sponsoring a pub crawl on Thursday night. Dublin is a fantastic city, full of rich culture, stellar food and drink all wrapped in beautiful historic architecture; so, we wanted to encourage conference attendees to experience all the city has to offer.

We’re not just sponsoring an evening of exploration; we’ll also be picking up the tab at The Bank on College Green from 8-10 PM where you’ll be able to spot a Momenteer by our light blue buttons.

So we hope that you stop by, have a pint and little bite to eat and stay for a chat while you make your way around Dublin.

For almost 10 years now, Moment has been designing great digital products with some of the biggest brands out there. We’ve worked on applications that millions use, websites that shaped iconic brand experiences and helped guide the development of new brands and their products.

Explaining who we are can be difficult. At Moment, we’re more about showing than telling, so our goal with this blog is to help us show you more about who we are and what we do. These posts are the thoughts of our employees (we like to call ourselves Momenteers), not only what they’re thinking about, but how it contributes to what we do here at Moment. They’re a talented bunch of designers who help to come up with solutions to some of the toughest design challenges, but also have relevant and thought-provoking ideas about digital product design, experience design, user research, and more. It’s time to share those ideas.

This blog is part of a new chapter at Moment; we hope you find it interesting, entertaining and maybe even useful.