As Android gains ground, iOS may not be enough for some brands. And with limited budgets and development constraints, sometimes you can’t give your app the full “Android Treatment” it should deserve. I’ve put together a mini guide to go over some common ways to get your iOS app over to Android, while keeping it consistent (mostly) with today’s Android patterns.

There are roughly five ways to move from iOS to Android without a full redesign:

• Menu Only
• Totally Custom
• Keep everything the same
• Move to the top
• Full Android

I’ve put together a PDF/Presentation that goes over these visually. Go ahead and view or download here.

Menu Only
Where the app basically stays the same, but moves navigation functionally to the Android menu bar.

Totally Custom
Where the design patterns are not common to iOS or Android, and stay the same cross-platform.

Keep everything the same
Specifically break with Android patterns to keep the app the same as the iOS app.

Move to the top
Where the app basically stays the same, but the iOS menu bar is moved to the top of the Android app, while most other options stay within the Android menu bar.

Full Android
Considerations were made to use the Android app patterns to their fullest – sometimes very foreign to a iOS customer.

My experience is that Android can match the iOS experience, and has some interesting enhancements you could use if creating for Android from scratch.

On the downside is the snappiness® that you get from an iOS app that’s hard to replicate on Android (if you’re used to an iOS experience). My experience has been with a series of Android test devices, and my personal Kindle Fire (which is a great secondary iPad ;-).

The last thing to remember is testing. Android is a much more expensive platform to build for. If you’re building a consumer experience (not a B2B device controlled experience) – then getting your app to look right, act right, and feel right across all devices is nothing more than very difficult.

As Android continues to evolve and grow, I feel like it will slowly come into its own, and if it doesn’t alienate people in the meantime, it will be a force to reckon with in the near future.

This past week I was able to speak to a large room of developers at the Gravity Center, who were all there to learn more about developing for Kinect. Which is really developing for sensors – of course Kinect development is much more exciting than sensor development :-) You could also say it’s designing for NUI – Natural User Interfaces, ways you’d expect to interact with interfaces if we didn’t have things like mice in the way. I was asked to speak, as a Designer (and the only one in the room) on the trends of Kinect interfaces, and give my perspective.

First up to start the day off right was Tim Huckaby – former Microsoft employee and currently the founder/chairman of interknowlogy. Tim has been working with Microsoft for a long time, and in recent years been focusing NUI interfaces around Surface, tablets, and now Kinect.

Tim set the stage with live demos and videos showing how some very interesting things around Kinect are being developed.

If you haven’t been keeping up with how Kinect is transforming from a gaming device to a UI for everything from home to business applications, here’s Microsoft’s official video:

What’s funny about this video is it’s a very gestural view on the future. If you gave a designer a Kinect, and had him/her dream up the future you’d get a world where everything was based on an invisible UI. To contrast, if you gave a designer an iPad, and tasked them with the same thing, you’d end up with a very different world where everything is a touch device. Here are some touch examples from Microsoft (they’re playing both sides!), and Corning – remember they make the glass for the iPhone:

Which direction are we heading? Probably somewhere in-between – or as is should be, whatever technology ends up being best for each specific task and context we’re designing for.

In my presentation I went through the beginning, of how the Kinect came to be – surrounded by a large enterprise company. Then on to how it’s transitioning into business, shopping, and education – with rumors that Kinect may end up in your next Windows laptops, ready to guide Windows 8. And with Microsoft officially opening up the SDK for Kinect, they’re inviting developers and hackers with open arms to create and innovate in this space.

Frog Design has dubbed this new skill of designing for gestures “Interaction Choreography” – how would that look on a business card:

Designing for this new layer of interaction requires new thinking about dexterity, ergonomics, and whether someone might feel silly or offensive with certain gestures. We are so involved in this space right now, that we’ve had to move our design technologists’ desks to create enough room for all the hand waving design.

I went on to show a round of hacks, everything from controlling your home to going full avatar and controlling a robot. Many of the first round business applications are around kiosks, things like trying on clothes, or controlling a TV.

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox had this summary when the Kinect was first released:

Inconsistent gestures, invisible commands, overlooked warnings, awkward dialog confirmations. But fun to play.

And there are no patterns to really draw from right now, they went on to say:

That there are no universal standards for gestural interactions yet is a problem in its own right, because the UI cannot rely on learned behavior. The Kinect has a few system-wide standards, however, which do help users.

Kinect does have some good rules they’re using when developing these first in-house applications and games:

Explain what the player can do.

Represent what they are doing.

Make it fun to match the two.

Test your implementation.

I left the large group of developers with some user centered questions to think about:

Distance and Environment?
How far do they need to stand? How far do they think they need to stand? Environment design of the area. Eyesight, size of the UI.?

Ergonomics?
Is it comfortable? Age? People with disabilities? Common movements vs. uncommon. How long will they interact??

Fashion
Do they look silly? Will someone of a certain age/race/gender use this? What’s acceptable for an Avatar??

UI Patterns??
What do they know from click and touch interfaces? Is there something more natural? Try and unlearn, and imagine.?

3D Space?
Is it close or far away? What do we infer from spatial positioning? Can you get people to interact in 3D space on a 2D screen??

Screen Resolution?
What’s the maximum amount of objects you can fit on a screen? What’s the minimum size of an object need to be on the screen??

Privacy?
Can you tailor to age? Race? Gender? What is helpful and what is potentially scary? Can you keep a snapshot for marketing purposes??

Here’s the full presentation:

Afterwards, one developer who had seen one of my earlier presentations on mobile was hoping for some more practical design tips, but designing for Kinect is so wide open right now. Even though we’ve been designing for sensors for some time now, but gestural by itself – how do we interact in space without tactile feedback – that’s new (and interesting!).

User Group TV posted a video of the resulting demos from the event here.

And here are some photos from the event:

All the photos from the event can be found here

I’m looking forward to exploring these interfaces, as I’ve explored touch over the past 5 years – and as always can’t wait to see what mind blowing interactions happen over the next 5 years.

I’m Gowalla user #91. They’re at about 2 million now. But, alas… they are no more. I’ve been easing into the idea for months now – my slow decline in usage started with a series of events: taking away my (yes my) icons, demoting check-ins, and my social graph moving on to other apps/sites. Gowalla is one of my first true “must have services” that have disappeared. Why am I sad, because Gowalla was meaningful to me.

Others are trying to leave me as well, like Google Reader’s removal of sharing (to move to G+), or Flickr’s possible buyouts from a mismanaged Yahoo – I’ve been pretty lucky that my virtual web apps, have for the most part stayed intact over time. There is no track record here. No shelf-life for a beloved app or service. It’s not like film, which we know will last a 100 years if stored properly, it’s something that if you picked up a mobile device in 10 years, I guess I’d be surprised if instagram works – or facebook for that matter.

But like a film, Gowalla had meaning for me. Gowalla’s offices started in Southlake in the shadow of Sabre/Travelocity where I was working at the time. We’d see the guys at lunch, had Josh come present at local events, and ran into Gowalla team members in various meetups around DFW. After they moved to Austin and over the years at SXSW we were luckily enough to attend some of the most sought after Gowalla parties – including last year’s Matt & Kim concert.

As they became a fixture in Austin (one of my favorite cities), you’d see Gowalla stickers on the windows of all our favorite shops and restaurants. We’d know what hangouts were hot via Gowalla, I’d know where my friends were via Gowalla, and more than once would serendipitously run into people I knew well, or wanted to know better.

I had a record of my travels and locations that had meaning for me. My wife called it “the husband tracker” (now who knows where I go during the day). It added interest to mundane tasks such as going to the grocery store – would there be a new icon to add to my collection? I was less than 10 short when they retired the feature… I had over 1,200 checkins, almost 100 pins, and a 100+ friends.

Not only was Gowalla invaluable during SXSW letting me know where everyone was, and where to go, but they’d have promotions running that would get me to go out of my way to check in. NASA, incase, Sweet Leaf Tea, just to name a few.

Then Disney… Which just happened to be weeks before I had a trip planned with my son. I was able to collect stamps virtually, which made it easier to remember which rides we’d gone on, and which we’ve missed. Again, collected memories.

And even as late as last month with Tintin. If you don’t know I’m a Tintin fanatic, and to my delight that Tintin actually chatted me up during my checkins on Gowalla.

Meaning came from: friends, memories, and fun. As well as a smart dose of gamification: limited duration, collecting, delighters, status – the list goes on. This meaning lead to my friends having ceremonies around moving Gowalla off their homescreens. It was like losing something big.

Am I ok with the core Gowalla team going to facebook? Yes, of course – they deserve to be with some of the best designers in the world, effecting many millions. Will SXSW be the same? No. Will I love other app like I loved Gowalla? No. Was creating Gowalla just a long interview for facebook? No, but it just worked out that way.

What do I want now that Gowalla is no more? They’re hinting at two things: 1) letting you access your data (which I hope to be able to import into my facebook timeline), and 2) something is going to happen with the company. Maybe another company will swoop in and keep it going at it’s current trajectory – but it won’t be the same.

What’s really interesting is the speed which my social graph moved – after the latest Gowalla update, there was a bit of a void, until Path showed up with a stunning updated app – now it’s roughly back to similar usage during the height of my graph’s Gowalla usage.

When Path came out, I found that I actually missed checking-in. I like to see where my graph is hanging out, where they’re visiting, what they’re up to. In my busy life, sometimes this is my only connection to people I enjoy.

Path is great, and really combines some of the best services into a single app, be how long before Path gets bought? Can anyone compete with facebook if they decide to get into something? We’ll see where Path goes, and then hopefully have a place to move on to after.

Gowalla, here’s to years of interesting times. Thanks!

P.S. I think Josh should fly the first 100 Gowalla users out to SFO for a tour of facebook ;-)

With Steve passing, my RSS reader and twitter stream filled up with stories of how Steve (or a product created under Steve) had made life better. Or that he inspired, and challenged people in their lives to do something big. To do something more interesting, to strive for great – or insanely great. I’ve been an Apple owner for some time, and owe most of my career to Apple’s products. Not that I couldn’t do great things on a PC, but something about the Mac – creating great things just comes naturally on something that is itself great.

Before going into my own Apple story – I wanted to mention my favorite Steve story. I’ve read books, blogs, news stories, but this is the one that stuck:

I had this idea about having a glass display, a multitouch display you could type on. I asked our people about it. And six months later they came back with this amazing display. And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He then got inertial scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, ‘my god, we can build a phone with this’ and we put the tablet aside, and we went to work on the phone.

(Full Article Link)

Another article puts it:

Apple’s multitouch technology began life not as a cellphone, but as a notepad-sized skunkworks project internally dubbed Safari Pad, run by Tim Bucher, then Apple’s head of Macintosh hardware. To his credit, Mr. Jobs seized on the technology and morphed it into the iPhone.

(Full Article Link)

It’s the ‘my god, we can build a phone with this’ part – that he saw something no one else did. He had the vision see how all the pieces fit together in a new way, in a way that finally took his company from his garage to the largest company in the world.

These are the types of people I admire most. People who can see how things connect in a way that no one else can, and what I strive for in my work.

This one observation – that what he had was a phone – has jumpstarted a mobile revolution that has grown countless companies, developers, designer, and startups – to join in on what may be the biggest change we see in our lifetimes.

Steve was a great American inventor, salesman, designer, innovator… I could go on. He brought Design to the front, and not a meeting goes by where the non-designers in the room don’t invoke Apple’s design as something to strive for, making my job a little easier.

Now back to my fanboy story…

I was digging through some old photos – while I used Apple computers throughout school, my modern usage came about during Design school in 2000. Where after using some brand new G4 Macs in class, I went and purchased a G4 350 – the cheapest desktop at the time.

I was at the Plano, TX Apple Store opening in 2001 – 3rd in the states – where @schubox and myself were videotaping and interviewing people in line:

We’re caught on film here (around the 1:56 mark). And more photos here on flickr.

I was around for the second DFW area store opening a couple years later, in Dallas:

More photos on flickr here.

From that early G4 tower, I bought a G4 500 Dual Processor tower, and a Powerbook G3 to accompany – moving up to a G4 17 (which I used at BrightCorner when they wouldn’t buy anyone a Mac!) – and then getting the very first intel iMac (sooo fast!) when they were released in 2006. Throw in the very first iPod, a newton I got at a garage sale, an Apple TV, and of course the iPhone.

I’m writing this on my MacBook Air, getting my internet from my Airport Extreme – and my iPhone 4 is right here next to me. You could say I’m a fanboy, or maybe I just enjoy products that think a little differently. Thanks Steve.

The first thing I’ve really been excited about in facebook for some time – the timeline. I’ve always been interested in showing my data in more interesting ways, and as the owner of much of my data, facebook is ripe to take advantage of it. While others have been trying to visualize parts your life, you really won’t need to look much further any longer. Let’s take a look at what my data looks like in the new timeline.

When you first hit a profile you see a “half view” of the new cover, along with the start of your timeline:

This makes you wonder some of the more interesting things people will do with an image that “folds up” as you scroll back up to the top.

You get all the basics – timelines (with month or year segments to jump to), about, friends, photos, maps, and likes.

Maps do something like I’ve always wanted Gowalla to do – show visited spots, and let you segment them by time:

As you start to scroll down the timeline you get a sticky header, with the profile name, and a “+” to add events to the timeline.

Some events now are very specific:

And it looks like facebook is going to allow others to build on this to create custom modules. I could imagine – a gaming module that asks: Just played… Just bought… Just won… – here what travel looks like:

There are automatic modules – like photos:

Friends you’ve made in a specific timeframe:

Places you’ve been:

And major life events, like marriage:

And work:

Overall, polished, slick, useful – and just fun.

There are others that do very simular things – memolane – my lane: http://memolane.com/jeremyjohnson does a great job – just quickly enter a couple of your social media hangouts, and instant timeline!

Dustin Curtis had lifepath.me – and just wrote about some of the similarities here: http://blog.dustincurtis.com/facebook-timelines-and-lifepathme

Or something like vizualize.me that takes your linkedin data and makes it more visual, and useful.

There are more and more tools out there that take your data and give you something more useful in return. As well as sites dedicated to visualization like: http://flowingdata.com/ and http://infosthetics.com/.

While I think this is a very useful display of the data facebook collects from me, I do wonder about people who will be growing up with facebook – and have a couple years they would rather forget, or maybe dated throughout – will you be able to “hide” specific years/months? Do you really want to have all your past a very quick and visalbe click away? I’m lucky facebook didn’t really take off until I was a “professional” and married – so I don’t mind everything being exposed to my friends or even the public. As always with facebook, privacy is key – and very granular options are needed.

Looks like everyone will be getting this view on the 29th, so get ready to have your life laid out for all to see!

The word this week from the Wall Street Journal (of all places) that Amazon.com is redesigning – for the tablet age. And while there may be some truth to that, I think it’s funny how modern, clean design – automatically equals designing for a tablet. Design trends are always informed by the dominate devices in its time, and mobile is where our trends for today are starting. And since I’m now in the e-commerce space, I’m obviously interested, and took the new design for a test drive.

Amazon did the right thing, unlike Target – that shot out recently with a BIG BANG – so big there are instructions all over the site on how to use the site (nice design BTW) – amazon is modernizing in pieces, a little at a time. Here’s what’s new:

All your buy options are now in one single location.

Overall – it’s a very minor redesign, and they’ve gone in the right direction – modernize what they can, when they can, keep moving forwards towards a new, updated, clean design. While not as sexy as target’s big band redesign, you also won’t need an instruction manual.

If I remember correctly, Refresh started in 2005 by @eris while working at Bright Corner. Eris and Garrett (who is speaking this Thursday) spearheaded the idea along with help from Jeff Adams. 2005, six years ago. That’s a long time in web years.

Thanks to google groups, the ideation is recorded, from @eris:

First of all, wow!  I was completely not expecting that many people to
show up and for the discussion to go so well.  Thank you all so much
for being interested in this and participating.  We’ve got a lot of
work to do, but I fully believe that we can do it. Here are the notes that I took, if anyone has ideas to add or points to discuss, please do!

Community goals: To refresh the digital design community and in doing so, highlight the collective badassness in Dallas.  To give back to the city and to essentially refresh the creative, technical and professional aspects of what it means to be a designer in the Dallas area.

Monthly meetings: 30 minute presentation/primer on a particular topic followed by an hour roundtable discussion relating to that topic.  Presenter responsible for putting their notes on the website, roundtable discussion posted via podcasting. Pending the monthly schedules for other groups in Dallas, we could do every second Thursday of the month.

And what started in Dallas, quickly grew worldwide over the years.

Poking around the google groups archive, I found a old suggested mock-up I created back in 2005:

Jeremy's Refresh Dallas Design

But even without a fully formed website ;-) it grew:

Photos from the 11/2005 meeting:

9/2006 meeting:

11/2006 meeting:

I spoke at the 10/2007 meeting on Mobile Design:

And streamed a meeting from home in 2008 (baby duty):

And here’s one from 2009 with @digitalcandy

In the end, it’s really great to have something that started here locally last this long. How many ideas turn into something that grows for 6+ years, travels all over the world, and still has people wanting to be part of it? Not many.

So if you’re in the Dallas area this week, check us out:

Thursday September 8, 2011
7:00PM to 9:00PM

Improving Enterprises
16633 Dallas Parkway, Suite 100
Addison, Texas 75001
http://www.refreshdallas.com/

Two weeks ago HP dropped their TouchPad by $100, Staples had a coupon for an extra $100 off that. A 16GB Tablet for $299. Sounds like a pretty good deal… The next cheapest option would be to get a Nook for $249 – but I really like WebOS. I like the attention to the design details, the gestures, the notifications – I could go on. But in the end, and as the events of this weekend showed – only when at the bargain price of $99 does it beat out the iPad in buzz and sales for a short time before its demise.

There’s not only the cost, or the details, but what I wanted the TouchPad for. Yes, I’m a gadget geek, and yes, I like to tryout new things, and I also believe in consuming as much as I can online and off to inform my own designs. But, I wanted the TouchPad to be my productivity machine. See my iPad has been commandeered by my 7 year old as a gaming console, and TV. There are also opportunities for educational uses: math, spelling, BrainPop – but overall it’s a consumption device. And that’s how I use it as well – games, movies, reading, surfing – occasionally email, etc… but never any real production. Not that it’s not capable of doing so – professional records, novels, websites, presentations – all can and have been produced on an iPad, but for me it’s just not natural yet.

So it depends on what you want to use this device for.

Gruber recently posted about Seth Clifford’s experience buying an Android tablet:

Case in point: when I went to Staples, I asked the sales guy for the 10.1 and the first thing he said was
“What are you buying it for?” When I replied, “development”, he said “Ok, because this thing isn’t going to replace a laptop for you”. No problem, I assured him, we’re app devs, and we know what we’re doing.

Then, the manager came over to verify the coupon I had and asked the same question again. Again I replied “development” and he asked “Of what?” rather indignantly.

“Uh, Android apps?” I replied incredulously.

“Oh, ok, because we’re selling a lot of these things, and we get a LOT of them back. People buy them thinking they’re getting rid of a laptop, and they all come back returning them.”

And I agree, most people think a tablet will be a laptop replacement, or something that will increase their productivity, it won’t. Or it won’t for most people. There are just certain tasks that are more difficult – typing without a keyboard (not that you can’t add one) – getting files from one place to another, managing your photos, multitasking (when needed), etc… If there is not an app specifically for what you’re doing, it’s probably not going to increase your efficiency.

Then why is the iPad selling like gangbusters? Because of what it does well, and how it fits so well in the entire Apple ecosystem. I love buying universal apps – where I get the benefit of purchasing once, and getting it across multiple devices. It does the reading and viewing all types of media well – and if you’ve experienced an iPhone, you know what you’re getting. I think it’s a wonderful entertainment device, that can help with work in a pinch.

I also like iPad’s interaction model with it’s focus, and I like that Apple is bringing that full screen, single-app-at-a-time focus to OSX with Lion. Is Apple purposely helping our distracted minds focus on one task at a time? Or are they just taking an interface that seems to work with millions (the iPad), and moving it to the desktop to get people to move up from an iPad at some point? I’d like to think this is Apple’s genius design – helping us get back some focus in our work – removing the distractions – which has been so popular as of late (IA Writer for example).

That brings me to the MacBook Air. I wanted something portable like a tablet, but used not for entertainment, but to create. And in my opinion nothing can beat a Mac for this – no matter how small. And small it is, the 11inch MacBook Air is small, light, powerful, quiet, instant, and besides the whole “it’s a laptop” thing, it’s great for portable, anywhere creating. And that’s what I’m looking for in the end: portable, quick, anywhere creating.

Lion really helps with this, with just my limited experience, it works well with smaller screen devices, again provides that focus, and has a tablet OR desktop feeling, that’s actually pretty nice.

So while I may of flirted with a TouchPad, and had extensive time in with an iPad – I’ll see if this MacBook Air increases my productivity. Like most purchases, we’re looking for something to entertain, show status, or increase our productivity in life – this purchase was about productivity. Let’s see what the iPad 3 has, and then I’ll check back.

Anyone using an iPad exclusively? Can it/did it replace a desktop/laptop?

This week the local Dallas UPA held a Big Design Preview event, where 40+ people got to hear 10 minute previews on some of the great upcoming talks here at the GameStop office.

There was a large turnout – and as always, the Dallas UPA is a great place to meet new people, get introduced to the local User Experience community, and hear from peers on new methods, books, resources, and more.

After the opening mixer, we heard from:

@BrianKSullivan
Designing for Awareness

@digitalcandy
Remove the Suck: Lessons in Product Differentiation

@mattdonovan
Defending Creative Designs

@marcelosomers
Use the Force To Build Your Strategy

@suredoc
Narrate This: How You Can Own Your Own Story

@schubox
Critical Thinking for Creatives: How to Make Decisions Faster

@AdamtheIA
Innovation: Ideas are Just the Beginning

Be sure to check out all the great speakers at this year’s Big Design: http://bigdesignevents.com/speakers

I also previewed my talk:

Game On: Everything you need to know about how games are saving changing the world

Gaming is at a tipping point, never before have games effected our day-to-day lives in such a substantial way. From entertaining yourself on the subway with Angry Birds, to solving the world’s greatest problems – gaming is quickly becoming a mainstream way to explore, communicate, connect, and work.

With “Game On” Jeremy Johnson will take you on a tour of gaming trends – which includes everyone’s favorite gaming buzz words: gamification, gameful, game layer, gamestorming, game mechanics, gameplay, game theory and good old video games. How’s that for a extra helping of games? Let’s top it off with a Call of Duty deathmatch – who’s game?

Along with the preview I handed out a list of books that will go well with this talk:

(Download PDF)

Big Design is this month! Get you’re tickets, and get ready for the biggest meetup of Designers, coders, technologists, and social media gurus in the DFW area!

• Logo
• Signs
• Postcards
• Pushcards
• Kathleen For Council Website
• T-Shirts
• Flyers
• Social: Kathleen for Council Facebook and Kathleen for Council Twitter
• Newspaper Ads
• Etc…

Again, speed was a pretty big factor here, but I I’ve always been interested in trying out some different visual styles when it comes to the standard local political campaigns.

• Kathleen is the only female running, and her name was obviously very different from the others, so we went with her first name.
• Used the purple that Grapevine is known for, and actually a favorite of Kathleen’s
• Used the “talk” style logo that’s popular now, but for us it meant something – the incumbent is not known for responding to citizens, and in general it’s all very closed and secretive – Kathleen really wants to be a voice for the citizens of Grapevine.
• Had a good friend shoot some great professional photos.
• Used a hosted service to get a site going, and again because the incumbent is generally not accessible, we planned on posting the entire campaign – being fully transparent all along the way.
• And quickly using mostly iWorks – created a series of materials that if you live in Grapevine, hopefully you’ve seen.

Here’s some of the materials:

Surprisingly (or maybe not) the incumbent Roy Stewart had for all purposes, really never needed to run before (typical in Grapevine). This incumbent was also invisible to the internet besides a few yellow page listings for an old business he once had. But we’ve made him get online – he’s launched a website (design by Ratio Software), and it looks like they just copied their main site template – I’m assuming they really don’t make websites for a living), and even start a Facebook Fan Page! There have been some pretty big mishaps and “un-reported” dealings, so we put them all together in a targeted mailer – trying to bring some attention to these issues that have been reported in the local newspapers:

And there is a third challenger Deverick Jordan, a young guy whose qualifications included working for his dad, and moving to Grapevine recently (still don’t know why he’s running, no issues, just wanted to run). He has a internet past, MySpace, Facebook, some bad company websites that all look just like his campaign site (what is it about people using the same sites over and over again?), but now also has a Facebook Fan page for his campaign. His printed materials are interesting:

Now you can argue that it shouldn’t be about the design – but the design is selling you, your ideas, and your skills. If you look like a 5th grader lobbying for a 1st place science fair, do we really want you lobbying to bring Fortune 500 into our city? And you could argue that you would hire people to do this once elected, but 1) if your materials are this bad, you’re never going to get it, and 2) do you really not have the marketing sense to hire someone now, for your campaign? A large part of running a city has to do with PR and Marketing – making your community appear better than others to get business, to communicate to your citizens – and strike up a genuine conversation. These are things that local governments really need in spades – and something lacking on the current Grapevine City Council. Out of the the almost 50,000 Grapevine citizens less than 2,000 usually vote. That’s not a community excited about its city government.

I hate to say it, but a designer could make some good money on the side creating ready to go political packages. Local candidates rarely have the time, money, or sense to try to create a cohesive campaign. There’s even one candidate in Southlake using Comic Sans :-/

So if you live in Grapevine Texas – please checkout my wife’s website, follow her, like her, but in the end – vote for Kathleen Thompson come May 14th.