I came into work a little bit late yesterday only to find the office buzzing with excitement and smiles everywhere. Did we land a big sale? Did someone win the Lotto? Not exactly…

Somehow a bright yellow condom (out of the wrapper) made it on to the floor of the art department. It appeared out of nowhere and theories of how this little bit of sunshine entered our domicile were rampant most of the day.

Going backwards for a moment, our people are predominantly thinkers or administrators so it is a pretty quiet environment most of the time, with our team channelling their energy into producing highly creative solutions for our clients marketing requirements. A pretty subdued bunch for the most part and very focused on meeting daily commitments.

Back to our story… I’ve never seen so many smiles or such a light atmosphere in our office ever. Spirits were over the top and so were the scenarios people came up with regarding our mysterious visitor. Now I’m pretty sure we don’t have any inter office romances and at the end of the day, the theories of choice were that the bright yellow condom hitched a ride on the bottom of someone’s shoe or we have a silent prankster in our midst. But how and why isn’t really the point…

We’ve spent thousands of dollars this year creating a more conducive environment for our ad agency to reside in. Lots of meeting rooms, loft style open ceilings, soothing colours, large whiteboards, pool tables, big screen TV’s and video games. It appears all we had to do to achieve the desired effect was spend a buck on a bright yellow condom!

The morale of the story in marketing as in life is that almost always the best solutions are simple. If they’re not staring us straight in the face, look around or take a quick glance down, the answer is there somewhere waiting to be discovered.

Years ago, a friend of ours gave me insight into a key process behind business innovation. Essentially to get creative solutions to a particular challenge, you gather a diverse group of people willing to engage in a divergent exercise where every idea (at first) is a good idea. To arrive at this thinking you might be asked by the meeting chair to take on the personality of someone famous or pick an object from a box of miscellaneous items to help you come up with some thinking outside the usual.

When you’ve exhausted all the ideas in the room, the next step is then to converge on THE IDEA, the one that the group collectively can see to fruition. This is where the 6 thinking hats come in. Edward de Bono is a well known author with the agency world and divided thinking in to 6 key areas that collectively can improve the quality of your decision making by spotting issues and opportunities that come to light through alternate perspectives.

In short, the White hat is the reference thinker, the Red is more intuitive, the Black an eternal pessimist, the optimist is Yellow, the creative Green and the Blue is all about process. There are no bad hats but you need to recognize what colour is needed at what time in the process. By using backward/forward questioning you then determine the action items to achieve your ultimate goal. As a quick example, if your goal is to achieve 20% sales growth you pose the question- We’ve achieved 20% sales growth, what had to have happened? The answer might be we added 10 sales people. Okay we’ve added 10 sales people, what had to have happened? The answer might be we closed down a poor performing warehouse to free up funds, and so on…

Our company puts a lot of effort into the divergent/convergent process and it has enabled us to create fresh thinking and targeted messaging for each customer’s marketing. So far, after 6 years on this journey we are able to keep delivering great results and “thinking inside the hat” is a big part of it.

When developing fixed width websites, there was always some kind of width standard in place. Back when a majority of users were using a 800×600 pixel screen resolution, we would design our websites at 770 pixels. All of the fixed width sites that we develop now are at 960 pixels (for 1024×768 resolutions), and it will probably stay that way until later this year, were we’ll re-evaluate at what new standard we will develop websites for. According to W3Schools and NetMarketShare, there are still 20%-25% of users out there that utilize a 1024×768 pixel screen resolution, and anywhere from 1%-3% that utilize 800×600. In fact, 1024 by 768, is the leading screen resolution according to NetMarketShare. So when developing a website you don’t want to alienate over 1/4 of your visitors by having them do side scrolling in order to get to content. We know that 1024×768 is in decline. Around the same time next year, there will be probably less than 15% of people utilizing 1024×768 or lesser resolution.

So the question becomes, what is the next “standard”?

If you had asked me this question a couple of years ago, I would have answered without hesitation, as the next resolution for 4:3 aspect ratio screens after 1024×768, is 1280×1024. Things were a bit simpler to figure out back then. Over the past decade, the most common screen resolutions were 640×480 (VGA), 800×600 (SVGA), 1024×768 (XGA) and 1280×1024 (SXGA), that is, until widescreen (16:9 aspect) monitors came along. Along with the widescreen monitors, we saw an explosion of portable devices such as laptops, netbooks, tablets and even cell phones utilizing the new aspect ratio, and varying  screen resolutions such as 1280×800, 1440×900, 1680×1050, 1366×768 and the list goes on.

So when it comes to developing the next standard consider a width that is divisible by 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, and 16. A year ago, Cameron Moll gave several suggestions for the next ideal width on his blog, being most comfortable with 1080. This is the most likely resolution that we will switch to.

Keep in mind though, that not everyone will surf the web at full browser width, so the 960 pixel standard may stick around for a while. In addition to this, many big sites such as Yahoo!, Youtube, CNN, and the majority of corporate websites are still designed for 960. If you wish to make your website design slightly more unique, you may want to experiment with unique backgrounds that extend the limitations of the 960 design space. In the meantime, we just might upgrade to 980, which is the upper width limit for 1024×768.

Happy Web Designing!