A friend of mine was making a point the other day about the difference between art and design.

Paraphrased, it goes something like this:

• Art is when you make something interesting, touching, inspiring or beautiful.
  
• Design, on the other hand, is about solving problems. Design can also be inspiring or even beautiful. But the primary job of design is to make things work. (That's why it worries me a bit when I hear people say "we're going to design a better user experience" and then proceed to talk solely about icons and graphics, which are often more art than design.)
  

Here is a case in point. I like to think our new Voice and Unified Computing pageis nice example of solid design. That is, it solves real problems and addresses real needs of customers. And, there's beauty and inspiration thrown in for good measure, making it artful as well.

Recently, for Cisco Live!, we put together a breezy and informal overview of some of the improvements we've been making to Cisco.com. There are a couple of nifty "hidden secrets" featured on this video, so it's worth a look:



(Note that a couple of features we labeled as "Coming Soon" have already gone live in the few weeks since we recorded this for Cisco Live!)

At Cisco, we run our web sites on templates. It's the only sane way to keep on top of a web presence that encompasses literally millions of pages.

Beyond sanity, templates also save time and money. For instance, we use the template below for some of our seminars and events around the world, and our tech team says it has saved them two days per event setup because everything is ready-made:

The other day I was blogging about how ready-made off-the-shelf templates can be just the ticket if you have a small business and need to update your web presence.

But what if you’re in a much bigger company, and you need to create templates that work specifically for your products and brand, and can scale to all of the countries where you have an online presence?

I realized something that will sound absolutely shocking:

In days of yore, if you visited any design shop, you'd see scores of printouts, sketches, and other design work tacked and taped on walls throughout. In fact, in our design teams at Cisco we still do a lot of this today to inspire each other and share ideas.

And, Web design teams use this same technique to capture inspiration that they may have seen on other great Web sites.

But what happens when you really want to share an idea, and folks are located around the globe rather than down the hall or in the cube next door?

There's a pretty easy electronic way to do the same thing, and we've been using it for a while to share screen shots of inspiring things on the Web.

Not that you would ever watch cartoons at work, but I was noticing that TBS.com has a "boss button" on its site, just like on PC video games.

Here's something worth visiting. From the "Quick Links" pulldown on the Cisco.com home page, you can find Cisco's Communities page, which features some of our more prominent online groups and communities.

A while back,  I blogged about a new embedded search feature we were thinking about building into the Cisco.com site. It is a simple search plug-in that works in Internet Explorer,  Firefox, Chrome and some other browsers..

The way it works is that you can add it to you browser (from pretty much any place on Cisco.com) and then use the search plug-in built into your browser to search Cisco.com.

“Crowd sourcing”—the idea that the greatest ideas come from amongst creative throngs of experts—has certainly come into its own. Companies have been at it several years now, and at Cisco we certainly have several of our own examples range from the I-Prize program to the interesting Heaven or Hell contest where consumers described their ideal (or nightmare) home technology dream.

But two crowd-sourcing examples last week grabbed my attention anew, because each had an unique twist and was accelerated by real-time factors.

Yesterday I was mentioning how our contests in the Digital Cribs area has been called out as an interesting example of crowdsourcing of creative ideas.

It turns out Cisco’s Ken Wirt, our VP of Consumer Marketing, was just interviewed on this very subject at the Aberdeen CMO Summit (for those not initiated in the arts of marketing, by the way, CMO stands for “Chief Marketing Officer.”)

By our talented summer associate, Chris A. Wronski Firstly, let me take a moment to introduce myself. I’m a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design shooting for the first degree in the United States in a service design program. This summer I had the extraordinary opportunity to work alongside the Adaptive Path staff [...]

By our talented summer associate Dane Petersen When you think of a computer, what sort of image pops into your head? Perhaps you see a screen, keyboard and mouse. Maybe you think of a laptop, with its screen, keyboard and touchpad all built into the same unit. If you’re particularly crafty, you might think of a [...]

Earlier this year I wrote about the value of prototyping. Along with my thoughts on why and how to create effective design prototypes, I listed some rapid prototyping tools. My hope was to offer non-technical folks in the UX field the inspiration and the means to create something interactive instead of a standard wireframe and [...]

On Monday, it was announced that Mint.com was to be acquired by Intuit for $170 million. On Tuesday, Aaron Forth, the VP of Product at Mint.com, spoke at UX Week. It was an excellent talk, sharing how Mint is structured to deliver rapid, user-focused innovation (in short: everybody cares about UX + nimble development processes [...]

Peter pointed out this article last week and I’ve been thinking a lot about qualitative achievements. What makes the article interesting for designers is that as we think more about game-like aspects to the interfaces we develop, understanding how to motivate and encourage interaction is important. Applications, websites, devices cannot always provide a quantifiable sense [...]

Do you use Google Calendar, and wish it incorporated a Swiss design aesthetic? Check out Helvetical. Copenhagen’s bike-sharing system, among the first in the world, has announced a design competition to improve it. The Good Enough Revolution is a must-read. It’s not about technology or features — it’s about the experience! “The Don” Norman preaches the Adaptive Path [...]

At last weekend’s Women 2.0 Startup Weekend, Adaptive Path interaction designer Alexa Andrzejewski and her Foodspotting team got $5,000 in seed funding (without even asking for it!). Within Adaptive Path, we’ve seen the evolution of Foodspotting, an iPhone app and website devoted to helping people find the best dishes (as opposed to restaurants) in their [...]

Quick note. Today is the last day to register for UX Week 2009 and receive the discounted early bird price. You can register for single days, or the whole shebang. And if you use the discount code BLOG, you’ll get an extra 10% off! Oh, we’ve just created a one-sheet promotional flyer for the conference which [...]

Smelling a fire and listen to sirens this weekend I realized something was up. Searching traditional media outlets like the local paper and TV stations provided no news. But a quick keyword search on twitter found plenty: an exact address and plenty of photos. I wasn’t tweeting or following a friend, but I was getting some [...]

Songbombing through data flows: http://flowingdata.com/2009/08/28/total-eclipse-of-the-heart-flowchart/ Top ten UX myths: http://carsonified.com/blog/design/top-10-ux-myths/ Social media companies “doing it right”: http://www.netpromoter.com/netpromoter_community/blogs/paul_marsden/2009/08/20/social-media-10-brands-doing-it-right Veen on Cargo Cult Design mentality: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/08/ignite-show-jeff-veen-on-great.html Kate at BayCHI: http://chi.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4165.html Design iteration process: http://www.taptaptap.com/blog/convert-design-evolution/ Tiny sketch: http://openprocessing.org/collections/rhizome.php LG Islamic phone: http://www.experientia.com/blog/lg-launches-islamic-phone/ Do want MakerBot!: http://makerbot.com/ Personas shows you how the Internet sees you: http://personas.media.mit.edu/