A new home page design that expresses the premium quality of the adidas brand went live last week on the company’s U.S. e-commerce site, shopadidas.com.

The clean, distinctively adidas design introduces a series of rotating banners that reflect the company’s current marketing campaigns. The rotating banners automatically refresh the look of the home page, while giving consumers multiple pathways to select products based on gender, brand, sport and product type.

Shopadidas.com also features links for popular searches and top visited locations, as well as three sub-banners that subtly highlight distinct product collections and sub-brands. Other features include a view into the shopadidas Twitter feed, and a simplified site map that makes accessing content easier for the consumer, while improving the site’s visibility in search results.

Isobar’s redesign team worked within a very short timeframe to develop the new design, which accomplishes adidas’ business need of making their products easier and more intuitive for the consumer to access than ever before.

While talking to Jon Mok  (Information Architect at Mindblossom) about finding images under Creative Commons (CC) licenses ( a variety of licenses which allow creative work to be used with limited stipulations) to replace his copyrighted images, in a piece he put together for Nissan Hypercube Contest, I revisited a passion I abandoned after leaving university. That passion is  Open Access (OA)  publishing.

In school I concentrated on furthering the efforts of academic OA, but often researched both sides of creative issue including designs, photos, videos etc. Much like the academic research (though a bit less complicated politically), creative work has been in the centre of a heavily polarized debate on whether everything should be copyrighted or left to influence of public domain and freedom.

While this debate is too lengthy  to tackle in one entry, I found a great example of social media as a venue for a  shift towards a community-centric model with a flexible copyright under Creative Commons License on Flickr. I was surprised at the amount of assets that users were sharing for public use.

Below is a link to check out the Creative Commons page on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

If you are not familiar with the licensing terms Attribution, Nonderivative, Noncommercial, Sharealike, check out the Creative Commons site:

http://creativecommons.org/

It’s a really interesting issue that is relevant to our sphere and most importantly our times. While ideas of open access software and publishing have been around for a long time and are at the root of CC, never has there been so much momentum in proliferation of the initiative. In my opinion it is a combination of technology and new thinking that I am always looking to coin with a sort of umbrella term - ethical, socially inclined, cause-centered, etc.

Well, I may need Karen King’s (Copywriter at Mindblossom)  help finding the term to describe this mentality but CC movement is a worthy of keeping an eye on.

As most agencies do, MindBlossom is composed of a variety of departments who collectively ensure the jobs get done. However, at MindBlossom creative ideas are not limited to the creative department; everyone is encouraged to contribute their creative ideas. A recent in-office competition is an excellent example.

The goal was to develop an iPhone application for an existing client that would utilize unexploited opportunities. Employees were allowed to form their own groups of threes that could consist of any department. Teams brainstormed ideas and assembled a preliminary pitch deck that included initial design compositions. Later each group presented their concept and final designs to the MindBlossom Senior Leadership Team. The competition inspired some truly original great ideas.

The winner’s concept will be polished and pitched to the client. They also won a new iPod Touch, not too shabby for a friendly in-office competition. The winning team consisted of Cassie McDaniel, design, Mark Kosokovits, development and Oila Krivtchoun, information architecture. Their outstanding idea may have never been realized if MindBlossom only encouraged creatives to think creatively.

Without naming clients I’ll just briefly describe two of the ideas MindBlossom teams came up with.

Pizzeria- This team created an iPhone application that offered ordering capabilities, locate the nearest restaurant and games. The game allowed users to create their own pizza by adding topping and putting it into the oven.

Airline- This team created an application that offered tools and information to use to both plan and experience a vacation. The application would continuously provide travelers with upcoming and ongoing vacation deals. Once booked, the application would help with the planning of itinerary and other details.

When clients work with MindBlossom they get the creativity of the entire company not just one department. This approach allows MindBlossom to successfully create original and ingenious concepts that achieve results.