Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) are rapidly and dynamically evolving into technological and informational savvy businesses. The technology and free flow of information creates tremendous opportunities for these businesses, but also creates great risk.

At risk, is their data.  If it is lost, it can be disastrous for a small business owner and all the people they employ.

Symantec’s new SMB site is designed to help SMBs navigate through solutions to protect their critical information. From studies, we’ve found that there is a process by which SMBs evaluate new products. They first strive to understand, then once they’re comfortable with it, they like to try, and then buy.

The new SMB site was designed with this in mind. We’ve designed the site to focus on understanding right up-front. This greatly differs from the previous site where the user was dropped...

We recently launched a redesign of our Symantec.com mobile website.

With the redesign, users can now enjoy a more consistent look and feel on the mobile site as on the desktop version of the site. The visual execution and user interface elements are more closely aligned from web to mobile thereby, providing a more familiar and recognizable experience for users from one form factor to the next.

Some of the main changes include:

• the addition of a quiet site selector at the top of the site which matches our desktop design
• the inclusion of a side-scrolling carousel for site-wide promotions
• visual responses to taps/clicks
• a minimized display of links which contains options to “show more/show less”
• “jump to top” at the bottom of each page to minimize scrolling
• increased leading for improved readability
• larger targets for ease of access

While the site still...

Much like fashion, what's old is new again in tech. The NYTimes had an interesting article on the resurging popularity of GIFs. There has been a fair amount of chatter on the subject of GIFs in the last few months signalling it's renewed trendiness.

GIF was the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year in 2012, and it has apparently also established its historic place in the Museum of the Moving Image.

GIFs or Graphics Interchange Format go way back to the Web 1.0 days and are a relic in Internet years. At the time, GIFs were popular because they were lightweight compared to JPGs, they supported transparency, and they could be animated. Well, none of that changed but competition did come in the Web 2.0 era for GIFs in the form of PNGs (Portable Network Graphics) which do all of the above and more including compressing better.

So, why the resurgence of GIFs? Well,...

Does your company, startup, or agency have a patterns library? ‘No, not yet’ you're thinking to yourself?! Well, a pattern library is a resource for your team/company that can contain design patterns, HTML & CSS, usage scenarios, images, sample links, and more.

When building a design pattern library, it's surprising how much work it requires to build a library and maintain it. Within Symantec's Corporate Design Group, we spent several months gathering requirements, compiling, and putting together a design library which houses various items necessary for consistency, collaboration, and efficiency within a large organization with cross-functional teams. It's a powerful resource an entire team can use to efficiently create consistent user experiences for your website. It cuts-out repetitive design work allowing teams to focus on creating new user experiences, and it creates a common UI language for a team, reducing communication...