Life
Imitating
Design

If you want to give your brand some personality and broadcast your expertise to a busy audience, recording your own podcast is an often overlooked and easy-to-do medium.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Medhedzz, Hats with Heart, is a new service providing top quality scrub hats to the medical profession. Proceeds from the sale of every uniquely designed and crafted hat go to Health 4 Humanity, a charity supporting doctors travelling to developing countries.

Deb Pogson is am operating room nurse with a passion for sewing with beautiful fabrics. She makes all hats to order to give surgeons the chance to show off their personality and individuality, even when hidden underneath scrubs!

Visit their brand new site at medhedzz.com. It is built on SiteCM, the professional and support content management system and features Simple eCommerce, an online purchasing solution, both from ideaLEVER.

You have a passion, and you turned it into a business, because you knew you would be one of the Chosen Few who get to do what they love doing all day long.

But instead, you’re wasting time wrangling with WordPress, hating HTML, vexed by vectors and annoyed by alliteration.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Mother’s Day can be a challenge. Sure, I could just run to the nearest big store, grab some flowers and a card, and be throwing the things out in a week. So this year I wanted to do something different, better and unique.
» Read the rest of this entry «

A healthy relationship is often about realistic expectations. What do you expect from a graphic designer?

Hiring a designer, or anyone to join your business, can be a challenge. Different people work with different workflows, have different personalities and different viewpoints. Different people communicate at different levels in different ways. I can’t count the number of emails that have contained the phrase “I’m sorry, I thought you meant…” or “I was under the impression…”. Somewhere somebody made an assumption and something got missed.

Because of these, and other differences I thought it would be a good idea to ask an open question to anyone who has considered hiring or has hired a designer, whether for short term projects or as part of an ongoing marketing plan. Rather than looking at things from a graphic designer’s point of view, it would be good to hear things from the other side of the fence.

So what do you expect? Do you prefer designers to provide all the ideas, or do you prefer to be part of the process? What has worked? What has gone wrong? What kinds of things would you like to see graphic designers doing that perhaps they aren’t? How have things changed over the past few years? If you’re a designer, tell me some of the things that you’ve been asked to do that you thought were not part of your job description but helped the project move along.

Tell me your stories … spill the beans!

NBurman Design is going through some changes – most notably the website itself. It’s all part of a strengthening and refocussing. More about that later. » Read the rest of this entry «

A regular column by author, Simon Rose.

Insider Knowledge and Consulting the Experts

As a copywriter, I’m often asked how I can compose copy and write about subjects that are not within my realm of expertise? As an author of novels, you could ask the same question about fiction. After all, how can you write about time travel, other dimensions or incredible journeys to distant alien planets without actually experiencing it? I’ve written a number of historical novels and although I’m a history major, I still always need to conduct research to get everything just right. This is also the case with my many non-fiction articles, which are not always on topics with which I’m overly familiar. Consequently, I must undergo a fair amount of reading before commencing the articles. The same principle applies to web copy, in that you have to get the facts straight in order to give your client the best possible impression and exposure on the web.

I always obtain as much information as I can from the client at the outset of the project, even down to the smallest details of their operation, which they may sometimes have overlooked. More importantly, I attempt to determine just what they are looking to promote in order to truly set themselves apart from their competitors. However, no matter how much research I undertake into various types of extremely complex surgical procedures, the processes of oil and gas exploration, the workings of car engines, real estate, animal health, landscaping, agriculture, insurance, the financial markets, or whatever the company’s business involves, it is still ultimately up to the client to perform the final review of the text before their website actually goes live. Let’s compare it to perhaps ordering some new business cards. In most cases, the printer will provide you with a proof, but if you give your approval and then later discover that your e mail address or phone number is incorrect, the error lies with you, not with the printer. Similarly, the client hires a copywriter for their expertise, but the client is the expert in their own profession and has to sign off on the website’s copy at the end of the process, ensuring that all the technical, legal and intricate details are correct.  

When your website doesn’t seem to be getting you the return on your investment that you had hoped, it is possible that your expectations were a little amiss. It is often said that a website is not a like the baseball diamond in Field of Dreams – you cannot simply ‘build it and they will come’.

Think of your website as a purebred racehorse.

You are the Owner.

You’ve invested in the horse, but there it sits (or stands) in the stables, looking beautiful and full of potential. It’s fit, well fed and ready to go. But you aren’t making money. It’s a fantastic horse, and all your friends tell you so, but it’s not doing its job.

Your site needs to show up in search engines using the keywords that you or your designer have chosen and your site has been built around. One of the most important and effective ways to get your site noticed is with backlinks, or links on other sites pointing to your site. Social media is one way to do this – Twitter links are indexed by Google and count as links to your site.

The Trainer.

Owners who aren’t going to train their own horse hire a trainer. In the case of the website, this could be the web designer or developer. They know your site already, and  probably have a good grasp on marketing your site, using search engines and choosing keywords. If your website guru doesn’t do these things, find one that does. At the very least, you should have a list of keywords that you or someone else can use to promote your site.

The Jockey.

The jockey is the one who does the work! Promoting your site is not the job of a web expert or a marketing specialist, in the same way that you wouldn’t hire a lawyer to collect your dry cleaning. A virtual (or real) assistant can help create inbound links by posting on other sites, take care of your Twitter account, update Facebook and write new blog posts for you, leaving you free to do what you do best: running your business. With a modicum of supervision (it is recommended that Tweets and posts be approved before posting) an assistant can, for a moderate outlay, promote your site, gain inbound links and get you the publicity you need online.

Where is your horse? Still in the stables, or helping your business win the online race?

*Photo credits

Anyone who owns a laptop will tell you that the portability is a beautiful thing. You work at home, on the bus, at Starbucks, in bed, in the bathroom… it’s great. But if anything should happen to your beloved ‘book, you suddenly feel isolated. Chained. Like ‘those’ people. You know, the Laptopless People.
Recently I joined the sorry crowd that is sans-laptop. My MacBook Pro suddenly suffered from failed logic board and portability was no longer in my life, except for my iPhone.
So, I set out to see exactly how much I could do with my iPhone. One of the problems as a graphic designer going from a fully functioning laptop for portability to depending on an iPhone is the shortage of apps. That is, real apps. Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Transmit, Illustrator… Basically, everything design related.
But I found a selection of apps that have enabled me to login, download and create webpages, create photographs and upload them to the website (after editing, resizing and cropping) and make changes to any existing website. I now had a real, and practical way to be a designer on the road. Print design is another story, but I’m not sure I would want a pre-press app on a hand held screen.

As an experiment, to see just how much I could live without a laptop, I created a website using nothing but my iPhone. You can see it here: Built on iPhone.

Here is a list of apps that I’m using for web design.

Here are some apps that I use for other business duties:

These apps (along with the phone and text messaging) help me run business while on the road, at the coffee shop or just away from home for whatever reason. Obviously there are a lot of tasks missing – my iPhone is not a laptop – but on the upside, I get to actually spend time with my family while on holiday!