How many times have you looked at your website and wanted to do an complete redesign? And how many times you said, ok I do it next month when I’m less busier. The truth is, that we just keep postponing the redesign and don’t do anything. But maybe just a little evolution and some small tweaking would do the job and would improve the website. How to decide if you need a complete new design or just some improvement? Here some questions to ask yourself and if you answer the majority with yes you need a complete overhaul.
Is your webdesign “trendy”?
Design is like fashion, there are trends. And the bigger trends of the last couple of years have been grunge, comics, <insert other trend here>. The beauty of the internet is, that it’s evolving fast. But just like in fashion, your site can look old fashioned in a blast. So if you don’t plan to renew the site design every year or so don’t get too trendy on your next design. And if your design is trendy now, get on to the next trend – sustainable web design.
Are you changing (or need to change) your website technology?
You are on a self hosted wordpress installation and want to switch over to a tumblr blog or get over to squarespace to not have to deal with updates and servers any more? It’s a good time for a redesign. You spend as much time to recreate your website on the new services as redoing the whole design. It can be evolutionary at large but take this opportunity.
Is your website just in Flash?
While I’m not a Flash hater and I see many uses of Flash in the real world that make sense, I cannot see the point of having a complete site in Flash anymore. It’s not even ok for “business card” sites with no content and who don’t want to get found in the search engine except for your local pizzeria which name you know but not the telephone number. Many of this businesses want something “flashy” and don’t mind the technology. It’s easier for a designer to please them with a nice Flash animation – and often it’s also quicker to do a Flash site, but you will get in trouble when mobile gets more important and the sites won’t work correctly. So I hope that with the advent of HTML 5 we will get rid of these problems – but if you want to prepare yourself now, get rid of Flash.
Evolution is better
I just picked three questions for the revolution section because there are not many reasons to do complete redesigns. Many times small improvements can have a big impact and help your site. Big sites like Amazon and Wikipedia have gone a radical redesign if you compare them to 5 years ago, but the steps where small. One by one. Testing and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Is learning from nature – making a lot of small variations to experiment what works best costs less “energy” that redoing everything from scratch. The are some instances where your have to revolutionize – but more often than not, evolution beats revolution.
I’ve looked around the web for the correct size of the wallpaper and a way to control what content is visible on a specific home screen. In fact the wallpaper is not scrolled 480 pixels when you change homescreen. After various experiments I’ve come up with a photoshop file where the guides are ready for you to design your own wallpaper for your nexus one. It’s for for you to download. Enjoy.
BTW: After I’ve done all the experimenting I’ve seen that simple math would have resolved it earlier. The whole wallpaper is 960 pixels wide and dividing it by 8 it gives you 120 pixel. This is the exact amount the Nexus One slides the background when you change homescreen.
There are beautiful portfolio sites out there in the web and I wanted to redo my portfolio site because like most of the websites of designers my site was:
Quite out of date
Not very compelling any more
The reasons because my site was like this are easy to find. If you are a busy designer you mostly don’t have time to update your site. In the last years I started a blog and used twitter to engage with my audience, so the time for the portfolio is even smaller. Maintaining a portfolio site is not as easy and there are many big sites where you can upload your portfolio. The question was, what should I do. …click here to continue…
Sometimes the biggest time savers are in front of your eyes the whole time but you can’t see them. Mostly because this great features are so part of the system that nobody actually talks about them anymore.
One of this hidden features is the incorporated calculator in Adobe Creative Suite. It’s not documented that every value field can actually do some basic calculations and transformations. So if you want to expand a rectangle by 5 pt you just select the rectangle, add a “+ 5 pt” in the width field in your toolbar and hit Enter. You can even use different units to do the calculations – cool isn’t it.
The operations you can do is addition, subtraction, multiply and divide. But remember you can make only one operation at a time. Another cool way to use this feature is for font sizes. If you know are doing a poster for example and you know that you need the font to be 5 cm in height you can enter it right away, no need to transform centimeters in points.
There is much talking about the Facebook usernames but none about the Feedburner feed dresses. You could get nice feed dresses in Feedburner right from the start and you might think there is nothing new to know about them. You’re right, nothing new but some time ago I found some trick to get the feed address you like even when it’s already taken.
There is a undocumented feature when you choose your Feedburner feed address – the address supports the forward dash “/”. This means, that you can have a Feedburner Feed with this address http://feeds.feedburner.com/frankie/blog/allitems and the best part about this URL is, that the feed address http://feeds.feedburner.com/frankie was already taken by someone else.
You can use this feature to make your feeds (say for your category or comment feeds) or to get nice looking feed URLs relevant to your business and to reinforce your brand.
BTW: I always suggest that if you are using Feedburner you should also use the MyBrand feature which let’s you use your domain name instead of feedburner.com. It’s wise to let your visitors subscribe to the RSS Feed with your domain in the URL because if for some reason in the feature you want to drop Feedburner or Feedburner closes down you will not lose your subscribers.
Everyone of you uses email, but did anyone of you learn how to write emails? In the old days of the ground mail there we learned how to write a business letter. There are books on how to write business letters with templates for any occasion. Writing a business letter is time consuming and the time it takes to get to the recipient seems endless nowadays. So the email took over. Faster to write, faster to send, faster to receive a response. What get lost? Not only the form. I cannot actually know how my email is displayed and and on what device. But the worst is, that many times we cripple the message because we are such in a hurry when writing the email.
I write every email like I would write an ad. I’m no copywriter, but I do fine enough. And I try to structure it, especially if I write to a person for the first time, following this advertising rules:
Who I am (for first contact)
Reason Why
Unique selling proposition
Call to action
Who I am
Introduce yourself in one sentence – if I get an email from an unknown person I want first of all know who he is.
Reason Why
Right after the introduction tell the people why you are writing them. Studies show that if you give a reason why your are asking for something people will be more likely to comply. You must give a reason why they should continue reading and make them know that it matters to them. How many times I get calls where a graphic designer asks me to send him a logo in a printable format. The first thing I ask is: “What do you need it for?”
Unique selling proposition
This is maybe the trickiest part, because you have to think always in a way that you are selling something – even if you ask them to do something for you. In fact if you ask them to do something for you (send you something, give you a backlink) you are actually selling them this favour they will do to you. You must therefore find a benefit for them and possibly one that doesn’t sound bland. Or it can be a straight “if you do this x for me, I can do this y for you”. Don’t try to sell “x” and pay “x” back (say backlink for backlink) – it doesn’t work. Your a genius if you can write this part in a way that the receiver thinks he profits from doing what you ask him to do.
Call to action
I sometimes wonder how many times I get emails where after reading them I think: “Ok, and what should I do next?” No, really. Check if your email has a call to action in the end where you distinctively tell the reader what you expect him to do. This applies also to “informative” emails, where you just want to inform someone about a specific topic – include in the end a phrase like “Please keep this email in your records for further reference” or “You can delete this message after reading”. Very popular call to action phrases for emails, where the request is actually clear from the central part or where you respond to a request “If you have any further questions, feel free to contact me.”
And now an example
A classic example – you are making a brochure for an event and your client gives you a list of sponsors. You have to include all the logos of the sponsors and you have none. The agreement between your client and the sponsors are usually made at management level and therefore the marketing department doesn’t know anything about it. Not all firms have printable logos at hand so the email must include the right information about what you need and that they might better forward the request to their graphic designer or advertising agency.
Dear Sirs,
my name is Frank Neulichedl and I write you on behalf of
Mr. Smith from ThisIsAfirm ltd. I am currently designing
the brochure for the annual spring concert in Holland Park
and I've been told that your firm is one of the sponsors.
I would therefore include your logo in the brochure and would
ask you to send me a high resolution digital version of the
logo suitable for print in order to display your commitment
in the best way.
Suitable file formats are Adobe Illustrator (.eps, .ai)
or high resolution images .jpg .tif (File size larger
than 500 KBytes).
If you do not have a suitable format at hand please forward
this request to your graphic designer or advertising agency.
Feel free to contact me for any further questions.
Yours faithfully
Frank Neulichedl
...
For further reference on this subject I’ve found a nice resource here:
Better writing – tips, useful phrases and sample letters
Why more and more companies choose to publish their own magazine is a wider topic I will cover in a future post. I will start my new series about corporate publishing by demystifying a myth – corporate publishing is boring. I will show you in this lesson how you can make a graphically stunning article about the introduction of a new window hardware product line by telling a story.
In the last lesson I pointed to the positive effects that studies can have in improving your projects. In this lesson I will show you where to find studies, how to make project and art director relevant conclusions and how to use them in your creative process. I have also included a nice example-tutorial to make it less “dry”.
What is the job of an art director anyway. How is it like? And how to learn to do the things the right way in real life. I will present you here some insights and some tutorials about becomming an art director, not just a graphic designer. Tips & Tricks you won't learn in any school and normally you will have to figure them out yourself. So go ahead and start your lessons.
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One of this hidden features is the incorporated calculator in Adobe Creative Suite. It’s not documented that every value field can actually do some basic calculations and transformations. So if you want to expand a rectangle by 5 pt you just select the rectangle, add a “+ 5 pt” in the width field in your toolbar and hit Enter. You can even use different units to do the calculations – cool isn’t it.
The operations you can do is addition, subtraction, multiply and divide. But remember you can make only one operation at a time. 
Another cool way to use this feature is for 
