ROI for Twitter

@Twitter. If Twitter wants to bring more ROI, ads can play a larger part to the picture. This is my solution and that is to design all the ads in black n white, full bleed in width for mobile devices for every other 5 tweets or every one vertical swap, there could be an ad, because that gives a visual break to the tweets and help in the reading process.

Right now, the white background with the world cup info is not doing the advertisers any justice as it is too light.

Before
The ad on the top has regress into the background.

After
The ads stands out but not overpowering the rest of the tweets.

Do not think that color is the only way of getting attention. Successful design is how you combine the design elements to make the visual work.

Meet Noah Levin Who Designed the Swipe

Why Rebranding is Needed

You do not need a very complicated website to show the success of your company. That is a myth.

When a website get too complicated, it becomes a turn off and a click off. Customers have no patience to wait for the site load... and to read through everything to figure things out. Help your customers by making things simple.

Your customers can tell if your site is professional done or not. It is very important to promote the right branding image for your company. You do not want your site to be confusing but want at least 3 most important things you want your customers to take away. The rest should be information that leads the customers into your pages gracefully.

The 3 most important things are:
1) Your Brand Feel. For that gives confidence, creates value and professionalism that reflects reliability.
2) What your company does. That includes a logo and a brief description.
3) What you are selling. It could be shown in photos or short descriptions.
and...

The 4th important thing: Offers and Deals
In some cases, like e-commerce sites, offers or deals are important in the first page or in a landing page. This is because you want to make your customers feel valued. And by giving them a discount, they will look forward to more deals in future, checking your site and spreading the word around.

Do not forget that to reach recurring customers. You want to make your site fresh with new information. Maybe to have a new video every month, or the latest content that changes in one of the sections in the front page. That could be a link to new article or a recipe, or an introduction to a famous person, or winning an achievement etc.

Here is a site: BEFORE REBRANDING

Here is a site: AFTER REBRANDING

These are little important things to note when you are evaluating or creating your company's site.
Good Design Is Good Business.
ShamikoDesign.com

Professional Embossing Technique in Photoshop

I always wanted to share how to create the perfect embossing technique to send cards and stationery to "Wow' your user experience.
Here is how to by Shutterstock.

Method:
1. Create your basic design. Bear in mind that during real-world letterpress printing, each color is applied separately, using a different plate, requiring the machine to be reset, making complex, multicolored designs hard to pull off. So letterpress tends to rely on line art, bold graphic elements, and limited color palettes.

2. Lay out your artwork in Illustrator, then bring it into Photoshop and merge the design into one layer.

3. Import two different paper textures, one for the printed, compressed area, and another for the blank background. I chose a handmade looking paper with highly visible tooth to it, ‘Watercolor paper background texture’ (Image ID: 57042394) by Ambient ideas for the background and a second image that also has visible fibers, but is more flat, ‘Paper texture’ (Image ID: 59705827) by R-Studio.

4. Command+click on the design layer to make a selection from the artwork, and mask the pressed paper texture so it covers the same area as the design. Place this behind the design layer. In the layers palette, set the artwork layer Blend Mode to ‘Multiply’. This will allow the texture of the paper layer to show through and give the colors the look of ink soaked into paper. (This is where the lowered opacity on the darker colors comes into play.)

5. Now we are going to begin to build out the indentation effect. Select the design layer and apply an Inner Shadow layer effect (at the bottom of the Layers palette). Tweak the settings until the scale and darkness of the shadow looks right.

6. Copy the background paper layer (the other texture), and place it on top of the design. Command-click the artwork layer to make a selection (same selection you made for the texture layer behind the design). Cut a hole out of the top paper layer. Apply an Inner Bevel (also found at the bottom of the Layers palette). Tweak the settings until the scale and darkness look right.

 7. Add a layer mask to create knocked out areas. These imperfections occur frequently in actual letterpress prints, and will add an additional note of realism to the image. For this I used ‘Great for textures and backgrounds for your projects’ (Image ID: 23399209) by ilolab. Desaturate the texture image and copy the grayscale version onto an alpha layer in the Channels palette. Make a selection based on this alpha channel, then make a layer mask on the main artwork layer and fill the selection with black. Adjust the levels until the prominence of the knocked out areas looks good.

Extra Impact
You can make things more interesting by embossing designs onto the non-inked parts of the of the paper. I added a border of dots around the artwork that I included in the indentation.

 Viola!

Had 6,000 in Counter

My poor counter has crashed. I had 6,000 on the counter. Too bad... I had to write this now to remember. Boo Hoo... I am now using the Blog's counter for safe keeping and not 3rd party sites. Sigh!

9 Principles of Branding

This is a great article on branding by Mark McNeilly - Fast Company.



I also like to summarize this as:
1. Brand is a Feeling
2. Brand is Design
3. Brand is the Wow Factor
4. Brand is Intelligent Design
5. Brand is Strategic
6. Brand is Process Driven
7. Brand is Obvious
8. Brand is Evolution
9. Brand is Change

For whole article, read

Nowadays... more effective websites depend on...

A beautiful website with fantastic design and colorful displays is wonderful, but if you are not making a profit, your hard work will be in vain.  How can you convert your website visitors into profits? There are many ways you can increase your conversions, but it’s important to know where to start.

Before we discuss the top 5 ways to increase conversions, you must understand what action you want your visitors to take. Are you leading them to opt in to your list? Buy a product? Become a Facebook fan? The goal of website conversions is to lead your visitors to an Usended action, so it’s important to know what that action is. Once you know, you can target your strategy to that end.

1) Add Live Chats
2) Add compelling Videos
3) Images of People or related product or story
4) Usability Testing like add page views or counter
5) Telling your story on the first page
6) Call to Action
7) A surprise element
8) A strategy to bring ROI

More on this article.

Live Action On Publication

Using CS5 to html. Watch this... real cool effect.

Why Brands Should Care About Customer Care

From the manufacturing process to the layout of the company website, every aspect of a brand sends signals to consumers that constitute the brand image inside their minds. If even one of these elements is not in line with the brand strategy, it can weaken its integrity.

The findings of this survey indicate that customer service can be a powerful advantage over competitors if leveraged correctly. One company, Zappos.com, discovered this early on. Founded in 1999, Zappos leveraged their customer service to become the top online retailer of footwear, and was bought by Amazon.com in 2009 for $1.2 billion. "Over the years, the number one driver of our growth at Zappos has been repeat customers and word of mouth," writes Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh in a Huffington Post editorial. "Our philosophy has been to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth."

This word-of-mouth marketing costs Zappos nothing. Yet, its volunteer army of brand ambassadors reinforces Zappos' brand signal of exceptional customer service, which in-turn drives sales. "Customers today have unprecedented power to broadcast their experiences — good and bad — to a virtually unlimited audience," says Bush. "This new and growing power raises the stakes for every single service interaction a company has with its customers." 

Source: Article by Andrew Davis: Beneath the Brand

More At >>

Adding Social Media Code

To my all my co-bloggers and web gurus.
This is the code for you to share social media links:
Here is the site to get it from:
http://www.addthis.com/web-button?where=website&type=bm&clickbacks=1&frm=home&bm=tb5&analytics=0

Share

And more examples:
http://www.addthis.com/help/client-api#rendering-preferred-services

Make Amazon banners open in new window ~ Blogger Tips and Tricks

Here are some ways to create a banner from iframe. Thanks Peter@Enviroman.

Make Amazon banners open in new window ~ Blogger Tips and Tricks

Screen Sizes for Mobile Devices

iPad = 1024 x 768 screen res
iPhone = 960x640 for the iPhone 4 and
480x320 for the earlier iPhones

Of course, since you can rotate these devices, the numbers are transpose.

The two iPhones are proportional to each other, but the iPad has slightly different dimensions.

Keep in mind that not all of this area may be usable since is you are going to show the clock and battery meter as part of your app.

Thank you Chris, apps expert from SF Graphics.

Vector Swirls, Swooshes, and Florals: Illustrator Tutorial

InDesgin Page Numbering

Here is this the link to how to do page numbering in Adobe InDesign

http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/InDesign/5.0/help.html?content=WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-7110.html

Anything Flash

This link is great for videos and learning Flash...

See what Flash can do...