Blog comments are fantastic. They provide a way for writers and readers to interact, thereby building a community, and sometimes even friendship. They’re also great for SEO purposes as they add fresh content to a page with targeted keywords, assuming you can keep the discussion related to the post’s topic. Therein lies the catch. There are a lot of spammers out there just itching to squeeze in unrelated links and advertisements. No matter what you do, spammers will keep mutating and haunt you like a bad virus, but you can minimize their effect on your blog by doing the following: (more…)
The other day I came across an interesting website with tons of factual information about relatively unknown world-class designers that have created brand identities that have shaped the world around us. It got me thinking about some of my own favorite logos, so I did some research to find out who created them.
I’m going to give you some advice that will rock your world. If you’re a web designer, you should design your resume. *GASP*
All kidding aside, the importance of impressing people with your resume’s visual appeal, especially online, is important. Here are some tips on styling a resume so it conveys your skills and is pleasing to the eye.
Keep in mind, when I say design, I don’t necessarily mean having flying planets, sparkles and grunge effects all over it. That would be annoying and if that’s what your resume looks like right now, I strongly encourage that you remain employed until you get a chance to fix it.
What I mean is paying attention to three critical things: typography, layout and accessibility.
The other day a friend came across a Myspace page where her modeling photography was being displayed as someone else’s work. She did a double take and then looked again, yup still there and the person had even gone to to the trouble of cropping out her logo and using his own. The audacity!? She wasn’t sure what to do, the guy wasn’t directly profiting off her work, he was using it in his portfolio. When directly emailed about it, she never got a response but after a few days, when she returned to his site the pictures were mysteriously gone leaving us to wonder if any of the guys work was his own. Whatever the case, it worked.
In this case the person was out of the country with no way to actively get in touch. Even if the person had been here, sometimes it’s more costly and time consuming than it’s worth to track down everyone stealing your content.
Photoshop is a tool that is versatile far beyond what many of the programmers can ever think of. When they introduced the smart object into the CS series it revolutionized the way I do things, here’s why it should do the same for you.
One of the most frustrating things on the web is when you think you’ve found what you’re looking for, and after you click on the link to that page, you get an error saying “404 Page not found”. We’ve all seen that too many times, haven’t we? The default style is the error information on a plain white background, but it can vary according to certain ISPs. It’s not very useful, and simply hurts user experience, making us want to navigate away to another site altogether. Now, imagine if the broken link was on your site. You can let your visitors walk away, or you can do something about it. If you have access to your server, you can create Error 404 pages can are useful to people, and even a little fun. (more…)
I recently developed a new logo for a social networking community. The site needed a logo so I began work right away. Here are a few tips that came to me after completing the task.
There’s a buzz spreading through the web design community like a virus. It’s called sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement). What is sIFR? Essentially, it’s a technology that replaces short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in the typeface of your choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems.
It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. Here is the entire process:
There’s been an explosion of resource, recruitment and tutorial sites, in Part 2 we continue our review of the biggest and the best of them, analyze their brands and make suggestions for their growth. Make sure you read Part 1 before continuing.
Founder(s) – Unknown History – PSDTUTS is a blog/photoshop site made to house and showcase some of the best Photoshop tutorials around. We publish tutorials that not only produce great graphics and effects, but explain in a friendly, approachable manner. About the Brand – A strong thematic cohesiveness throughout their family of websites. Alexa.com Ranking – 14,664 Other Properties – audiojungle.com, flashden.com Ideas for Growth – Their team has successfully created a design and tutorial blog, the audio search engine and a monetized flash resource site. They should take the business model they used for Flashden.net and apply it to resources for AfterEffects or Premier. Alternatively they could create a portal for scripts like Hotscripts.com
There’s been an explosion of free design resources made available thanks to a number of sites that offer freebies and related tips. In this two part in-depth look, I examine the biggest brands in design blogs and suggest what they can do to make their brands even bigger and better.
This list was compiled and ordered by relevancy as well as their influence on the design community at large. I looked at each groups branding, site design, logo design, the strength of content and resources offered. I also looked at the number of properties each had. Alexa rankings were used to estimate site traffic although a high Alexa ranking did not always equal a higher ranking on this list. I did all this so as not to appear to be biased towards any particular blog or group.
