Saturday Brand-Off

I’m doing work for a lifestyle client who launches this spring. We’re in the early stages. It’s incredibly fun and a little messy. For company founders, creation of a brand can be liberating and frightening. There are enough books, websites, consultants and published articles on branding to help position and name every new product and service for the next 20 years. 
Branding, [...]

Amazon Kindle Redux

Browsing books to buy on Amazon, I suddenly wished for a Kindle — if just for a moment tonight. The ability to download books on a wireless device is brilliant if you want something now.
Remember the hype and Newsweek cover story two months ago? The product was out of stock less than six hours after [...]

5 Tips on How to Pick a Web Design Agency

Does selecting a web design partner or agency give you nausea? Is the idea of ideation funky to you? Are you ready to talk PHP, CMS, PPC, SEO, MySQL, .NET, XHTML or CSS?
Don’t worry.
The majority of corporate marketing VPs, directors and managers (and most owners of small- and medium-sized businesses) have never built a website [...]

Ugly Website Part II

About a week ago, I pointed out the utilitarian website of Berkshire Hathaway, which has about $47 billion cash on hand. The holding company this week acquired a 60% stake in Marmon Holdings for $4.5 billion, proving that once you’re flush — and headed by legendary investor Warren E. Buffett — all you need is [...]

What’s Your Website Say About Your Company?

I had lunch today with a web marketer I hadn’t seen in 4 years. We talked about Web 2.0 (big buttons, huh?), social media (Facebook vs. LinkedIn) and mobile applications (Japan and Europe have it over us). But what we spent the most time on was the intersection of business and web.
Open source platforms [...]

Design Agency No-No

Have you ever questioned a design agency’s invoice? Here’s one that should never have been mailed. A friend of mine in the business received a $60 bill from an agency for its “time” to pull an electronic file and post to FTP site. No CD to burn. No FedEx form to complete. No courier service [...]

Save a Tree, Clip a Branch

OK, two environmental posts in one day. Time to recommend a product that uses natural resources, but in a very nice way: Field Notes. It’s a 48-page mini notebook that fits in your pocket so you can put pencil (or pen) to paper at those important moments away from the desk. Graph paper for easy chart plotting, sketching, note taking.
Although not the first with the concept, a very [...]

Fonts are Beautiful

Do you love fonts? Done well on a printed page or poster, fonts sing. Correctly chosen for web design and body text they hold our attention. Choosing fonts for your design projects should be fun. Do you enjoy the process — or manage client requirements for a short list of tried and true? For a recent project, I looked to [...]