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Why Have a Fold, Anyway?

paperSo it happened again. Another client asks to have everything above the fold. Since the term “above the fold” has its roots in newspapers, I can’t help but draw the newspaper analogy.

If the goal was to have everything above the fold, then newspapers wouldn’t be folded. To ask to put everything above the fold on your website is like the newspapers switching to a half-height format.

The next thing I say is, “Yes, we can put everything above the fold, by cutting back on content.” Most clients get that I’m being sarcastic: what’s the point of having a website if you just remove all the content from it?

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Why the Marketing Folks Don’t Get Twitter

whale Ahhh, Twitter. For better or worse, the service has gained major exposure from Ellen, Oprah, P. Diddy, and its most popular user, Ashton Kutcher. Additionally, in a desperate attempt to appear young and relevant, news organizations such as Fox, CNN and MSNBC have jumped on the bandwagon as well, shoving their twitter names down our throats and creating a television format based entirely around reading tweets from their followers. Of course, with this increase in exposure, the marketing folks come pouring out the woodwork: from self-promoting freelancers to corporate twitter accounts, it seems I can’t send out a single tweet without some spambot kicking in and auto-friending me. But how effective is twitter as a marketing tool?

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SEO Isn’t That Important

Defeat Yesterday I got in a bit of a twitter debate regarding SEO and flash-based sites in particular.

While I will agree that flash-based websites suffer from an SEO standpoint (workarounds aside), I don’t always think that matters. And this is where the deluge of “WTF” started- largely from people that weren’t even following me.

I know, I should have expected it. Saying SEO doesn’t matter on the web today (let alone on Twitter, where the SEO folks tend to congregate) is social media suicide. But it’s true. Sometimes.

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Feedly Organizes your RSS Feeds to be More Reader Friendly

screenshot-01OK, I’ll admit it. It took me a long time to get used to the idea of RSS feeds. I liked the concept, I just hated the implementation. More often than not, subscribing to multiple feeds just led to the feeling that I will never catch up on it all.

Sure, I had my iGoogle start page with a few sites I followed: Lifehacker, Slashdot, and a friend’s blog or two, and that worked fine. That is, until I saw Bradley Robb speak at WordCamp in Richmond. In his presentation, he advised bloggers of the importance of RSS, and setting up Google alerts to get the latest news from the topics they’re most interested in. And my whole outlook on RSS changed.

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Tips for New Freelancers in 2009

2009There’s no denying that freelance, no matter the field, requires a certain type of personality. You must be willing to take risks (after all, you never would be freelancing for a living if at some point you didn’t have the guts to quit that full-time job!), but that’s only the beginning. What follows is a list of lessons I’ve learned in 2008. Hopefully they will help you as you begin your new freelance career, or continue your existing one.
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The Handwriting of Type Designers

handwriting_goranThemaninblue is running a story on the handwriting of type designers.  I don’t know about you, but my handwriting barely passes for legible, and I’ve always wondered what some of the greatest type designers’ handwriting actually looks like.

The results are quite varied.  Many make me not feel so bad.  Others make me swoon.

What are your opinions?  Do you think it is important for a designer to have good handwriting in this digital age?

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CSS Hack: Cross-Browser “min-height” Hack

css_hack.png

So CSS can be a bit frustrating from time to time. While working on the reskin of this site, one problem I kept running into was the css attribute “min-height” wasn’t always working. How did I get around it? With a little help from Grey Wyvern (who just so happens to be the #1 Google result for “div min-height”).
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New Skin

I made a new skin and went ahead and launched it. Everything works, though you’ll probably be noticing some heavy changes over the next few days as I tweak out the final details.

Please, let me know what ya’ll think below! Comments, criticisms, browser-incompatibilities, etc. Thanks!

9 More Rules to Designing a Logo

While my last article, which linked to Hal’s blog focused on logo design from a client’s standpoint (what to look for in a logo), today’s post focuses on what to do when you, the designer, are creating the logo.  Some of these I’ve learned in school, some of these I learned from others, but all of these “rules” I at one point disregarded until I learned again- first hand- how important they are, and why I was taught them in the first place.
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7 Steps to Designing a Logo

One of my clients is a copywriter, and has worked in the industry for a damn long time. Well, he runs a blog of his own, and has written up a very good guide on logo design.
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