Quarketing

Interesting attempt by Quark at a community site: ilovedesign.com

It massively misses the mark from a digital marketing perspective. It’s too obviously and painfully salesy, rather than building on the community aspect first. Designers are a tight-knit community. Unless they’re already rabidly pro-Quark, this will just naff them off.

Clean design though, and the portfolio will be great once it has a few more uploaders.

What is scary is David Carson’s desktop. Good grief, if that’s true, I bet he doesn’t have a clear desk policy.

Printing’s Alive

Clever video about printing being alive and kicking, and being a vocation.

He makes some great points about why computers can’t compete with the printed word. If I had a print job and they were in my neighbourhood, they’d get the gig.

(Apparently it’s an homage to a set of videos called Regrets which are also well done, if a little dark in their humour. I had previously seen a video micky-taking ad agency video which attacks the truly jaw-droppingly awful agency.com video. This was all from some time ago but priceless.)

Pretty website

This is a pretty website design, not great SEO but you can’t have everything. I’m not a big fan of moving graphics or excessive Flash, but this is strangely relaxing. (Text is too small though.)

I see hundreds of design companies websites and, although they are often passable, it’s rare that they are beautiful. Weird.

And no, our website isn’t beautiful, but it works and we’re not showcasing our design abilities.

$25,000 of free creative software and stuff

I won’t make any jokes about a $ being worth tuppence because, even so, $25k of tuppences is worth a whole heap.

X-Ray magazine is running a free-to-enter giveaway for oodles of creative goodies. Well, free apart from surrendering your precious email address and the usual marketing grab for personal information but that’s because there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Not least, you can win a copy of our software LinkUP Pricing. This is our company blog! Impressively also up for grabs; a copy of QuarkXPress 7, the Canadian edition of QXP 7 (eh?!), the Latin American edition, QXP Passport and some upstart called Adobe Creative Suite.

With all this, you could start your own Design Company. If you happen to be a trained Designer.

Groking Horrible

I love Future Now. They have a great newsletter full of actionable news. They have great books, full of actionable ideas. But, oh my god, do they need a Designer at that company. Or they need to hire one. And a logo designer wouldn’t go amiss either. I’m not sure why, but their website reminds me of the 90s.

Now, our website isn’t a thing of astounding beauty but at least I got a Designer to design it for me. I’m currently reading ‘Call to Action’ – original version with perhaps the worst dust jacket known to man – and note that at least they got it redesigned for the new version.

So I’m wondering. Why exactly do businesses scrimp on design, when there are so many Designers ready to turn you into the next Apple for a reasonable fee. Yes, I know that it takes more than great design to be the next Apple; packaging is important too .

Perhaps there is a better way to find a Designer than I know about. Style is certainly as important as substance online these days, but where do you buy style?

Cut URLs down to size

There are some helpful sites that I am at a lost to see how they ‘monetise’ their work. TinyURL.com being one of them. Or rather, I’m amazed that people are sensible enough not to be too greedy.
This is such a useful site that I use all the time, and have seen being used by countless others, I’m amazed it hasn’t been bought by Google. That said, I suppose they get a pretty penny from the Adsense ads. I really wonder who gives money by those donation buttons. I have once, so with billion’s of hits I suppose a tiny fraction giving a tiny amount makes it a good business.

I’m intrigued how it ‘never expires’ either. Gosh, people are clever.

Got milk?

A beautiful bit of marketing-led-design-programming-triumph: gettheglass.com

Thanks to creativepro for the link.

(We don’t have the marketing term ‘got milk?’ in the UK but it’s such a great tag line that my Husband and I use it all the time. See wikipedia for the history of the Got Milk campaign.)