Friday, the 23d of November

23.11.2012

Slogan of the day: Pixel Art

- Yesterday I sent my super-trooper design to my boss, and now get the feedback. Not the one I was expecting - no enthusiasm or exaltation - but I'm not the one who will complain of the lack of appreciation. Anyway, some of his critics hit in the vulnerable spots: the overall look of my yesterday variant was a little busy and the color scheme was a little out of nowhere and disoriented. So today i played with different colors, font sizes and styles, etc. I also started the second page, but due to my inattention some of the results were lost and I was not able to finish it before the end of the day. That would be a matter of concern if my boss was paying some attention to my progress. But he wasn't - so I took myself easy and polished fist page design as well as I could, to the point where I zoomed to it on a maximum and hunted all unnecessary pixels I could find. Pixel Art is a very interesting practice, I must say. There is a sort of feeling like you are solving some mathematical theorem or constructing a building from square standartisized blocks. The feel of completeness, integrity and wholeness - like completing a line of blocks in Tetris - overcomes me every time I make a line of color look smooth by adding or erasing some little pixels to it.

- My Indian colleague asked me on Skype, why Christmas is in Jan for us, when the rest of the world celebrates it on 25th Dec? I was very touched by this question, because it offered me an opportunity to share some knowledge of my cultural tradition with a person of the entirely different ethnic region, sharing different point of view. I explained her, that it is because some of the countries that belong to the eastern orthodox Christian tradition (Russia, Ukraine, Bielarus, Georgia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, etc. are amongst them) Christmas is marked by the old Julian calendar, and December 25 on the Julian calendar corresponds to January 7 on the internationally used Gregorian calendar. Conversing with her was really enjoyable.

Thursday, the 22nd of November

22.11.2012

Slogan of the day: Designing is inserting logic into space

- Designing the brochure take all day. Thankfully there were no other tasks or concerns I should deal with, so I was left alone with my thoughts and photoshop layers. After I came up with background design this Tuesday I thought that putting all the contents into it would be disgustingly easy. I was wrong - when it came to putting the contents (texts, pictures, etc.) I realized that finding the logic for its organization IS the main task of this work. At first, too saturated colors of a background distracted me. I was fruitlessly trying to somehow put text and contents inside those two blue twists, and could not make them look organically. I was thinking that the background is my main organizing structure, a carcass of a sort, when in fact it was just an unostentatious visual tone, like a kind of jazz melody that you hear while sitting in a bar or restaurant and having a conversation with a friend. The main focus must be on the conversation, since it is the reason that motivated you to visit a bar in the first place, jazz melody in the background is just comforting you unconsciously, making your stay here more pleasant and leasurous. Same was with the visual design of the brochure: to really have the needed effect my super-awesome design must stay almost invisible, only making view sliding more comfortable and pleasant.

- With competing the background and pushing it on, well, the background, I suddenly understood how roomy my brochure can actually be and how much unorganized space I have to deal with. I've started to experiment with it. My first steps were very vague and clumsy. There were stupid blue boxes all over the place - and then I added orange for more diversity, and then... Don't remember how it all went up, but at some point I realized that some general logic should cover every one of the design elements, or else they will fall apart and look very unpleasant and eclectic. I experimented with gray banners for the heading, and find out that with the little colored block in near the page edge it will look much more consistent and convincing. I don't even know exactly why: maybe because with it the banner looks like a kind of menu or option that pops up when you push that little bright colored buttons near the top or side of a web page with, say, live chat option? Anyway, the banner started to look just the way I wanted, and that is - ORGANICALLY, or NATURALLY, if you will. This was my revelation of the day, and later I summarized it in a single phrase: designing means adjusting any kind of logic to any kind of space. In my case the space was visually perceiving blank of the brochure, but what was the logic? Logic is not something you look at (logic doesn't care about variables - that is why even the most absurd phrases, if they are constructed logically correct, can be nevertheless be truthful), rather it is something that makes you look at something in one way or another. It's a principle of seeing, perceiving and making sense of something. And it is the main thing in design.

Tuesday, the 20th of November

20.11.2012

Slogan of the day: "A brochure is a microcosm of your business" (from http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Brochure-That-Looks-Professional)

Fig. 1

- Brochure-making job appeared to be a very pleasant kind of work to do - all thanks to my practice in poster design during my student days (I was designing film posters, to be particular), and my overall Photoshop experience. The idea for the background design haunted came to my head yesterday: instead of boring horizontal heading lines, no gradient and little to no composition, i decided to apply more elegant, soft curved (since our company is dealing with rotary equipment I thought it was logical) and gradient design. My first design came out of tried to expand its basic elements (that is - two curves forming a circle) to the brochure as a whole. The result was not quite as good as I've expected (fig. 1)

Fig. 2

Also pretty creative, it was never near neither official, nor readable. And this was the main requirements my design was to meet. So I went to plan B and, with the help of some simple tools like select rectangle / oval and fill (gradients was the layer effects), made it look like this: Also pretty creative, it was never near neither official, nor readable. And this was the main requirements my design was to meet. So I went to plan B and, with the help of some simple tools like select rectangle / oval and fill (gradients was the layer effects), made it look like this (fig. 2)

The big deciding point was the image of the propeller in the center. Firs of all, appropriate image was selected and carefully converted. Originally it was a photo of some computer cooler:

but I contured it, filled selection with monotone color and slightly changed blades shape. This clip-art-like image has been just as abstract and non-distractive (perfect for a background) as I wanted it to be. But the problem occurred when it was put into my brochure background. Originally I wanted the propeller to look slightly like the Turbine gemedesign company logo:

Fig. 4

That is tilted and turned into 3/4. But when I tried to leave it as it is, I suddenly liked it much better than how I imagined it (fig. 4)

Fig. 5

I reduced opacity almost to a minimum - the less distractive it looks, the better. My Beloved said, that with the propeller left untouched the whole picture resembles an eye. It was totally unexpected and spontaneous surrealistic side effect of my design decisions, but I found it really creative and stylish. So I stuck with it and that's what I came up with as a result (fig. 5).

- Trying to find the most appropriate font for the brouchure I stumbled upon this article: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Brochure-That-Looks-Professional, which I found very interesting. It is a careful and pretty thorough popular-science research, which goes in a very deep detail about a particularly design-related question: what fonts are better - serifed or non-serifed? Amongst all the "5 easy steps to do design" and "Follow our out-of-nowhere rules to be an absolute design guru" articles that floods the web, this one stands out and should be definitely read by those, who are interested in serious design study.

Friday, 16th of November

16.11.2012

Slogan of the day: scavenging on Sandy's victims

- The fact that in Anglo-Saxon tradition calendar week starts with Sunday is somewhat frustrating. My Indian colleague requested me to send her full calendar of Ukrainian holidays.

- We decided to center our next-conference-invitation e-mail around that hole Sandy thing, and I was said to write the appropriate text. Doing a little research i discovered some interesting facts: like how actually big (in terms of casualties) was this hurricane after all (it was pretty big, also number of victims - 199 - was never near to that of Katrine in New Orlean), and how it was mysteriously connected to Obama's reelection on the second term of presidency (New-Jersey

governor, Romney's big supporter, turned to Obama after the disaster).

- I used SemRush just once, and now it's everywhere - every contextual generated on-site commercial is about registering pro or guru account.

- After all, it's a question of taste and our self confidence. Some % of viewers will be in favor, some % will think that we are cashing in. You either love it, or hate it - that's a very bold strategy, but seeing how they all wanted "something new", "something that will stand out", then why the hell not to try? After all, it's not like we try to use the grief of hundreds of people as a marketing tool to attract customers - maybe we do really aware and do really care? Maybe we don't care about our income (well, obviously we do, but that's not the point) and charity to those who are in need is our only goal? Why there is always someone in need, why didn't you support them before? I'll tell you - 'cause we were blind before Sandy came and were not even realizing how greedy and selfish we were. We were blind in the same way as New Jersey governor Chris Christie was blind and supported Romney before Sandy struck. It's our duty, our call now to realize how wrong we were and try to somehow change the situation for better. And that is the only reason why we are offering you to pre-order our next year training courses and by doing this donate some money to Sandy victims rehabilitation.

- Anyway, Sandy variant was rejected. Someone thought that it was too risky, and no one wanted to take those risks. Shame, 'cause i worked really hard to write this little hypocritical e-mail. It was my little masterpiece - but who cares if our possible financial stability is on stake?

Thursday, 15th of November

15.11.2012

Slogan of the day: SEMRush

- Some tips about marketing graphical design that proved to be useful:

1. Use only pictures that are absolutely 100% legal. That means - are in corporate property of your company / drawn by yourself
2. Make all text fonts similar. Avoid "cluttering" fonts, such as Times New Roman, and use only 1-2 text styles (one small and one big, or one bold and one italic, etc.)
3. Be more soft in your marketing messages. Words like "buy", "purchase", "now", etc. are too strong to your potential clients tender years. Better replace them with "leverage", "try", "today".
4. Be logical. Both graphical and textual parts of the advertisement should should be connected to each other and have some sort of narrative structure or logic. For example, if text is "having problems with X?" then it will be more convenient if the supporting image will be a graphical illustration of the problem, or an image of person having trouble with X. Also if the "catch" is "having trouble with X?" then at the end of your little advertising narrative should be some kind of answer or hint, that could show potential customers that the decision is your product. For example: "Then use Y!" or "Then contact with us and we will help you!".

- There this web service called SEMRush that is said to be highly accurate in website researches. I checked it and was not disappointed - by the entering of competitors domain and clicking "search" it gave me a lot of very useful data, like competitors keywords, traffic, trend statistic, etc. It was actually promising until I found out that only 20% of acquired info are available for free. In order to get the whole pie and to be able to export the results to excel I need to pay 400$+ something to them monthly. Considering my bosses miserliness I will probably never get my hands to this data, without which my masterpiece keyword-research would not be completed...

- SemRush was useful in two ways: first, it allowed me to include in the list some of the competitors traffic-generating keywords that I've overlooked before. Second, it did provide some data about exactly how much traffic (in %) some of these keywords are generating. Some of the data that SEMRush offers, though, proved to be incorrect (Google rank of competitors websites was a complete mismatch to Rank Check results, which i tend to trust more), so it's a questionable data resource anyway. 

- Today I've received e-mail from Jesus Christ. Some antisemitic, fanatical and intolerable fundamentalist Jesus Christ. I think I'll keep it for history (and for possible miracle proof). 

- EMERGENCY TASK: I was told to make an email invitation to the next big exhibition-symposium that we are taking part in. Once again, the seemingly easy task proved to be a little challenge. Since our popularity and sailings are dropping, my boss decided to refuse our old safe and plain "come visit our booth" strategy, and wrote an "attack" text, that was sharp and tended to "hurt the nerve". We chat a little and decided to include three points in our invitation e-mail:

• Sharp and edgy problems that, according to my boss, every project manager is facing
• Our solutions to these problems and some fake numbers from the last exhibition invitation
• Promise to donate 10% of our income to the victims of Sandy superstorm, if our clients will preorder our services for the next year (this branched from my idea to somehow tailor the disaster to our marketing strategy)

Wednesday, 14th of November

14.11.2012

Slogan of the day: Shortening the list

- Checking google rank on different keywords proved to be a very effective and fruitful tactic: not only does it reveal your/competitors website position in the most influential website top, but it also allows you to get new insights about who your competitors are, how many of them are there and what are their strategies. Since I've started this seemingly endless activity over a week ago, I have broadened our competitors list and discovering potential customers all the time. A week ago this list featured only ten names and URLs, now it's more than 20 of them, and more potentially coming.

- Shortening the list is hard, but absolutely necessary work. The main criteria for me is word overlapping: for example, if there are some overlapping words, like "zzz" and "the zzz" or "zzzs", than the last two of them will be deleted. That works with one exception: if google ranking / annual visits columns show different numbers for the seemingly overlapping words I save them both. For example, if for "zzz" word we have #1 google ranking and one hundred visitors a year, and for "zzz of yyy" our ranking is #10, but our competitors ranking is high, I will probably leave both words as they are for further, even more precise consideration. I will do so because apparently "zzz" and "zzz of yyy" matches for two different users request's. Users looking for "zzz" will most likely to find us, and that is good, but we must not forget - somewhere out there there are also users looking for "zzz of yyy", and we will lose them if not enough attention will be paid for the appropriate word. Sure, their numbers are much less than of "zzz" looking users, but they are, and that is the thing that matters most.

- Keyword list optimization continues, as I specify groups in the following way: now group name consists of Topic (this is usually name of specific area that is in our technical competition) and, through a hyphen - Website Section (or sections - since some of the words with broader meaning fits to several sections) that keyword fits the most.

Tuesday, the 13th of November

13.11.2012

- Started the day with adjusting new keywords (found yesterday through Google Analytics) that our visitors use to my keyword list. Now it features more than 350+ words. Too big - so after acquiring some additional data (year global searches, time per visit, our/competitors rank) I'll clean it up and try to make shorter.

- Note on Year visits statistic: useful factor, but somewhat imprecise. Since the google rank changes pretty rapidly and depends on many different factors (media coverage, season events, etc.), and number of visits assumably depends strongly on google rank factor, high/low Year visits number does not necessarily mean that particular keyword is efficient or not. Much precise would be to show the 12 month changing curve or diagram, that could illustrate changes in keyword popularity depending on year period. But that would make my already enormous table even bigger, so I'll reserve this idea for some other time.

 Example to illustrate my words: key word "zzz" generated 20 visits to our website this year. That would probably mean that we have pretty good google rank of this word, right? Wrong! According to Ranck Check we are not even in the top 100 with this word. But how is it possible?! My suggestion is that a few months ago we actually had a good rank position with this word (probably due to some advertising campaign or new published press release, etc.) but then the wind changed and we lost this rank, but traffic, generated with "zzz" word were nevertheless calculated by Google. So I think I'll try to be as careful as possible with this parameters and will not rely on them too much.

- Seemingly simple task - to design a flyer for a magazine, that would advertise some of our products - turned out to be not so simple. The images I selected for this flyer was good, but they were not OUR'S. I was not allowed to use them because of possible copyright-violation. My boss said that he could buy pictures of similar products from iSharephoto, if I could find and identify them with the help of the engineer. iSharephoto proved to be pretty misery - there were only two more-or-less appropriate photos, and even they did not feature the product we needed to advertise, clear enough. Then I spent some hours digging in my predecessor's work files and finally finished with some crappy, low dimension and scetchy pictures. But these pictures were OUR'S - that meant no one will have to worry about it's legalness. I did what I could to make it look like something presentable and ended up with nothing-special-but-not-that-bad picture. It's pity, that due to such limited resources aesthetic values of the end product have to suffer...

Monday, the 12th of Nowember

12.11.2012

Slogan of the day: Eureka!

- Todays top priority: to calculate annual (or yearly?) visits to our website through the keywords from the list I already have

- After literally hours of fruitless research I was almost done, ready to surrender and get what is coming. I read a ton of articles on the subject, even posted a question in Google+ - nothing. It's like it was some sort of conspiracy - everybody, every stinking SEO guru was avoiding this theme like it was nothing at all. And i was asking for such a small thing! How to know a year keyword traffic for website - that's all! Thankfully, salvation came in the shape of my beloved one with her angelic voice and tendering laugh. I raised my eyes above, to admire her divine beauty, and suddenly noticed a single dialogue bar in Google Analytics. It asked me to choose the date range - and when i choose "from November 2011 to November 2012" it finally gave me the results. Sweet, precious results that i was dreaming about for god knows how long. And that was it, actually. Thank you, my Dear!

P.S.: I do realize that it was incredibly stupid of me not to notice one of the main features of the web service I was using. I am deeply ashamed of my stupidity and hope that such a misunderstanding will never occur again.

- EMERGENCY TASK: my boss called me and asked to design new look for some magazine advertisement about retrofitting and ORC.