Drawing Board

3 Web Design Tools for Non-Web Designers Who Need to Explain Design Ideas

I couldn’t draw you a 6-inch straight line if you gave me a ruler, a pencil, and a 5-inch head start. Seriously, design is not my forte. Just ask anyone who has ever tried to copy off my papers in high school. My doodles are terrible and cast doubt on my ability to perform basic [...]

An Illustrated History of Content (and a Smooth Move in Content Marketing)

You know you’ve done your job as a marketer when people do your advertising for you. By creating something memorable, entertaining, and worth talking about, you get more mileage out of your initial investment. This is what brands hope for when they make decisions like investing $100,000 per second in the Super Bowl commercials we [...]

Capital Improvements: Using Initial Caps to Improve Your Designs

It’s been said that history is our best teacher. It’s hard to believe that whoever first uttered those words had custom media on the brain. But they might as well have. One of the most effective and time-honored tools in a designer’s repertoire is the drop or initial cap. First used in ancient, illuminated manuscripts, [...]

Fall into the Gap? More Like Piling On …

Unless you’ve spent the last week under a rock (or in an Old Navy or Banana Republic), you’ve probably heard the backlash over Gap changing their logo to a “new” logo. It was announced. Then it was denounced. A lot. And now it’s a footnote in the history of “how not to handle your brand’s [...]

Video: Design of the Times

It has only been 10 years, but magazine design has come of age in the digital world. It’s gone from page turning to page swiping, scrolling, and tapping. Suddenly your art director is bombarded by visual inspiration and influences. You can collaborate and get feedback at the speed of light. All of this is made [...]

The NCAA Tournament of Average Salaries

It’s hard not to stop and pay attention when someone gets it right, and that’s exactly what PayScale did with their Salary Madness effort.

Showing Versus Telling in Marketing

There was no shortage of buzz surrounding Google’s announcement of the launch of the Nexus One – an HTC-built smart phone which desperately wants to be lauded as the “iPhone killer.”

A Screenshot to Take to the Board Room

Most brands don’t have the luxury of being able to ignore their customers and still be wildly successful, let alone the desire. Which is why it’s a surprise to see some companies still playing the “if we ignore it, maybe it’ll go away” card when it comes to social media monitoring. So, to those of [...]