Why all Graphic Design Students should Learn Web Design (and 10 other things you oughta know)
Author: Michelle Godfrey
When I was in Design school, I hated looking at anything that didn’t have color or beautifully kerned typography. The thought of actually having to parse a wall of monospaced code was daunting, and to avoid learning it I told myself “I’ll just design for print when i graduate, no biggie.” Boy was I wrong.
I graduated from San Diego State University in 2010 with very little knowledge about web design. The program director really favored print and typography (which is normal). So I was skilled at conceptualization, branding, typography, and print, but I didn’t know how to make a website when I graduated. Continue reading
SEO these days for most businesses is not a question of “If”, but “How” and “With whom?” A good SEO can work wonders for your business, while a bad one can cost you dearly. Many times that last question (whom?) is the most important, or should at least be your starting point.
What makes this challenging is that the industry is full of both intelligent, passionate, creative individuals; and also yokels who may promise the world but underdeliver, or worse.
So how does one go about chosing the right SEO to work with? We’ve interviewed 10 of the top minds in the SEO industry to share with you the answer to one very important question: “What advice do you have for businesses when they are looking to hire an SEO consultant?”.
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Whether your brand is big or small, you may be neglecting the design your Google+ page. And the simple truth is that people will take your brand more seriously if it looks great in the places you communicate. Oh and if you aren’t on Google+, you should be.
In the past, we shared how to create the perfect Twitter profile page and even how to create the perfect Facebook profile page. The ideas are similar, to make sure your page renders the way it should for viewers across all applications and browsers, and help you get started with templates that do the layout leg work for you. In this post we will give you a free downloadable template to fix your Google Plus page, as well as share some inspiration of brands doing it right.
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Ah Facebook. The largest and fastest growing social network to date. By now many of us have certainly had enough time to familiarize ourselves with the platform. The most recent timeline update isn’t very hard to master, and the cover photo option is an opportunity to further “pimp out” our profile. It is very difficult to mess up your Facebook profile, unlike twitter which can get hairy. In this post I just want to give you some examples of some nice Facebook profile designs, and at the end provide you with a template to create the perfect profile photo and cover photo together.
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Whether you are in web design, seo, inbound marketing, social media, or analytics, you have probably seen your competitors logos. I think it is safe to say, some people do web better than others. I’ve prepared a list of the best logos I could find from people in our immediate industry, the underdogs if you will. You just might find yourself on our list, and if you do, Congratulations!
FACT: Almost everybody messes up Twitter profile design. Does this include you? Yes, it does (probably). In this post, we’ll set you straight with a start-to-finish tutorial on designing your Twitter profile, including freebie Illustrator & Photoshop templates to resolve your crappy background once and for all (click here to skip the examples below and go straight to the templates).
In order to make an impact, your brand needs to be consistently crafted from one media channel to the next. This means your social profiles, e-books, white papers, business cards, t-shirts, letterhead, water bottles, brand-encrusted condoms, fluffy stuffed animals with your logo stitched on their forehead, the list goes on!
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WordPress is great. We love it, build with it all the time. But gosh darn it, what is with the rogue “<p>” tags? You’ll go through 92% of a site build, and then the widget you’re building on the last page of the site won’t quite line up properly. After an egregious round of ‘inspect element’ with Chrome’s developer tools, you’ll ask yourself in a half-eureka / half-chewing on your molars voice “where the f$@# is that p tag coming from? There’s no p tag!!”
So you’ll dig in to your post, and reassure yourself, yes, there is in fact no rogue p tag in your code. So, clearly WordPress has gone to the trouble to provide an unrequested p tag and its just cost you two hours you aren’t getting back unless I can finish my time machine (it’s on the list after the hover board, which it appears I have been beaten to).
