First off, what are videos like this even for? Well they’re basically branding…but in video format. When people get on YouTube and click a million videos per second, everything starts to blur after a while. No particular video or brand sticks out in their memory and that’s that.

Which is where these video intros earn their weight in gold. I know videos don’t actually weigh anything, but you know what I’m saying. These videos are fun, slick, creative, and, more importantly, people aren’t used to seeing them. Short intros like this can really set you apart from your competition and bring a professional edge to your video channel or courses.

As a sample, here’s one to check out. It’s perfectly safe for work but there is sound, so be warned. Also click the little gear on the video and watch the video in HD to see the cool little details.

Enjoy!

Charfish Design Video Bumper

Like it? Need something like it for your video channel or course you’re putting out? Just get in touch and we’ll take care of you!

Also…if you’re interested in learning how this was made, make sure to join the newsletter below. I’ll be making a tutorial on this soon!

We’re going to answer that question in a seemingly roundabout fashion. In fact, what we’re going to be talking about is your greatest competition.

A lot of folks think their biggest competitor is another website in their niche. A big-time consultant in their field. A bigger shop down the street.

Surprisingly these might not pose the greatest threat to your empire.

In fact, to be honest, I never ever pay attention that type of competition. You have much more dangerous foes to defeat than similar businesses, as you’ll see shortly.

So let’s talk about your two biggest biggest competitors:

1. Life
2. Past Experience

Competitor #1: Life

Let’s say you’re a book designer like myself. And Aunt Marge comes to your website looking for help designing the cover of her book of memoirs.

Right now, Billy the Book designer’s website is not your competition.

Right now your competition is Aunt Marge’s life. ‘Cause Aunt Marge is busy as all hell and very very distracted.

She’s got one eye on your website, and the other on her dog Fido. He’s got that super guilty look in his eye like he just left her a present. “Ding!” goes the microwave. She’s also concerned about her big meeting with the boss on Wednesday. Speaking of work she needs to fit in a shower tonight and maybe prepare some lunches for the week. “Damn, I forgot to go shopping,” she thinks. Then “Ring-a-ling!” goes the telephone. She’ll answer but will talk fast so she can watch Jeopardy! She walks to the phone and “SQUISH!” between the toes goes the present Fido left her.

That’s life for Aunt Marge. So way before she hires you to design her book cover, she needs to be lifted out of her coma with some smelling salts and a bit of “ZING!”

This “ZING!” comes from the look and design of your website.

Luckily, you’ve got a badass design. And when Aunt Marge landed on your home page, something happened to her. For just a split second the world stopped turning. There was a sparkle in her eye, a little bit of magic and she forgot all about Fido’s squishy nastiness between her toes.

And thus you have vanquished Competitor #1…Life.

Competitor #2: Past Experience

Now that you have Marge’s full attention, it’s time to make her feel more at ease and get on the way to making a true fan out of her. Unfortunately, that’s exactly when the Past Experience villain rears its ugly head.

See, this ain’t Aunt Marge’s first rodeo. She’s transacted business before with people in stores, car dealerships, online, etc. And a lot of these people conducted themselves in ways you’d never even think of. So Marge is now on guard.

Now that she’s emotionally involved with your site, she feels vulnerable. Because in the past this is exactly when people started to take advantage of her.

She doesn’t want to get hurt again. She doesn’t want to be scammed. She doesn’t want to give her money to you and then find out you’re buying crack with it.

Marge already knows the internet is full of scammers and hackers, pervs and Miley Cyrus grinding on some dude.

Regardless of your business and your niche, you do have this competition:

• If you’re a writing coach, your competition is Professor Dingus. The English 101 dogmatist who ruined the subject for thousands of innocent college students.
• If you’re a salesman, your competition is Sleazy Randy. The used-car salesmen who brags about the day he sold seven rusty Oldsmobiles that didn’t even start.
• If you’re a yoga instructor, your competition is Yogi FooFoo. She was too touchy-feely, burned too much incense, and forced the class into spiritualism when all they wanted was a good stretch.

Whether or not Professor Dingus and Sleazy Randy are still around, these representatives live on in the customer’s mind.

So here’s Aunt Marge on your site, feeling kind of comfy with you but not quite wanting to completely. So if she can’t immediately differentiate you from them (the Bad Guys), she’s going to leave. That’s a fact.

Your design and personality are what will set you apart in her mind.

That means your writing, design, branding, sidebar ads, navigation – everything – has to be easy and fast and right up her alley. The more you appeal to her sensibilities, the more personality you show her, the more she starts to resonate and feel safe with you.

(It’s also possibly she won’t like your personality at all, in which case she’ll leave. But that’s exactly what you want. If she doesn’t like you, she’s not exactly your ideal customer, is she?)

Why Design Wins, A Summary

We have talked about how design and personality break down the walls of boredom, discomfort and alienation your visitors have when they arrive on your site. In essence, they wake people up.

And we’ve talked about how design and personality are like a sympathetic vibrations between you and your ideal customers. They bring you closer together and begin a friendship.

Out on the street, shaking a stranger’s hand, looking into their eyes and starting a conversation will give you a pretty quick feel for the person.

Online, this is done with design. Design is the handshake, the look in the eyes, the first impression.

So right now, for your brand new visitors, design matters more than anything. Because nobody is going to read all your content, subscribe to your newsletter or buy your wares if they don’t like you/can’t trust you first. And that’s how design can defeat your biggest competition. Because your competition is interested, first, in moving product and not necessarily making that true connection.

So make it easy on your visitors. When amongst the cold infinite vastness of the interwebs they find your site, make sure they’re woken up, and made to feel right at home.

When it comes to books nowadays, you’ll hear many terms thrown around pretty regularly:

Ebook, PDF, Kindle, Nook, ePub, .mobi…the list goes on. We don’t blame you for being confused…it’s confusing.

Don’t fret, we’re here to make some sense of this stuff for you.

Luckily, despite the confusing terms, dot-whatever file types and cute device names, there are really only three different electronic book formats we need to worry about. Let’s look at each of these.

But first, we best play Socrates and clarify our language and terms a bit.

Standard Electronic Book Definitions

Ebook: Generically, ebook just means “electronic book.” That means it’s read on a computer or hand-held device. If what you’re reading is on a screen of any type and not on paper, it’s an ebook.

However, when you see “download my new ebook” on the internet, about 99% of the time that means a PDF document (.pdf file type). A .pdf (Portable Document Format) is a document that can be read with Adobe Reader, Preview on a Mac, and other software. Pretty much any computer in the universe, brand new off the shelf, can open and read a .pdf.

Kindle: A Kindle is a hand-held book reader. It reads many different file types, but its favorite at this time is a known as .mobi. That’s the file type that offers us the best control over how the Kindle actually presents the written work.

Now, when people want a book for their Kindle, they usually don’t say “ebook” which fairly universally means a pdf. Instead they’ll specifically ask for a Kindle book or say, “Can I get this on my Kindle?”

Nook: Nook is much like Kindle, in that it’s another hand-held reader. However, it does not use .mobi files like the Kindle does. Instead it uses .epub files.

So much for the semantics. What’s the real difference between these?

A .pdf ebook is a fixed document, much like a magazine is fixed. We all know that once a magazine is printed, its words and images stay put forever after. The text will never grow or shrink in size and one column of text will never magically become two columns. It’s set in stone.. Er…paper.

A .pdf is the same. Once a .pdf is created, it is fixed in layout. Yes you can zoom in and out, but that’s really just the equivalent of holding a magazine closer to your face. Unless you’ve got really bad breath, it doesn’t change the document one little bit.

But…Kindle and Nook books are different. They both have a resizing text feature, meaning users can make the text bigger or smaller to accommodate their vision and reading comfort.

Because of this resizing, text will flow differently from page to page. If, for example, you increase the text size, fewer words will now fit on the electronic “page”, so text that was once on page 5 might end up on page 6. Make sense?

Because of this fact, Kindle and Nook books require a bit of a special touch when it comes to layout and design. Once the text starts moving about, obviously so will chapter beginnings and endings, page breaks, etc.

I hope that brings a little clarification to the e-book confusion.

But what do I need? An ebook or Kindle book or…?

Now, one last thing. We get a lot of questions from clients, writers and business owners about what they really should be offering their customers. Do they just need a pdf ebook, or something set up for the Kindle and Nook?

The answer is yes, all of the above.

Honestly, it’s just better to have them all. If you’re selling an ebook, some of your customers will only read it on their computer screens (like I would). Others will only read it on a Kindle (like my father would). But then other folks will read some of your ebook at home on their computers, and then want to read the rest with their Kindle on the subway. So give them both. It can’t hurt.

Bonus benefit of having each format is that you can feature it on your sales page, in the selling-points of your book. Something like this will do quite nicely and actually improve sales:

“Each electronic download comes bundled with a .pdf as well as both Kindle and Nook formats! You can read it anywhere you wish on any device.”

Dig it?

Dig it.

Because in a world where everyone’s a designer, designing isn’t enough anymore. Clients want to know what’s behind their projects and the people that do them.

Some say technology is making our world smaller but it’s really just making it more anonymous.

There are professionals from every field available online. You can order groceries, do your banking and hire a lawyer whose face you’ll never see, all from the comfort of your keyboard. Whatever you’re looking for is available in legions.

So the question is no longer whether or not you can find someone to do the work. You can.

The question is: who’s going to do it? It’s about you and me and our personal branding. It’s about the people behind the scenes, what they do and how they arrive at their magic.

It’s about the quality you’ll present to this growing world of quantity.

In all the speed of our modern world we’re all still seekers after beauty. We can get the news anywhere, but where do we find the poetry? For me the poetry is in the process and in the end result. You’ve got to take a ride and make the ride enjoyable for those around you. You’ve got to be responsible about where you’re going and how you get there.

This manifesto is about us, what we do and how we arrive.

Why do we design?

We design because we love it.

We design because design is beautiful.

We design because making something look better earns us the right to complain about things we don’t like. And then change them.

We design because this is our world and if we don’t like it we’ve nobody to blame but ourselves.

Apple computers are gorgeous; that’s half the story. They also work phenomenally well, which is the other half. But were they boxed in matte black sheet metal they’d lose appeal. You could say beauty is not tangible, but anyone who’s opened the box of a new shiny gadget and felt that rush knows the truth.

Design is tangible; beauty is tangible. You can’t cut either of them with a knife but that’s a physicist’s definition of tangible and we’re not interested in that here. The truth is, we all know, deep down where the real things reside, there’s another universe of tangible and it sits right there in your chest.

It’s the place where Christmas as a child lives and where it hurts when you lose someone. There’s more reality there than in any block of concrete.

That’s why we design: because it matters.

How do we design?

Very carefully. That’s the truth disguised as a flippant answer.

It’s the truth because good design is functional, and without the end goal and end user in mind, there can be no true function and hence no design.

We design when we know where we’re going, and no sooner. There is beauty in functionality, in purpose.

You know the feeling you get when you flip on the light switch and nothing happens? That’s bad design. Bad design is improper function and something not working like we suppose it should.

Is a website any different? Should there be ten images when one will do? Should the navigation require the wits of a neurologist to figure out? Should every last pixel be packed with eye candy?

One glance around the ‘net will show you that not everyone in our field agrees, but there’s one sure thing we’ve come to know over the years:

When there are millions of websites, ebooks and products available at the flick of a “dot com,” quality is of utmost importance.

The web is about content. Anyone who comes to your site is looking for something. Our purpose as designers is to deliver this something, make it live, make it breathe and present it as it should be presented.

Or at the very least just make sure people can find it, for God’s sake.

Design is the route the crow flies from dry utility to brilliant interesting function.

If it doesn’t work, it isn’t designed well. And if it does work but people don’t want to use it…it still isn’t designed well.

Good design works and people want their hands all over it.

Answer: Hahahahahahaha!

We are continuing today with the series on ebook design. This time we’re going to discuss the bare-minimum quality that ANY ebook should have. By bare-minimum we mean an ebook that at first appearance won’t make your audience laugh or feel they’ve been ripped off.

This post is based in part on an email I received and which got me thinking. Basically, the email said:

“Look, I really just need a cover. The inside doesn’t need to be anything special because it’s going to be a freebie anyway. People won’t be expecting much.”

Mmm…no.

First off, if your friend gave you a bunch of hand-me-down clothes that didn’t fit you and looked like something from the early ’70s, complete with sequins, would you wear them because they were free?

And second, who cares what people ARE expecting? That’s Averageville, Mediocrityland and a boring roller coaster ride to Plain Jane’s house.

Don’t JUST give people what they’re expecting! That just makes them…well…another customer

Give them MORE than they expect and you’ll make a die-hard fan who will go out and sing your praises to his friends.

So…bad idea #1:

Only ebooks that cost money need to look good. If I’m putting out a free one, it’s okay if it looks like a bomb went off at a chili cook-off.

Why a lousy, ugly or average ebook is worse for business than you think.

• They create far less word-of-mouth attention, reducing overall sales.
• Customers may trust you less and/or think you’re shady.
• A book that looks lousy also creates the apparency that its content is lousy.
• They get more refunds from unhappy customers.
• Unhappy customers now leads to fewer repeat sales in the future.
• Ugly ebooks are promoted by fewer affiliates who themselves fear returns and damage to their reputation.
• Your affiliates who don’t jump ship will also be getting more refunds.
• Unhappy affiliates now means fewer affiliates in the future.

On the other hand, here’s what a professional ebook design means for your business:

• Far greater word-of-mouth attention = more web traffic = more advertising dollars = far more sales.
• Far fewer, if any, refunds.
• Affiliates who are happy to support your product.
• Affiliates who will also happily back your future projects.
• Huge word-of-mouth between affiliates and their networks.
• Repeat customers in the future.
• Trust.
• People will know you’re a professional and care.
• Blooming friendships, networks and relationships, bringing more sales opportunities.

You must remember that the internet is one giant snowball effect. News, good or bad, spreads quickly through Internetville via multimedia channels too numerous to count. And it is permanent.

This means if you create something poor enough in quality that people want to bash you, the word is going to spread fast via blogs, videos, YouTube, etc. and your little enterprise is going to see troubled times.

On the other hand, if you create something really nice, it can similarly spread like wildfire. Chris Guillebeau’s 279 Days to Overnight Success is a case in point. Aside from being very interesting and well-written, it’s also visually stunning. That kind of combination is unstoppable, as Chris found out while his ebook was being downloaded 25,000+ times over a couple days. Did the design of Chris’s book help? Absolutely. Would it have been as highly downloaded if it had been ugly but just as well written? No chance.

And in summation

Make it look good and people will trust you and think you’re a pro. Make it look amateur and people will think you don’t care and will look elsewhere. Can you blame them?

And, lastly, if you’ve got some writing you’re about to launch and need some help with your ebook design, contact us. We’d be happy to help you out.

Everyone has spent the last month or so crying for the lack of free items, I know. So here you are, some funky peeling-paint textures. You can print these out and frame them for your living room, or you can download them and make your friends jealous with your growing free textures folder. Yay.

About the paint textures

There is nothing I like better than peeling paint. Seriously. I see it anywhere and I have to stop and just look at it. It is layers and layers of pure awesomeness.

Anyway, each of these 3 textures are .jpg’s and are in one size: 3872×2592. The total file size is only 4.2 MB (quick download!).

If you end up using them on something and it looks super rad, you should share it here. I love awesome stuff. Especially when I wasn’t the one who just spent a million hours working on it.

I hope you enjoy them!

Download Instantly!

Stuff! Things! Other stuff and other things! That’s right, folks, free textures. Again. Barely more than a week since the last time we gave you free things. Geez, we are awesome.

About the nature textures

These textures are a bit random, but super swell anyway. I have used these in design work – and turned out some stunning results.

Each texture is a jpeg and comes in one size: 1024×685 at 300 dpi. There are 9 different textures in this set. The total file size is 7.8MB.

If you have any questions about these or you want to request a certain kind of texture, leave a comment below and I might even write you back!

Or just download them and go about your business. That’s what I would do.

Download Instantly!

A bit about the new design, what prompted it and what’s coming up:

First off, the new design was built to be fast. Google is up to new things as usual, one of which is determining search rankings based on site speed. The old site was a bit more graphic-intense and wasn’t quite as fast as it should be.

Of course, hosting makes a difference in that as well, and we’re currently looking into new hosting solutions as well. But for now, the site, code and images herein should be fast enough for even the stingiest of search algorithms.

More fun than a kiddie pool full of colored balls, minus the urine.

More important than site speed, at least to us, was just having some plain old fun. I wanted to get away from any sort of dark, murky aspect this site had in previous incarnations. I don’t wear jackboots or beat people up (without provocation) so “let’s lighten up a little,” I said to myself.

I like things fun, light, fluffier than a chicken, and I wanted this site to reflect my own personality a bit more closely. After all, clients and I become friends. It’s nothing unusual to be calling each other by odd and wonderful nicknames shortly after meeting, and our phone calls go every which way, some of which aren’t fit for print. Awesomeness.

You may have seen our blog. It’s decomposing on the side of the road.

It has, in actual fact, been more than a year since we published a single new word to the blog. Sacrilege!

This is not for lack of ideas. It was, simply put, an experiment. Now that experiment is over and the blog will be resurrected with all sorts of fine things being churned forth.

A quick word about The Experiment. Shortly before said experiment started, Charfish had picked up steam and was sort of living a life of its own. Comments, emails, work, clients and friends were coming forth due to no trackable action on our part. So I thought, “Hmm…why not stop altogether? Let’s see what this inertia can spew forth.”

So for the last year, the only thing I’ve done (where this site is concerned) is my job: design, consultations, writing on other projects, etc. No freebies, no updated pages, not a single blog post, no advertising and no marketing.

Suicide, right? To most people’s thinking, probably, but in fact the reverse has happened. The inertia we’d noticed continued and Charfish has had more work over the past year than all previous years combined. Not only that, and much more importantly, we’ve expanded into new areas that we never even announced to anyone. They just happened as a natural organic sort of flow.

This is a wondrous magical thing and we can only thank our growing family of friends and clients for making this happen. You guys seem to have more ideas for us than we have for ourselves. You are the best crew around, times about 20 billion plus 5.

Extra, Extra!

Down in the happy new footer, you’ll see a newsletter sign-up area. This newsletter idea is new territory to explore and we’re pretty excited about it.

To give a couple hints about what’s coming up with that, we’ve got a store in the works. There will soon be a new WordPress framework (with accompanying themes), icons and other general yumminess. There will be specials and discounts for members, so if you’re interested (you are), get thee on the list 🙂

”Methinks your site needs some crutches.”

We believe in launching, doing and getting it out there. Well, we gave this new design a Godin-inspired “Ship it!” and he we are.

Therefore it’s very likely, in fact I guarantee, that some parts of the site might not yet be top-notch. We tested a lot and ran the site and coding through the wringer, but no doubt some things are still awry. After all, there’s probably some dude out in Podunk, browsing this new site on a Casio calculator with Internet Explorer 6 (I just threw up a little).

Speaking of Internet Explorer, you should probably be looking at this any website using Firefox or Safari to get the best experience. Ditch Internet Explorer altogether and your life will improve by a factor of at least eleven. Why? I could give you the philosophical stance or the technical one, but both pretty much equate to: Internet Explorer is pretty lousy for exploration. Sort of like trying to dig a ditch with soggy kleenex.

Anyway…regardless of your browser…if you find anything funky, feel free to give us a shout and we’ll fix it. Unless it’s Internet Explorer. Then we’ll probably just shrug and say, “Meh.”

That’s about it for now, gang.

I appreciate you being out there, folks. It’s been a great year, and this has been more fun than I would have dared imagine.

You know how when you walk into Baskin Robbins, you see all those ice cream colors? And there’s that smell in the air? That sweet waffle cone smell that makes you feel like your nostrils just got a cavity? That shouldn’t be your website.

And with that, I welcome you to Part 3 of our “10 Ways to Make Your Website Look Better” series.

Today, we’re going to talk about color.

An introduction, and why I’m even bothering

I think it’s safe to say that MOST of us don’t use hideous color schemes in our designs. The reason for that is simple and quite obvious: they’re hideous. They stick out like a sore thumb. A hideous sore thumb with yellow and purple and green bruising. Maybe even an open sore that…nevermind. You get the point.

This post isn’t about the huge glaring mistakes you can make by using really awful color mixtures on your brochures or website. Well…it sort of is. But it’s also about the fine-tuning, such as picking hyperlink colors for your text. Or finding the right color for the chapter titles in your book.

Well, it’s all about integrity.

Integrity of the Piece

I like to think that every project has its own purpose. A website isn’t just a website. It’s a website ABOUT something. It’s about fishing or cooking or cross-country running.

A logo isn’t just a picture or symbol. It’s a picture or symbol ABOUT something, like food or health or technology.

That’s where the integrity comes in: your visual assets are supposed to be doing something, and that something is communicating a message. Your fonts, colors, layout, images, etc. all support (or should) that overall message.

So…if your header is red and your main content bright green, ask yourself, “What is this doing for my overall message?”

But overall, just be practical

Back in college, where I studied architecture, I gave an end-of-quarter presentation about a building I’d designed over the prior three months. At the end of the presentation, one of the visiting architects in the audience raised his hand and said, “Architecture isn’t about building.” Um, what?

Yeah, I know. I thought so too. But that’s not even the crazy part. He then said, “Architecture is philosophy. Every brick in your building should have a purpose. What is the purpose of the bricks in that wall?” he asked, pointing to my model.

When I replied that the bricks were holding up the ceiling, he insisted that I think harder about it.

My point is, it’s all too easy to go overboard with thinking deep thoughts and philosophizing about every last detail. “Red means impulse” and “Blue means peace” and “If you mix tan with off-white, it means please take your shoes off before entering.”

You can drive yourself nuts with this stuff, and it’s quite likely that your audience isn’t going to get it anyway. So don’t go all introverted on me.

The overriding function of your site, business card, logo, etc. is that it simply look awesome and communicate. Your site, regardless of whatever deeper meaning it has as a whole, simply needs to be legible.

I could lie about the text on this site and say that I chose black text on a white background because it symbolizes how I hope for equality between cardboard manufacturers. But nope. Black on white is easy to read. That’s it, and you really don’t need a better answer than that.

Where to find a color scheme

Speaking on the integrity thing, your golf site probably needs some green in it. It just makes sense. Again, you could go all avant-garde and do it in pink with elephants all over, but your audience is going to miss such subtle symbolism.

So…you know you’re looking for a green color scheme, but how do you come up with one that works? If you use one shade of green here, what shade works over there? And what sort of text will be legible?

Well, a great place to start (after you’ve experimented…which is the best way to learn, I think) is to head over to Kuler. Kuler is a color scheme picker and it’s phenomenal. The first thing you’ll see there are sample color schemes, complete with RGB and hex codes. Simply browse around the site a bit, or do a search for “green” and you’ll have all the schemes you’ll need.

And the really cool thing is that after you pick a color scheme, you can tweak individual colors of that particular palette. So, for example, if you’re still working on your green golf theme, you can start by exploring for a green scheme that works overall. Then you’ll need some colors to use as emphasis, say for your logo or text hyperlinks, right? Well, you can use that little slider dealy to find them and you’ll see exactly how the colors will all interact.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next with some great tips on how to format the text on your page so it’s easy on your visitor. Want a hint? Well, your old school professors had it all wrong…but you knew that already. 🙂

If you missed the other parts of this series, you can find them here:

• 10 Ways to make your website look better
• 10 ways to make your website better, Part 1 – Effective eye trails
• How proper line height will improve the look and stickiness of your site

And if there’s something else you’d like to see here, or you’re looking for advice on some particular woes, just let us know in the comments or contact us.

Everybody loves textures, and since we use them on practically everything we make, we thought we would share the awesome.

We are starting out with a set of Wood Textures here, even though there are already eighty bazillion free texures on the interwebs. Ours are better because they are free. And they are wood. And stuff. Anyway.

About the wood textures

Being a photographer, I often find myself shooting every single thing in sight, without reason. To justify this ridiculous use of my camera, I have to do something, right? So here you are, free textures for you!

Each texture is a jpeg and comes in one size: 1024×685 at 300 dpi. There are 9 different wood textures and you can use them on anything you like! The total file size is 8.3MB, so you should have a sweet, sweet connection before downloading them.

I hope you enjoy these and I am looking forward to posting some more next week!

Download Instantly!