The dreaded competition

Unless you were smart and chose a niche topic, you likely have a lot of competition to keep up with other blogs / sites. If you find anything groovy that other sites have that allow them to succeed more, it might be an idea to think of something that’s equally or more groovy. Updating your layout and the functionality of your site to match the competition will help you compete. Have you ever heard those intense guitar licks by Django Reinhardt, Hendrix, or (insert your favorite guitarist here) and imagined being able to play that? If you don’t match up with the other guys, you will be seen as the one who doesn’t understand the tools / tricks of the trade, like a person brand new to guitar. Go out and see what other sites are doing that you’re not doing.

Use new technologies

Keep up with technology, even if you’re not in the tech field. If your competition isn’t tech-savvy, then you have the upper hand. This applies to on-site and off-site technologies. If you’re trying to promote your business on Myspace groups instead of facebook groups, it’s likely a bad move unless you have a good reason to. If you’re using the stats tracking tool that your hosting company provided you that shows just the number of visitors are on your site each day, perhaps you need to move to something like Woopra.

The new Ocular Harmony layout (now) uses a prominent RSS / Mail subscription, a button to add me on twitter, and a fashionable way to display social media links.

Layouts have a time limit

You can have killer AJAX technology that loads like a bee, but if the loading screen is filled with various animated GIF’s and marquee tags, the whole glamor of in-page loading is defeated. That’s an extreme example, but layouts age like a living thing, and some faster than others.
On the rare occasion, some stay fresh after a decade. Adam Russell shared this interesting link on Twitter that’s unbelievably a layout from 1999. It looks fresh and fo’shotally 2010.

So that being said, keeping up with a fresh look can keep users engaged.

Layouts are more important nowadays

An increasing amount of people place importance on the layout to avoid scammy sites or fake blogs. They would also like an easy read. When I read blogs, sometimes I come across a site using the default Wordpress theme. The first thing I do is check to see if the content is relevant based on a two second glance, and then bounce if it’s not. I never do this ‘check’ if it’s a nice design, because the layout can establish trust with the user.

That’s all folks! If your site is up-to-date then all the better – just avoid redesignitis and as spyrestudios says – “realign – not redesign”!

Related posts:

1. Ocular Harmony has a new design
2. A website is more than just good design
3. Making a perfect grid-aligned website using Gridfox and Firebug

Online marketing and SEO has come a long way. There are so many different activities you can do now to promote yours or your client’s site / product / event / service. It is very easy for SEO to be an addiction. I’m sure many of them look like addicts with the amount of over-promotion they do. I know this because it’s happened to some of my clients and myself.

Are you an SEO / marketing junkie? Here’s what you can do to recover:

Admit there’s a problem

You’re spending countless hours seeking dofollow backlinks to improve Pagerank and your spouse feels like your marriage is with the screen instead of him/her. Think of the situation objectively and try to find the thought chain in why you’re doing in what you’re doing. Here’s an example:

“I’m building great backlinks BECAUSE it will help my client’s business succeed BECAUSE that will lead to my success”

What is ‘success’ and will spending all day marketing it really further business? Is money success? Sure, it’s something that you need, but is the active notion of clicking the “send message” one extra time of so many times really going to further you in life?

Get back to the roots

Think about the fundamental practices and advice people say about SEO / marketing. Try not to get sidetracked from it with some unusual Digital-Pointesque easy-exposure concept.

Content is King and some solid, authentic, white-hat ways to promote it is the way to go. If people like the content on your blog, the concept of the product you’re selling, or your latest design work, they will spread the word through the hundreds of social apps we have now and your manpower will substantially increase. If you’re only one person promoting it and over time it still doesn’t pick up amongst a broad audience, maybe there’s something you should be doing differently. Change the content, write with a different style, or add a feature to the product that will benefit people.

The right mindset

A while back, I was constantly using StumbleUpon in hopes that I’d increase traffic. I realized I was missing the point…entirely. For example, do you enjoy tweeting away messages to people, or do you see it as a way to advertise your blog? Or both? These are both good examples of tools you can use to help share pages that you want to share, but if you’re using it FOR just getting traffic, you’re missing the point. I noticed that when honestly building relationships online, authentically communicating with people without the goal to promote my blog ends up being the people that help me the most – both personally and for business.

There are no loopholes

I worked for an SEO dude in Montreal at one point and he told me that there’s no easy ‘loopholes’ in SEO / marketing. There’s a cost to everything. I chose not to believe him. I believed that back in the day when SEO / online marketing started there may have not been an easy way, but with all this software helping SEO and marketing, there must be something out there that would easily promote my site. I realize it’s actually the opposite. It’s increasingly becoming harder to be found, search engines are a hell of a lot smarter, and the scammy software’s functionality barely helps. These “miracle traffic” programs are all scams. If you know a miracle IM technique that isn’t already popular, I would love to hear about it in the comments section.

Moderation is the key

Submit your new article to some news sites, digg it, and promote your awesome new web layout on some CSS showcases. Just don’t get caught up with going out of your way to harm people’s mental environments with your content. If it’s great stuff, people will do the work for you. Amen!

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Garrett Olinger

Mash Creative – Mark Bloom

Homepage: mashcreative.co.uk
Twitter: @MashCreative
Buy this print!

Mark Ryan

Colin Bright

What a great idea for a school project too, they are provided with an area code and were to typographically experiment with it for the phone book cover. I wish my teachers did something like this!

Robert Missen

Parachute

Homepage: Parachute

David Brier (a branding Jedi)

Homepage: Rising Above the Noise
Twitter: @DavidBrier
Oh, and David wrote a book too! Rising Above the Noise

Font Fresh

Homepage: Typographics
This one really should count as five pieces, as it takes up half of the page length. Certainly worth the addition, kudos to Font Fresh!

Paulo W

Fonts Page: Intellecta Design @ MyFonts

James Davies

George Birch

Erik Trysberg

Homepage: De:Try

Rachel Herzig

An ambigram! Totally love this one, pick up your notebook and flip it over or rotate your head in an odd manner and see how both words are identical, but flipped.

Zen Killa

Homepage: Zenkilla.com

Barral Fabien

Homepages: Barral Fabien – Portfolio
Prints

Which ones do you enjoy, and why? You can also add me on Behance or Twitter.

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Not long ago I had a discussion with my brother about the massive amount of information being published. It was brought to my attention that most of this information is redundant and re-published. I had the idea of blogging, just not the idea of information control. If you’re a twitter user, you’re likely to see more links to blog articles than the amount of times you’ve clipped your fingernails. Admit it, with people immigrating to the ‘blogosphere’ on a secondly basis, it’s hard to stand out of the crowd. Here’s what you can do to improve your blog quality in terms of information:

Have the Right Intention

If you’re reading this right now hoping to acquire knowledge to solely increase ad revenue to your blog, receive backlinks, or both, it’s time to step your game up (or step away from blogging altogether). Blogging is an excellentway to spread your wealths of knowledge to the world. I mean, that’s what the internet is about right? Your blog should reflect what you have a passion for, and what others may profit from instead of being self-driven. Karma will reward you in the end when you use passion, and allow you to profit (traffic, backlinks, exposure, etc) off your information, but you must get there first.

Ponder, Brainstorm, Ponder again

A wonderful way to grasp a strong post idea is to make it very targeted to the subject. Use a sketchpad and jot down a list of things that you like in your blog’s topic. Mine is design, so I’d pick stuff like Magento, The Grid System, Siggeir Hafsteinsson, Wordpress, etc. Now try to meld some of those ideas together, and use adjectives to make them niche. Scratch out the ones you don’t like and keep the best ones. Jot 100 ideas down, and refine what you can of them. The more you think, the better you will get at thinking.

Here’s what I mean about niche:
Original thought: A list of 20 cool animals
Refined thought: A list of 20 species of monkeys
Final thought: 20 different Monkey Species doing funky faces

So here’s what that title communicates to the user:

• There happens to be 20 things for the user to look at
• Those things happen to be different types of monkeys
• They happen to make funky faces

Do some Research Around the Net

Find out what’s out there before ejaculating an idea that has been thought of 23,000 times (or for those that are fans of popular quotes…don’t reinvent the wheel!). Google your idea first and then start writing about it.

If you dwell on the almighty Twitter, you’re likely getting a substantial dose of what people like to read. Skip over to Digg, CNN, BBC, etc… and see what they’re writing about in your target area, and get a sense of what the user wants to read about. Tweetmeme is a great place to do some research.

Write Compelling Titles

Now, Instead of me writing a paragraph on this, Diana Adams (Adams Consulting) has written a great article on Bit Rebels explaining ways to write great titles that encourage people to click. Only promote / write / encourage people to click articles that you’re confident that will benefit your user, otherwise you’re wasting their time.

Again with Twitter…if you use Hootsuite, you can use their Ow.ly URL shortener and track which articles are clicked on most, so experiment around with different titles whether they’re your own article or not. This will get you into a “groove”. A dude that has a good “groove” in compelling title writing is @Minervity. Once you get the “groove”, you should start seeing results.

Writing for other blogs

The idea and title wording are crucial when writing for other blogs, especially when they’re a big name. If your idea is thrown down by one person, don’t quit unless you draw the mental conclusion that your idea really is garbage and it’s not just a self-esteem thang.

One time I presented an idea to a big-name web design blog and they rejected my idea and told me they’re not interested in working with any of my ideas. Zip. Nilch. None. I took the same idea to Pro Blog Design and it was accepted and showcased on the front page of Digg.

Conclusion

And that just about wraps up today’s piece on the OH blog. Feel free to sign up to the RSS feed since there’s more fun-filled posts coming your way.

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1. Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola’s is a ubiquitous product known around the world for the sweet, carbonated drink, made with a secret formula of ingredients. The marketing material associated with the drink has generated an instantly recognisable brand, with its red and white colour scheme, traditional lettering and contour bottle modelled on a cocoa pod. Drugstore owner John Pemberton created the beverage, and his bookkeeper, Frank Mason Robinson, designed the iconic logo in 1895.

2. Olympics

The interlocking rings of the Olympic logo represent the five continents of the world, brought together in the spirit of the competition. While the Olympics can be traced back to ancient Greece, the founder of the modern games Baron Pierre de Coubertin created this logo in 1912.

3. Apple

Apple is an immensely popular electronics company know for Mac computers, iPod, iPhone and the new iPad. The original 1970s logo pictured a scene of Isaac Newton under a tree with an apple about to drop onto his head. In 1976, designer Rob Janoff created this logo with the rainbow colour scheme that was used until 1998.

4. McDonalds

McDonald’s is the world’s largest chain of fast food outlets, known for the distinctive letter ‘M’ logo. Jim Schindler designed the logo in 1962, taking inspiration from the golden arches built on the sides of the original restaurants.

5. Microsoft Windows

Bill Gate’s Microsoft dominates the personal computer market; the Windows operating system is familiar to any computer user, as is the four-colour window logo.

6. Nike

The iconic Nike swoosh represents the wing of the Greek goddess of the same name who was said to have inspired the feats of courageous warriors. Carolyn Davidson, a graphic design student from Portland State University, created the logo in 1971 while freelancing with the sportswear company.

7. BBC

The BBC logo has evolved over time from the original television idents used to brand the broadcaster. In the 1990s, Martin Lambie-Nairn’s design company took charge of the idents, and eventually created the simplified logo seen above. The design is reminiscent of the corporation’s first logo from 1932, and employs a font based on London Underground’s typeface.

8. Audi

The rings of Audi’s logo represent the amalgamation of brands that formed the Auto Union of 1932: Audi, DKW, Horch and Wanderer. The logo bears a striking similarity to the Olympic Rings, causing the Olympic Committee to sue Audi in a small claims court in 1995.

9. Google

The search engine is so popular that word Google has entered the English language, and the company’s branding is also instantly eye-catching. There have been several adaptations of the wordmark logo since its inception in 1999; designer Ruth Kedar designed its current incarnation using the Catull typeface.

10. BMW

The Bavarian Motor Works was originally known for building aircraft engines, and the company logo was developed to represent the movement of a plane’s propeller cutting through the sky. The design also incorporates the blue and white of the Bavarian flag, reversed to create the BMW roundel.

11. Mercedes-Benz

Gottlieb Daimler designed the Mercedes-Benz logo, which debuted in 1909. The three-pointed star signifies the company ambition to dominate land, sea and air. The laurel wreath was added to the logo in 1926, when Benz was merged into the company.

12. BP

In 2000, British Petroleum was renamed BP and replaced its traditional shield emblem with this design, with the aim at highlighting the company’s green credentials.

13. IBM

Graphic designer Paul Rand created IBM’s ‘eight-bar’ logo in 1972. The horizontal stripes simultaneously represent speed and dynamism, while also making the logo easy to print with the reprographic technology of the 1970s.

14. Pepsi

Pepsi Cola has been around since the 1890s, and like its great rival Coca-Cola, has a brand image that has evolved over time to become one of the world’s most recognisable logos. The company currently uses a variety of variations such as this text-free example, identifiable by its red, white and blue waveform design.

15. Adidas

When Adi Dassler parted company with his brother (who went on to form Puma), he created the Adidas brand, and since its inception the company’s marketing material has featured the three-stripe motif.

16. Puma

After Rudolph Dassler angrily severed his partnership with his brother, he created Puma. The leaping big cat, representing the company’s potency, was first used in 1948 and continues to be used today with few modifications.

17. MTV

MTV changed the way people listen to and create pop music, and the logo, with its solid ‘M’ and graffiti-style ‘TV’, reflects music’s constant evolution. While the format remains the same, the design means the separate elements can be decorated with any pattern, colour or material.

18. Tesco

From humble beginnings, Tesco has gone on to dominate the retail market. The logo is based around the company name, which originates from when Sir Jack Cohen joining forces with TE Stockwell to create a grocery chain. The first shop called Tesco opened in 1929.

19. Marlboro

Phillip Morris’s Marlboro cigarette brand is famous for its billboards featuring Marlboro Man, and for its distinctive red and white packaging.

20. Starbucks

Starbucks’ logo is based on a 17th Century Norse woodcut of a twin-tailed siren. Since Terry Heckler created it in 1971, the logo has been adapted and streamlined through various changes, mostly to make the siren’s body more modestly concealed.

Related posts:

1. Designing a logo from scratch part 1: Creative Brainstorming

Prepare your canvas

Make a new canvas about 1200×600 or higher, double click the ‘background’ layer to unlock it, and create a new layer.

Go Crazy

Seriously. Just use a soft round brush and do what you can to make it a nice collage of color. Use any colors you’d like. Change the size of the brushes and use opacity to darken / lighten some of the areas.

Add a background

I added a dark gray background gradient with a subtle fade to have a better idea how it’s going to turn out in the end. Select the background layer, select your foreground and background color, then use the gradient tool to add a simple background.

Liquify the colors

Photoshop’s liquify tool will manipulate lines by bending them a certain direction, unlike the smudge tool which directly mixes the colors. Select the layer with all of the colors, and click Filter -> Liquify. You are taken to the realm of liquification.

I set my brush size around 130, and varied the density and pressure. I also changed the brush size to a lower one to acquire more detail afterward. Your goal is to use the forward warp tool and the twirl clockwise tool to get a form that you like and one that mixes the colors to a detailed degree. Simply make strokes with the brush in different directions.Try to keep it somewhat rectangular to be able to fit it inside the letters in the next steps.

I acquired this effect by using a smaller brush and continued to make loops. Uh, groovy!

Make your type

Choose a font. When you’re done typing what you want, drag the type layer below your color layer, hold down alt on the line between the two layers, and move it until you see cursor turns into a stamp-like thing, and click. The colors will now be a layer mask that exists within the positive space of the type.

You can do anything from here. I changed the hue (Command + U or CTRL + U) to a different color and discarded the hippie colors (yet they will forever live on inside of me). You can go back into the liquify filter, and now see what areas overlap the text.

Adding More Background Detail

I created a new layer above the background and used a large soft round brush with a low opacity to lighten up around “prana”. I also played around with the hue in search of one that I like, and added a 3px black stroke with 30% opacity.

I then created a new layer, rendered clouds (using black and white) and set the opacity to a lower percentage. I also settled on turning the text black and white.

Adding Stars

Add a new layer, and use small soft round brushes set at 50% with a white color to create a starry effect. By changing the opacity and size it makes them have depth. You can also get star brushes here.

Adding a Reflection

Finally, flatten the “color” layer with the text layer by selecting both with Command (or CTRL on Windows) and pressing Command + E (or CTRL + E) to merge them.

Pressed Command + J to duplicate it, and Command + T to transform the duplicated layer. Right click and select “flip vertically” and drag the layer just under your text, and press enter.

At the bottom of the Layers window, select “create vector mask. Select your gradient tool (use black and white) and drag until you find a reflection that you like.

You can also add more text to appear subtly in the background by writing it and lowering the opacity to 4 or 5 percent. I did this to the top and bottom of mine.

Results

Related posts:

1. Designing a logo from scratch part 2: drawing and illustrating
2. Creating stunning, detailed typography with Illustrator
3. Making a perfect grid-aligned website using Gridfox and Firebug

…And why didn’t I drink this at the switch of the decade? The hand drawn type makes it stand out from the common Serif type on the front of wine bottles, and even the twist-offs are branded. Notice how the labels resemble torn-out pages with the ring-holes on top.

Sweet. For those who want to type-up their walls (and want some inspiration to glue their own ideas to their walls), Veer offers a typographic wall decal that you can take apart and build into different shapes. Neato.

If I saw someone walking in the street with one of these, I would be tempted to ask what letter it was supposed to be. Maybe a P. Or an I. It’s the subtlety of this that I like. It doesn’t have to shout typography at you, but it can if it wants to.

Nicely done by Taxi Studio. “Venezuelan Black” can almost even pass as a name of a typeface. If one knows what they’re doing, using multiple fonts in a design can drastically increase it’s typographic color. This is a great example.

Oh man, who would have thought that a conceptual repackaging of Monopoly would get so much critical feedback? Created by Andy Mangold, this Monopoly has sparked a lot of discussion whether the design affects the functionality and usability of the game and discredits it’s previous all-ages appearance. I feel that a redesign of the classic board is 100 times more interesting than a far-out board concept like the “Ford Thunderbird 50th Anniversary Monopoly Board“. Although it sure would be fun to try something like Googleopoly for those social media lovers (despite the type, of course).

Now here’s an interesting one. Brut has an excellent logo and a suitable green package for it, but then it’s destroyed by all the other gibberish text on the front that seems like it wants to have typographic color but doesn’t. Certainly a leap in front of most deodorant designs, but still lacking so much potential. Better luck next time Brut, and stop the animal testing and chemical-based formulas while you’re at it.

And while still on the subject of environmentalism and carbon footprint, these guys started selling water in boxes making a blatant environmental statement on the front. So many products now have what I like to call “noise” on the front which distracts you from what you should be seeing. A minimalist typographic approach suits this product perfectly.

Marcie Hicks uses the simple yet clever concept of putting a closing elastic straight through a Helvetica “BILLS”, turning the “S” into a dollar sign. You can buy it here.

Simon Alander does a great illustrated job of relabeling a wine bottle for his mother’s 50th birthday. The entirety of the product is black and white making the classy thin type and the 50 illustration outstanding.

You might be thinking “what in the world is that?!” like I was when I first saw this image. This is honestly the single most original idea I’ve ever heard of for a piece of hardware. Each of those “matches” is actually a 5gb memory stick which only becomes active when you “light it” on the side of the box followed by plugging it into the device.

In terms of practicality it may not score full marks, but the device uses remarkable typographic branding on a remarkable idea. This was created by Efir Rifat and Burak Kaynak. Check out Burak Kaynak’s portfolio, he has some neat stuff in there.

Videal  Natural Energy Drink.

Starbucks I’m very happy for you and ima gonna let you finish, but Studio 43 has the best coffee package design of all time.

Gness Music packaging design by Effektive Design. I always liked great looking labels on plain Boxes. Behance Network does the same with their box design.

Related posts:

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2. 10 great off-white websites
3. 15 Typographic Designs from Behance

Get Mailchimp, and hit the giant “Sign up free” button

You’re taken to a form. Fill er’ out!

After filling out the form and confirming your email address, you’re taken to the login screen

In the top right corner, click “account”

Click “Monkey Rewards”. Scroll down until you see text link code, and simply use it in websites to encourage people to sign up, giving you money for use on MailChimp. And voila!

Related posts:

1. 6 sets of free web icons
2. 5 great Monkey-themed websites
3. Rupture: Free Wordpress Theme

1. Bloggodown’s list of 400 twitter icons
   What a score for people looking for twitter icons!
   
2. Websiteicons.net
   If you’re not looking for a “2.0″ style, this is a great resource for having simple, to-the-point web icons
   
3. Free Social Icons
   The name says it all. This is a new resource for getting free social media icons
   
4. Web Icon Sets
   A variety of some very large icon sets
   
5. Star Fish’s Free eCommerce icons
   
   
6. Komodo Media’s Social Network icons
   

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2. Rupture: Free Wordpress Theme

Rupture

Download

Go to the Rupture Theme homepage

ˈrəp(t)-shər’ noun : a breaking apart or the state of being broken apart

The word is defined as breaking something apart. The goal of Rupture is to open Wordpress to some of it’s utmost potential and provide a free product for bloggers to take advantage of. Where Wordpress premium themes generally offer more than the free ones because of the financial aspect, isn’t Wordpress something that is free and open source anyway? Rupture will be a theme that will have ongoing support with the latest version of Wordpress and continuously improve it’s flexibility and functions. It will be released as a simple theme with an eye-catching design with hope the community will contribute ideas to make it stronger.

“lets see!”

The Breakdown:

Features:

• HTML5 + CSS3
  Rupture is written with the newest web technologies so the inner core of the template has specific attributes. For example, the sidebar is written with the <aside> tag and the navigation written as <nav>. This will be the standard in the future, so Rupture is a head start. Not to worry, it is backwards compatible tested using IE6 and up.
• Background Glow
  It glows! Rupture’s appearance is very focused on the aura around the content area to give a spacey, new, original, and stimulating look.
• Widgetized
  Built with widgets in mind, so you can simply drag and drop something and expect it to look good!
  Current Widget Styles in Rupture 1.0:
  -Tags
  -Blogroll
  -Categories
  -Search
  -Buysellads (Coming soon!)
• W3C Validation
  Well, almost. Since CSS3 isn’t fully supported yet, Rupture uses Pseudo-classes for corner rounding that doesn’t validate. Other than that, you can count this HTML5 + CSS3 valid.

Download Rupture Theme

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