HollawayGraphics

HollawayGraphics basically covers all the bases from Business packages to Websites, Flash UI's to SEO. Visit online or call for a quote. You're satisfaction is my priority. var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-27495912-1']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();

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Landing Page Design

Have you ever thought about designing landing pages?

If not, I suggest you look into expanding your skill set toward this lucrative design discipline. What is a Landing page? A landing page is a webpage that allows eCommerce website owners to capture a visitor's information through a lead form. A good landing page will be targeted to a particular stream of traffic - say from an email campaign advertising a particular product for sale- and, because it is targeted, and because it has an interesting offer behind a lead capture form, your client will convert a higher percentage of their eCommerce website visitors into leads with which they can follow up. Can you see the possibilities?

But before you go jumping into the deep end of this ever expanding revenue stream, here are some design failures that you should always avoid.

FAIL #1 – Message Mismatch

If you’re going to do only 1 thing wrong to screw up a marketing campaign this would be it. It’s so fundamental that it blows my mind how frequently this fail occurs. Message match is when the offer/copy/messaging in your advertisement maintains momentum throughout the conversion funnel. In other words, there is consistency from AdWords/banner ad, through to the landing page, and on to the confirmation page or destination website (depending on the purpose of your campaign).

Whenever you break the conversion momentum you are giving your visitor a slap in the face and telling them they may as well go elsewhere. If you can’t maintain your message across every campaign touch-point you are failing in a big way.

The problem can often arise when different departments handle different aspects of a campaign (the email guy doesn’t speak to the campaign manager who doesn’t even know about the PPC team). If this is the case, get everyone in the room – or ask the marketing manager to do it – and open a can of conversion marketing whoop-ass on them. Then sketch the campaign flow on a whiteboard to ensure the message transfers without changing direction.

Warning – if you failed #1, proceeding past this point could be painful…

FAIL #2 – Broken Lead Generation Forms

You spent 3 days designing and creating the perfect landing page, your software guy put a form in it for lead generation and you’re good to go. You’re daydreaming about all the great leads that will come flooding into your inbox or Salesforce.com account. Then you head out for beers on Friday after work.

Monday rolls around and your boss asks for a report. Sweet, time to blow his head off with the super low cost-per-lead you got from your $2,000 PPC spend over the weekend.

But wait, there’s not a single lead or email, and the PPC funds have been drained.

“WTF happened? You tested it right? Umm, well no, it worked on Dave’s computer so I just figured…”

The lesson: always test your landing pages to ensure anything interactive works perfectly. Try out the form on different browsers and make sure it’s bulletproof before you spend money driving traffic to it.

FAIL #3 – Advertising Something Other than your Primary Objective

I’ve seen genuine landing pages that had a single objective, such as taking advantage of a 50% coupon or a lead gen form. And then at the top and right-hand side of the page there are… wait for it… Google AdSense advertisements. Seriously? Think about it. You just paid $2 to get someone to your landing page via PPC, and you’re serving up more of the same to take them away from your page.

Ok, so that’s the worst case scenario. What else shouldn’t you do?

It’s been proven time and again that landing pages with a singular focus are more effective than a homepage. The reason being that you are providing a targeted message for targeted traffic and your visitors can focus their attention on the task at hand.

On a homepage there are too many distractions and multiple pathways that can lead people away from the all-important shiny button.

With this in mind, try to avoid the following things on your landing pages:

Global navigation to your entire website

Banners for other offers you are running

Google AdSense – we already covered why it doesn’t make fiscal sense, but it also makes most pages seem cheap and spammy

FAIL #4 – Leaving Watermarks on Stolen Stock Photos

Tsk, tsk, tsk. My finger is wagging in your face right now. For starters you shouldn’t be ripping off photos. There are plenty of good alternatives such as wiki commons and cheap stock agencies where you can get a picture for a couple of bucks. There are also a ton of freely available icons and social media illustrations that you can use (this blog uses a fair number) so you can get decent design assets quite easily. For the record, I designed the FAIL stamp myself (thanks to this technique).

Nothing screams cheap and untrustworthy like a 5 dollar photo you didn’t pay for.

FAIL #5 – Asking if I Really Want to Leave this Page

You know what I’m talking about right? A spammy page that throws up a dialog box“confirming” whether or not I am “sure” that I want to leave the page. Usually presented in complicated double negatives that make it hard to know if OK will make you stay or leave, and if Cancel will make you stay or leave.

Do you not understand why it’s totally not un-bad practice to generally or falsely re-ask for confirmation about whether or not you don’t want to not be elsewhere? OK or CANCEL? Hurry up and answer?

Hard to read right? Don’t do it. Ever.

FAIL #6 – Playing Hide & Seek with the Call To Action (CTA)

You want to avoid eliciting the “What am I supposed to do here?” response at all costs. Inthe first 5 seconds of arriving on your landing page the visitor should be able to discern the purpose of the page and the method by which they interact with it. Typically this is a big shiny button. Put it above the fold so that they can get their bearings as soon as they show up.

A good way to think of this can be illustrated by catching a plane. When passengers get through the ticket area in an airport – especially if they are late – they need to know 3 things:

Where am I?

Where do I need to go?

Do I have time for a beer before I get on the plane?

To resolve this momentary period of panic they look around for information. The “Departures TV” to see what time the plane leaves and from which gate, and the map that shows the “You are Here” dot and the departure gate. Having established where they are, where and how they are going to get there, they relax into shopping mode. This is what you want on your landing page. Explain in a succinct manner what the page is about, and show them how to complete the transaction. Then they can sit back and explore your page with no fear of confusion.

FAIL #7 – Recreating War And Peace

You’re not trying to make people fall asleep are you? With too much copy on the page you risk a couple of reactions:

Your visitor sees reams and reams of text, balks at the prospect of being asked to work (we had enough of that in school) and clicks the back button.

They literally fall asleep from boredom and hit the backspace key with their head (you never know).

Either way, you’ve lost them.

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Easy Color Matching in PowerPoint

I came across this article recently and thought it would be great info to share for those who wanted to know a simple way to find complementary colors in designing PowerPoint templates or simply recoloring an existing template.

We are all too familiar with this color picker window that can be found in almost every software that has anything to do with color. Whether you are trying a new background color for your PowerPoint slides or want to change the bucket fill color in MS Paint, you can’t miss the color picker.

There are three ways to choose colors here. You can pick a particular shade you like with the mouse (that’s how most us do it, right?), you can directly type the hex RGB values (as web designers do) or the third option is to use HSL also known as Hue, Saturation and Luminosity (or Brightness).

Hue, Saturation and Brightness

If you are like me who has never paid attention to HSB (or HSL) because it looked all too confusing, check this brilliant comparison from the Tech Museum that makes the concept so easy to understand.

We might use hue to tell the difference between ripe bananas and ones that  aren't so ripe. Or, we might use saturation to help us tell the difference between your glass of chocolate milk and the chocolate milk for  your friend. Brightness can help us tell the difference between bread and toast, especially burnt toast.

Hue is therefore the actual color. Brightness refers to how much white (or black) is mixed in the color while Saturation indicates the amount of grey in a color.  A saturation value of 0 indicates mostly grey while 100% luminosity (or L = 255) is white (see charts).

The next video, where Bruce Gabrielle explains how you can change colors in PowerPoint using the HSL scale, makes it all the more simple.

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My latest T-shirt Design!

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Tweet Hot-spots Around The World

This is more about "cool factor" than it is about design but I thought you might find it interesting just the same. 

Have you ever been on twitter and wondered where all these tweets are coming from in the world? Well, neither have I but the folks over at Frog Design thought enough about it to create this cool web site that tells you just that.

You can even view it in 3D but I highly recommend only 30 second intervals on that!

Check it out! http://aworldoftweets.frogdesign.com/

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3 Text Spacing Principles Every Designer Needs to Know

This is basic information for most of you but there are always new designers coming up that really don't have a clue about small detail stuff like this. Good info and principles can never be over-shared!

Many typographic decisions are based on spacing. This is something that has always been true with printed type, and became applicable to web type with the advent of CSS. Regardless of whether we’re talking about using type for print or for the Web, there are two directions in which we can control spacing — horizontally, and vertically.

Horizontal Spacing

Kerning and tracking are two terms you’ll often hear in conversations about horizontal letter spacing. Kerning is the process of adjusting the space between individual letters. Often when you’re working with type, you’ll notice pairs of letters that appear too close together or too far apart. Most fonts have a set of rules that determine the spacing between specific characters. The kerning between the letters “Wa,” for instance, should be — and is — much tighter than the kerning between “WV.” Most of the time, the rules for the font are sufficient to make the text readable. If not, you can adjust the individual letter pairs within your image creation software of choice.

For the text in a web page, it’s impossible to make letter-​​by-​​letter kerning adjustments. What you can do is adjust the letter-spacing CSS property, which is known in the print world as adjusting the font’s tracking. Like kerning, tracking adjusts the horizontal spacing between letterforms, but applies to the space between each letter. If you want your text to have a more open, airy feel, try adding a pixel or two to the tracking value. Figure 4.9 shows an example of the effect of spacing. The text in a web page is normally fairly tight, as you can see in Figure 4.9, so assigning a negative value here would probably reduce your text’s legibility.

Another horizontal spacing option in CSS is provided by the word-spacingproperty. This property can take a positive or negative length, or the keywordnormal. As you might expect, this property affects the amount of whitespace between words.

Read the rest @ designfestival.com

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Come visit my online store!

Look for a personalized gift at Zazzle.

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AIGA Launches Action Alert

Seems there are always people trying to profit from the creativity and hard work of others. The good news is that it's finally getting dealt with which is great for us designers.

Crowd sourcing for design work namely through Logo design contests needs to end to preserve the dignity and professional respect our craft deserves. 

This is just a bit of an article posted by Steve Delahoyde on mediabistro.com's blog; UnBeige. 

Last week we saw the uproar over the Huffington Post‘s decision to run an unpaid-yet-high-profile logo design contest and this week we’re expecting the branding outrage to continue, this time in a slightly different direction but with likely much more ferocity. Late last week, Kansas-based designer Bill Gardner posted on RockPaperInk about the logo-for-cheap-site Logo Garden and how they had stolen not just 200 logos that his company had designed and were offering them up for a mere $79, but had also fairly blatantly swiped ultra-familiar logos like the World Wildlife Fund‘s panda and the Time Warner brand. So direct and widespread are the thefts that the AIGA has issued an Action Alert, requesting that all designers create an account through Logo Garden and search the site for copies of their own work that may have been pilfered. Should you find you’ve been robbed, the AIGA requests that you contact the site and CC: them, as “several legal actions are already in process.” 

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Introducing Adobe Muse

(Image - Credit Adobe)

Adobe has just launched what maybe a game changer for most designers who've dreamed of creating great looking websites WITHOUT KNOWING ANY CODE! You read it right, Now designers that are well versed in Photoshop, InDesign, or Illustrator, can create great looking sites that are completely coded to look and function the way you designed it to without need for a coder or developer. Me personally have been waiting for a product like this for years. It only helps that over the years, I've learned a great deal about coding and converting Photoshop images into HTML/CSS functional websites but now I can just relax and CREATE!

Adobe is offering Muse as a free download now until sometime next year so get your copy today and feel the love baby!! http://muse.adobe.com/

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What's on your playlist?

For all you designers out there, this just came across my twitter page: "You should check out http://designers.mx/ if you haven't already! Mixes created by designers -- a lil something for everyone." It made me curious...what's on your playlist when you're designing. Usually I like it quiet when I'm designing but sometimes I crank up some Bach, Motzart, Billy Joel, The Fat Boys, George Duke, The Isley Brothers, The Temptations, Candy Dulfer, or Fourplay to name a few.

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Welcome to my new blog!

HollawayGraphics is now blogging! Stay tuned for great articles, images and interesting tuts & videos from the world of design!