#businessadvice Tag

Illustrations by Po-An,Pan

These are even featured in creative bloom and various other online magazines. His human forms are a delight to watch.

Typography

This week we will be sharing a lot work that we are so inspired by from different artists –  Typography one of our favourite subjects and today we are sharing with you Tenski work he has shared some letters created for the latest 36 days of type challenge. As any graphic designer would tell you that typography is a big challenge.

And, it always amazes us to see the different interpretations and styles designers can use to recreate the basic letters of the alphabet. Here is some inspiration for all to see.

Link of Tenski work : https://www.behance.net/gallery/126245271/36-days-of-type-2021

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Improve your website typography

Typography is one of the most important elements of any site, having a measurably large impact on brand and experience.

 

So fundamental is it that making wholesale changes to your typography — opting for a new font, changing the measure, increasing leading — is complex and fraught with potential time-sinks.

 

But there are some simple changes that you can make to your typography that won’t break your grid and can be achieved in 30 minutes or less. Here are eight of the easiest.

 

Increase Color Contrast

When laying out text, it’s common for designers to see text as a block within a visual design. A designer’s relationship to text is very different from a user’s; a designer positions text as a shape, a user reads it line by line. Consequently, designers tend to underestimate the amount of contrast text requires.

Light grey text is aesthetically beautiful but functionally useless. Text is meant to be read and needs to meet WCAG AA standards on desktop and WCAG AAA standards on mobile — or in any situation with many ambient light sources. The larger the text is, the more leeway you have.
Text should be thoroughly tested for contrast, but as a starting point, 18px text on a white background should never be lighter than #595959.

 

Tighten Heading Spacing

The vast majority of typefaces are designed for use as body text — large blocks of running text, multiple lines long. When the font was made, it was spaced for this use.

 

Unlike running text, headings tend to be short and are surrounded by more whitespace — especially above and below. Extra whitespace visually floods the negative space in the word shapes and forces letters apart.

 

To compensate, tighten the letter-spacing and word-spacing of headings by 1–5%.

 

Loosen Non-Word Spacing

When we read, our brain doesn’t spell out words letter by letter; it recognizes word shapes and even word groups’ shapes.

 

Most micro-typography is concerned with not disrupting those word shapes. However, there are times when you do want to prevent words from forming and allow individual characters.

 

Loosen the letter-spacing on any text intended to be read as a series of characters, such as serial numbers, tracking codes, and tabular data.

 

Use System Fonts for Inputs

Privacy is a big issue for users. Anything you can do as a designer to reassure users their data is safe will increase your site’s positive UX.

 

Style your HTML inputs to use system fonts — the default fonts set by the OS your user is accessing the site with. This creates a clear delineation between the brand data in the brand fonts and the user’s data in the user’s fonts.

 

Using system fonts in this way encourages the user to feel ownership of their data, builds trust, and increases conversions.

 

Mark Paragraphs Once

Paragraphs of text need a visual indication that they have begun. There are three ways in which this is normally conveyed: following a heading, with a vertical space before the paragraph, or indenting the first line.

 

Each paragraph should use one of these indicators and one only. Due to the nature of web content and the benefits headings have for quickly scan-reading content, for most sites, the best choice is a combination of following a heading and vertical spacing.

Use Genuine Styles

For various reasons ranging from the availability of fonts to aggressive optimization, it’s common for sites to fake alternative styles using CSS. Italics can be faked as obliques with a skew, bold weights can be faked by using the browser’s defaults, and small caps can be faked by setting text to uppercase and reducing the font-size.

 

These tricks do more harm than good, creating distorted word shapes that interrupt the natural flow of text.

 

If you cannot deploy genuine italic, bold, and small caps, then don’t fake them. Find alternative ways of creating emphasis, such as changing colors.

 

Use the Correct Quotes

Apostrophes, single, and double-quotes are specific characters. Most fonts provide a glyph for them that is distinct from the quick single or double-quote key on your keyboard.

 

These quote marks are most commonly referred to as “smart” quotes because word-processing apps usually have the option to be “smart” about which glyphs they use.

 

Using the correct quotes is one of the simplest ways to deliver a refined piece of text.

 

Hyphenate Text Properly

Hyphenation is the breaking of a word over two lines. It allows a less extreme ragged-right text, and it is vital on mobile devices where the available page width is relatively small compared with desktop.

 

The web has surprisingly poor support for correct hyphenation, but it is gradually improving, and it can be applied as a progressive enhancement.

CSS allows you to set hyphenation to none (no hyphens), auto (the browser inserts automatically), and manual (in which you specify where hyphens should appear using the soft hyphen character).

 

Typographically, a hyphen may be inserted in any word that is five characters or longer; there must be at least two characters preceding the hyphen and at least three following the hyphen.

 

You should never hyphenate three consecutive lines of text, but addressing this requires JavaScript. You can minimize this problem by increasing your measure.

UX Strategy for Digital Projects

Before handing on developing prototypes, sitemaps and wireframes, we need to raise questions regarding the product — as much as possible. So, nothing better than knowing the circle involving the user experience, whereas decisions based on user-centred design in User Experience Design projects.

 

The purpose of User Experience is to work to make it easy and pleasant interaction and user contact with your brand through its products or services, viewing elements, communication or usability. It’s essential to comprise all the variables such as desires, emotions and experience of a person.

 

UX step is disregarded in many projects. Some companies often “predict” behaviours or actions of their customers without study, research, or testing, just by feeling or do not know the use and value of your business process. We need to understand more about people and, therefore, to work with UX; we should create a checklist, starting with a method to organize the flow of ideas, since there are various areas of knowledge in a relationship at all times within a project, especially involving User Experience Design.

 

So we can work with four steps:

COLLECT PROBLEMS > IDEAS TO SOLUTIONS > SETTING SEGMENTAL PRIORITIES > WORKING IN IDEA

 

Kanban Board

We can use different UX design techniques to organize ideas, and one of them is Kanban (Visual Signaling). There are various apps and software that use this technique (like Trello). The frame and your sticky-notes are often used in room strategies. The main decisions are taken together, especially at the beginning of a digital project, including UX design.

 

Another tool that uses Kaban in a holistic view is 360 ° View. With it is possible to answer frequently asked questions of the business as a whole.

 

360-degree View Diagram

Business, Sales and Marketing

• What are the business goals?
• What is profitable?

Design and Research

• What do people need?
• What is useful and enjoyable?

Technology

• What is possible?
• What features can be built now or later?

At the intersection of UX, Business and Technology is the opportunity. This 360 ° view method is one of the best ways to analyze user needs. This type of diagram can be changed by updating the account in the project scope.

 

Proto-persona

It’s time to find out who is your user name, your needs, goals, behaviour (problems, hobbies, etc.), and demographic information. For this, a widespread exercise is a brainstorm with a short questionnaire among the UX team to each report their assumptions and observations about your target users and use your answers to create the first draft of proto-persona.

 

Soon after, you should group all the information and continue the design phase. All assumptions and data collected should be noted, especially on how to use your product/service.

 

Name the proto-persona and outline how they can be. It is essential to “humanize” the proto-persona: it needs to create empathy within your team and bring it to life in a way that your team can easily understand.

 

They may appear different profiles of people using your service or interface. So, you can create separate profiles, defining primary and secondary proto-personas, for example. However, it is essential to know that proto-persona is the beta version of the ultimate persona. We need to study this type of persona through interviews and survey research about the user.

 

 

Pro customized tool using Mural

Blueprint Strategy

Blueprint is a map showing all points of contact between consumer and brand, as well as the internal procedures necessary for this from happening interaction. It is useful to view the path that consumers run across multiple channels, for example (site, SAC, e-commerce) and to identify opportunities for improvement. — Fabrício Teixeira

 

In the Blueprint strategy, we need to answer some questions on different boards. Here are some examples:

Challenges

• What problems are you trying to solve? What obstacles did you overcome?

Aspirations

• What are the ideal desired results?
• What do you want to achieve?

Focus areas

• What is the scope of the strategy?
• What are you going to focus on the most significant impact?

Guidelines

• How will we overcome the challenges?
• What specific mantras will guide the teams?

Activities

• What kind of activities solves problems?
• What capabilities reach their aspirations?

Measurements

• What kinds of measures do you employ?
• What metrics will be used to succeed?

 

According to the UX Blueprint strategic model, there is no initial risk of experimenting with alternatives: cross items, move notes, rework ideas, knead and start over. Here the strategy will be developed, starting with the challenges and aspirations.

 

After that, define where they fit. It exposes the strategic choice dependencies is an advantage of the Blueprint: allowing you to see all the elements at once. There are several situations in which you can use the Blueprint of the UX strategy, such as briefings or launch meetings, to guide the discussion and stay focused on the exercise, as it builds a panel based on consensus.

 

Consumer Journey Map

The consumer journey map is a guided graph that describes a user’s journey representing the different points of contact that characterize their interaction with the service.

In the Consumer Journey Map, the interaction is described step by step, emphasizing aspects such as the flow of information and devices. At the same time, there is a higher level of synthesis. Designers can define what motivates and the consumer’s real needs in this stage, analyzing each step of their navigation.

 

Stakeholders interviews

The stakeholders must go through an interview script, from company employees to external people concerned with the project’s approval. Here come the decision-makers in different aspects of the business. As they come from other areas, ideas can be shared anonymously to guarantee suitability. At this moment, the collection of insights is fundamental for the definition of business success goals and the prioritization of its functionalities.

 

Barbara Miotto, a designer based on the book Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services by Kim Goodwin, created an essential list that we share below:

* Replace these words with the names given to your project, product, etc.

About the product:
• What will this new product * be?
• What worries you about this product *? What’s the worst that could happen?
• What are the business expectations for this product *?
• What would you define as success?
• What do we still need to clarify?
• What are our biggest competitors?

 

About users:
• Who is this new product for *?
• What kind of interview with the user would be relevant to this project?
• Who do we expect users to be five years from now?

 

On the relationship of people with the project:
• What is your role in this project?
• I will talk to [person 1] *, [person 2] * and [person 3] *. Is there anyone else I should talk to?

 

Questions to Marketing stakeholders:
• Who are your customers today, and how could they be different five years from now?
• How does this product fit into the company’s product portfolio?
• What are [Brand] *’s most significant competitors? What are the company’s points of concern about them?
• How do you think this product could be differentiated?
• What do you think of the company’s current identity *, and how does it influence this project?

 

Practical information:
• What has already been defined about the project *? Who defined it?
• What are the requirements for this project *?
• What technical decisions were made?
• When will this new version be released?

There are numerous techniques for implementing UX strategy, and these are just a few of them.

How to Create a Press Kit

A press kit is a promotional resource companies use to communicate important facts to journalists. An effective press kit is a one-page, double-sided document containing contact information and details about your business, events, products, or promotions. You can distribute press kits to help support press releases in person, via email, or as PDFs on your website.

 

Letting your customers and prospects understand your accomplishments and mentions can be tough to do in today’s day and age of social media. Therefore, a press kit can help with this greatly. Moreover, it can help increase your brand’s awareness and reputation online.

 

Indulging your organization in the press immediately initiates interactions across networks that will bring more attention and eyes to your business as a result. There is a multitude of topics to include that will describe your brand. So, you are essentially creating press for your branding.

 

What do you need within your press kit:

 

1. Cover photo (website and social links)
2. Contact information
3. Brief Example of your business
4. Your story
5. Company background and facts
6. Hi-resolution images of your logo and brand materials
7. Team members/people within your office/what team morale should look like
8. Past press coverage
9. Website and social links

 

Cover photo (website and social links)

 

Look back to your brand guidelines and allow your logo to shine. Make it obvious as to what you do and how it helps people.

 

Contact information

The main intent of a press kit is to transfer customers into using our service or product as a result. There is no purpose of including company history, information, or any other factors that are used to represent your brand if there is no means of contact. Provide an email, number, and etc.

 

Brief explanation of your business

 

Viewers will not know if they need your service. Make your services and explain your business in an obvious manner. Put your service in a scenario and if the audience can relate, they will have a reason to show a deeper interest in your business.

 

Your story

 

For customers to fully grasp your organization’s motives, the audience will have to require information background behind how it all started. So, clients need to understand why you do the things that you do.

 

Company background and facts

 

Measurable data is what needs to be communicated. The simple answers to what makes your company. Answers to questions like, who and how many customers have you served? How long has your business been around? What year did your business begin to develop? Or even the location of your headquarters and etc.

 

Hi-resolution images of your logo and brand materials

 

To ease the process for publishers to release your logo, provide high-quality resolution images. So, the images will be distributed through various networks to present your company properly. In conclusion, include a possible transparent background that translates ever possible use of your company’s logo or images.

 

Team members/people within your office/what team morale should look like

Likewise, customers are interested in knowing who they are investing their money in. So, to ease their curiosity, provide a visual portfolio of your team members or the representatives. These are minor leverages in a press kit used to spark interest and create credibility.

 

Past press coverage

Your reputation is a factor in how customers will respond to your service or product as a result. Similarly, your audience may request information from credible sources that can allow your brand to shine.

 

Website and social links

Adding important information like the website and social media links will direct the media to see the kind of company you are too. So, it’s important to be mindful of your organization’s efforts and what you have achieved as an organization.

 

Optional slides for your press kit:

• Awards and recognition are a part of the business’s identity also. Moreover, this representation will communicate your company’s values and areas of strength. In releasing this minor information will influence the audience’s opinions and responses towards you also.
• Volunteer work demonstrates the business’ involvement in your community. It is a component that ties in with your brand’s identity. A good reputation is what makes a profit.
• Testimonials will allow consumers to entrust their time to you. Testimonials are forms of expression that support your concept. These strengthen your reputation and are an excellent form to promote your business.

Design Elements

• Typography, it is the visual component of an arranged type for written words. These are the minor elements used to influence mood. The typography you chose will be used to convey the subliminal message invested in your business.
• Imagery, the visual portrait of what you are attempting to represent. This will showcase your business to look reliable.
• Additionally, consistent branding will manage your organization’s identity. The slogan, logo, color, or any related cues that make up your brand will have to be consistent. This will allow consumers to memorize the business and if a particular group takes an interest to a specific style from your company, it can get efficiently tracked.

Share your press kit with us or if you need any help from our Design Services, head to the pricing page for more information.

Modern Love

Valentine’s day isn’t just about shopping and gifts (Although most people do that only). It also involves figuring out how to create memorable moments and meaningful celebrations.

 

On valentine’s day we are going to introduce you to our favorite modern love illustrator Brian Rea. The illustrations are filled with stories and art as he explores the joys and sorrows of dating and relationships.

 

Over the course of his career, the LA-based artist – who was previously art director for the paper’s Opinion section – has contributed illustrations to magazines, book covers, murals and, most recently, turned them into animations. He’s also written and illustrated two books, one of which – Death Wins a Goldfish – was recently optioned for TV.

 

Here it is the link to his website  http://www.brianrea.com/work/illustration

 

 

Unused Designs!!

What To Do With Your Rejected Designs ?

Let’s be clear about one thing before we look at your options:

 

Check your contract for the ownership and copyright rules before you do anything with your unused designs. Better yet, write your own contract and make sure the copyright rules are clearly stated and work in both of your favors.

 

The last thing you want is to repurpose a rejected design, only to hear from an angry client who believes they have the rights to everything you created during your time working together. Once that’s settled, you can pursue various options.

 

When that happens, what do you do with the unused designs? Unless the client wants to take ownership of them for a rainy day, do you just throw them away?

 

If you have something really well-designed or even the inklings of something that could be great, you have a number of things you can do with your work.

 

Let’s start making a list of all that we can do with the unused designs.

 

 

How to Choose What Font to Use?

If you’re looking for the right font for personal correspondence, business use, logos, signs, or branding – or any other reason – picking out just the right one can be daunting. There are so many popular fonts in different categories.

So how do you choose?

Narrow Down the Field

Take a look at different categories. There are several options, with some overlap,– but there’s a lot of variety in all of them! By deciding which category your ideal font lies in, you can immediately cut out a huge percentage of fonts that aren’t appropriate right now.

A Lighter Example

Let’s take the  comic category as an example. The most famous font in this style, Comic Sans, is very popular for producing an informal, ‘fun’ style of notice at work or at home, but is one of the worst fonts ever invented. Never use this font! Please consider these instead.

 

Buttered Toast by Hanoded has a similar, quirky handwritten style but will stand out from all the others. Without leaving the category, though, you can find some very different styles which still carry that informal and fun tone – like Comicraft’s Bronto Burger, Scangraphic’s Flash SH, and the eye-catching HighJinkies, also by Comicraft.
If you want to maintain a unified appearance across different font styles, one of the best ways to do it is to look at the different font foundry’s  which designed your first font.
While they’ll offer many that don’t present that unified aesthetic, you know that they’re interested in that look, and there’s a good chance they’ll have tried another spin on it in another style.

Weekly Social Media Updates

Welcome to the Social Media News edition. Here is the recap of what was trending in the month of October! A case study to show the impact of search term report change, Google Ads Benchmark Report by Tinuiti for the third quarter, Key findings of Q3 Merkle report.

Reaching relevant audiences with product targeting – Product Targeting on Sponsored Display and Sponsored Products can ultimately contribute to your business goals. Let’s look at these elements in detail in this blog post.

 

Pinterest announces new global shopping and ad features ahead of holiday season – This week, Pinterest is rolling out new shopping tools for Pinners and advertisers. It is also launching ads alongside visual search results and expanding it’s shopping tools for Pinners in the UK, bringing shopping inspiration to a new market.

Platform-wide brand safety protection, powered by Integral Ad Science – To help advertisers achieve their advertising goals while implementing the right guardrails to protect their brand, Microsoft Advertising is coming together with Integral Ad Science, to offer an additional layer of brand safety protection on the Microsoft Audience Network. More insight by Priscille Bouchez in this blog post.

Get your business ready for what comes next – In this blog post, Jerry Dischler shares innovations that will give you new insights about changing consumer behavior and help you meet customer demand in real-time through automation.

 

Announcing the open beta for Digital Marketing Center – Digital Marketing Center is a way to help small and medium-sized business owners manage their digital marketing across not just Microsoft Advertising, but also on Google Ads, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Prince Bajracharya, Cristiano Ventura & Rosé Dorleans give more insight into this blog post.

Get discovered by deal seekers with new features for listing your promotions (U.S. only) – Covid-19 pandemic has hit people very hard financially and they are holding off on buying gift items until they’re on sale. With Google’s new features, you can get discovered by these deal seekers effectively. More information in this blog post.

Easily respond to real-time holiday demand with Smart Shopping campaigns – New features in Smart Shopping Campaign can help you to capture real-time holiday demand, boost your visibility to new customers, showcase your brand and products in rich creatives, and uncover meaningful insights from your performance.

Introducing a Season of Support: Holiday Marketing Resources for Your Business – Holiday season is around the corner and to make the most of such an important season, Facebook is announcing new products that can help your business adapt to the pandemic & get on board with the accelerated shift to online shopping.

 

Google Ads ‘Search Terms Report’ Change & Its Impact – A Case Study – Google has left everyone shocked when it announced limiting the search terms report with terms having significant data. A case study to show the impact on the accounts.

 

Google Ads Benchmark Report by Tinuiti | Q3 2020 | Key Highlights – Google Ads Benchmark Report is based on anonymized performance data from Google programs. Get key highlights from this report here.

Automated bidding strategies update – In this blog post, learn all the updates with regards to automated bidding strategies in Microsoft advertising.

New features and alerts to help set your campaigns up for success – Google’s effort to introduce several improvements to help us create new campaigns more effectively.  Get more insight here.

 

Merkle | Q3 2020 Digital Marketing Report | Key Highlights – Merkle released its third-quarter Digital Marketing Report. You can find the key findings of this report here.

[New Feature] Discover and add negative product targets to Amazon Ads – Like Negative Keywords, negative product targeting excludes irrelevant brands and products from your targeting choice. We are glad to announce this new feature on Karooya’s Negative Keywords Tool dashboard. More insight in the blog post.

 

 

Weekly Social Media Updates

Google Smart vs. Standard Shopping: When to choose which campaign type– There are advantages and disadvantages of using Google’s Smart and Standard Shopping campaign. Through this article, Geetanjali Tyagi gives insight on some use cases for better understanding which Google Shopping campaign type will work better for your needs.

 

Google tests local ads in Maps auto-suggest results – Google continues to test new ways to surface ads and this time, they are testing ads for local businesses in Google Maps auto-suggest search results. Ginny Marvin gives more insight on the same.

Make every marketing dollar count with attribution and lift measurement – If we wish to use our ad budget in a wise way, we need tools that help to learn how people are responding to our ads, so we can take action to improve the results. Let’s take a look at the announcements from Google regarding improvements to attribution in Google Ads & updates to lift measurement solutions.

 

How much does Google’s new search term filtering affect ad spend transparency? Here’s how to find out – Google’s search term visibility announcement had a huge impact on PPC experts. Noticing the concerns, Frederick Vallaeys has come up with a Google Ads script to calculate how many queries are unidentified.

 

21 Essential Tips & Tools for Running International Google Ads – Whether you are expanding your new business or have been in the business for quite some time, the paid search practices remain the same. In this blog post, we learn 21 best practices to gain success while you are running international Google Ads.

4 ways to amplify your holiday marketing with Amazon Attribution – Amazon Attribution can boost your holiday marketing strategy by offering unique insights about how your non-Amazon digital marketing across channels, creatives, and landing pages impacts how your audiences engage with your brand on Amazon. Learn more in this informative blog post.

 

Automated bidding strategies update – In this blog post, learn all the updates with regards to automated bidding strategies in Microsoft advertising.

PPC Brand Safety 2020: Search Channels – Many times we see misplaced ads popping up next to an ironic news article and this could spoil the brand name of your or your client’s company. Andrea Taylor explains ways to keep your client and client’s brand safe.

 

How to Use Google’s Call Recording to Listen to Your Call Ads – Advertisers use call ads and call extensions to see the number of calls and their duration and always wish to know more about these calls & assess whether they were viable leads or something else. Pauline Jakober shed some light on how this feature can be used to listen to call ads.

 

Weekly Blog

Sponsored Display launches custom headline and logo worldwide – Now, advertisers can personalize their Sponsored Display product targeting ad creatives with custom headlines and brand logos, which will help to create more engaging ad creatives to convey the brand message.
 

Get your business ready for what comes next – In this blog post, Jerry Dischler shares innovations that will give you new insights about changing consumer behavior and help you meet customer demand in real-time through automation.

Announcing the open beta for Digital Marketing Center – Digital Marketing Center is a way to help small and medium-sized business owners manage their digital marketing across not just Microsoft Advertising, but also on Google Ads, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Prince Bajracharya, Cristiano Ventura & Rosé Dorleans give more insight into this blog post.
 

Finding eCommerce Success on the Display Network and YouTube – An informative post by Zato Marketing to help us to know how we can get eCommerce success on Display Network.
 

Reaching Your Audience on LinkedIn With Precision: A Primer [Infographic] – Johanna Kimura shares ways to take advantage of LinkedIn’s tools and capabilities to make sure your campaigns are being seen by the right people.
 

2020 Holiday Advertising: 8 Secrets to Success (and Sales) – As the holiday season is approaching fast, customers are going to need to shop online for holiday gifts. Michelle Morgan shares best practices for holiday advertising success in 2020.

 

New Advanced Format Options Available for Google Responsive Display Ads – Explore new options available for Responsive Display Ads to get a good handle on what is working best and what’s not working well for your campaigns.
 

How Will Google Ads Limiting Search Terms Affect Account Managers? – Search Term announcement by Google has created a havoc in PPC community. How it is affecting account managers, let’s find out in this interesting post.
 

What’s changed in Google Ads Locations reporting and why you need a custom report – In this article, Ginny Marvin shares the importance of location settings and reporting and what changes Google is making in location reporting.