This presentation from Colin Robertson at TED is one of the best demonstrations of concise and effective communication that I’ve ever seen.   It has great object lessons that can be applied to Web design and marketing communication in general.

Here are the main takeaways I got from the presentation:

• He uses very few words, but the words he does use are the key messages of his presentation. So much of Web and print design would be much more effective with fewer but better chosen words.
• It’s out of the ordinary (way out of the ordinary) and creates a unique memorable experience. How long will you remember this presentation?  How long would you have remembered it if he would of taken up the three minutes talking?
• The nonverbal communication which comprised 99% of the message is “quality” in the sense that it’s professionally orchestrated. The effect would not of been nearly as powerful or long lasting if that level of effort wasn’t put into the production.  It’s the cumulative effect of many small details being done correctly. Same applies to Web design, overall quality is achieved by paying attention to many details which result in the cumulative effect of providing credibility to the message.
• I think this is a very important point–a significant portion of the content was provided with collaboration from the audience.

I ran across the website for Boeing’s new plane releases, aptly named newairplane.com, and was impressed. It’s one of the best examples I’ve seen in both design and function of the microsite.  What is a microsite you might ask? It’s a small website, separate from a the main website of a company, that provides a dedicate platform for highlighting a product, product line, service or campaign. Microsites can be on a subdomain but are most often on a domain of their own which includes descriptive keywords or keywords consistent with branding.

Being such a mammoth corporation even launches of new products as big as the Boeing 787 would lose focus if placed within Boeing’s massive corporate site. Their microsite isolates and focuses attention on one aspect of their business, their new product launches. While Boeing doesn’t have to worry about this, microsites can often times serve as successful components to bolster search engine marketing. The key is though they have to be legitimate sites with unique and valuable content. There’s no better way to get an understanding for what a successful microsite looks like than to visit Boeing’s at newairplane.com.

While we’ve not developed any microsites of Boeing scale, we have help clients successfully develop numerous microsites to better focus and market their products and services. Contact us if you have questions about the feasibility of a microsite for your company or brand.

A great example of the the principles of consistency and conformity is the email template we designed for Baker Tilly. Compare the email design with the graphic identity of their existing Website.

Seth Godin’s blog posts are always profound, but his most recent post Bypassing the Leap is especially relevant to the services we provide. The gist of his post is that most of the time creativity is the act of reinterpreting and reassembling elements that are already well accepted and proven to work.

Effective branding and design services are based from this same perspective. While it may sound contradictory, quality creative products are almost always intentionally designed to conform within well established boundaries.

No matter how unique of graphic identity a corporation has, you’ll find the logo almost always in the upper left and the main site navigation in one of two locations. This is staying within the proven boundaries of usability. When Fortune 500 corporations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop their branding and identity all marketing publications will almost always have identical colors, layout and typeface. This is adhering to the core principle of graphic design—consistency. Corporations conform to the principles of usability and consistency because they know they’re the most effective way to communicate a credible message and the most effective way to persuade their customers to action.

Embracing conformity to communicate uniqueness is really the secret of success when it comes to marketing communication and application design. 

Many small and mid-sized companies don’t get this. Have you ever found a Website through Google that you thought might be a good solution for a need only to have second thoughts when their Website design looked dated, amateur or unclear?  No matter how unique and appealing their solution may be, if their graphic design and usability do not establish unwavering credibility you’re likely to just head back to Google to search for an alternative.

Small and mid-sized companies have a great opportunity to level the playing field against even massive competitors by communicating their unique value message by conforming to already accepted and proven principles.

Does your marketing communication produce credibility or doubt? Ask ten people outside your organization that you can trust to give you honest opinions about their impressions of your Website, emails or other marketing material. If you need an objective professional opinion let us know. The one thing you’ll get is honesty and there’s no obligation. If you do decide for yourself that your identity needs a makeover we provide consulting as well as in-house development and design services. You can call us at 866.770.7967 or through our online form.

These do-it-yourself instructions are based on best-practice recommendations from Facebook and are current as of February 18, 2011. Additionally, Risingline provides full Facebook development services. If you would prefer to have us setup, optimize and integrate your Facebook and other social media assets with your Website, please feel free to contact us for a no-obligation estimate.

1. Setup a Personal Account

If one does not exist already, set up a personal account for the CEO, owner or a principal of your company. Do not set-up a personal Facebook account and populate it with business information. This is against Facebook’s terms of service and may result in Facebook deactivating your profile.

2. Setup a “fanpage” (In Facebook lingo, fanpage is synonymous with business page)

a. Login to the personal Facebook page you created in step 1. Click “Home” in the upper right.

b. In the far-left column, look for “Ads and Pages” and click. You may have to click the “More” link in that column to see Ads and Pages.

c. Click the “Create Page” button

d. Select the category that best describes the type of business page you’re creating. In most cases, you will need to decide between “Local Business or Place” and “Company, Organization or Institution.”

• If you market your products/service primarily in a single market then choose Local Business or Place.
• If you market your products/service nationally then choose Company, Organization, or Institution.

e. Fill in your basic business information and click “Get Started.”

f. Your business fan page is now setup in its initial draft state.  Proceed with uploading your logo or other company images for your profile. Save the other suggested actions like “Invite your friends” until after you add essential information to your page.

g. Click “Info” in the far-left column then click “Edit Info.”

h. Complete the Basic Information page. Insure you use (but don’t overuse) the keywords for which you have optimized your Website.

3. Add additional Administrators to your Fan Page (Business Page)

Click “Manage Admins” from the far-left column. Type in the email address of the other personal profile accounts of individuals that will also administer this page, then click the “Save Changes” button.

Your additional administrator should now show up on the “Manage Admins” page.

Important Information About your Facebook Business Page

Your business Fan Page needs to be treated as a business asset. It’s important that the owners/principals of a business have control of the business/Fan Page by being added as an administrator. It’s ok to have a trusted Web developer or employee as an administrator; the business principals just also need to be administrators. As Facebook states:

“Businesses do not typically put the titles to company vehicles in employee’s names, nor do they allow the employee to keep the company vehicle after termination of employment. Nor should they with FB business/fanpages.”

For more information on Facebook best practices for business fan pages please see this article from Facebook’s Website: Fan Page Help – Beginners Read First!

4. Start populating and promoting your page.

Click the “View Page” button in the upper right hand corner, then proceed with Invite your friends, Tell your fans and Post status updates.

Confusion Warning!

While logged into your business fan page as an administrator, be aware that clicking on the Home, Profile and Account links in the upper right hand corner will connect you to those section on your personal profile/page with no notification. Hopefully Facebook will correct this long-standing usability issue but until then, it’s best to use the lower column sections to insure that you’re remaining in your business page.

The View Page or Edit Page button that appears under them does pertain to your business fan page.

Continuing Your Fan Page Development

The above guide will allow you to optimally setup a functioning Facebook business page, but there are numerous other options you can explore for managing and promoting your Fan Page through your administrator account.

Facebook Optimization and Integration with Your Main Website

Risingline provides additional development services to integrate your Facebook page with your main Website, blog and other social media accounts like Twitter. A popular integration includes us setting up your Facebook and Twitter accounts to automatically post links to blog, news or article posts when you post them on your main Website. Feel free to contact us for more information.

A design article entitled Oh, the logo by committee over at the Before & After Website is worth checking out. A few key quotes:

“Design looks easier than it is, and it’s more important than it looks. . . Design is us and it is personal. How something looks tells the world who and how we are.”

“When Steve Jobs started his Next computer company, his first act — before he had a building, before he had employees, before he had a product — was to pay Paul Rand $100,000 to design a logo. And Rand’s black cube gave Next its sleek identity.”

“NBC once paid a designer a million dollars to design an N.”

Read the whole article here.

I want to point out a great post that Seth Godin made today—The inevitable decline due to clutter.

As is his gift, he does a great job of articulating minimalism; a principle of design and communication that has become even more important in this digital communication age.

I’m having a hard time not quoting his whole post because it’s so good, but in the spirit of minimalism here are the best parts:

• “As digital marketers seek to increase profits, they almost always make the same mistake. They continue to add more clutter, messaging and offers, because, hey, it’s free.”
• “Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention.“
• “More is not always better. In fact, more is almost never better.“

I became acquainted with Tri-Digital Group, a digital imagery studio here in Boise, a year or so ago. Recently, these guys started doing some truly ground-breaking work with Air Force imagery that I wanted to pass on.

I’ve been to more than half of all Air Force and Air National Guard bases in the U.S.  In all these travels, and even at the National Museum of the Air Force at Wright Patterson AFB, I’ve never seen imagery like these guys are producing.

What’s even more amazing that all of these planes were photographed on the ground (most of them at Gowen Field in Boise) or in museums. The action, scenery, surroundings were created in-studio by Tri-Digital Group.

Check out the sample gallery of their Air Force Photography work posted at Rylex Consulting’s Website. If you know anyone who might be interested in their services a point of contact at Tri-Digital is: Jim Armstrong, 208.433.9939 or visit their Website for additional information.

Hints and tips for the styling and layout of your text content

With the vast amount of text being posted online and via social media these days I thought it would be beneficial to share this very brief tutorial for how (and how not) to style all that great stuff you’re sharing online. These tips apply anywhere you might post text—whether it be in one of our content management systems, WordPress, Facebook, Blogger or even old fashioned MS Word, these simple design principles will help insure your message gets the credibility that it deserves.

1. Learn to use <shift><enter> (Windows) or <shift><return> (Mac) to insert line breaks with no vertical spacing. This practice helps insure you maintain close proximity of related content and greatly aides in readability.
   People often just hit <enter> between lines of text which adds awkward and undesirable vertical space.

   Example using <shift><enter>	Example using <enter> only
   My mailing address: RisingLine 111 S. Broadway St STE 101 Boise, ID 83702	My mailing address: RisingLine 111 S. Broadway St STE 101 Boise, ID 83702

2. Don’t change typefaces (fonts). In fact you cannot change fonts/typefaces in our CMS text editor but many other text editors allow you to do so. The typefaces for your Website are specified in a single Style Sheet that was developed specifically for your site and insures consistency across all pages of your Website. Consistency in the presentation of your content is a cornerstone of good design.
3. Don’t change typeface colors. For a professional consistent presentation of your content the colors are controlled through the Style Sheet. Emphasis colors (such as the color of your hyperlinks) have been selected by your professional designer specifically to harmonize with the color palette of your Website.
4. Use the "font size" selector very very sparingly. Avoid at all costs using the "font size" selector to increase text size. This practice will invariably create inconsistent and amateur rendering of your content which cannot be controlled from the central style sheet. The only reason we retain the font size selector is for those rare occasions where a line of text needs to be reduced in size.
5. Avoid using "U" Underline to emphasize inline text. People will think the underlined text is a hyperlink. Rather use the "B" (Bold) or "I" (Italic) icons to emphasize a word or sentence.
   

   For professional and consistent presentation of your content…
   Do	Do Not
   News and Announcements We are extremely pleased to announce the opening of our second storefront in the beautiful city of San Jose, California. Please join us for our grand opening on April 3rd.	News and Announcements We are extremely pleased to announce the opening of our second storefront in the beautiful city of San Jose, California. Please join us for our grand opening on April 3rd.

6. Use the "Format" selector to change heading text size and create a logical hierarchy of content. Using this method allows consistent presentation for your site which is controlled by the Style Sheet.

Choosing the best domain name for your Website is a daunting task. Actually thinking of a great domain name is not hard, finding a great name, or even a good-enough name, that’s taken is the hard part. We’ve accumulated a number of guidelines to use when considering a new domain name which we’ll be sharing the next few blog posts; here’s the first:

.Com instead of .Net

This first guideline is the most absolute of them all—never use a .net domain as your primary business domain. The reason a company considers a .net domain is almost always because someone else already is using the .com version of the domain. Usability studies have proven that when someone hears or reads a domain name, by the time they type it in their Web browser they’re most likely going to type .com anyway. If you do choose to go with a .net, be aware that a huge percentage of the branding expense and effort you do for your Website will benefit the .com version, not yours.

Sometimes people see that their .com is not currently developed and assume that since there is no site on the .com the .net is a viable option. In these cases it’s even more important not to choose the .net. A domain squatter dreams about a company investing a ton of money into developing and marketing a Website on a .net for which the squatter owns the .com. It raises the value of the .com significantly and it’s very easy to squeeze the .net domain holder into paying an exorbitant price for the .com when the squatter puts up a porn site.

This means that even though there is the perfect domain name available (such as mycompanyname.net or myexactkeywords.net) you’ll be far better off to select a .com even if it’s not as desirable of phrase. Our upcoming posts will shed some light on how to do that.

What determines the success (or failure) of a Web development project?

While there are many important factors (both on the client and developer side) there are two all-powerful prime lynchpins that will make or break even the most qualified participants: Perspective and expectations. Some time ago I made a blog post on perspective, in this second of two posts I’ll discuss expectations.

Expectations

Success in almost any transaction or relationship is determined by establishing and meeting a set of shared expectations between parties. A $3 meal at a McDonalds can be just as successful as a $200 meal at a Smith & Wollensky Steakhouse. The same degree of success can be realized at both regardless of the vast difference between a dedicated waiter serving dry-aged prime beef and a mass produced sandwich handed to us in a crumpled paper bag. It’s all about us getting what we expect.

When a client and developer view a project from a shared perspective, setting expectations is the natural progress of collaboration. Without the collaborative systematic development of a set of shared exceptions we risk orchestrating an iPod dance party. Both parties may participate but they’ll each be in their own world and when the music stops they will have completely different perspectives from which to determine success.

Developing a shared perspective is the responsibility of the developer and starts with listening, interrogating really (in a nice way, without the light), to the client and extracting the core business goals of a project, the details of the client’s unique value proposition, the needs and profile of their customers and other such vital information.

Provocative and challenging questions should be presented to the client in this stage to help them gain an outside perspective and the developer needs to be willing to adjust their biases so that in the end there is an unambiguous meeting of the minds about the project goals. In addition to the primary goals, there are many technical parameters that need to be discussed and agreed upon including development environments, creative parameters, branding continuity, etc.

After goals and requirements have been collaboratively determined, the developer is responsible for drafting a formal systematic development process that articulates the specific developer tasks that will be provided to meet those goals, and establishes a work-flow time frame for project completion.

All of this is not that profound or new. It’s really just common sense. But from my observation, the temptation is often great to gloss over a formal development of a shared perspective and expectations. It’s usually in the context where the client and developer develop good initial rapport and feel confident that they’re “on the same page.” Feelings are great but Web development projects are too complex and expensive to rely on luck for success.