Hiring The Internet

When starting a new design, usually one of the first orders of business is establishing a basic color palette. Sometimes a client provides one as part of their branding guidelines, sometimes it’s up to the designer. Regardless of the situation, chances are you’re initially going to be spending a fair amount of time choosing colors.

That’s where colorlovers.com can make your life a little easier. In addition to lots of nice user submitted palettes, their Trend section uses a color slider to search for examples of color usage for both magazines and websites. With the web quickly becoming saturated with 2.0 widgets, it’s nice to stumble across sites like this that harness those tools to create something useful.

One caveat… the color search seems to work much better with magazine colors than websites for some reason.

The w3c browser usage statistics from Jan. are in. No big changes from previous months, but look for IE6 usage to start shifting over to IE7 in the coming months as Microsoft is scheduled to start including upgrades to IE7 as part of their auto update on Feb.12.

Jan. 08 Browser Statistics:

If you have a good tagline, people will remember you. And if your tag line reminds them of how you can help them meet a need or solve a problem, then they are more likely to do business with you as well. In short, having the perfect tag line helps you to BE VISIBLE to others - to stand out from the competition.

So, how do you come up with the perfect tagline? A good tagline should fulfill several criteria:

• Be memorable
• Include a key benefit
• Differentiate a brand
• Recall the brand name
• Impart positive feelings about the brand
• Be unusable by competitors
• Be strategic

You can read more about how to write the perfect tagline from this article on HowStuffWorks.com (You know, if you’re not hiring us to do it for you!):
How Ad Slogans Work: The Perfect Tagline

We often do research in which we need to convert measurements from one format to another to produce a unified report that refers to only one type of measurement consistently (for example, ounces versus milliliters). Because we work with a wide variety of clients, we found the following web site to be useful in helping us produce our reports:

Online Conversion of Any Measurement
http://www.onlineconversion.com/

Whether you are a total computer geek or someone new to technology terms, Webopedia.com has a lot to offer:

http://www.webopedia.com/

They describe themselves as the “only online dictionary and search engine you need for computer and Internet technology definitions” — and they’re right!

Not only do they have helpful definitions that keep up with the current trends, but also you will usually find useful links below the entry that cover it in even more detail.