October 28
Earlier this morning, Microsoft unveiled Azure, their foray into the burgeoning cloud computing industry. This, coming days after the announcement of Rackspace’s acquisition of virtual private server provider Slicehost (Disclosure: I’m a happy Slicehost customer) and online storage provider Jungledisk, means there will soon be some big league competition for the incumbent Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) for the estimated $42 BN this market will grow to by 2012.
This trend toward more affordable big-league server capacity for companies is a boon to start-ups and small companies who can’t finagle the cost of building and running their own server farms, but at the same time bodes poorly for those companies currently operating under the Software as a Service (SaaS) / Application Service Provider (ASP) model. These services we all know and love were, and still are in some circumstances, ideal for keeping technical infrastructure out of the way of creating complex solutions to elegantly address the business needs of all sized interests.
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October 20
We all use Adobe Photoshop. Some of us use it for simple image editing, and for some (including myself) our careers depend on our proficiency of using it.
I’m going to share with you a few tricks I use everyday that help me speed up my production time. You should be able to scan through these in under a minute, and hopefully find them useful.
1. Changing the color of your pasteboard to fit your needs
You are not limited to the default grey or the black background when you’re working, you’re also allowed a “custom” color.
- Pick a color you wish to use
- Select the Paint Bucket Tool (G)
- Shift+Click anywhere on the pasteboard, and you will see it fill with your desired color.
- You may always return to the default grey or black backgrounds by right clicking (and holding the right click) on the pasteboard then selecting from the contextual menu that pops up.
2. Find your center
So you want to place your logo right in the center/middle. By positioning it manually with the mouse, or perhaps with some Photoshop ruler guidance it takes too much time and it isn’t always accurate. Here’s a much quicker and simpler way that is dead-on accurate. Simply highlight all your canvas (Selact All), make sure you have the the logo layer selected, pick the Move Tool (V) and click on these 2 buttons on the top toolbar (shown in the image above).
- Align vertical centers
- Align horizontal centers
3. Zoom like a pro
We all know the (Z) key activates the Zoom tool, but did you know…
- Space + Right Click (and hold the right click) on the canvas gives you a contextual menu where you can select “Fit On Screen”, “Actual Size”, and “Print size”
- Command + Space activates zoom-in mode tool without selecting the zoom tool - (Ctrl + Space for Windows)
- Option + Space activates zoom-out mode tool without selecting the zoom tool - (Alt + Space for Windows)
- Option + Cmd + 0 resets the view to 100% ative view - (Alt + Ctrl + 0 for Windows)
4. Clean up your Color Swatches
Certain projects call for custom color palettes. Deleting the existing swatches by dragging them one by one to the trash takes too much time, try these tips for extra speed.
- Hover over the color swatch you want to delete and hold Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) then click.
- You want to delete all of the swatches in a hurry? Go over the first swatch, Hold down Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) you will notice that the pointer turns into scissors, and click away until all your swatches are gone.
October 16
Often times in the fight to develop web pages quickly we forget how important it is to make sure our page is optimized to the best of your ability. Simple things like placing CSS and Javascript files externally are an easy and well known example of page optimization but many times we can do more. Yahoo! has provided a set of recommendations on their site called Best Practices for Speeding up your Website. This list spans all areas of a page that can be tweaked with to minimize page size and loading time. Now many of these recommendations have their downsides as well but overall I found some good ideas on improving my web page performance.
The obvious question now is how do I make sure I am complying to all these best practices while I am developing. Well luckily Yahoo! has provided a very well integrated addon for Mozilla Firefox called YSlow. YSlow provides automatic feedback in your browser status bar for every page you load. It gives a performance grade (very strict) on each page along with the page size and load time. I find this very helpful while developing so I can quickly glance at these stats every time my page loads. YSlow also provides a detailed list of every HTTP request made when loading the page. This is nice so you can see how long it takes to download certain images or script files. Improvements can then be made to cache those large images if they tend not to change often or with a script maybe minify it before deploying it. Lastly this addon provides a nice way to view overall stats of the page including images, css, and JS downloaded.
Next time you go searching for Firefox addons be sure to pick this one up!
October 16
“Molecular’s Brand Personas Help Firms Fill The Brand Experience Void”
A unique practice by interactive agency Molecular, Inc. was recently recognized in the report “Molecular Brings Brand Personas to Life: Build Better Brand Experiences by Correlating Brand Attributes with Design Personas,” Forrester Research, Inc., September 8, 2008.
In the report, Principal Analyst Ron Rogowski says “Customer experience professionals struggle to create Web sites that support key brand attributes because their organizations often lack a shared definition of the brand. To fill the brand experience void, interactive agency Molecular has developed brand personas that help designers refer to key elements of brand style, map key attributes to relevant personas, and organize information in a way that resonates with client stakeholders.”
The benefit of using brand personas in the Web development process is that it helps companies create Web sites that effectively influence targeted customers and drive business goals.
“The strongest brands do more than convey an image, they engage customers at both a practical and emotional level,” says Howard Kogan, president of Molecular. “Driven by a passion to deliver real business results, we help our clients create brand experiences online that customers want to be part of — and will remember.”
Molecular’s use of brand personas is just one part of the proprietary process used to help clients extend their brand beyond a catchy headline to online customer interaction that is satisfying and effective. According to the report, “Forrester expects this practice to proliferate as firms strive to create more immersive, engaging brand experiences on their customer-facing Web sites.”
October 16
As marketing professionals, our main goal is to try to cut through the clutter and create time with our key constituency. Delivering key messages in terms and forums that are relevant to users allows these messages to have a far higher impact. Furthermore, uncovering white space in the media market that allows your message to be delivered without dilution gives the advertiser an unparalleled advantage.
An organization that has done this very successfully recently is the Obama campaign. A key part of Obama’s key target audience are young people. One can assume that the primary infotainment outlets that these individuals dwell on are online and television. Gaming and ‘wired’ gaming however, is a very interesting and in my opinion hugely effective channel to consider. The Obama campaign leveraged the gaming channel, by delivering its campaign message in the context of the Xbox 360 racing game Burnout Paradise.
This type of innovate advertising delivery requires that an organization very clearly understand their target audience, where they dwell, and where a marketing message can have a high impact. Gamers might spend multiple hours a week playing these games. If this advertising message (without relavant competition) appears to the user multiple times during this period, an organization may well be getting the marketing impact that they might be looking for.
