Welcome to the Escape Blog

For all you aspiring designers out there. Michael McDonough’s Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School
Summary:

1. Talent is one-third of the success equation
2. 95 percent of any creative profession is sh*t work
3. If everything is equally important, then nothing is very important
4. Don’t over-think a problem
5. Start with what you know; then remove the unknowns
6. Don’t forget your goal
7. When you throw your weight around, you usually fall off balance
8. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; or, no good deed goes unpunished
9. It all comes down to output
10. The rest of the world counts

Springwise point out this work of Design Barcode Inc. from Japan.

inspiring Design. Innovative and thought provoking. How long before we see this in the UK?

Very powerful advert here just using words.

Say No More - go watch!

from Brandflakes.

I just read an article in Design Week (p.3 Volume 21 / No. 27 6 July 2006) about how a recent redesign of the Mr Kipling Packaging has boosted sales.

Interesting, I thought, that would make a good blog post. You know, about how design can make a big difference to the top and bottom line in a business. In fact any business, not just Consumer.

So, I thought I’d have a look at their web site. Ouch!

First of all you send an e-mail to someone who doesn’t understand why they are getting it - they didn’t subscribe and didn’t ask to be sent anything. This ensures that you confuse them. It really helps if they don’t want your product or service in the first place. Add a little anger to the initial confusion.

Secondly, you add the real content as a Word file attached to the e-mail. This ensures that the receipient has to have Word to read your real message - but what the hell - it makes life easier for you. (more confusion, more anger)

Thirdly, CC everyone in your list at the same time. This means that if a spammer (and it does happen) wants some fresh new e-mail addresses, they are ready-made - simply copy and paste. This actually happened to Craig once and it was a 500k (1/2 Megabyte) PDF attachment. The cc’d addresses were all spoofed and started emailing each other. This resulted in our entire internet connection being closed down due to too much traffic - he ended up getting about 5 copies of the email a minute over two days (3.6 gigabytes - ouch). (anggggggger and confuuuuuusion = frustration)

If you follow these three simple rules you should be able to p*ss off the recipients at the other end which may result in them blogging about you - a bit like this one that happened to me this morning. Luckily for the sender, I blocked out your details.

A great article here by Chris Lake at E-Consultancy based on a piece by the Guardian.

Businesses suddenly seem to take Google as a given and that they have to come and register your web site.

Isn’t Google a business like any other, making money, choosing it’s customers, trying to make the best search engine out there?

Google makes changes to it’s search engine to make it better and it must be pretty good if so many of us use it.

The question is, I would ask, why should any business rely on the results of a search engine alone?

In
California, Kinderstart.com is suing Google because its site fell in
the rankings: it claims traffic fell by 70%, and its income from Google
AdSense by 80%. Searchking sued in Oklahoma, after it was delisted; it
lost, but its listing was restored. Both sites may be rubbish, but
there will be more and perhaps better cases.

I can understand peoples frustration but why not work on making your web site better. Google probably doesn’t have time to judge every web site on ikt’s merit so it has to have an automated system, the same as all the other search engines.

No offense, but Kinderstart is a klunky site which doesn’t validate for a start.

That said…

We were quite interested on the Picture Studio Site this last weekend when we turned off a Google Adword campaign for the term ‘Doug Hyde’ and the page disappeared from it’s listing, then reappeared when we turned it back on. It also had quite an impact on actual visits to the site based on click throughs from the natural listing. um…. interesting.

We can not know the set up of every computer that connects to the internet but it always helps if you can get an overview - sometimes, the stats blow away all your preconcieved ideas.

The latest W3 Counter Stats do just this with the most relevant (to us):

• Firefox - 24%
• 800×600 screen res - 11%

If you are running Escape Stats, you can localise this information to your web site.

Nice little article here from small business brief about protecting your company image. It is designed for people with very little knowledge of design but it does cover some important points for any small business owner of what they should expect and protect about their company identity when initially working with a designer.

Summary

• Make sure you know the font name of your logo
• Make sure you know the panrtone colours and CMYK and RGB values
• Get Vector files on disk if you can - more flexibility
• Send a copy of your logo when asking for a print quote to make sure that they can read the files.

Protecting your identity and creating a cohesive ‘brand’ is important for any business, whatever size. It is often something that is overlooked with many startups. If a customer has your business card or brochure, or visits your web site, your image needs to be seen (and felt) as one.

Obviously as you get larger, it becomes even more important.

Staying with a numbers theme, twelve reasons why UK Companies Don’t Blog from E-Consultancy.

1. You don’t understand why you’d want a business blog. Neither does your CEO.
2. You are the CEO. And you’re not going to allow your minions to blog.
3. You think it is too risky to allow your colleagues to write blog posts.
4. Your PR agency thinks blogging is a bad move.
5. You mentioned something to the techies. It is in their development schedule.
6. You haven’t figured out who will contribute to the blog, or what you will write about.
7. You can’t see any benefits whatsoever. It would be a waste of time.
8. You don’t see any return on investment. It would be a loss leader. We don’t do loss leaders.
9. You have no clue about how to set up a blog.
10. You think blogging is all hype / a passing fad / for kids.
11. You are happy to ignore blog activity in the US. The US is a totally different environment for this sort of thing.
12. You think blogging isn’t right for your business.

Each one is explained more on their site.

If you have bigger balls and a spare afternoon, why not got to www.typepad.com and set yourself one up. Tell your customers about it and have a play. It’s funny how creative you can get when you play!

Don’t take our word for it… from the mouth of web host directory

Although:

12. Limit Use of Frames Never use them