Welcome to the Escape Blog

It must be a big decision to update an iconic brand and I think Xerox (with Interbrand) have done a great job, as mentioned by Advertising Goodness. From the Xerox website:

The new signature incorporates a lowercase treatment of the Xerox name. It is in a vibrant red Pantone 1797 alongside a sphere sketched with lines, called “connectors,” that link to form an “X,” representing the company’s connections to its customers, employees, partners, industry and innovation. The connectors are super-graphics that will appear as reoccurring design elements.

All businesses change, and perceptions of a business change as industry knowledge, indeed entire industries, move on.

With information overload, a brand that does not site alongside a set of values or a vision, defined by it’s offering and interaction with the world, is in danger of losing any identity with anybody.

It’s constant challenge with evolution becoming more rapid. And, it’s not just for the Xerox’s of the world. Does you brand reflect your vision?

One of our favourite design blogs is currently celebrating its first birthday by giving away a free iPhone. All you have to do is leave a comment on their post. Comments will be open for one week, and the winners will be chosen at random. You must only comment once, and you have to fill out an email address in order to win.

So get yourself over to Bittbox, wish them happy birthday and you could be the proud owner of a shiny new iPhone.

I personally am not a fan, but I know a few of you are.

So I thought I’d share these tips with you from SEO YouMoz

At an ethical level, I would say always yes. It’s an area that still gets highlighted regularly, but usually because companies are not complying.

It confuses me no end. On one hand we are told (as do we tell our clients) that accessible websites are a must. But, many companies are doing just fine without it. Websites like Google, Amazon and E-Bay don’t seem to let a little thing like compliance get in the way of making profits.

With the launch of our new website,  I checked out a few of our competitors, one of which has updated it’s website in the past few months. There is a page, spouting the need for accessible websites, with which I of course agree; but their own website is a mile away from being accessible. It is, by the way, a very nice website, with some very sexy features; the sort of features that break any rules of validation.

It isn’t a snipe by the way. It’s a genuine quandary that is puzzling for me. With an estimated 10% of web users in the UK having a disability, how many people are affected by websites not complying?

So, as much as I’d love to sit on the moral high ground, I am found questioning that if non compliance is good enough for E-Bay, Amazon and Google, surely it is good enough for the rest of us?

These are the websites that need to lead the way with accessibility and until they do, I can only guess at how much confusion this area of web design will continue to have for the rest of us… and for the people who rely on accessible websites.

No, we aren’t talking about the stuff you used to see kicking about at raves in the late eighties (trying to prove I was once young after another new years eve)… we are talking website speed.

With the supposed increase of broadband connections, optimisation of a website, in terms of image size video streaming, seems to be lower down on most people’s agendas.

It’s worthwhile remembering, especially in the UK, that the broadband infrastructure is getting jammed. The promised speeds we see in the adverts aren’t what we actually get. For instance, at home I get 1/2 Mb  download speeds despite being promised 4Mb?

So, if you have videos on your web pages, enable them to be playable on demand.  And, if you have images, how optimised are they? Can they be reduced in resolution to suit the size you are using them at?

Another aspect of web speed that has appeared to me on a project this week is server delivery speeds, ie. how quick a server delivers your page.

If your web pages takes too long too respond and load, you may be losing out.

Two separate reports suggest between four seconds and the blink of an eye is your time frame for people’s decisions when surfing and finding a page.

On top of that, remember search engines. They have better things to do other than wait for your page to load and be indexed. In Google Webmaster tools I have witnessed web pages getting missed in the indexing because of server time out errors.

So, remember, keep it pretty, but keep it relevant and non-intrusive. More importantly, keep it quick.