2010 November Archive - Paper Leaf Design | Edmonton Graphic Design, Edmonton Web Design

Archive for November, 2010

How to Lower Your Bounce Rate by 64%

November 29, 2010

Bounce rate is an important metric for website designers, developers and owners to know. Bounce rate, according to Wikipedia, “essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. The formula used to calculate bounce rate is: Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing Only One Page / Total Number of Visits“. Based on this explanation, you can see how important having a low bounce rate is. The lower the bounce rate, the more people are staying on your site and clicking around: increasing pageviews, learning more about your business, and perhaps leading to more follow-through (if that’s your goal).

But how do you lower your bounce rate? Keep reading to find out.

How to Lower Your Bounce Rate by 64% Read the whole article >

Found Friday Vol 35

November 26, 2010

This week has been crazy. Crazier than Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind – and that’s crazy. This week’s design finds include: how to make your own font, how to use your logo to up brand recognition, an awesome designy gift shop, some cool sleeves for all your gadgets, and a book on beer (designs from around the world, so it fits!). Sounds good for a Friday, right?

How to Make Your Own Font

I imagine most designers out there at some point or another have tossed around the idea of making their own font. If you’re interested, this article from Just Creative Design is a good starting point.

10 Places to Use Your Logo to Maximise Brand Exposure

Instead of the oft-heard “make the logo bigger!”, why not follow the tips in this article? It’ll be a better way of doing what your client really wants: upping brand exposure.

SwissMiss Gift Shop

SwissMiss is a daily read for me, and now she’s launched an Amazon shop of some of her favorite things. Have a look – there’s some beautifully designed stuff in there.

Selvedge Sleeves

Sleeves for everything! Passports! Laptops! iPhones! And they all match to boot – you’ll be so stylish and whatnot. I dig ‘em.

Beer

It’s Friday! Fitting to have an entry about beer, but this book is “a visual tour of a collection of cans … vast and varied”. So you can have it on your desk with the excuse that you have it for the DESIGN aspect, not the BEER aspect. But we all know the truth.

See you next week!

My Attempt at the Worst Logo Ever

November 22, 2010

On November 15, 2010, some fine ladies & gents launched a fun contest for graphic designers called How Low Can Your Logo? The gist of the contest is for designers to “willingly create that which you spend your entire life trying not to create: the worst logo ever. ” It’s an awesome way to bring the design community together and have some laughs, and it was a really fun, quick project to complete.

Perhaps the most fun part of the whole contest is the client writeup, where you get the most jargon-laden client brief to work from ever. Full of contradictions and punchlines seemingly pulled straight from ClientsFromHell, I had a good laugh reading it. Here’s a few sections pulled from the client brief, so you can see what we were tasked to create:

Meet the Client

Excellencico (established in 1996) is a global leader in providing a focused, broad range of services to a world-class, international, region-centric clientele. Excellencico harnesses evolving, dynamic e-technologies to provide unparalleled levels of synergistic e-products to a heterogeneous set of unperpendiculated e-applications…

Direction

Our logo needs to be simple and yet detailed, complex yet spare. We prefer that the logo convey the forward-thinking nature of our company without looking too futuristic or flashy but we also don’t want anything too conservative or neutral. “Just right” is the vibe we are looking for. We believe that “e” best defines our unique approach and core company culture. We’re very drawn to the colors one finds in a rainbow but color wheels are a significant turn-off. I have attached a picture of our puppy. We don’t want the puppy incorporated into the logo but we do want you to capture her spirit and attitude and expect that to be conveyed through design elements.

Pure designnerd comedy gold, I tell ya. Armed with this information, I opened up Illustrator and, with much thought, created this monstrosity of a logo: Read the whole article >

Found Friday Vol 34

November 19, 2010

Last week it was Found Friday #33 – Scottie Pippen – this week, #34. Shaq? Fernando Pisani? Walter Payton? Your call. You’re all probably wondering what the hell is wrong with me, but this is actually how I remember numbers. Anyway, back on topic: this week’s design finds from the depths of the internet are splendid: tips on speeding up WordPress, a Star Wars typography poster series, awesome Marshall headphones (gotta have music at your desk, right?), custom dock icons for designers, and a must-read article from A List Apart on Art Direction vs. Design. Read on, readers!

15 Ways to Speed Up WordPress

WordPress…. a flexible, powerful and all-around-great CMS for many. We use it here and for our clients, so this article on maximizing its speed is a good one for us – and for you too, I imagine!

May the Force of Typography Be With You

Star Wars AND typography? It’s pretty much a nerd overload. Must…buy…

Marshall Headphones

I personally don’t have to use headphones at my workstation (I’M MY OWN MAN!) but many of you might; these awesome Marshall headphones look good, I’d bet they sound great, and they show off how down you are with the rock and rolls. That’s what the kids say these days, right?

Fancy Custom Dock Icons

Bored of your stock Mac dock icons? Hit the link to download some beautiful, free replacement icons – and to watch a video on how to install ‘em.

Art Direction & Design

This article hits close to home for us; sometimes we’re tasked with art direction AND design, sometimes just design, sometimes just art direction. It’s important to know your role in the project, and this article helps clarify what can sometimes be a murky distinction.

Thanks for reading!

The Designer’s Most Important Skill

November 15, 2010

A graphic designer in today’s day and age has to have a wide-ranging skill set. Along with the obvious grasp of design principles like contrast, balance, color and such and the knowledge of how to use the industry-standard software, many clients also expect designers to be developers, illustrators, strategists and more. I agree with most of these expectations (so long as they’re realistic); however, there is one specific skill that can and does, in my opinion, mark the difference between a good designer and a great designer: the art of clear communication.

Read the whole article >