1. Easy navigation for reader usability. The best designed blogs are those that are easy to get around. The headings are in the same font each time, the menus are in the same spot on each page and it’s easy to get from one page to another.

Think about what a reader would like to do at your blog. Check out photos, check for your latest posts, check for related posts to the one they’ve just read? Give users whatever they want at their fingertips – make navigation easy. If people get confused trying to get to a post, more likely than not they’ll just leave your blog altogether.

2. Use lots of white space. A crowded page is just confusing. No one wants to read a post with tons of other text surrounding it. They also don’t want to be distracted by photos that have nothing to do with the post. Photos are a great, and I would say, necessary addition to blogs, but the photos should be in the same position(s) in each post for uniformity and design aesthetics. White space helps your blog look clean and polished as well.

3. Don’t use too much advertising within the posts. Yes, you want to make money, but you won’t make much money if readers leave because of annoying ads in the middle of your posts. Put ads down the sides of the blog and leave the center for your most important content – your thoughts!

4. Use colors judiciously. I was going to say “sparingly,” but decided against it because colors can make a boring blog look fun. I don’t think you should only use a white background with one or two spot colors, but limiting your color palette to between two and four colors will help with the uniformity of the design. It’s fine to have a purple background with white boxes of black text, if that’s the feeling you’re going for. Don’t forget that colors affect people’s psyches – red can make people feel more aggressive and black can make people feel melancholy. Pick colors that give off the feeling you wants visitors to experience when visiting your blog.

You need to review your portfolio multiple times, carefully scrutinizing which samples best show your ability. You need a mix of media if possible – Web site designs, magazine designs, advertising design (which can be broken down into further subcategories, such as direct mail, billboards, posters), and anything else you’ve designed. I’ve looked at plenty of portfolios – to hire people, to get ideas and just to admire a designer’s work. Here’s what I’ve noticed will help you and your portfolio to stand out – in a good way.

Do’s
Sign your cover letter. No one is going to look at your portfolio unless you write them a nice, personalized cover letter. I could write a whole blog, or even a whole book, about cover letter mistakes. But for designers, the important thing to remember is to sign the cover letter. That space between “Sincerely” and your typed name is the place for your signature – not your logo or some design element. Save that for the portfolio.

Organize your portfolio. It doesn’t matter if you organize by genre, by media or by project, just make sure there is some method to your madness that is apparent to the interviewer’s eyes. There’s nothing worse than looking at samples that have nothing to do with one another and try to make sense of them.

Include some sketches or scribbles to show the progression of a piece. Head designers like to see how your design mind works, so don’t throw away that old scrap of paper that holds the progression of your magazine ad. Include these items in the back folder of your portfolio case for when the interviewer asks how you came up with a piece.

Don’ts
Don’t lie. This seems obvious, but seriously, don’t do it. When asked if you designed a piece in its entirety, including the photo shoot, the lighting, everything – if you didn’t do it all, don’t say you did. Taking credit for everything in a piece doesn’t show that you’re a team player. It also makes you look like a liar since most designers work in teams on every item they create.

Don’t ask for critique. Some interviewers might offer some critique, and you should take it if offered, but don’t ask for it. The interviewer doesn’t have the time and you’ll be seen as someone who needs direction – never good for any kind of designer.

Don’t forget about the online portion. Your portfolio should be for your best, best and absolute best work. Your online portfolio has much more room for those “okay” projects that shows your variety, but aren’t quite the cream of your crop. Be sure to create an online portfolio of which you can direct interviewers to in case they want to see more. This way, they can also review what they saw in your portfolio and remember you better.

With the instability of the Internet, “People are looking for a safe harbor in times of turbulence.” If this is true, newspaper and magazine publishers would welcome the news, since they’ve had so many cutbacks in advertising budgets in the past year. The advertising budgets were already scarce enough before this sluggish economy.

Newspaper and magazine circulations have been declining since people get their news online anymore. So many advertisers have cut print budgets in favor of the Internet that some analysts think that some U.S. newspaper may even fold in 2009. (I know I’ve seen headlines just this week about weekly newspapers folding, so dailies might not be too far behind.)

Digital information is still big business for many companies, including WSJ parent Dow Jones & Co. But at the same time, print advertising is still a valuable moneymaker for many companies. Although display ads on Web sites are reaching a lot of people’s computer screens, that doesn’t necessarily mean that people are paying attention to them. Thomson believes that advertisers are starting to recognize that people ignore display ads because they are looking at other parts of the screen that sap their attention. Newspaper and magazine ads may be more valuable because you can’t click out of them like you can online ads. Print ads aren’t as intrusive as many Internet ads. It’s easier for people to get distracted, surfing from page to page and it seems that if they notice the ads at all, it’s only because they’re annoyed by them.

Advertising in the luxury market haven’t been hit too bad, but it’s inevitable according to Nick Brien, who is the CEO of Interpublic Group’s Mediabrands, a holding company for media buying and planning agencies. Even millionaires and billionaires are losing money, which doesn’t mean much to the average Joe, but going from having 1 million to half a million is still a loss.

As a result, advertisers will be hitting print – it’s been the reliable advertising venue for years and in this unstable economy, advertisers don’t want to take too many risks.

For those who are used to the “Search” and “Find” features giving instant gratification, Evernote will alleviate your frustration in not being able to search your magazine clippings and business cards. Your brain only has so much capacity for remembering things; Evernote is like an external hard drive for your brain.

You can clip part of a Web page or take a photo of a wine label, upload it into the software where it’s archived, then you can later search for whatever terms were on the wine label, such as “milk sake.” Even if you handwrote “milk sake” on the wine label, Evernote will recognize the text and bring up that wine label. Evernote even reads cursive writing. Awesome.

Here’s how Evernote works:

1. You capture what you what to remember by using your computer, phone or camera, and uploading it into the software.

2. Everything is run through Evernote’s recognition technology and Evernote synchronizes it across all of your devices. You can organize your info into notebooks and create tags for items so that they’re easier to find later.

3. Later, you search or filter in Evernote for whatever words are associated with the item you’re trying to remember, and Evernote brings up the photo, Web page, etc. that you uploaded.

You can even record audio and listen to it later! This is so good. You don’t have to type anything from your handwritten note into the software – its image recognition software can read just about anything. I would think if you have really bad handwriting, it wouldn’t work, but from this photo it looks like it does!
 

That’s CEO Libin holding on to that ticket.

You can keep track of receipts, business cards, anything that has text on it. You can actually keep track of photos with no text as long as you add a tag to describe it.

Once the software is on your phone, anytime you take a picture it automatically goes into the Evernote software – you don’t have to do a thing after taking the picture unless you want to add tags to it.

So, once you scan or take photos of all your business cards, you can later go into Evernote, type in the name or business name and get the card you scanned or photographed earlier in its entirety. The only caveat with this software is that it can’t read PDFs, so you’ll have to save your images as JPEGS or PNG files.

The Evernote interface looks pretty simple to use and gives you nice details, such as the dates you made the notes. Pretty handy if you get into a habit of taking a pic of a business card the same day you receive it.

A 1-year premium subscription costs $45 which gives you more security and higher uploading limits than the free version. Still, the free version gives you 40MB per month which is probably plenty for your non-business needs. 

Do’s

1. Keep it simple. Doesn’t this seem to be repeated in every design article you read? That’s because it’s the first rule of design and it works. The best blogs have two or three column layout, with all the ads and other info, like blog rolls, on one side of the page. No ads or extraneous stuff in the middle of the posts. Keep everything streamlined and your blog will be pleasing to the eye.

2. Position posts high on the page. If people have to scroll down to see your first post, you’re toast. Most people will lose interest if they don’t see a headline and the start of a post right when the page loads. 

3. Tweak your template. If you’ve got a WordPress or Blogger or one of many other blogging template sites, you need to change up your colors, your top image, something! Make it different so that it’s memorable. So many blogs look the same that it can be hard to remember whose blog said what.

Don’ts

1. Don’t let your page load slowly. Stay away from widgets or videos that download slowly. People have short attention spans, especially on the Web, and they won’t wait for your page to load before moving on. Keep your blog free from unnecessary items that just look cool – any downloaded items should have some kind of function that every visitor needs.

2. Don’t make navigation hard. Blogs should be scannable. People will scan the headlines, scan the blog roll and scan your posts for the info they’re interested in. If a reader is looking for archives or to read your About page, they’ll give up pretty quickly if they can’t find it easily. Put navigation links where people expect them – across the top or down one of the sides of the page. Remember, simplicity is the first rule of good blog design. You can always jazz up your background or the links themselves.

3. Don’t make it hard to see and post comments. That’s the whole reason for a blog – to encourage communication and conversation. If you bury the comments feature, no one will bother to comment and you won’t meet your blog’s purpose. Whether yours is a business or personal blog, comments are the lifeblood of a blog so design your comments not as an afterthought, but as one of the major design focuses.

1. They have colors or use colored card stock. This isn’t too hard to do. I can see the merit of a black-and-white card – as long as the black overshadows the white. What I mean is that nearly everyone has a white business card with black lettering. The ones that stand out don’t have neon colors – a simple change of cardstock to cream or light gray could do the trick. The one I like the best is black on the front and white on the back. The back is matte, so I can write on it if I choose. The black makes it stand out from the rest.

2. The simple designs win out over the complicated and cluttered. Some have crammed so much text, along with a logo and tagline, that I just gloss over them when I’m looking at them along with the hundred others in my handy business card holder book. The ones with the most white space, or empty space, look the neatest, cleanest and most professional.

3. The best ones are free from typos. Proofread before you print. Please. Just do it. It can’t take more than a few minutes for the longest business card. Give your proof or your contact info to someone else to look over. Typos and spelling errors make the few who do it unprofessional. If these people can’t or won’t take the time to get their business cards right, there’s no way I’m trusting them with my business!

4. Have a professional email address. This is just a small pet peeve of mine. These people took the time to create a business card, but they don’t have a professional email address. My opinion of someone with a Hotmail or Yahoo account, or even Gmail account is that he isn’t professional. He doesn’t have the resources to even get an email account at his Web site address? I think a lot of domain names come with email space as well, so if you have a Web site, you should have an email address at that site. For me, when I’m comparing two real estate agents, the one with the address at her real estate company’s site seems more reliable and long-term than the one with an email address at Yahoo.

5. Write a personal note on your business card as you hand it to someone. Whether this is your cell phone number, a date or a product name, the cards with enough room to jot something down (and that did have something down) stand out to me. Handwriting looks weird on a business card, so those with writing stand out. Writing your cell phone number or some other number that isn’t printed on your business card makes the recipient feel special.

Why is it that anymore, it seems like the creative markets are the only ones expected to produce work on spec? Why can’t doctors or lawyers all take time to draw up plans for our wellness or our legal matters and then we just pick whoever’s got the best plan? Well heaven forbid we take up a doctor’s or lawyer’s valuable time! That’s horrible that some pros’ time is considered more valuable than others. We are all people. We all produce something that someone else wants or needs. We should get paid for that, even if we’re just asked for a sample. It’s our right!

Whenever I see a job that says it requires an unpaid, original sample, I always walk away. My time is too valuable for someone who’s not paying me to get! Someone I don’t even know for that matter! Who do these people think they are?

I know designers are upset; I’ve seen plenty of blogs about them being asked to create a design on spec for many clients. Some clients even come to expect it, it seems. It’s just a big scheme many times for companies to get free, fresh ideas from people whose work they never intended to use anyway.

I know that newbies need to build up their portfolio, and when I was in college I did write for free. But, it was an internship and I knew I wasn’t going to get paid. I did get some good contacts from that internship though, as well as good experience. But, please, to all the creative pros out there: don’t do anything on spec! There are many more horror stories than there are success stories. And, the more people do work on spec, the less creative pros get paid down the road. Every time someone produces work for free, that lowers the bar for what is a decent wage. And that doesn’t exclude those that are doing work on spec; it’ll come back to you too. Our time is just as valuable as any other profession so treat it that way!

• Uses existing social networks
• Encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, either online or offline
• Consumers volunteer to distribute (the marketer doesn’t ask consumers to pass on the message; the marketer creates a compelling message that consumers want to pass on)

to

• Increase brand awareness,
• Increase sales,
• Influence others, or
• Achieve some other marketing objective.

Viral marketing is generally word-of-mouth marketing on the Internet. Offline, viral marketing is usually referred to as simply “word-of-mouth marketing.” The word “viral” conjures up nasty images of sick people, bacteria and a whole host of other sicknesses that spread quickly. Viral marketers are thought of as being somewhat nasty as well. Nasty, but effective.

Many have tried to rename viral marketing to something more pleasant, most recently, a new marketing company called Dandelion is referring to viral videos as “dandelions,” but so far, the term “viral marketing” is here to stay.

The term was coined by Harvard Business School professor, Jeffrey Rayport, in December 1996 article for “Fast Company”: The Virus of Marketing. Later, Tim Draper and Steve Jurvetson from the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson used the term in 1997 to describe Hotmail’s practice of including ads for itself at the end of every outgoing mail from their users. The Hotmail practice is seen as the first viral marketing campaign.

The practice was so simple and it worked beautifully. Hotmail gave away free email accounts, waited for people to email their network of friends and family who read the message and then signed up for their own accounts. Then those friends and family emailed their friends and family, and so on and so on, and then almost everyone caught the “bug” and opened a Hotmail account. It occurred pretty rapidly from Hotmail’s idea to let its users spread the word for it.

The Elements of a Successful Viral Marketing Campaign
For any successful viral marketing strategy to work, it needs to include the following six elements:
1. Give something away – everyone wants something for free.
2. Easy to transfer to others (email, phone calls, text messages) – viruses spread when they’re easy to transmit (like how easily it is to catch the flu from a cough or touching something someone sick has touched).
3. Scales easily from small to very large – you have to be able to support the spread, either with your free product or more servers to accommodate more Web hits.
4. Uses common motivators and behaviors – people want the best, they want money, they want to be cool. Use these motivators to your advantage and make your viral message something everyone will want to know about.
5. Uses existing social networks – this is what makes it so easy. You’re using people you know to get to other people they know and so on.
6. Uses others’ resources – by putting your message on someone else’s Web site or blog, you’re not doing any work after that person sends your message to others – you basically have tens, hundreds or thousands of people working for you for free.

Once you have all of these elements in place, your viral marketing message is more likely to hit the masses and give you much coverage and success. The sales don’t come right away – you must be patient and they will come.

You need to create a marketing plan that includes measurable goals.

It doesn’t sound as hard or tedious as it sounds. The key to make something measurable is to add numbers. While you’re creating your marketing plan, make all of your goals, often referred to as objectives, specific and clear so that they can be easily measured.

Marketing Objectives
You need a “marketing objectives” section in your marketing plan, which is where you put to paper what you want your marketing plan to achieve in the coming year. Each marketing objective should include a description of what you what to accomplish along with numbers to give you something concrete to aim for. For instance, you can say you want to become one of the top selling baseball hat companies in the American marketplace by the end of the year. That’s a somewhat measureable goal by you looking at the marketplace at the end of the year, but it will be easier to measure if you add some numbers. Let’s say you want over 35% of the American baseball hat marketplace to belong to you. This is a much better goal because it’s measurable with numbers, meaning there won’t be any ambiguity of whether you met your goal.

Benchmarking
You can keep track of your results by including specific benchmarks in your plan. Examples of benchmarks could include “selling 500 widgets by the first quarter,” or “having 100 people visit our Web site to learn about the product by XX date.” Now, you could have said “having more people visit our Web site” but by adding a number and date to the benchmark, and the reason for visiting your Web site (which is measurable by seeing which pages of your site they visit), you’ve just made that benchmark measurable.

Now you’ve got an easy way to see if your marketing objective is being met, and if not, you’ll know you need to change your strategy. By adding a specific date, you can take action now rather than waiting until next year to figure out what you were doing wrong.

Keeping Track of Results
You need a way to track how well your marketing plan is working. Schedule monthly or quarterly meetings and spell out in writing what your definition of marketing success is. If one goal is to create a higher sell-thru rate, you’ll need to decide on a specific number that will constitute a success for sell-thru numbers by a certain date. If you don’t meet this specific objective when you get numbers back from the suppliers and stores, you’ll know you need to work with your packaging or advertising strategies.

Also write down how you intend to track sales and costs, and at what point will your marketing plan change? For instance, you might tweak your marketing plan if you lose 10% of customers in the first quarter. Marketing isn’t science – you can use whatever metrics you’d like to measure success. Just make sure you always measure and measure consistently.