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The Process (a.k.a. Designing The Stop Sign Video). What if there were no stop signs, and a major corporation was charged with inventing one? They’d brief their agency and let them do it. Sorta. Welcome to corporate creativity, where groupthink and endless revisions help good ideas get executed.

Random selection from the very cool Vintageadbrowser.com—classic ads sorted by decade and theme, a great source of retro inspiration for designers.

New MartinKelley.com designed site:
Michael Oliveras is a long-time union carpenter making the entrepreneurial jump and starting his own business: Mike’s Precision Carpentry. He came to me looking for a webpage to advertise his new enterprise.

It’s a simple design, a typical small-business site of half-a-dozen pages. The color scheme matches his business cards for a bit of branding. Oliveras faced a problem typical for new businesses: a lack of good photos. The work he’s done for many years is not technically his own (per the employment contracts) so for now the pictures are a mix of the few jobs he has done on his own and a few stock images. I’m sure he’ll have a well-rounded portfolio before long and we’ll be able to fill out the site with his own work. In the meantimes, he added a couple of great pictures of him and his family on the “About Us” page to give it that personal touch.

See it live: www.mikes-precision-carpentry.com

Web marketing my MartinKelley.com blog:

A potential client recently came to me with an existing site. It certainly was slick: the homepage featured a Flash animation of telegenic young professionals culled from a stock photo service, psuedo-jazz techno music, and words sweeping in from all sides selling you the company’s service. Unfortunately the page had no useful content, no call-to-action and no Google PageRank. It was an expensive design, but I didn’t need to look at the tracking stats to know no one came this page.

So you’re ready to ditch a non-performing site for one more dynamic, something that will attract customers and interact with them. Here’s five tips for building a self-marketing website!

Read the whole piece on MartinKelley.com

New site from MartinKelley.com Design:

Elisabeth is a painter and artist who specializes in original acrylic paintings and giclee prints of nature and South Jersey beach scenes. Her existing site was attractive, but it didn’t have online ordering and she wasn’t able to update it herself.

We put together a features list and then went through a round of concept screenshots which I built in Adobe Fireworks and Photoshop (you can see our work here!). Design in hand, I built a customized Movable Type site. A specialized template allows her to enter information about the each piece: medium, theme, price and the URL to it’s image (most of which are hosted on Flickr). Movable Type pulls these together into various category and individual art pages, with automatically-generated Paypal “Buy” buttons for available pieces. We stressed search-engine visibility so there are many categories and they all cross-link with each painting.

Visit: Elisabeth Olver

A local client from Tabernacle NJ came to me with an interesting project. He’s owned a commercial cleaning company for a number of years and has heard his share of horror stories about the cleaning services clients hired before finding him! This experience led him to write a PDF book about how to hire the right cleaning service. What a great idea and a what a useful book this is for small business owners.

The site’s on a bit of a budget so it’s a simple design, with colors and general look-and-feel borrowed from a site the client likes. Simple editing comes via CushyCMS. When customers click to buy, they are sent to Paypal for the actual transaction and then forwarded to E-Junkie, which provides the automated and integrated PDF download.

Visit the site: Office Manager’s Guide to Hiring the Best Cleaning Service

This Quaker meeting sits along Philadelphia’s Main Line suburbs and is making special efforts at outreach. They wanted a design refresh that would allow the heads of committees direct access to…

From the article, Google Drops A Nuclear Bomb On Microsoft. And It’s Made of Chrome:

In the second half of 2010, Google plans to launch the Google Chrome OS, an operating system designed from the ground up to run the Chrome web browser on netbooks. “It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be,” Google writes tonight on its blog.

The NYTimes also runs an article, Google Plans a PC Operating System.

Martin’s commentary: Google releases its share of junk that it never really supports (Froogle, Google Notebook) and it buys companies that it lets whither away Yahoo-style (Feedburner), but when there’s something they want to go after they’re completely serious.

A Chrome OS makes a lot of sense and explains why they went to so much trouble to make a Google branded browser even though they already pretty much had one (Firefox development is more or less paid for by Google). It’s often been reported that Google employees have their own Linux-based operating system and now they’ll clean it up and release it widely.

Smart move, though I wonder why they didn’t go the Mozilla route: fund a third party to do the development work as an open source project and keep it officially at arm’s length. Kind of hard not seeing the anti-trust government units not getting nervous when the operating system, browser and user data all has “GOOGLE” stamped on it.

The folks at Friends General Conference have a Twitter feed and designated tag for the year’s FGC Gathering of Liberal Quakers in the U.S. Being flexible, QuakerQuaker.org’s FGC Gathering coverage will be pulling from both the new official “#fgc09” tag and the “quaker.fgc” tag that many of us have been using.

For the curious, here’s a link to the 2006 post when I first suggested that Friends start tagging our FGC Gathering social media.

Could Iran Shut Down Twitter? Via Dirkthecow.

Monocle is a search tool designed for the way you search. Monocle hangs out in the menu bar and you bring it up with one hot key. You can easily switch between engines to search exactly where you’d…

Yo, Operation Rescue, if you abhor vigilantism take this shit off your website.

Today Dr Tiller’s family said that his clinic will be closed permanently, a victory for gunman who shot him execution style in his own church nine days ago. Operation Rescue is the outfit that made Tiller the poster boy of right-wing extremist killing fantasies yet it’s leader Troy Newman told the New York Times:

“Good God, do not close this abortion clinic for this reason. Every kook in the world will get some notion.”

And yet the Operation Rescue website still has multiple icons running across the top denouncing Tiller’s clinic. One boasts “Undercover Investigation Stings Tiller.” WTF? I don’t think you want to be talking about stinging a man who took a bullet to the brain last week. You raised a lot of money over the years by demonizing an individual who is now dead because a man with a history of mentally illness took your message as a license to kill.

I’ve got dear friends who are Pro-Life and I understand and sympathize with the cause. But if you’re really worried about “kooks” then it’s time to do the right thing and wipe the shit (no other word for it) off your website. Make up a colorful button saying “We’re Sorry, We don’t condone this” or “Stop the Kooks / Not this Way.” Hell, I’ll be happy to donate my own design services pro-bono to create a 124x124 pixel buttons for you to use. Just take it down.

While we’re at it, why not consider donating this year’s proceeds to the groups working on the issues of violence and mental illness? Seriously. Show you care.

Nothing ground-breaking in this article on Mashable but useful for the newcomer. The most important take-aways for designers:

• use a large background image to avoid unwanted tiling on high-resolution monitors (1600 by 1200 pixels works for most scenarios);
• restrict your left-hand column to a 200 pixels width so it doesn’t slip underneath the main twitter column.

My own Twitter profile has a customized background that gets its color cues from my main blog. When picking themes and designs, it’s good to have a look-and-feel that follows your other sites. Here’s a page of unique designs which shows you how you can break out of the Twitter box.

One of the best uses of a Twitter account is to help drive traffic to a Facebook Fan Page and you can do this by having your tweets point to relevant pages on your Facebook profile (videos, links, events). I use http://bit.ly for my linking because of its good analytics. Many of us continue to use Twitter for its original purpose of sharing useful tidbits with friends, but if you are using it for publicity, you should consider how your tweets can lead to ongoing relationships with your other online properties.

This was a site I recently designed for a client. Ginny does a lot of consulting work with Friends Schools. Her company Strategies for Growth, LLC, provides “strategic planning, board development, executive coaching, and leadership team development for independent schools and nonprofits.” Check out Ginny Christensen’s Strategy for Growth.

And of course, contact me at MartinKelley.com if you want to get your consulting business online!

“Living Beyond Breast Cancer has won supporters for one of its biggest fund-raisers with e-mail blasts, brochures, and personal calls to big donors. But that’s so yesterday. For the first time, the nonprofit based in Haverford is posting to its new Facebook page information on this year’s Yoga Unites event, which takes place Sunday. It also is tweeting on Twitter as @YU4LBBC and uploading video to YouTube. Of course, Living Beyond also blogs, and it shares photos on Flickr, including one of women saluting the sun on the steps of the Art Museum, where the annual Yoga Unites takes place. As a result, the number of teams signed up for the event has nearly tripled, the group reports. That’s the bottom-line promise of ‘social giving,’ which uses online networks to raise awareness and, ultimately, money.”

Martin’s Commentary:

For context, my recent posts on Nonprofits and Social Media

Will Facebook (all but) Replace Corporate Websites
I’m looking at the work of a potential non-profit client now. They have a fine website: recently redesigned, it has intuitive navigation, good e-commerce and a design that projects elegance. The client is staffed with some fantastically-creative people and the web team is obviously skilled. Yet despite all this, the website itself feels oddly static.

Nonprofits and Social Media
Over the last few years we’ve focused on email lists. We all have big email lists—tens of thousands of users, segmented all sorts of different ways. We send out dozens of emails a week and they end up seeming not spam. A new era is coming with social media. 

Batch vs Real Time Processing and the Emerging Web Culture
Malcolm Gladwell treats us to another of his counter-intuitive x-rays of the world’s workings in this week’s New Yorker feature, “How David Beats Goliath.” His focus on the difference between batch and real time processing is a key to understanding why many nonprofit and commercial marketing professionals can use Twitter, Facebook and other real time media.