.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Relaxing Music & Sounds of Nature for Designers

As a designer, we all need to relax & not get so stressed out at the agency. Listen to some soothinh relaxing music, that can help to inspire you & move on to0 greater heights:)
China - Meditation - Yoga - Chinese Bamboo Flute Music
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Chinese bamboo flute music - Meditation.mp3
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Sounds of Nature - Relaxation & Meditation with Carrabean Sounds

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Tibetan Meditation - Spiritual Renewal.mp3

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07 Enigma - Only Time will Tell.mp3

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Deep Blue.mp3 - Inspiring music

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Meditation - Classical Relaxation- Mozart - Concerto For Flute - The famous Mozart - Can make you SMART:)

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Sounds of Nature - Forest Piano .mp3

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Sonds of Nature - Meditation.mp3

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Sounds Of Nature - Water Voices.mp3

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Relaxing Music & Sounds of Nature

Need some relaxing music & sounds of nature. Check these linksout:
 
http://www.esnips.com/web/muzicaderelaxare/
 



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Friday, January 23, 2009

________________________________________________________________

 
Entertainment News

'Button' Rules Oscars
 
 
AP -Thu Jan 22, 4:04 PM ET
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is the Academy Awards heavyweight with 13 nominations, yet the shadow of Batman loomed large with the absence of "The Dark Knight" in the best-picture race.
- Slideshow: Academy Award Nominations
- Video: 'Button' leads with 13 Oscar nominations
- Interactive: Oscar nominations
 
More Stories
- Famed quartet played inauguration to taped music AP - 2 hours, 49 minutes ago
- Kelly Rutherford, Hubby Spar Over Son at Custody Hearing AP - 2 hours, 49 minutes ago
- Penélope Cruz: Why Are They Laughing at Me? AP - 2 hours, 49 minutes ago
- Famed quartet played inauguration to taped music AP - 2 hours, 49 minutes ago

 

 

 



Hotmail® goes where you go. On a PC, on the Web, on your phone. See how.

New Way to Present Our News

 
Entertainment News

'Button' Rules Oscars
 
 
AP -Thu Jan 22, 4:04 PM ET
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is the Academy Awards heavyweight with 13 nominations, yet the shadow of Batman loomed large with the absence of "The Dark Knight" in the best-picture race.
- Slideshow: Academy Award Nominations
- Video: 'Button' leads with 13 Oscar nominations
- Interactive: Oscar nominations
 
More Stories
- Famed quartet played inauguration to taped music AP - 2 hours, 49 minutes ago
- Kelly Rutherford, Hubby Spar Over Son at Custody Hearing AP - 2 hours, 49 minutes ago
- Penélope Cruz: Why Are They Laughing at Me? AP - 2 hours, 49 minutes ago
- Famed quartet played inauguration to taped music AP - 2 hours, 49 minutes ago

 

 

 



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Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Top Design Schools and Reviews

Ok here we are going to do a listing of some well known and popular design schools around the world. And may be do a short review to discover their unique qualities and school culture.

Note: Recognised schools are those that employers know well and With a recognised design school, you have a better chance when you apply for a job.

I have also included a benchmark which websites I think are the most CREATIVE in terms of design and EFFECTIVE at attracting traffic.

Design Schools List (Popular and Recognised Schools) by Country & City:


Picture - Lasalle design school in Singapore

USA, NEW YORK
  • The Art Institute of New York City - The Art Institutes offer real-world education programs in design, media, fashion, and the culinary arts. More then 30 schools across America
  • Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York - They have big city pizazz and high-end sophistication. They are the crossroads between commerce and creativity.
  • New York School of Interior Design - Founded in 1916, New York School of Interior Design is one of the country's leading, fully accredited interior design schools. Courses include 3D Design, Architectural Design, Architecture, Art History, Art-General, CAD, Decorative Arts, Environmental Design, Exhibit Design, Fine Arts, Furniture Design, Interior Design (
    C,A,B,M), Landscaping Design, Liberal Arts, Lighting, Lighting Design, Product Design

Most Effective website design in attracting traffic: New York School of Interior Design
Most Creative website: Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York

SINGAPORE

  • LASALLE - A prestiege design school in Singapore. A lot of students dream of coming here. Their new campus is state of the art in design.

  • NAFA - A popular fine arts school

  • Temasek Design School - Out of all the polytechnics in Singapore, the Temasek Polytechnic design school is know for its creativity.

Most Effective website design in attracting traffic: NAFA
Most Creative website: LASALLE

Click here for more Education and Career tips

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Obama Websites on the Inauguration Day

Barrack Obama, the 44th President of United States have been sworn in. How do websites around the workd showcase this historic event?
 
Let's start with the barrackobama.com site
The obama website has a very media look. Its big, coloful & impactful, just like the man himself. Its backend is a social media backend, where users can sign up & post on comments & have their own profiles.
 
To attract traffic the site makes use of just one youtube video on the right hand side of the home page. The video has been viewed 1,224,474 times and has about 46 comments as of this writing. On the bottom right of the home page, the site has links to popular social network sites like facebook, youtube, myspace, twitter,digg & many more. And also more specialised niche social network sites which have be carefully selected. An interesting one is AsianAve.com .This link alone may have contributed to lots of Asians voting for Obama. And also migente.com for the latin community people. On both these sites, the Obama victory is showcased on the whole home page. I guess the Obama Marketing team partnered with these 2 sites to do just that. Very good exposure for the niche community.
 
THE HISTORIC SPEECH
The first article on the Obama blog website homepage showcases the historic speech that he made just hours ago. As expected it has tons of comments.
 
This US presidential election is run like a US sports league championship final. They even have victory t shirts. How does the obama t shirt look like. Well, you can see it on the front page of the website on the top right. The design is pretty cool, with the main campaign message 'CHANGE' right on the front of the t shirt.

WEBSITE MONETISATION
On the bottom of the homepage, the website showcases the Obama Store. Very good technique, to target people who want to be associated with campaign.
 
CAMPAIGN MESSAGE DESIGN
I guess the way they market this CHANGE message, other groups like corporations can follow suit as an example to make change happen.
 
MOBILE SITE
The mobile internet community is growing fast. And the Obama website has catered to this market with its mobile site
 
SEO
For other sites, searching Obama in google returned the Facebook site and MySpace site as one of the top results.
It goes to show the power of marketing on Socia networks, can bring you to the top of google.
 
In terms of traditional media CNN brings the Obama news.
 
 
OBAMA AROUND THE WORLD
 
Indonesia
Since Obama had lived in Indonesia when he was at a young age, the country has a special link with him. How did Indonesian websites cover the event? Typing Obama Indonesia in the main google.com site, I found it hard to find any Indonesian websites in the top results.
 
Something about an Obama look a like in Indonesia came up. Haha, may be its his twin haha. The look a like will be famous too. His name is Ilham Anas, a 34-year-old magazine photographer. Like Obama, Anas is of American and Kenyan descent. Coincidence or what??? Now, Anas is making public appearances around Asia, and even appeared in a heartburn medication commercial in the Philippines.
 
The first indonesian site to come up was the Jakarta Post story
 
Obama's classmates in Indonesia to hold party - Dozens of old friends of the newly-elected U.S. President Barack Obama in Indonesia will hold a party at their elementary school where they studied with Obama, a schoolteacher said here Tuesday.
 
So over I go to the indonesian google site . Amazingly, Wikipedia always manage to get top spot, even on Indonesian Google!!
The detik indonesian site was in one of the top results, followed by the Antara news site . None of the site is that well designed.
The best site would be the indonesian Kompas site which is layed out in the popular blog style.
 
OTHER RESOURCES
Official Whitehouse site - Nice clean design similar to the Obama site
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

3 Best Ways to Maintaing Your Website Success

The advice & tips below does not only apply to your Website Success. You can apply it to achieve business success too.
 
So to maintain your success do:
 
1. Keep your work fresh.
If you are succesful, do not just hang with the success. Do try new things to be fresh. Be innovative, think out of the box. Dare to go against the trend. But do remember point number 3.
 
2. Get the right partners
Create something bigger than any of them could do individually. For example, one person can create a beautiful website. A team of people can market, run contests, events & take photos & get a ton of traffic to the website.
 
3. Have a well oiled money-making machine in place
Its called the thing that brings in the cash flow. The core team that brings in the cash must have the business system processes in place & integrated as a team. If someone new comes in he/she can quickly learn the business process & carry on as business as usual.

Simple isn't it.
 
 
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Cheap Flash Templates

Don't want to spend so much buying cool flash templates. Well there are sites selling cheap cool stuff:

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FREE Oscommerce Templates

Since its hard to find oscommerce templates, why not we do a  collection here, so its convenient 7 easy for everyone.
 
http://www.freetemplatesonline.com/templates/category/57/ - need to fill in your email adress to download

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Sunday, January 18, 2009

Adobe spreads Flash to tons of new hardware platforms

In a bid to fight back Microsoft, Adobe wants to spread its Flash platform to all sorts of devices, not just PCs.
Chip designers Sigma Designs (Nasdaq: SIGM), Broadcom (Nasdaq: BRCM), Freescale (NYSE: FSL), and Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) has plans to supports Flash on their latest platforms such as set-top boxes, mobile phones, and netbooks in the near future.That kind of support across different hardware platforms is something that Silverlight can't equally match today.
 
What does it mean for us designers. Well, that's good news. We can now use flash on many different platforms. More  exposure for our work. hehe.
 
 
 
 



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Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Can Beautiful Font Typography on a Website bring in the Traffic & Keep Users Coming Back?

Typography on a website is an art in itself. Yes beautiful fonts can bring in those traffic & keep your website visitors coming back for more.

The point to remember is not to keep all the fonts on the page as the same. Websites with all the same font's looks stiff & boring. If you do decide to use the same fonts, try mix different sizes. For simplicity & that pleasant look, try 2 font combination.
 
Font combination is like like husband & wife etc. You need to be able to match the 2 fonts so that together as one they can look like a beautiful couple meant for each other on their wedding day.
 
Note the mix of Times New Roman & Arial in the image below. Times is used as the header whilst Arial is used as the body text.



FONT SIZE VARIATIONS
Do note that fonts in the main column is usually larger than the left or right columns. This gives a more relax look & feel for the eye.

Website designers can decide to use a certain font to provide a certain look & feel. We'll sum up some common look & feels here.
 
1. Professional Website Look & Feel 
Usually make use of Arial, Ms Sans Serif or Verdana fonts. For example the IBM website.
 
2. News WebSite Look & Feel
Makes use of Times New Roman. For example the New York Times website.
 
3. High Class Classic & Exclusive Look & Feel
Makes use of some form of scripting fonts. There are many classic looking fonts out there. One of the good script fonts is Palace Script . The Free-fonts site has a good selection to browse.
 
FURTHER READING 
 
 

Creating Big Buzz with Hired Bloggers in 3 simple steps

1. Contact & hire an influential or popular blogger.
If you are targeting a local market, do contact a local blogger who is influential inthat particular city.

2. Ask the popular blogger to offer the product for FREE.
Do a budget to see how much worth of FREE products you can giveaway. If yu are targeting only beauty salon clients for instance, offer the product FREE for those working in the beauty industry only.

3. The other bloggers will start to write about the FREE product offer.
Bloggers will write this to promote their product also. They can link it with the main topic of their blog, to make it more unique. For example, if the blogger is writing about Website Technology Tips & the product being given away is a bottle of saple moisturiser for women. He can market the promotion to his female reader's.

4. Ask the original blogger to organise a geek dinner or lunch with more popular bloggers.

This can help generate more buzz for the product. Once the FREE product promotion is over, you can start using discount vouchers and gradually increase the price back to its retail price. And from time to time you will do the discount promotion or another FREE product offering. Soon your website readers will be expecting to know of these offers. and bingo you have a ready subscriber & customer base.

This is what I call making use of the complete marketing cycle.

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Golden Globe, Design, Fashion, Glamour and Website

The 66th Annual Golden Globe awards as held on Sunday, 11 Jan 2009. And its a glamourous event with lots of design elements being staged. From designer fashion to the actual website.

Lets take a look at the Golden Globe website and see how it s designed to attract traffic & make website visiors stcik to it(The sticky factor). The website is at http://www.goldenglobes.org

Its a glamourous event, but looking at the website its not that glamourous. It looks kind of official and formal.

HOME PAGE
The most glam part of the home page is the TV banner, which showcases the hollywood stars.

HYPE FACTOR
With Shah Rukh Khan, Bollywood's biggest film star and recently named by Newsweek as one of the 50 most powerful people in the world (the only film star on the list), set to host, how is this being hyped up & marketed on the website & throughout the net?

The website itself just has a press release. Nothing much is listed out to link to the Shah Rukh Khan hosting.

How did they showcase the Golden Globe winners? Well lets see:
They have a summary of the winners on the home page on the right column. And then there's a dedicated sub page for the winner's list.

SUBSCRIBTION & RSS
The site has an RSS icon on the bottom right. Together with a Twitter icon.
Wonder where the Facebook one went?
There is also a unique innovative mobile icon whick links to the mobile site.

FACEBOOK ACTIVITIES
Can any of you think of any creative ways that Facebook could be used to hype up the Golden Globe? Comments please.

PHOTO & VIDEO GALLERIES
The website has lots of video & photo galleries all the way from 2005.

Some links to other design elements of the event:




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Definitions

Popular Blogger - A blogger who when he or she writes people will listen and they have a huge number of readers on a daily basis. 100 or more readers.

RSS - Stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.[2] An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed",[3] or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based or desktop-based.

Monday, January 12, 2009

RSS Icons and buttons that are most Creative

Do you want more subscribers. Well, if you could find a cool creatively designed RSS icon or button, your website visitors would more likely click on it. And you can have a lot more regular readers.

Definitions: RSS

Here's some of the most creative RSS icons. Enjoy



rss icon

Incredile heart





rss icon

rss icon





SOME TIPS TO PLACING RSS ICONS
1. Place it where people are used to see it
Its commonly on the top right of the blog.

2. Display the RSS icon on all pages
Whatever page your website visitor is reading, they can see your RSS icon & will mst likely click on it if they see it.

3. Write a small message to explain what the benefits of clicking on the RSS icon can do for them. For example "Click the RSS icon above to subscribe & keep up to date with this website"

4. Offer a way to subscribe by email.
Not all your website visitors know about RSS. When they subscribe by email, whenever you update your website of add a new artice, an email will alert them. Keeps them coming back to read more.

5. At the bottom of every post, tell them to subscribe.
Here you can place a smaller, but still creative RSS icon, so you increase the chance of the reader clicking.

6. You may want to place your RSS feed link when you comment on other people's website.

7. Do a contest to offer prizes to website visitors who subscribe.
With a contest you can engage your readers & they are more likely to act & subscribe. Something like the 1st 50 subscribers this week will get a FREE ebook.

8. Launch an email newsletter with Aweber.
Aweber enables you to send a series of emails to educate your readers of your website. Overtime if your content is interesting, they will look forward to the enewsletter.

Anyway you can find more tips here at:
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/50-simple-ways-to-gain-rss-subscribers/

If anyone finds creative RSS cons do post the link on our comments below.

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Ways to really boost your article up on Digg.com

If you study those posts which are on top in Digg, you'll notice that a lot of them are lists.
Not just any list, but a list giving the reader information on Top Lists & Top Resources.
For example, Top 10 Web Hosting companies, Top 10 Ways to Communicate More Effectively at Work.

Skellie from Skelliwag gave some very practical interesting tips.

1. Write about things that can be really useful & practical.
Not spam. Useful like helping people be more productive & making their lives easier.
Practical means people can put into practice right away. I always look for practical information.
You can onlyread so much theory & not do anything about it.

2. Research & give the best list.
Don't just write. back up your content with case studies or test results.

3. Develop relationships with Digg power-users who will submit your content
And get a network of people who can be 'shouted' to come over to Digg, to vote up your post.
How do you develop this network. This will be the topic of our Future post.:)

4. Use a lot of images in your post.
You be surprised that a lot of traffic can come from people using Google images
Did you know, you can get Free photos online.


5. Ankesh Kothari did some resarch & he studied how digg calculates which links should be shown on the front page.
Your link requires at least 7-8 diggs per hour. The more diggs per hour the better. You need at least 50+ diggs. But more likely: 125+ diggs. Anything below won't hit the front page. Your link has to first hit the top spot on the category page before it hits the front page. So your success also depends on how bad other links are that were submitted within 2-3 hours of your link submission in your particular category. If they're better than yours or if they have a wider network - you are out of luck. If anyone buries your digg link, its very very very hard to make it to the front page.

6. Marelisa wrote that its an important element is having enough subscribers
that they push your number up, thereby getting the attention of people in the Digg community who have never been to your blog.

7. Remember, we don't have to apply this with digg. There are many other similar sites, which are also popular & growing. For a list of other popular similar digg sites click here.

8. And remember, that once people reach your wesite by Digg etc, your blog design can play a vital part in keeping loyal readers & getting click thrus for your sponsors.


Click here for more traffic boosting articles

Top completely FREE Photo & Graphic sites

Enjoy readers.



Lets help out the designers & bloggers 7 make it practical. If you know of any free photo, clip art, flash, videos, audio sites do post it here.

Click here for more cool graphic design and web design links

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Blog Themes & Links

Looking for blog themes for your blog on blogger, wordpress, myspace & facebook.

Here are some links. If you know of any great links with really creative themes or a site with lots & lots of themes, post them on my comments.

LIST OF BLOG THEME LINKS:
  • Createblog - This one has lots & lots of really cool designs. Very suitable for music blogs too. I like the website design too, its simple & cool.
Click here for Cheap Web Hosting

Friday, January 2, 2009

Reebok Hockey

Reebok has launched a new website called Reebokhockey.com. And its one awesome site.

Design wise, its way cool & pretty in flash. Its pretty similar to the IBM site in design. The IBM site was voted as one of the most efficient website on the FT Bowen Craggs Index

I like their video section. Its simple, yet effective in design. The site makes use of large & sharp graphics to give that themed look & feel.Its very immersive. They make use of videos to showcase their products. You don't see much use of this technique, but its a way to differentiate your site & products:)

This article is sponsored by AvaWebHost - Complete & Affordable webhosting. Start your dream website today.

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G Commercial

Today I'd like to point out at the concept of simplicity & how it can do wonders for your design & marketing campaign.
 
Check out the G Commercial. The design of it is just the letter G. It makes people curious & want to know more what the G stands for. It can stand for anything really:)
 
Actually the G stands for Gatorade. It was runned during the Rose Bowl game. Since Gatorade is a sports game. Running the G commercial would hit the exact taget audience of sports people.
 
Visit the Gatorade website tonight, you don't see the brand name, you just see the "G" as the logo, the new simple logo. Good branding strategy.
 
So what's the design psychology here? Keep it Simple Stupid (KISS)
 
This article is sponsored by b21 - be beautiful, be sporty
Click here to visit the website http://www.b21.net.ms where you can find cool items to make you more beautiful & sporty
 

 

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Top 3 Web Hosting for Designers

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Globat
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