Who sat down and made the executive decision that advertising must look crappy and out-of-place? I understand that the point of advertising is to attract attention and therefore should be an anomaly that the viewer is drawn to, but come on… enough is enough. People are starting to become desensitized to big flashy ads that are borderline unethical.

So how does one maintain ad-space and a good design? The online radio site Pandora managed to solve this problem. Instead of sticking the ad in a banner and calling it good, Pandora takes it to the next level by incorporating the ad design into the background. Not only does this draw more attention to the ad (by using the entire background it creates more visual interest) it also doesn’t sacrifice the design for an ad - it adds to it. Furthermore (and probably most importantly) the ad is usually a memorable one. A good example of this was when I was debating this topic with a co-worker (who is a general hater of flash sites) and he named a previous ad without even thinking about it. I say good work, Pandora. Not only do I love your music, but you made me a believer in ad-space.

Although I feel a little bad about posting another bash on a logo redesign (especially in a row) I felt that this one needed special attention. I recently used the popular directory listing “Yellow Book” on-line and came across something that made me pause. It looked like a strange bird or maybe an elephant’s trunk and tusks. I quickly realized that it was a more simplistic version or the walking fingers that were featured in the old version of yellow book. I don’t know if I can stress this enough, but if it’s not broken, don’t fix it!

I always considered the walking fingers a clever concept representing “Let Your Fingers Do The Walking” and the idea of convenience and ease. Now you can’t even make out the fact that they are fingers. People who are challenged to decipher the new icon have never seen the old version of the logo would probably fail. In my opinion, the only good thing about this redesign is the change in typeface. I understand that the world is changing and typically stream-lining your logo is a good idea, one of my favorite redesigns is the NFL redesign. The designer was able to simplify and stream-line without losing the overall look and feel of the logo.

My friend Pete, a local art teacher has been practicing the Japanese art of Raku. Like most, I’ve never header of Raku before, but when Pete told me it involved dirt, fire and burning odd materials, I knew I’d like it.

Rather then doing a book report on Raku, you can read up on it for yourself on Wikipedia.

I didn’t want to make a traditional pot, but rather something very odd and different for my desk at work. The plan; to design a cool iPhone holder. Yep, pretty geeky, I know. Here are the highlights from my first experience with Raku.

1. Working with clay to make anything other then a straight pot is pretty difficult. Especially in the arid Colorado climate. The more you work a piece of clay the drier it gets and cracks start appearing. Next time, I’ll do more planning then experimenting before I start.
2. Let it sit. The longer it sits the drier the piece and the less likely it is to crack on firing.
3. Apply the glaze. I went with a copper glaze to give it the look I wanted. In hindsight I think I would have gone for a gloss black instead.
4. Toss it in the kiln. Apparently at 1600 degrees Raku is considered a low temperature pottery. Let it cook for about 1 hour.
5. This is where it gets cool. Create a nest of hay, saw dust and paper. Pull out the red hot pottery and toss it in the hay. The whole thing starts to burn, at which point you suffocate the fire and let it smolder.
6. The smoldering fire cracks and distorts the glaze to make the random patterns which Raku is known for.

Let it cool for another hour or so and then you’ll be good to go.

Here is my creation. It’s very rough around the edges but it makes for a great iPhone holder and an interesting conversation piece.

We would like to introduce a new search engine optimization technique which we’ve nicknamed PASEO for Performance Adjusted Search Engine Optimization. The technique uses the external references, the tag-cloud concept and internal search to reinforce content within a site and encourage improved natural search rankings.

How does it work?
By parsing out referring URLs for search terms, PASEO calculates which terms are the most popular for a particular page. The same method is used by all the major search analytic tools. These terms are then listed in order of importance on the destination page. Clicking on any of the terms listed on the page will drive the visitor into an internal site search which helps the user locate relevant content for the end user.

The dynamically ranked PASEO tags help build relevant text links; thereby providing a positive feedback loop for when the search bots come to re-index page content.

Is this Black Hat?
No, it is not. We fully believe that PASEO tagging helps the visitor locate more relevant content, quicker. The technique is akin to tag clouds with the fundamental difference being that tags aren’t assigned by the end-user, rather they are driven by external influences.

Example.
Have a look at the Imulus homepage page tags on the bottom left corner; compare these tags to the page tags on our Solutions page.

Considerations.

• Given that PASEO is analyzing the referral URL it is wise to setup exclusions for terms which you may find undesirable.
• This technique isn’t foolproof and we feel others could expand on the concept by blending PASEO tag rankings with a combination of other Web 2.0 methods to tweak the results to be more relevant.

As many of you have probably noticed, a huge design trend these days is the infamous reflection. I am not ashamed to say that I am probably one of the biggest fans of this style. However, I am not a huge fan of throwing perspective out the window. What I mean by this is if you are going to use reflections, you should understand how something would reflect if it was a physical 3d object.

Too often do I see images that are robotically flipped, rotated and opacity-ed but the designer doesn’t take perspective into consideration. If the object is 3d, this tactic doesn’t work mainly because the surface should reflect the planes of the object.