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links for 2010-12-10

  • It’s no secret that we love textures and patterns here at WDL. They’re great for easily adding lots of interest and depth to a design, whether it be a huge background pattern or just some subtle textures here and there. So to continue our “Best of 2010? series, this week we’re covering textures and patterns. We’ve seen a lot of them this year, but some really stood out. So here’s our picks for best textures and patterns of 2010. We picked our favorites, but tried to include a mixture of styles.
  • The Web Design Ledger is a publication by web designers for web designers. We cover a wide range of topics such as Photoshop, web design, photography, programming, and more.
  • "Tron: Legacy" is a high-tech 3D adventure set in a digital world that's unlike anything ever captured on the big screen. Sam Flynn , the tech-savvy 27-year-old son of Kevin Flynn, looks into his father's disappearance and finds himself pulled into the digital world of Tron more »where his father has been living for 25 years. Along with Kevin's loyal confidant Quorra, father and son embark on a life-and-death journey of escape across a visually-stunning cyber universe that has become far more advanced and exceedingly dangerous.
  • The web and its related disciplines have grown organically. I think it’s safe to say the web is not the domain of just the geeks anymore—we all live here. And those of us who work here should have sophisticated, native tools to do our jobs. A little over two years ago, I started reflecting on the web as a design medium. Coming from a print design background, most of what I knew about design was still applicable; but the things that weren’t made a huge difference. What came of this was a presentation I gave at a few conferences (the abbreviated 10-minute version of which you can see on Vimeo). The discussions that followed prompted me to look closely at how the creative process—and the tools we use—affect designing for the screen. The framework for what a page is has changed considerably even in the past few years, though our applications for designing those frameworks are still stuck in the web of yore, and largely dictated by their use for print design.
  • I’m not sure about you, but I still favour using Photoshop to create my designs for the web. I agree that this application, even with its never-ending feature set, is not the perfect environment to design websites in. The ideal application doesn’t exist yet, however, so until it does it’s maybe not such a bad idea to investigate ways to optimize our workflow. Why use Photoshop? It will probably not come as a surprise if I say that Photoshop and Illustrator are the applications that I know best and feel most comfortable and creative in. Some people prefer Fireworks for web design. Even though I understand people’s motivations, I still prefer Photoshop personally. On the occasions that I gave Fireworks a try, I ended up just using the application to export my images as slices, or to prepare a dummy for the client. For some reason, I’ve never been able to find my way in that app.
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    links for 2010-12-06

  • In this tutorial, I will start and finish a logo while documenting the entire process. I encourage you to open up photoshop and follow every step, it will help you learn a lot more than just reading it.
  • This is the time of year that many of us are thinking about what we didn’t do in 2010 and what we should do for 2011. Even professional online marketers have a long ‘to do’ list of things to improve their online marketing performance – made up of tasks to specifically improve ROI or something to save time and improve efficiency. For those of you that are doing your own online marketing, this sort of tasks may be way down on your list, way below items more specifically related to your business. These are the types of tasks that may not be ‘sexy’ and fun, which is why they are easily ‘put on the long finger’ (as they say in Ireland), but are critical to bring the best results from your online marketing activities.
  • I hope you had a blast fine-tuning your blog with testimonials last week. It’s really encouraging to hear that some are trying out the methods, can’t wait to receive more feedbacks on that! In the mean time, I will be sharing few more practical ways to display testimonials (and portfolio) on your LinkedIn and Facebook Page! Now there are definitely limitations comparing to working on a self-hosted blog because application is the main key. Not the best of plans but hopefully you can be inspired by this post and work out creative ways to promote your brand:
  • Today is the first page in a new chapter of our mission to improve access to the cultural and educational treasures we know as books. Google eBooks will be available in the U.S. from a new Google eBookstore. You can browse and search through the largest ebooks collection in the world with more than three million titles including hundreds of thousands for sale. Find the latest bestsellers like James Patterson’s Cross Fire and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, dig into popular reads like Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken and catch up on the classics like Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities and Gulliver’s Travels.
  • Search operators in Google help you refine and improve search results. For instance, a query like “Taj Mahal AND Hotel” will search for pages related to the Hotel Taj and not the Mughal monument. Similarly, “kindle -site:amazon.com” will find all Kindle related resources outside the Amazon website. This Google cheat sheet [PDF] has a nice overview of all the popular search operators that are supported in Google. Other than this “official” list, Google also supports an undocumented search operator called AROUND(n) that will help you find documents where the distance between two search terms is around ‘n.’
  • Looking for an alternative to the Windows native Windows Media Player? If yes, then look no further; fortunately for you we have gathered a list of 7 great audio players for people running Windows computers. Find the players detailed below and check out which one will suit you best.
  • Google today unveiled its long-rumored entry into the e-book sales world, not called Google Editions, as was previously speculated, but a more anonymous-sounding Google eBooks. The basic idea is to provide an entirely web-based e-book platform accessible from any device with a browser. The business model they’ve opted for is slightly less centralized than the competition, but not quite the distributed seller network I envisioned last week. My wool-gathering regarding the decentralization of the e-book store model are all in that post, so we’ll just focus on the particulars of eBooks service for now. One quick note: I’m going to continue to use the term “e-book,” though the service has opted to drop the hyphen. Like so many new tech-related phrases, the word and its relatives have yet to settle into a single standardized form.
  • Google eBooks is all about choice, so you can use just about any device you own to read any book, anywhere.
  • Google's thrown open the doors to an online bookstore stocked with over 3 million titles, which you can store and read in the cloud as if they were Gmail messages. Google's also offering free reading apps for Android and iOS devices. Beyond Android and iOS, Google's eBookstore supports Nook, Sony readers, and other devices, as well as offering straight-up access through the web. Other retailers, like Powell's, will offer Google's eBookstore offerings for sale, and Google claims it will offer "unlimited storage" of your purchases, with your page progress synced across everything. Google's made an effort to offer up lots of modern, popular books at reasonable price, but there are also a lot of free books in the collection, culled from Google's scanning of more than 15 million items in library archives. A video demonstration of Google's new Books and eBookstore is available, but it's neither playing nor embeddable for us—we'll update soon.
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    links for 2010-11-30

  • Three day work week! Woohoo! Now, what are you going to do with all of that free time? Sure, you’ll probably get in the regular Turkey/Shopping/Football Thanksgiving activities, but here’s a few more ideas from The Loud Few if you are in St. Louis over the holiday.
  • After your Google Apps accounts are converted, your users will have access to most Google products. Previously, many Google products — such as Blogger, Reader, and Picasa Web Albums — were available only in personal (consumer) Google Accounts. See the list below for which Google products are accessible to users for use with accounts on your domain. Note that this list is subject to change without notice, and that not all products are available in all areas.
  • Digital marketing is gaining traction in a number of industries, and business-to-business (B2B) marketers are in on that trend, too. Increased spending on online marketing is driving companies to try new and innovative means of getting the word out about their products and services — one area that’s getting a lot of buzz with B2B marketers is social media. The following five case studies lend insight into how B2B marketers can use social media to generate leads, create specialized communities, improve SEO, become knowledge sources, and strengthen marketing campaigns. Let us know how your brand uses social media for B2B marketing in the comments below.
  • At noon on November 13, 2010 unsuspecting shoppers got a surprise while enjoying their lunch. A flash mob singing the Hallelujah Chorus!
  • Irvin Kershner, director of the best Star Wars film, has died at 87 in LA. Kershner also directed such genre hits as the Bond flick Never Say Never Again and Robocop 2, and the cult favorite TV series Seaquest DSV.
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    links for 2010-11-29

  • This best web 2.0 stripe generator on the net! Generate seamless stripe patterns and textures of any two colors, harnessing the power of AJAX. Generate beautiful transparencies too.
  • As designers, we are used to having quite a bit of control over how things are displayed in a browser. Sure, differing rendering engines don’t always agree on everything, but for the most part we can at least find ways to mitigate variance through workarounds, or by writing for the lowest common denominator. By far, one of the most frustrating parts of dealing with browser inconsistencies has got to be forms. There are two distinctively differing schools of thought regarding (not) styling form elements. For the longest time, we’ve had people on both sides of the proverbial fence, neither group being particularly pragmatic. Some designers advocate styling form elements to match the brand of a site. Others would tell you to leave them alone entirely, so that they adhere to the native look and feel of a given operating system.
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    links for 2010-11-24

  • Starting a new web design project, even when you have someone else actually doing the design and coding for you, can be an intimidating proposition. If your company does not have an existing website you are likely wondering “Where do I start?” If you have an existing website it makes the task a bit easier – but your objective is to bring a fresh perspective, so you don’t want to rely on what you already have too much. The more you can understand about your objectives and be prepared to communicate these objectives to the web design agency building your website, the better the final product will be. At the Loud Few, we work with many clients in St. Louis and throughout the world to meet their web design and online marketing objectives. Regardless if you are working with us, another agency, or a group within your company, here’s a checklist of areas to think about when starting a website design project: Read more: The Loud Few – How to Prep for Your Web Design Project
  • As the sole e-commerce manager for my company, I’m tasked with developing and implementing plans with goals to increase: revenue, customers, transactions, average sale value, referrals, and feedback. Each of these metrics are, bottom-line, sales objectives. To put it simply: we aim to increase business. There are so many tactics and activities used in e-commerce it can be overwhelming. You want a strategy to reach your audience, ensure your store converts into buyers, and foster these new relationships. Leveraging each steps of the sales process effectively against your resources (time and budget) is what will raise the bar on your goals. What we need is a simple, surefire way to manage all of our marketing tactics. I like simple, and it is our company culture to cut out waste. With those ideals in mind, here is a series I developed to help you strategize, prioritize, manage, and measure all elements of your your own e-commerce marketing plan.
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    links for 2010-11-23

  • It is known that website creation requires a lot of means, skills and energy. And if you are unfamiliar with HTML and CSS or just wish to save your time, our website templates are the perfect solution for you. TemplateMonster has created this collection of free web templates for you and regardless whether you are a newbie or a professional webmaster or designer you will still find them useful. They will also help you to evaluate the quality of our products, get a feel for things and try your skills before purchasing. So don’t hesitate to view and download these high quality templates free of charge for your education and use, but please note there are conditions and limitations associated with using these free website templates. For example you are not allowed to use these free sample templates with commercial purposes (including but not limited to selling them, using them as your online stores or including them into your portfolios).
  • Enhance your shopping cart appearance with professional ecommerce templates and graphics.
  • Website Templates.bz would like to present you a great collection of Free osCommerce Templates. They are absolutely free that`s why it is the best solution if you want to try your forces in web design or do not have any finance for developing your online business. All Free osCommerce Templates are stylish and unique. The style of every Template differs so you have a great chance to choose the most proper design to the area of your business. If after viewing this selection you will not find suitable Free osCommerce Template we are always ready to create a unique Template just for you or to do some changes in design as for your wishes and requests.
  • With nearly four times the crime than the average American city the dubious honor goes to… St. Louis as the most dangerous city in America. Annual rankings, based on FBI crime statistics and population statistics, offered up the most dangerous cities in handy list form. St. Louis beat out last year's chart topper, Camden, NJ, though Camden is still pretty crime-y at number two. The top 10 most dangerous cities are: 1. St. Louis, MO
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    links for 2010-11-22

  • I've had this issue as long as I can remember – Adwords and Google accounts collide. If you are an intense user of both, you know what I'm talking about. It is a great mystery why Google invests so much money in developing magnificent products that generate 0 revenue, and the one product that brings in all of its revenue – adWords – remains a step child. It is the only product that works really badly with the whole Google single-signon system. To take just one small example – the password strength requirement is different in AdWords. AdWords requires a stronger password, so if you attempt to sign up for a new Adwords account, your good ol' password from your Google account may not be strong enough. Anyways, that's enough whining for one post. The reason I'm writing it is to explain how I finally got all my logins lined up without getting thrown from one account to another unexpectedly or getting logged out in the middle of writing an email.
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    links for 2010-11-17

  • If you’re one of the countless small business owners who have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, we have two things to say to you: congratulations and beware. Even big companies, like MacDonald’s, get flamed for their Twitter missteps, reminding us all that social media can be a free for all where good intentions sometimes go terribly wrong. It’s tough to navigate this world when so much is out of your control, but there are elements of your social media strategy that you can and must manage. I recently spoke to Ryan Holmes, the CEO of Vancouver-based HootSuite, a popular social media dashboard for groups, who offered five tips for tweeting entrepreneurs.
  • The Loud Few is an interactive marketing agency focused on delivering measurable results through the smart execution of user experience and digital marketing strategy.
  • Comprehensive analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes App Store showed very plainly that people were looking for an app from Twitter—we didn't have one so they generally got confused and gave up. Obviously, we saw room for improvement. Starting today, Twitter for iPhone and iPod touch is available for free on the iTunes App Store. Loren, Leland, and the rest of the Mobile team have artfully crafted an application that takes the Twitter experience to a whole new level of awesomeness. We hope you'll love it like we do. Something worth noting is that you don't need a Twitter account to enjoy this application. Browsing trends, reading Top Tweets, finding popular users, and checking out public tweets geographically nearby are all possible immediately upon download. Discovery and consumption of interesting, relevant information is a central focus. However, quick and easy signup exists within the application so new users won't need to visit our web site to create an account.
  • Earlier this year we launched a Google Voice HTML5 web app for iPhone users. Today we’re taking the Google Voice experience on the iPhone to a whole new level with the launch of the official Google Voice for iPhone app. With this native app, you’ll continue to have access to all the major Google Voice features on your iPhone, like: Cheap rates for international calls Free text messaging to U.S. numbers Voicemail transcription Display your Google Voice number as caller ID when making calls In addition to these benefits, the app provides some features that make using Google Voice on your iPhone a much better experience: With push notifications, the app will alert you instantly when you receive a new voicemail or text message Most of your calls will be placed via Direct Access Numbers, making them connect just as quickly as regular phone calls
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    links for 2010-11-16

  • SoTel Systems, LLC is the premier wholesale supplier for business communications products and services. We offer traditional refurbished and unused voice and data equipment, authorized distribution of VOIP equipment, and commercial SIP Services for both inbound and outbound traffic. With nearly 30 years of experience in the telecommunications industry we provide your company with quality products, valuable expertise, and lightning fast delivery.
  • Only the best commercial- use free fonts Free fonts have met their match. We know how hard it is to find quality freeware that is licensed for commercial work. We've done the hard work, hand-selecting these typefaces and presenting them in an easy-to-use format. Here are some of our favorites:
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