Marketing Automation - Use These Tools To Improve Your Business Immediately
Source: COLORPEAK Web Design & Marketing https://colorpeak.co.uk/marketing-automation-tools-for-business/
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I have yet to meet a business owner who has never been in need of automation. Today startups, SMBs and large companies have one thing in common – they’re all thrown in the game of pursuing the holy grail of business and marketing automation (The Automation Singularity).
As you’re reading this, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve got your feet wet trying a marketing automation software at some point. MailChimp for example or even chatbots…?
But maybe you have been doing all your marketing the “old school” way, and you want to get some of the piling work volumes off your shoulders, and you don’t want to hire, train, pay and manage additional employee(s). Well, I share your viewpoint, because running a business means innovation. So, you either work on out-innovating your competition or your practices get inefficient and your business becomes outdated pretty quickly.
I will try my best in this article to help you get started with choosing the lowest hanging fruit of marketing autopilot platforms. You should finish the piece having a grasp on what is marketing automation, why marketing automation is the next big thing in coming years, and how to use the power of automation platforms and tools to their fullest potential.
Remember, you can’t turn your eyes away and pretend the business innovations don’t affect you. I will argue here that 2018/19 is a perfect time to jump on board and benefit from at least some of the cheap and accessible business automation out there. As you read on pick one or two solutions and over the next few weeks try to integrate them for the betterment of your business and your life.
Why do businesses need marketing automation?
The traditional marketing as a scientific field goes back to early 1900s or even earlier with the development of modern capitalism and consumerism. In a nutshell, business owners and (modern) marketers discovered that by studying consumer behaviour they can predict and influence sales profits. Businesses then went on developing step-by-step processes to anticipate the needs and wants of potential consumers so they could satisfy them more effectively in comparison to its competitors. Several decades later we use complex data and scientific methods to measure and design specific procedures to sell more to more people.
Marketing and sales funnels evolved and it’s no longer just printed ads in papers and magazines or lump mail ads. With the technological revolution, especially the Internet and social media’s worldwide blitz, we’ve opened several channels enabling us to communicate more effectively and build relevant relationships with our customers. What it means for marketers like you is that a need for a more sophisticated and technologically enhanced approach with complex, multivariate sales funnels is required. Hence, marketing automation.
What Marketing Automation meant up until 2018
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” – Steve Jobs
Despite the overblown claims and inflated marketing slogans, marketing automation is NOT an artificial intelligence (AI). The real AI doesn’t exist (yet) and we’re likely far away from it. Some moderate that and use “semi-AI” but it’s misleading because the “semi-” isn’t clearly defined and means anything. I just call it for what it is for now. Marketing automation is a set of logical rules, processes and tactics that run on autopilot, making some tasks or even segments of your business autonomous and independent from human input. Besides the obvious profits like time, money and energy saving, such marketing practices bring a real and quantifiable added value to your business.
Although the philosophy of business management and marketing orientation remains intact and pretty solid, the tools and methodology seem to evolve and set new milestones almost every week.
Today, marketing automation software has never been more accessible. And in such high demand. Entrepreneurs keep coming up with creative ideas and cutting-edge technology to help businesses design their perfect strategies to predict the needs and personalise the copywriting.
So new marketing software is springing up like mushrooms.
But let’s step back to something basic, like MailChimp which is an email auto-responding system. Their automated software is free (to the extent) and allows for:
- Easy integration on your website so you can quickly start building your email list
- Getting your prospects details in an engaging form (MailChimp Lead Magnet)
- Designing an auto-responder with a drag-and-drop visual builder
- … and Sending automated and targeted emails to your recipient’s list
———————-・・・———————-
Here’re a few triggers you can use:
- Email your tagged contacts – Send a targeted message when you add a tag to a contact.
- Welcome new subscribers – Introduce yourself to people when they sign up for your list.
- Say ‘happy birthday’ – Celebrate with an exclusive offer or cheerful message that will be sent out based on the birthday field in your list.
- Share blog updates – Help contacts keep up with your blog by sending new posts straight to their inboxes.
- Now you can essentially build “set and forget” email sequences.
(did I mention it’s free?
———————-・・・———————-
Check this video on how to set one up with this step-by-step tutorial:
The top 5 essential gains of automation
To summarise, here are the top 5 essential gains of automation in the area specific to marketing:
- Automated marketing tools build complex customer journeys and sales funnels (e.g. MailChimp)
- Marketing artificial intelligence software learns your customers’ behaviour or who they are and tries to make your product and services highly personalised (e.g. UNLESS)
- Marketing bots aim to leave your customer informed, happy and engaged (e.g. Quriobot)
- Marketing analytics enables you to quickly test and change the direction of your marketing strategy (e.g. CustomerLabs)
- Automated sales software makes your marketing efforts more efficient, faster to adapt and scale (e.g. DataGran)
What Automation means for the future of business
“In peace prepare for war, in war prepare for peace.” – Sun Tzu.
The future of automation in 2019 and beyond looks bright. And it isn’t just Tesla and their self-driving autonomous cars. Interestingly enough, I find those same principles that drive Musk and his robo-vehicles towards automation apply to any aspect of the business. Here’s what we all are after:
- multiplied productivity (ROI)
- exponential growth
- multitasking (that actually works)
- large data processing power
- and, yes – if used correctly, a much better life
———————-・・・———————-
See Marquees driving Yandex self-driving car around California
Sales and marketing automation software – who’s on the frontend?
Let’s bring it down to a business application and see what benefits businesses can expect from automated systems in 2019 moving forward.
The most common use of marketing automation software appears to be in sales, but this limited utility expands very quickly.
eMarketer reports that only 5% of companies have never benefited from marketing automation (I couldn’t dig their source though, so take it with a grain of salt). But that makes sense, given the power of computing and how technology penetrated the entire world of economy. It is clear that customer journey maps are extensively used by Googles, Amazons and eBays of this world to accurately map out how customer behave in relation to businesses. And the same applies to Social Media giants like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Their optimisation is so granular, and it developed so fast, that <a some people stood to consider its ethics and what we want as a civilisation.
Nevertheless, the value in sales is so obvious and tempting that it only makes sense to continue using it. Providing your primary incentive is to quickly “help” your prospects who are travelling the distance from being a bystander to a raving fan. And the distance, no matter the length, is measurable and categorisable. Therefore, prone to endless optimisations (and exploitation).
Is marketing automation software difficult to access?
As of today, experts agree that by learning different ways how customers interact with businesses, pretty much guarantees big profits. For this reason, social scientist and marketers flock to use all sorts of automation tools that help with just that. Meanwhile, Marketing SaaS companies try to meet their prospects midway offering easy to understand but potentially vastly scalable in its application software. In fact, lowering entry level is now the name of the game with most marketing automation software.
One such software is FullStory. The software works based on simple principles but the results, which it draws through different modes of user interpretation, provide comprehensive and quite elaborate customer journey maps.
“See your site through your users’ eyes. More than the sum of its clicks, FullStory replays your customer’s journey – like a DVR for your website – so you can search, see, and understand your user experience.”
There is certainly a learning curve associated with implementing any new system or technology. However, with much lowered entry-level bars the fruit has never hung so low.
Large Data Set Calculations – how to optimise your website running costs and business spending for free?
Back in the days, gathering and calculating any large data sets was done by businesses who could afford full-time data analyst and a “numbers person”. So it was reserved usually for enterprise-level companies and agencies, or outsourced and never looked at closely again. Today, with tools like Google Analytics, you have quick and easy access to software that with a click of a button displays almost complete picture of your company’s money flow.
It’s free and offers a tremendous amount of actionable data that is automatically gathered and calculated from your website, ads and email campaigns, to mention just a few sources.
It’s also worth mentioning that Facebook, Pinterest or LinkedIn Ads platforms use sophisticated dashboards where data is calculated and presented to you in any way you want. It takes time to figure it all out, though. I’d suggest to start with finding answers to simple questions like:
- What is my website’s monthly traffic?
- Which of my ads increased traffic the most?
- How long an average visitor spends on my homepage?
- Is my traffic local or international?
- Using what device (mobile/tablet/desktop) people are visiting my website?
- Which of my web pages are most popular?
- Where is my traffic coming from?
The Rise of The Marketing Bots
One of the most significant aspects of marketing automation is the sudden spread of bots and various auto-messengers. Apart from built-in Facebook Messenger Bots, platforms like Quriobot and MobileMonkey are rapidly developing and are more and more sophisticated in methods of visitor engagement on your website. The key to a great visitors engagement appears to be:
- the speed of response
- 24/7 availability
- useful and relevant bot responses based on the keyword and intelligent intent recognition
- and so-called “triggers”
Speaking of “triggers”. These can be heavily customised to adhere to the customers’ behaviour on your site and provide visual and heavily targeted responses. For example, imagine you have someone checking on your “Home Page” then going to “Pricing” where they spend two minutes and decide to leave. Normally this particular visitor could be classified as a prospective customer, that you may want to engage further. Therefore, at each individual stage, your bot can enhance your visitors’ experience by way of targeted messages, additional content and offers. Even at the point of departure, a bot can be configured to throw an “exit intent” trigger and, hopefully, stop the visitor from leaving the website.
The “AI” in bots gets also increasingly sophisticated. For example, tools like ActiveChat try to mimic human-like responses and with it infinite visual building blocks you can make it up as complicated as Lego’s Star Wars Millennium Falcon set. It can also integrate with e-commerce systems so you can have an actual “digital counter” right on your website.
No wonder bots are the next big thing and we will hear about them more and more.
“I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better, and questioning yourself.” – Elon Musk
Conclusion
It may be hard to start learning all these platforms today. However, in the long run, it will pay back immensely. Also, know that 99% of your competitors aren’t doing it.
So, it’s better to start giving marketing automation some attention before it is too late. Whatever industry you’re in, it will be driven by the same principles as any other, whoever puts in the hours to innovate will increase the odds of success over the business owners that procrastinated and neglected to do the homework.
You may not have enough resources to go all in with learning the marketing tools, but there is no harm in trying. I have probably been guilty of procrastination more than anyone in the business. But eventually I have learned to take little steps from early on, and over time I realised that I made a quantum leap in growing my business and developing myself. So, if you are reading this article right at this moment, stop wasting your time and jump right in.
These are obviously just a few tips and the ocean of automated tools is filling in with more and more fish. There are few more things that I have learned over the years, so pop back in and check this article for updates. But most importantly start with making your first marketing automation funnel, no matter how big your goals are. From my experience, the right actions will pay off. I wish you good luck with your marketing automation journey.
How has SEO evolved throughout the years?
Source: COLORPEAK Web Design & Marketing https://colorpeak.co.uk/seo-evolution/
The early beginning before SEO became a thing.
1991 Before SEO there was the beginning of world wide web. In on March 6th, 1991 the first ever website – info.cern.ch – was launched by Tim Berners-Lee.
1994 Stanford University students Jerry Wang and David Filo start Yahoo, the first Search Engine to be used by masses followed by AltaVista, Excite, and Lycos.
1996 Backrub search engine is created that ranks sites based on inbound link relevancy and popularity. Backrub would ultimately become Google.
1998 The King is born. Google launches in September, and so the story of SEO really begins. Before it, search engines positioned results based on on-page content, domain names, directories and breadcrumbs. Google introduced PageRank algorithm that also took into account the quantity and quality of links pointing to a website and anchor text.
The Google SEO revolution
2003 First Google algorithm update named Florida takes down a lot of websites in their ranking, especially those that would stuff keywords. Repeating keywords would be hidden at the bottom of a page in a font colour that matches the background. That way reader would not see them, but the bots would feed off them and rank websites position higher. Actions like that became to be known as Blackhat SEO tactics. Around this time a new tactic of link building is born. A race to build as many backlinks as possible begins as the savvy marketers quickly learn how to abuse the system.
2005 Google makes its first attempt to fight back linking exploitation and launches its "rel=nofollow" attribute preventing the authority of websites to be passed on. Following this update, Google launches the Jagger and Big Daddy algorithms just before the end of 2015 to prevent link farming and other suspicious SEO tactics.
2006 YouTube gets acquired by Google for the whopping amount of $1.65 billion. Eventually, it would become the second most used search engine in the world. In the same year, Google also launches Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools giving developers profoundly deep insight on how Google sees their websites.
2008 Suggestion Box is finally launched after four years of development and testing. Continuing its path of improving the user experience, Google focuses on understanding better how we surf the web and interact with content. It may seem like the most obvious Google feature these days, but back then showing related searches to automatically appear below, after you start typing in the search box, was a major hit.
2009 Bing goes online or rather Microsoft gives a new name to its Live Search tool. By then Google has nearly 70% of the search engine market in the USA.
2010 Google announces that site speed is a ranking factor following "Caffeine" update, dubbed a next-generation search architecture that is faster, more precise and provides more relevant results. All that thanks to fast "spider-bots" that can quickly crawl website and cover larger parts of the internet.
2011 "Panda" update causes a notable impact on SEO which resulted in affecting optimisation field to this day. In an attempt to clean up search results, 12% of them were impacted. Websites with low quality and irrelevant content (better known as "content farms") drop down in the rankings. A similar thing happens to websites with unoriginal, static and auto-generated content.
2012 The following "Penguin" update doubles-down on eliminating aggressive, black-hat SEO spam tactics. Gone are the sites that violated Google's Webmaster Guidelines such us buying links, keyword stuffing and keyword matching anchor text to the dot. Eventually, Penguin and previously mentioned Panda release become part of Google’s real-time search architecture.
2013 "Hummingbird" release centres around the growing market of mobile users. It is the biggest update to Google’s algorithm since 2001 and deals better with natural language questions, conversational search, and it lays the foundations of Voice Search. Original content becomes a major factor in ranking along with blogs. Google starts to reward websites that provide useful, unique and lengthy answers to visitor’s queries. "Long-tail keywords" or, in other words, detailed and specific search queries become a thing.
2014 The release of "Pigeon" is all about better local search results. Google improves location and distance ranking parameters to provide relevant results to users based on proximity. Local businesses with strong organic presence showed higher in traditional search within the area of the searching person’s location. The "Local SEO" finally gets its own genre, now distinct from the general SEO.
AI & Machine Learning algorithms
2015 Some would say a breakthrough year in which Google reported more mobile searches in comparison to desktop search. "RankBrain" – a self-learning search architecture is introduced as part of the Hummingbird algorithm. It determines the most relevant results to search engine queries. At first, it runs only on 15% of searches that the system had never encountered before, but eventually, it applies to all of them.
2016 Google confirms that the search engine's top three ranking factors are: links, content, and RankBrain.
2017 Google "Fred" update hits mostly websites with poor content. In general, Google tries to deal with aggressive monetisation, misleading and deceptive ads, poor mobile compatibility and poor content. Fred is not a stand-alone algorithm update, rather a catchall name for every quality tweak to Google system intended to improve it and get rid of the content that violates the Webmaster Guidelines. It's been a known fact for a while that Google does quality updates on a regular basis and most go unnoticed and are unannounced.
2018 A year of Webmaster Tools modernisation. Google Search Console, Google My Business and, most notably for SEO, Google’s PageSpeed Insights tools receive their updates. There are of course multiple changes to Google's ranking algorithm done almost every day, but there were three Broad Core Algorithm Updates that were actually announced. PageSpeed Insights update becomes a significant player in ranking and slow sites with low optimisation score on mobiles are affected. Google announces nine factors that influence Optimization Score.
And so, the story continues. What will 2019 bring? Most likely further updates toward mobile-friendly AMP enabled websites that load fast on slow 3G networks. A lot has changed since the first Google SEO revolution. An easily abused system based on keywords evolved into sophisticated learning machine that thinks like a human. Content became a king, and mobile device accessibility will further shape the ranking.
Sources:
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Create interactive websites – Vistag review
I thought I’d drop a few words about Vistag as we’ve tested the tool a little bit on two of our now interactive websites (not e-commerce, yet…). The first website did not work due to, what we believe was Slider Revolution interference. Vistag and Slider Revolution tandem renders our website completely unusable. Therefore, we decided to switch it off there.
The second of our interactive websites, a static WordPress site, was (is) much better. We’re still testing it there but performance is all good and Pingdom/GTMetrix/PageSpeed did not mark any meaningful drops in loading speed scores. Even with 10+ or so tags thrown on two web pages.
Vistag Highlights and PROs
To cut to the chase, I really like the visual presentation and interactive aspects of Vistag. Objectively looking at it – Vistag WILL make you and others hover, click, poke, fondle and (hopefully) buy-through those flashing gems. There is just no way around it given how our brains and eyes work.
However, at this point in time, Vistag isn’t finished tool yet and many fundamental options are missing.
Vistag’s missing features (or rather Not-There-Yets)
Some of the things we’d like to see rather sooner than later include:
- “mailto:”/”tel:” and other HTML special links to enable CTA’s (Call-To-Actions) for anything that is not e-commerce
- images within the tags that could be fed from WP Media / external URLs
- CSS selectors and more customisations
- global UTM trackers
The dashboard and interface would also benefit from some conscious cleanup and re-planning for easier navigation. The User experience (UI) is a bit all over the place on the admin side.
I’ve also looked at this new “Lookbook” feature, which allows to add images to tags. I’m sure this is probably my pure ignorance, but I still don’t get it. Again, it could be lack of my attention but how is this better or more important than just feeding and tagging pictures from WP Media or external URLs. The link on the dashboard takes me to some vague Documentation on how to make it work, but nothing else.
I’ve mentioned CSS customisations already but let me reiterate the fact that the default font size and colour (light-grey on a white background?) is just unreadable. To change that you need to do some CSS gymnastics on your website. But it seems to be in development now, so fingers crossed that we won’t wait long for this must-have feature for interactive websites to work as intended.
Your images. Shoppable. Create visual content that sells like crazy.
Vistag – an ultimate web design enhancing tool?
At this point, I can’t give it a 5-stars review because Vistag is incomplete; clearly in beta stage, and an exorcism on their bugged code is yet to be performed by the developers. However, I can confidently score this tool 4 out of 5 because this brilliant, yet simple idea serves you a ready-made link between human behaviour and computer science that you can use to your sales advantage, this very evening. And all this without the need of getting two PhDs in the respective fields trying to sweat something like that in your own basement. A fine marketing tool with great potential to make your plain web become one of truly interactive websites.
You simply install Vistag, place tags over your e-commerce images and the job of selling fidget spinners and made-in-China “what-have-you’s” is done for you.
You can check Vistag on their website or, if it hasn’t left the station yet, you may even jump on their AppSumo bandwagon.
Find out more about interactive websites and tools:
Who should build your professional business website? Web designer, web developer, graphic artist or graphic designer?
This isn’t a trick question, or is it…? It used to be much easier to answer. Back in early 2000 when web design reality was situated around ‘Is that person capable of creating a website?’ rather than ‘Is that person capable of designing a beautiful website, that is functional and makes people buy products?’ And it is an important matter especially when you’re considering who should design your professional business website.
Developing websites in the past
In the past, knowing how to code was necessary. Without understanding HTML or flash, you could not build a website. There was no question about whom should you hire to design it. The problem was that tech people were not known for their exquisite sense of visual style. Making a professional business website that looks good was not a priority if it’s appearance was considered at all. You can see for yourself by visiting the Wayback Machine to see how the internet looked like back in 2005! Very few heard of good UI (User Interface) or UX (User Experience). These words may sound silly to a “full-stack-web-developer-engineer” however, now coding skills are not necessary just put a functional website up.
Cheap Websites (or “web design on a budget”)
Which is not to say skilled coders and web developers aren’t necessary. Not at all! The “no-coding” approach works if we think about a general site, with a basic purpose like displaying simple information. Having an online space that functions as a visual business card or a leaflet is useful to describe and promote your company quickly. And there is a rapidly growing market for that type of web design. The reason? A website is often the first thing your potential customers will look for when they want to learn more about the product or service that you sell. So, you won’t get away with not having a website. At least not if you want to appear as a forward-thinking business owner.
If you need to outsource the creation of this type of website, an experienced graphic artist should be enough allowing you to save some time and money on more elaborate developments and designs. But there is no question that thousands of entrepreneurs, start-ups and resourceful individuals benefit from available (often free) web design tools that enable non-techies to “DIY” their websites. You probably heard of Squarespace, Wix or Weebly.
Making a website using free website builders – the “DIY”-way
If you’re on a budget, have lots of spare time, and you’re determined enough, there is no reason why you shouldn’t try to bootstrap your online portfolio! The disadvantage, however, is that there is a lot of technical, functional and visual limitations imposed by online web builders. So, websites built with those tools are also almost impossible to expand beyond their generic purpose and are often locked to the system they’ve been designed with – so forget about easy migration and scale! Moreover (and assuming you don’t know CSS), your website won’t be bespoke, and you will likely cringe while stumbling upon an identical one (your competitor’s!). Therefore, your expectations towards DIY website builders shouldn’t be to create professional business website that really stands out and takes you to the next level, which is…
Web design for professional businesses
If you’re a small or medium business owner that cares about how the website presents the company brand, and how good it is in actually making money (i.e. conversions) you’re probably better off hiring a professional web designer.
We get to live in the lucky times where a good web designer has a solid understanding of coding, so you no longer need to choose between functionality and the looks. It’s also often the case that an experienced web designer will have a good understanding of graphic design. So is undoubtedly qualified to pull off a bespoke, professional business website that will lift you above the rest of the “DIY-crowd” and your competitors.
If you’re treating your website as an active advertisement or a real business asset that can draw the attention of your customers – and you should! – then having it done by a professional web designer is without question the best way to go.
High-level functionality in web design
If you need your website to do more than the above, you probably will have to consider investing your money in a developer, especially if you’re thinking about managing large databases of information through your website. If you have a bunch of money on a large team of web developers, front-end designers, artists, project managers, etc. and have plenty of time for everyone to team-up then you can deliver a great professional business website project that will look stylish and modern. If all goes well, it will also be more reliable and capable of handling more complicated tasks like bespoke e-commerce shopping carts and payment processing systems. In a sense, a well thought-out and properly executed high-level website/IT project is infinitely scalable and can handle billions of active users like this website or this one.
However, expect a bill to the floor and, as unfortunate as it sounds, a high risk of failure. As it often is with large, overbudget IT projects.
Who should I higher to design my website?
It really depends on your goals. There will always be some work for developers who get higher paychecks and can pull magical websites that do more than looking good. Some people don’t need to spend a fortune on online advertising or marketing if they can stitch up a basic site from a template for free. However, the sweet spot has never been as available as it is now and you can have a professional, beautiful and functional website with a reasonable price tag and realistic ROI for your business at the same time.
4 key skills of a Graphic Designer
A graphic artist of any kind is a person who may not necessarily possess the skills needed to be able to call themselves a graphic designer. On the other hand, not every graphic designer is an artist. You can learn the craft of design and techniques needed to create graphics that can carry one’s message. With the right set of tools and knowledge, the world is yours. The best of the best will have both and will be the leaders who inspire others; creating graphic designs that are admired and shared.
Who is a Graphic Artist?
If it only was so easy to define a graphic artist. Some will say you need to be born an artist, that you need an artistic soul, but for the purpose of this article, we will focus on a more down-to-earth approach. In short, a graphic artist is a creative person such as an illustrator, photographer or somebody designing typography to list just a few; an artist that works with a visual medium.
Who is a Graphic Designer?
A graphics designer will most often be a part of a graphic artists group, though not necessarily. Many freelancers are working in this area by themselves. A graphic designer specialises in supplying graphic illustrations for an editorial piece, web developer or advertising, among many others. Your job as a graphic designer is to produce a visual design (a digital one most of the time these days) that conveys a specific message for whatever purpose.
What skills do you need to be a Graphic Designer?
- Soft skills
- Tools
- Knowledge
- Degree (skills confirmation)
Soft skills in graphic design
You would think that there are more important skills to have as a graphic designer. However, this is not always one of those jobs where you sit behind a desk all day and work on your computer. Your task as a graphic designer, especially in a large company, is to communicate the client’s written or spoken message through visual means. That requires you to have well-developed communication skills. It’s not a one-man job so you will also find yourself participating in brainstorm meetings where you and your colleagues will have to agree on the best marketing strategy. You will have to be able to understand the team leader’s vision and confront them if your experience tells you this or that won’t work. And you need to be a team player, so knowing some negotiation skills will come handy when putting your thoughts out there for others to think through.
If you need a qualified Graphic Designer, please call Colorpeak
Graphic design tools
I could tell you there are plenty of tools that you can use as a graphic designer, but there are only a few that truly count and enable you to create with no limitations. These days, knowing how to use (and use well!) Adobe CS is a must. As a freelancer, you may want to dip into Gimp, Inkspace or Krita freeware software. If you’re looking for a job in a respected Graphic Design company, however, then having InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator listed in your CV is a necessity.
Knowledge of graphic design field
In terms of "know-how", there are certain things that you need to know by heart and most importantly understand, like typography or branding. However, there are others that you only need to be aware of, like printing technicalities.
Areas of knowledge that every Graphic Designer should be familiar with:
- UI/UX Design
- HTML/CSS
- Typography
- Branding
- Printing
UI/UX design (User Interface/User Experience), typography and basic HTML/CSS knowledge are essential if you are considering working as a graphic designer in
When it comes to branding, there are specific guidelines that you need to be aware of. Fortunately, it usually lies within a team leader’s scope to decide what needs to be designed. It is good to have experience in creating a brand for a company. However, in the end, you simply need to produce what the client needs, so most of the time you learn as you go.
Need a brand design? We can do it all! Call 0191 645 1645 for more information.
You do not need to know how the printer operates. Frankly, you’re not working at the printer. Regardless of that, you should know how to prepare your design for printing purposes. When applying for a graphic designer position, trust me, you will not get it unless you know what bleed or CMYK is.
Degree for the graphic design industry
We’re living in the era of Skillshare, Treehouse and Udemy online courses as well as YouTube where you can find anything from instructions on how to clean the coffee spill from your carpet to
Conclusion
Although it is not easy and takes time to acquire graphic design skills you can do it yourself especially if
For any Graphic
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Flat design vs depth in web design
Article appeared first here: Flat design vs depth in web design
CSS has been with us for over two decades, but its use properly kicked in 2003 when Jeffrey Zeldman published his book “Designing with Web Standards”. Since then the use of flash templates for web design started to slow down, and CSS became widely used.
By the time flat design was introduced in 2006 by Windows with their Zune player release, web designers were in a phase showing off their skills using flashy illustrations and animations that int their minds were to wow website visitors. It was a minefield full of colours, textures and simple animations that constantly distracted people to no end. You can check out how the internet looked like in early 2000 by visiting Web Design Museum.
What is flat design?
Flat design emphasises usability in its minimalistic approach toward the interface. It focuses on being clean and simple, emphasising open space, 2D illustrations, contrast and crisp edges. As a principal, the less stylistic elements seen as unnecessary clutter in web design, the better.
One can say that flat design goes back to the basics of web design in terms of being a functional tool. The focus shifts from how it looks to how well it works. Don’t get me wrong, the looks are still important and need to please the eye, but at the same time when your end goal is to implement flat design it needs to equally be user-friendly.
Here are some basic principles of flat design:
- clean and simple
- two-dimensional illustrations and icons
- crisp edges
- use of contrast
- decluttered space
Depth in web design
On the other hand, the use of depth in web design has been equally popular. Designers who use it tend to say they like to “breathe life” into their work and add depth as a way to do it. By adding shadow, which is very popular to create a 3D perception, you can emphasise specific elements on the website and make them more realistic.
According to some, a real-looking interface can boost people’s interaction with the website which is always important when it comes to web design, as it must be pretty but more importantly, functional.
Some specific tools can be used to achieve depth in web design.
How can depth be achieved in web design?
- parallax backgrounds
- focal points and perspective
- subtle shading and lighting
- overlapping layers
- gaussian blur
- skeuomorphism (interface objects that mimic their real-world counterparts in how they appear or how the user can interact with them – definition by Interaction Design)
Skeuomorphism became popular thanks to Apple. Steve Jobs was always the one who emphasised that people should use devices thanks to intuition and should not have to read manuals to enjoy the technology. But after a few years, this trend seems to be overused, and even Apple followed the Windows approach and introduced flat design in their devices.
These days everything seems to be mixing, and although we see the flat design in the lead, it has some depth elements incorporated into it like subtle shadows and micro-animations. It is the best of two worlds combined for better visuals and user-experience. That’s a win-win if you ask me.
Minimalism in Web Design
Source: COLORPEAK Web Design & Marketing - Minimalism in Web Design
When you think about minimalism in today’s websites, you most likely have a specific light-weight style in mind recognised across many fields. In many ways, the concept of minimalism has been a constant presence in the designer's world of art and architecture for almost a century. It has also become a dominant trend in website design, especially in 2018, and likely will only grow stronger in the upcoming years. I hope you will be interested in learning what Colorpeak has to tell you about what it means to design a minimal website.
What is minimalism?
You've probably heard the phrases "the art of less" or "less is more" many times. It's a cliché, but there is truth to it. One can say that the simplicity represents the essence of a minimalistic approach in modern design.
“The term minimalism is also used to describe a trend in design and architecture, wherein the subject is reduced to its necessary elements”.
However, today I would like to focus on exploring minimalism as it’s applied in digital web design. I will also go through its main principles and show you actual examples of beautiful minimalist websites.
Minimalism in web design
Most designers agree that minimalism in web design means simplifying the interface by removing unnecessary elements. Some will also argue that you need to strip down the website to its bare bones, especially since AMP was introduced. However, no matter which approach you prefer, remember that there are some restrictions in deleting the elements of your design before it loses its main goal of providing information to the visitor or generating sales.
The main principles of minimalism in web design
- Invisible or subtle navigation
- Negative/empty space
- Use of contrast
- Power of typography
- User-friendly layout
Invisible or subtle navigation
Most people are in a hurry, or to be more accurate, are impatient. Simple navigation will encourage them to look for what they came to your website for. Unless you're building a large retailer website that requires a mega menu, keep it simple, and you will be rewarded.
Negative/empty space
White space can be a powerful tool, helping you to draw people's attention toward what little remains on your minimalistic website. It is commonly used, but often its inclusion is an accident, especially when a designer building an e-commerce website will tend to focus on making sure the shop works. How it looks is a secondary concern. In such instances, you end up with a website of a five-year-old who did not learn yet how to fill in the background between the grass and the sky on that picture they drew for grandma.
Use of contrast
In terms of contrast, you can play with light or dark colours (resist using too many in one project) to effectively use minimalism in web design. In addition, you can strategically place some of the website elements in the foreground vs background to emphasise them. Another contrast to consider is size and shape. These come especially handy when designing Call to Action buttons that should draw the attention of the visitor.
Power of typography
There are hundreds of fonts to choose from these days, and with minimalistic design in mind, it's not about which one you choose but how you use it. You can even use bold fonts and huge letters. No website should use one font only, but do not go overboard. Do not go over three if you care about minimalism in web design. Even better, stick to two and play with the size, weight, and letter spacing to achieve balance and simplicity.
User-friendly layout
Large images will empower you to bring life to empty spaces. But they only work in certain cases like when designing a website for interior design, or photographers etc. Pictures can be very heavy and can slow down your website, so they need to be well balanced with the text between them.
When should you choose minimalism in web design?
There are certain benefits to choosing minimalistic web design, but it's not suitable for all projects. On the one hand, they often seem a good choice for one-page websites or to sell a few products but won't work on large retailer e-com stores.
It also depends on your audience. A professional corporate worker may not care about the aesthetics but for a musician, or in fact any artist, a minimalism in web design can be appealing. It is quite clear that you need to keep your end user in mind at all times and design for them. Will your customer appreciate the ease of navigation? Or will they feel like something is missing and flee to your competitor's website?
Conclusion
Whether you choose to design a minimalistic website or not, remember that what seems simple at first glance, usually requires a lot of effort from a designer’s perspective. There is no point in stripping things from the website to make it light and user-friendly if it's not going to be functional. With a bit of time, dedication and a proper approach to never sacrificing usability for the sake of visuals, you can create a beautiful and useful website in no time... Kidding! Every designer knows that it takes time to design any good website. At least now you know what you should keep in mind to design a minimalistic one! So, are you ready for minimalism in web design? Good, then go and be creative!
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5 Sectors Blockchain Is Disrupting That Are Not Cryptocurrency
Source: Colorpeak | For Business https://lucashawro.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/5-sectors-blockchain-is-disrupting-that-are-not-cryptocurrency/
For a few years now, “blockchain” and “cryptocurrency” have gone hand-in-hand. The blockchain concept is complicated, and involves constant-growth record lists linked together and secured through cryptography (think of the Cryptex from The Da Vinci Code). Each block of the chain envelops a hash pointer relating to the previous block, as well as transaction data and a timestamp.
The idea of a blockchain isn’t relegated to the infant-era cryptocurrency revolution. Massive worldwide corporations are beginning to incorporate blockchain technology into their systems. The technology behind the blockchain is far more valuable on a global scale than any market capitalization of cryptocurrencies. Here are five large sectors currently being disrupted by the potential of this technology:
Related: Why Bitcoin Is the MySpace of Cryptocurrencies, But the Blockchain Is Here to Stay
1. Crybersecurity
Although one of the main draws to the blockchain is the transparency of its public ledger, the data communication piece is verified via advanced cryptographic systems. This ensures the data arrived through the proper channels, without interception by a third party in the transmission process.
This idea brings about the strong possibility that blockchain can provide severe reductions in cybersecurity risks. The removal of human interaction in the data communication process will severely lessen the threat of data corruption, human error, and hacking.
Additional cybersecurity applications of the blockchain include large-scale authentication of data. A startup called Guardtime is currently experimenting with a blockchain-centric keyless signature infrastructure. This KSI works by tagging and verifying data transactions, providing crypto-level assurance of data authenticity and integrity.
2. Elections and voting
Voting manipulation has become an active pain point in the election process at many levels. Elections require not only the authentication of the voters’ identities, but also secured record-keeping, vote tracking, and win tallying.
Looking to the future, blockchain technology could enable tools to serve as an infrastructure from start to finish. This could potentially eliminate the need for recounts, as it removes the human element involved in vote manipulation and voter fraud.
Through the capture of votes as blockchain “transactions,” government entities would have a public and verifiable trail of votes, ensuring none are changed or removed, and no illegitimate votes are added. A blockchain-based election focused startup called Follow My Vote is in the process of developing a beta version of their complete blockchain-centric voting solution.
3. Transaction-based real estate
The purchase and sale of property come with many pain points, including massive stacks of paperwork, an overall lack of transparency, public record errors, and the possibility of fraud throughout the process. Blockchain instead offers a method to reduce the need for paper recordkeeping, while simultaneously speeding up transaction times, helping those involved in the process reduce transaction costs and improve overall efficiency.
Technology and finance startup Ubitquity has begun offering a SaaS platform centered around blockchain technology, geared toward mortgage, title, and financial companies. The service provider is working with various recordkeeping entities in foreign countries to gather property information and documents for their blockchain.
4. Analytics for forecasting
As industries continue to embrace the concept of the blockchain, the power expands into the analytics and forecasting niche. With entirely accurate transaction records to support data analysis, forecasting technologies can adapt to a less error-prone foundation for things such as machine learning algorithms to develop more accurate insights and predictions based on blockchain data.
Even in the current day and age, blockchain is in the process of allowing for a new market focused on predictions. A program called Augur has been developed using the Ethereum blockchain. Augur allows its users to forecast events, incorporating a reward system for accurate predictions. The parent company of the program claims that the full process will be decentralized, enabling their users to place bets on everything from stock market predictions to sports, to natural disaster occurrences.
5. Ridesharing applications
Lyft and Uber are definitions of centralization in business models. The companies, in essence, operate as cloud-based dispatch hubs, using algorithms to control fleets and dictate charges. Blockchain could allow new technologies into these dynamics. Decentralized and distributed ledgers could provide a more user-driven and value-oriented market environment.
Final thoughts
While still relatively new technology, blockchain is easily poised to become one the most useful technological innovations of the 21st century. With massive corporations already incorporating blockchain into their systems, and hundreds of chain-centric startups pushing into the mainstream, the potential utilization of this cryptographic process is unfathomable.
The above five sectors scratch the surface of the disruption blockchain has caused, and the technology is likely already an unbeknownst part of your daily life. Cryptocurrency platforms are only the beginning.
As first seen on 5 Sectors Blockchain Is Disrupting That Are Not Cryptocurrency
Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’
According to Ubuntu philosophy,
which has its origins in ancient Africa, a newborn baby is not a person. People are born without ‘ena’, or selfhood, and instead must acquire it through interactions and experiences over time. So the ‘self’/‘other’ distinction that’s axiomatic in Western philosophy is much blurrier in Ubuntu thought. As the Kenyan-born philosopher John Mbiti put it in African Religions and Philosophy (1975): ‘I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.’
We know from everyday experience that a person is partly forged in the crucible of community. Relationships inform self-understanding. Who I am depends on many ‘others’: my family, my friends, my culture, my work colleagues. The self I take grocery shopping, say, differs in her actions and behaviours from the self that talks to my PhD supervisor. Even my most private and personal reflections are entangled with the perspectives and voices of different people, be it those who agree with me, those who criticise, or those who praise me.
Yet the notion of a fluctuating and ambiguous self
can be disconcerting. We can chalk up this discomfort, in large part, to René Descartes. The 17th-century French philosopher believed that a human being was essentially self-contained and self-sufficient; an inherently rational, mind-bound subject, who ought to encounter the world outside her head with skepticism. While Descartes didn’t single-handedly create the modern mind, he went a long way towards defining its contours.
Descartes had set himself a very particular puzzle to solve. He wanted to find a stable point of view from which to look on the world without relying on God-decreed wisdoms; a place from which he could discern the permanent structures beneath the changeable phenomena of nature. But Descartes believed that there was a trade-off between certainty and a kind of social, worldly richness. The only thing you can be certain of is your own cogito – the fact that you are thinking. Other people and other things are inherently fickle and erratic. So they must have nothing to do with the basic constitution of the knowing self, which is a necessarily detached, coherent and contemplative whole.
Few respected philosophers and psychologists
would identify as strict Cartesian dualists, in the sense of believing that mind and matter are completely separate. But the Cartesian cogito is still everywhere you look. The experimental design of memory testing, for example, tends to proceed from the assumption that it’s possible to draw a sharp distinction between the self and the world. If memory simply lives inside the skull, then it’s perfectly acceptable to remove a person from her everyday environment and relationships, and to test her recall using flashcards or screens in the artificial confines of a lab. A person is considered a standalone entity, irrespective of her surroundings, inscribed in the brain as a series of cognitive processes. Memory must be simply something you have, not something you do within a certain context.
Social psychology purports to examine the relationship between cognition and society. But even then, the investigation often presumes that a collective of Cartesian subjects are the real focus of the enquiry, not selves that co-evolve with others over time. In the 1960s, the American psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané became interested in the murder of Kitty Genovese, a young white woman who had been stabbed and assaulted on her way home one night in New York. Multiple people had witnessed the crime but none stepped in to prevent it. Darley and Latané designed a series of experiments in which they simulated a crisis, such as an epileptic fit, or smoke billowing in from the next room, to observe what people did. They were the first to identify the so-called ‘bystander effect’, in which people seem to respond more slowly to someone in distress if others are around.
Darley and Latané suggested
that this might come from a ‘diffusion of responsibility’, in which the obligation to react is diluted across a bigger group of people. But as the American psychologist Frances Cherry argued in The Stubborn Particulars of Social Psychology: Essays on the Research Process (1995), this numerical approach wipes away vital contextual information that might help to understand people’s real motives. Genovese’s murder had to be seen against a backdrop in which violence against women was not taken seriously, Cherry said, and in which people were reluctant to step into what might have been a domestic dispute. Moreover, the murder of a poor black woman would have attracted far less subsequent media interest. But Darley and Latané’s focus make structural factors much harder to see.
Is there a way of reconciling these two accounts of the self – the relational, world-embracing version, and the autonomous, inward one? The 20th-century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed that the answer lay in dialogue. We need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image. Think of that luminous moment when a poet captures something you’d felt but had never articulated; or when you’d struggled to summarise your thoughts, but they crystallised in conversation with a friend. Bakhtin believed that it was only through an encounter with another person that you could come to appreciate your own unique perspective and see yourself as a whole entity. By ‘looking through the screen of the other’s soul,’ he wrote, ‘I vivify my exterior.’ Selfhood and knowledge are evolving and dynamic; the self is never finished – it is an open book.
So reality is not simply out there, waiting to be uncovered. ‘Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction,’ Bakhtin wrote in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929). Nothing simply is itself, outside the matrix of relationships in which it appears. Instead, being is an act or event that must happen in the space between the self and the world.
Accepting that others are vital
to our self-perception is a corrective to the limitations of the Cartesian view. Consider two different models of child psychology. Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development conceives of individual growth in a Cartesian fashion, as the reorganisation of mental processes. The developing child is depicted as a lone learner – an inventive scientist, struggling independently to make sense of the world. By contrast, ‘dialogical’ theories, brought to life in experiments such as Lisa Freund’s ‘doll house study’ from 1990, emphasise interactions between the child and the adult who can provide ‘scaffolding’ for how she understands the world.
A grimmer example might be solitary confinement in prisons. The punishment was originally designed to encourage introspection: to turn the prisoner’s thoughts inward, to prompt her to reflect on her crimes, and to eventually help her return to society as a morally cleansed citizen. A perfect policy for the reform of Cartesian individuals. But, in fact, studies of such prisoners suggest that their sense of self dissolves if they are punished this way for long enough. Prisoners tend to suffer profound physical and psychological difficulties, such as confusion, anxiety, insomnia, feelings of inadequacy, and a distorted sense of time. Deprived of contact and interaction – the external perspective needed to consummate and sustain a coherent self-image – a person risks disappearing into non-existence.
The emerging fields of embodied
and enactive cognition have started to take dialogic models of the self more seriously. But for the most part, scientific psychology is only too willing to adopt individualistic Cartesian assumptions that cut away the webbing that ties the self to others. There is a Zulu phrase, ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’, which means ‘A person is a person through other persons.’ This is a richer and better account, I think, than ‘I think, therefore I am.’
Source:
https://aeon.co/ideas/descartes-was-wrong-a-person-is-a-person-through-other-persons
