Quoin Design

Steve Rubel over at Advertising Age revealed some statistics:

According to an eConsultancy study of 1,400 U.S. consumers, 42% said they prefer to receive ads for sales and specials via e-mail compared to just 3% who said the same for social-networking sites and 1% who preferred Twitter.

I was shocked at first, until I thought about my own online habits. I’ve clicked maybe 5 ads since I started using FaceBook heavily 2 years ago. On Twitter, the only advertisements I ever click are for cutting-edge web sites. I’m not going to be on the lookout for a great deal on a new barbecue. I contrast that with my personal account with Yahoo (which folks I trust to keep SPAM in the junk folder where it belongs). In email, I get to decide when I receive the information.

Looking through the newsletters I subscribe to, they uniformly give me a great deal (usually one that makes me think, ‘how can they afford to do that?’) and/or keep me up to date with the very latest professional information. Another species email I enjoy is from designers or companies doing work that excites me.

Only those companies that have successfully earned my trust by delivering me more value than value proposition will earn a check in the opt-in box on their subscription form.

 

The YWCA of Clark County approached us for a wide-ranging rebranding effort. Part of that was to redesign their brochure system. These pieces are the front line for this non-profit in fulfilling their mission to help individuals in crisis. We were given the mission of working within their existing corporate identity.

YWCA brochure system before redesign

As you can see from the ‘before’ image, the system had suffered a range of variations due to organizational changes over the years. The result was an incoherent look that seemed messy and disorganized. We also energized the layout while prioritizing easy comprehension.

We did take one liberty with the identity: YWCA wanted to move away from the over-bright persimmon orange shown in the ‘before’ pictures, so we chose something with more red and complexity which was in the same family of color.

We worked hand in hand with YWCA’s content writer, Eve Connell, to conceive content that spoke directly to the individual in accessible, active language.

Working with an organization such as this means that we had to remain flexible as each stakeholder brought their input to the table, while we advocated for our own design viewpoint and built consensus.

Once the designs were complete, we guided the brochures through the printing process.

Redesigned brochures have better impact.

When you spam an email, the originating location of the email is inspected and sent to an IP black list or clearinghouse run by a third-party company. These clearinghouses are supposed to gather IP addresses that are malicious so that everyone can know who they are. Your web host or internet service provider will then check each email that comes in against this black list to make sure that the sender isn’t a spammer.

This is a great idea, as long as the clearinghouses are ethical about only blacklisting genuine spammers. Unfortunately, Quoin has recently had a run-in with another kind of company.

One of our clients had their email rejected by the recipient’s web host. It was an important message to a supplier. This happened several times, so the supplier talked with their host. The host said our server had been blacklisted. I checked and found that it was on a single black list, UCEPROTECT. I emailed my web host, and they sent me this reply:

Hello,
While the server is listed at UCEPROTECT, there is very little we as a company can do.  They run their blacklists only as an effort to make money.  We’ve tried to work with them before and it all comes down to them wanting money to do something that is automated in the first place.  We have repeatedly asked them for logs/evidence/proof and they adamantly do not provide any.  Unfortunately, even paying them to remove the listing gives them no reason to not re-list the server at their whim, based on little or no evidence, based on past experiences where they have done just that. Armed with this information, upper management refuses to deal with such unscrupulous companies.

Essentially, this black list holds email hostage. We did some research on UCEPROTECT, and discovered that they want 50 Euros ($70) to de-list a single IP address.

What we couldn’t understand is why reputable web hosts would be working with a black list like this. We’re very glad ours doesn’t! Web host administrators have the option to exclude lists such as UCEPROTECT but sometimes don’t take the steps necessary to exclude them.

We’ve posted this in an effort to increase the exposure of this practice. If it’s not illegal yet, why isn’t it?

There are thousands (literally thousands) of blog entries out there about how to best optimize your web site. The truth is deceptively simple: search engines like Google want content. They’re like a news outlet. They’re looking for the information that their users are looking for. If you have it, they’ll like you more. If you tell them you have it, but you really don’t, when they find out, they’ll drop you off their lists. They want to know that they can trust you and your site.

Google’s Central Conflict

Here’s the problem Google has: you’ve got a website about sauerkraut, and someone just typed ‘how to make sauerkraut’ into the Google search field and pressed the return button. There are 770,000 articles in their index that match this string. How do they decide which article to serve first in the list? Where does your site rank?

In very simple terms, there are a couple of criteria Google uses to determine PageRank:

1. How many other sites think your site is a trustworthy authority on the keywords entered?
2. How many people have already searched for ‘how to make sauerkraut’ and then clicked on your link?

There are hundreds or perhaps thousands of criteria Google uses or we think Google uses. Here’s a more comprehensive list of Google ranking factors.

Google is Mysterious

Google has to play its cards close to its chest. If it didn’t, far more sites would game the system than currently do. All you’d see when you searched for ‘sauerkraut’ is the ‘Shamwow Sauerkraut Spinner’ (this product doesn’t exist, I just wish it did).

Google won’t tell us directly how to get high rankings. Many times we have to guess from the way sites are ranked, and simple trial and error. It’s a constantly changing game. Web developers can and do gang up on Google to figure out why they do what they do, trading secrets and tips on blogs everywhere. On the other hand, Google can always change its algorithms.

A Few Clues

Google’s Matt Cutts says, “We prefer to focus on things like ‘trust’, ‘authority’, ‘reputation’, PageRank, high quality… The Google philosophy has always been the same: If somebody comes to Google and types ‘x’, we want to return high-quality information about ‘x’.” They repeat this a lot, and many people say, “But that doesn’t tell me how to get to the top of the rankings!”. It doesn’t, but it shows us how we can help Google’s business while they help ours: create trustworthy content that people find useful.

Corollary

Because Google has an enormous team of well-paid engineers focused on outwitting web masters everywhere, beware of anyone who says they know how to get your page to the top of Google’s rankings. As a business owner or marketing director, you can do much of the work yourself by finding partners to link to your site and by writing content that everyone wants to have.

 

Sungari Pearl, a restaurant serving Chinese cuisine, felt their new business principles of simple, organic, locally-sourced food had changed their business completely. Along with needing to separate themselves from another restaurant with the same name, they decided it was time for a big change. They chose Seres, a derivation of the ancient Latin word for China, which symbolizes the very old relationship between China and the West.

Working from earlier designs we had created, Quoin tweaked the logo, built a new web site and updated their signage.

The website is built on the WordPress framework. It’s a small, flexible, extremely SEO-friendly platform with a wide range of plug-ins. This installation includes anti-comment-SPAM software, SEO tools, XML sitemaps to notify Google of new content, and a plugin that incorporates Google Analytics reporting code into each page in a highly-configurable way.

The owner or staff can update the menu at any time, and, most importantly, their blog allows them to keep in touch with their community and create content that boosts their search rankings.

See this Chinese restaurant’s website.

Stumbled across this blog by illustrator Charlie Allen. He’s 87, and he’s scanning his back catalog and commenting on it. He has work on there from the 30′s through the 70′s, from what I’ve seen. Reading the creative briefs is a trip through the economic history of the USA.

Trading links with another site may not help you or the other site.

Google wants to know if your site’s content is trustworthy and valuable to their users. It uses the PageRank scoring system to describe your site’s popularity. One large factor of your site’s score is the quality and trustworthiness of the sites that link to yours. Such a link is called a “backlink” in search engine optimization (SEO) terms.

When a site with better popularity than yours links to you, it bumps up your ranking. Government (.gov) and educational (.edu) sites are more trusted by Google, and they are very valuable backlinks to have.

Beware of Toxic Backlinks

A site that is less popular can hurt you, if Google has taken disciplinary action against the site. A toxic site is one that has a history of spreading viruses, spamming people, or using ‘black hat’ SEO techniques to try to boost their popularity artificially on Google. Such a backlink could lower your PageRank.

For this reason, Quoin Design advises its clients to avoid signing up for “link farms” where people trade links in the hope that more links will equal better page rank. It just doesn’t. Your time is better spent writing rich content which is what Google wants more than anything else.

Before you trade links, make sure that the other site’s PageRank is higher than yours. If it isn’t, you might still want to do the deal for other business reasons, but make sure they’re a good internet citizen first. It’s the quality of the backlinks that counts, not the quantity.

I saw this recent post by arch-designer Michael Bierut and wanted to add my own comment.

Like us here at Quoin Design, Bierut has had enough of the legion of faceless, genderless, ageless, raceless representations of people in logos. They’re sort of beefed-up, slickified stick figures that are meant to stand in for you, me, and everyone else.

Logo designs like these usually leave me feeling slightly alienated and pandered to. They say, rather than including everyone, that the company or organization sees me, not as an individual, but as a nameless being interchangeable with another 3 billion or so.

Part of the problem lies in the drawings themselves. The limbs are attenuated, sharpened, floppy or stiff. Deprived of life, we see our reflection in them, but uncomfortably.

As designers, Quoin avoids sprites. Rather than representing a person, we prefer to create a connection between the viewer and the logo. This can be done by just creating a design with tension between positive and negative space (such as Hamish Murray Construction), which draws the viewer in and creates a lasting impression. Or more directly through an appeal to the senses, such as the warm wood texture in RSN Radiology.

If we are called upon to represent everyone, we prefer to turn the question around and ask how can we allow everyone who sees the logo to feel a part of the organization? We want to do the best job we can of reaching out to our audience, and that’s not by telling them that they all look alike.

WeLoveTypography.com is a comprehensive and wide-ranging clearing-house for cutting edge typography. But almost more important, to me personally, a great place to see old type solutions.

This image is from the Boston Public Library Flickr group.

I signed up for Darren Rowse’s 31-day blog tour-de-force. I got the first assignment and was promptly stuck. It asked me to come up with a mission for our blog. It seems reasonable, to set a guideline for what I’ll talk about here, but I came up against a quandary right away.

Many of the blogs out there are tutorial, or directed outward in terms of broadcasting the writer’s knowledge and understanding. This is of course a very good idea. The writer can demonstrate his expertise, and Google will then send all sorts of PageRank karma his way.

I could sit here and try to crank out PSD Tuts (that’s graphic design blog speak for PhotoShop tutorials), but there are many out there who can do that far better than I can.

However, I’ve been surveying my knowledge. 30% or so of it is verbal. Another 60% is non-verbal. To create content, that knowledge can be demonstrated via images, of course. Google doesn’t love that, but it’s a start. The last 10% is non-verbal, and, frankly, non-visual. And it’s the part without which I can’t possibly do my job – that 10% inspiration part. It’s the magical bit. I’d love to talk about that, more than anything else. The best way for me to begin to do that with this blog is just to find stuff I love and link to it.

I’ll start there anyway.