This is about what some clients want you to do in order to accomplish their overall goal, which usually ends up coming back to you the designer as a negative project both you and the customer. Maybe we could get a good rapport on how to effectively guide a client out of the mindset that having a project done faster doesn’t always equate to having it done better.

One type of client may want to have their website up by the end of the week so that they can be ready to “make money” over the weekend. But I have found that if you sacrifice your time in testing and ensuring proper usability the website will initially flop. It is best to have a good plan of action and stick to it. The client like this I have found will normally want a large project done and wait until two days before their desired deadline to get you essential project information.

Say your job is print related, staring at the MAR+APR 2008 Create magazine sitting beside me I can see a ton of work going into some of the ads placed in here. So if I was designing for something like this; where obviously deadline is an issue. I may have to steer the client out of the target issue if their overall brand or idea wasn’t properly portrayed, suggesting the following issues print deadline for a more successful campaign.

How do others handle clients like these?

As you probably know, traditionally, the “sweet spot” for most marketers has been the consumers who occupy the coveted 18-34 age bracket. While is has become a commonly-accepted ‘fact’ that this group spends and spends frequently, the REAL FACT being overlooked by many American marketers is that 18-34 is not the only demographic “sweet spot.” There is another group of considerable size, possessing far more spending power, that’s almost ignored in the strategic plans of many of our most prominent marketers.

Who are these “emerging” consumers flying under today’s marketing radar screen? Why, they’re just our Baby Boomers. Consumers age 40 to 70, nearly 100 million strong, with annual spending power of more than $2.1 trillion — seven times the spending power of Generations X and Y combined.

Recent studies prove Baby Boomers still have what it takes in the spending department:

• People over 40 spend 65% more than any other age group
• The average household buys 13 cars in a lifetime - nine of them after age 40
• One of Nintendo’s fastest growing new products is Wii Bowling. Their biggest customers? Retirement homes. They call it “Wii-habbing”
• The 45-75 age group spent $97 billion in household furnishings and $32 billion in the drug category in 2004, 14% and 148% more, respectively, than consumers age 44 and under
• The average age of a Harley Davidson buyer is 48

Enter thirdgear, a Chicago-based marketing consultancy with a fresh new focus on the Baby Boomer generation. thirdgear, in partnership with Millennium, a UK-based advertising agency, is committed to its mission of bringing marketers closer to the millions of consumers over 40 who helped set the tone for today’s consumer landscape.

thirdgear has created a proprietary panel of consumers over 40 called gearheads. These active, highly involved, highly opinionated think tankers are not shy about sharing their ideas and opinions on about everything from product design to packaging to advertising.

And, in response to this booming market, thirdgear co-founded IMMN, the International Mature Marketing Network. The association’s mission is to champion mature marketing around the world and currently has members from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, England and the United States, including noted marketing consultants and authors such as Marti Barletta and Dick Stroud.

To learn more about thirdgear, check out their Web site, www.thirdgear.com or reach out to Jenna at 773.715.0879 or jenna@snackboxlabs.com.

Ever run across a good article on a website, but you were about to punch the timecard, or head away from the computer? What do you usually do, you can drag it to your overlowing bookmark bar where you will undoubtably forget about it for a few weeks. Maybe you post it to your del.icio.us account instead, or some other bookmarking site, where again you usually forget about it. I find it’s helpful to just hit command+p (ctrl+p for the PC user) and normally get just an awfully layed out print of the page, and normally it has some content cut off, well that was useless and not very green to waste the paper and ink right?

After a week of finding articles and not being able to get a decent print I aimed to fix it for our site, and then write about how others could do the same. If your a designer and your getting a lot of traffic it stands to reason that someone may at some point print out your article for later reading.

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We came across a great article on the do’s and don’ts of Google search engine optimization (SEO). The beef of the article is included below.

DO

1. Have other quality, relevant sites link to yours
2. Submit a site map using your Google Webmaster Tools account
3. Submit your site to quality, high authority directories in the appropriate category
4. Make a site with text links and a clear hierarchy, and make sure every page is reachable by at least one static text link
5. Create useful, unique and clearly written content
6. Make sure your title tags and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate
7. Maintain clean HTML code
8. Keep the outgoing links on a page under 100
9. Make it easy for search bots to crawl your site without error
10. Make use of the robots.txt file to limit crawling on pages that aren’t useful to visitors
11. Make pages for users, not search engines

DON’T

1. Don’t include broken links on your site
2. Don’t use hidden text or links
3. Don’t cloak or use sneaky redirects
4. Don’t load pages with keywords or phrases a.k.a spam
5. Don’t send automated queries to Google
6. Don’t create duplicate content
7. Don’t create pages that install Trojans, viruses, etc.
8. If you participate in an affiliate program, don’t provide duplicate, run-of-the-mill content
9. Don’t participate in linking schemes – bloggers are watching you!

Source: seonoobs.com

You have a client, they have money, a goal begins to emerge. Before long you are headlong into a design project. What are the steps to take, how do you get from point “Okay, we have a deal” to point “Here’s the finalized results now pay up”?

A project can start on a few different levels, either taking an existing design and creating a reality, or creating the concept from scratch, and then taking the concept into a reality. This here will only deal wiht the former as it’s all about how to get the look from Photoshop* and putting it successfully to Firefox, IE, Safari, etc.

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