Feb 16 2010

Wordpress gets a new default theme

Wordpress is working on a new theme for 2010, called “Twenty Ten”

http://2010dev.wordpress.com/

The new theme supports a lot of built in options for customizing the banner, background, and typefaces. Kubrik was a great starting place for a lot of <= 2.8 themes, but with 2.9 and 3.0 coming out, it’s time to embrace the upgrade. Go Wordpress team!


Feb 16 2010

Click Affinity

I’d like to use the term “click affinity” in the world of web design – if it does not already exist. I just realized this concept when I visited the Wall Steet Journal’s online magazine site and was immediately tempted to click on many of the stories.

It was a difficult struggle as I had many other things I needed to be working on (ie: no time to visit that site) but there was still a pull to get into their content.

In addition to having good design and usability, the real core piece of being popular online is having good content, which is:

  • Unique / Original
  • Up to date
  • Well-written / Easy to understand

I believe having valuable content, content-teasers, graphics, and yes – even ads will increase that content’s “click affinity,” which will  engage users.

Try to present good content! Raise the click affinity for the items on your website.


Feb 16 2010

Custom Wordpress Theme for WH?

I’ve been thinking that I need to revamp the site again, maybe do a more custom template. I don’t really do any advertising here, nor do I plan to, so I’m thinking of going with a minimalistic theme that just highlights the content well.


Jan 26 2010

Coming Soon: WFU Marketing Summit

Get live updates of the Marketing Summit


Jan 14 2010

New site launch

The WFU Energy 2010 Conference has launched: http://energy2010.wfu.edu/


Jan 7 2010

Sweet Typography at Sweetwater

Getting typography right is hard enough, even when you have all of the image editing tools to aid. But as we all know, many times images are blocked on e-mail clients, which makes the task of designing an effective e-postcard with high penetration difficult. Sweetwater has done an nice job mixing an e-mail promotion with a graceful fallback on a recent e-mail promotion. Take a look at the email below with and without images. I especially like the second heading which uses a -2px letter spacing css attribute to achieve a nice kerning.

The ad was available here when I posted this.


Jan 4 2010

Capitalism Site Launches

The second, more official launch of the BB&T Center for Capitalism at Wake Forest University was today

We tried launching the site for the first time back in August but there were too many revisions to make. It’s looking much better now.


Jan 4 2010

wonderful designers

There are a TON of wonderful designers out there to bookmark. Be sure to look into the classically great as well as the contemporary.
Here’s a starter list:
Paul Rand
Stefan Sagmeister
Milton Glaser
Chip Kidd
Michael Bierut
Neville Brody
Paula Scher
Lucille Tenazas
Alan Fletcher
Wolfgang Weingart
Armin Hoffman
Eric Spiekerman
Josef Muller-Brockman
Kyle Cooper
Thanks @JamesKurtz!

Jan 4 2010

Twitter on Facebook Pages

Thought I’d post this here, too:

I wanted to share a facebook application I just learned about. It adds a tab to a facebook “page” that shows twitter updates:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=53267368995#/apps/application.php?v=wall&id=53267368995

It was difficult to find, I didn’t realize it was possible. For a long time I thought facebook only allowed you to push your FB updates to twitter, and not vice versa.

Hope you find it useful. They have a free and pro version. I’m using free.


Jan 4 2010

Google gets crazy with Newton’s Apples

Google is celebrating Newton’s Birthday today with a poppy javasript falling apple. Google recently added javascript to their homepage with the fade in /  fade out of the text around the edges. Google usually adds cool graphics for holiday’s like Issac Newton’s Birthday but they have decided “what the heck,” we are already using javascript on the homepage, let’s add something else. I think it’s kind of delightfully tacky.