Brand Design Blog, News and Ideas

I recently sent a question regarding Effective Business Promotion to the Mind Your Own Business Podcast and was fortunate enough to have it featured as the topic for the day.

Mind Your Own Business is a great Podcast which talks about business issues relating to the entrepreneur. The podcast is paneled by Guy Kingston and John Richards, two successful business entrepreneurs from the UK.

My question to them was to discuss what are the most effective forms of business promotion.

It’s a broad question and being in promotion myself, I expected the same old answers.

Answers such as, it depends on your unique business area and your unique target market.

Which of course it does.

But the question was asked to prompt some discussion on the subject, which may reveal a few different ideas on the topic. Which it certainly did.

So make sure to have a listen to their podcast on effective promotion which you can find here.

It’s definitely worth a listen to hear their perspective.You’ll find some great information on general marketing topics, but also some real nuggets of information about topics such as strategic alliances.

Thanks to Guy and John for featuring Crimson Fox on their show.

I know I’ve said that you may never need a design book again with internet services such as Flickr around…

…But, if you’re stuck for gift ideas for the designer in your life. You could do worse than to purchase one of the great design publications from this list over at You the Designer.com

Hi Guys and gals,

Do you love photoshop? …I do.

If you’re like me, then you’ll be happy to hear that I just stumbled across this blog post that contains 60 great little, free, photoshop tutorials.

I haven’t had a chance to check them all out, but the ones I had a quick look at, are definitely worth your time.

Have a look for yourself at: 60-advanced-adobe-photoshop-tutorials

If you have anything to do with web design or the internet, here’s a website that you really must bookmark.

Click here to view the Web Developer’s Handbook

While normally I speak about design and business related issues – today I’m going to have my say about business ethics.

SPAM emails have become common place in my day to day dealings with the internet, but today I received one that frankly, pissed me off.

The title: Four-year-old Madeleine disappeared from Portuguese holiday resort in May

We all know the story of little Madeleine. I’ve been closely following the story myself, because my daughter carries the same name.

But the email wasn’t a chain letter referring to donations, or an email prompting me to visit a website…no.

This email was promoting VIAGRA.

How the hell does a business think, for a second, that by tricking me into looking at an email that I’ll suddenly go out and buy their product.

Let alone the disgusting tactic of connecting VIAGRA to the story of a missing 4 year old girl.

So the email was able to get through my SPAM filter…Congratulations!

You’ve succeeded in making sure I never buy the product.

I would think that the makers of VIAGRA would be doing everything in their power to stop this sort of situation.

Or does the money they make from using affiliates such as this outweigh a moral sense of evil.

For everyone else…

…If you have a business. Be careful how far you’ll go to make a buck. Simply being being in business doesn’t not give people the right to leave their conscience at the door.

The Smart Business Brief is a great resource website which I’ve been frequenting over the last year.

I’ve also just become a moderator on their forum so I thought I’d give everyone a heads up as to what you can find there.

If you are thinking of starting or are currently running a small business you’ll find the articles and networking opportunities on the site to be invaluable. While the quality of articles varies greatly from one writer to the next, I find that having a broad range of ideas and topics really helps to keep up to date with todays small business issues.

The Small Business Brief Forum is a great place to meet other business people, share ideas and ask questions about small business issues. The friendly atmosphere makes for a really accessible community. Even if you’re a novice to the business world you won’t feel excluded here.

While there if often some great heated debates on the forum, you’ll rarely find any nasty response or verbal bashing which makes for some really interesting discussions that cut to the heart of an issue.

The website has just implemented a digg like ranking system on articles which makes finding the great new business articles much easier. Articles including everything from SEO to through to tips on running a business franchise. No matter what small business you run, you’ll find something useful here.

So, if you have a business idea, have just started in the small business world, or have been a business person for years – whether you’re running an online business or a traditional brick and mortar, you’ll find something useful at the Small Business Brief Forums.

I may even see you there.

Lists are all the rage on the internet. Everyone has a top 10 of this or a top 5 of that.

Here is another one for you.

What impressed me about this list, is the description that accompanies each link. It becomes far more useful than simply listing urls.

Check it out at: 99 Useful Resources for Graphic Designers

Have you got some spare time on your hands? If you’re reading this blog then chances are you do.

So why not check out this fun little time waster.

It’s called Line Rider and it has become a world wide illustration sensation.

How does it work?

Basically, using the tools provided, you draw up a course for your little line rider. When you’re finished hit the play button and watch him ride.

Why am I featuring it here? Well, I wanted to show you some of the samples you can watch on You Tube.

Once you have a go yourself at the official website or at other sites like this one, You’ll soon see that designing a course for our little guy, is not as easy as it seems.

Check out this same below.

I’ve been having a discussion concerning the blog name over at the Small Business Brief Forum.

I think I’ve come to a decision. The word blog is fast becoming a household name, even in the non-internet community. So to remove the word blog is going simply make finding these entries harder.

So, I’ll include blog but also add descriptive words to the button name – Brand Design Blog.

This should help visitors find the blog but also help new visitors find it through search engines.

Let’s see how it works.

Blogs are what they’ve come to be called. But what is a Blog?

Well it comes from the word web log. Which is supposed to be a log of journal style entries. ‘Journal style entries’ is what I’m intending to do here. But the word Blog doesn’t really grab my imagination.

The same is being said by the web community at large. Every day you hear of some internet community leader becoming sick of the term. I have to agree.

So…what do I call my ‘blog’ then?

It’s a tough question especially since practical branding is what my core design ideal is about. As soon as the community at large (non-internet folks) are slowing getting around to the idea of ‘what is a blog’, does it makes sense to go and change the term?

If so, it would have to change to a term that makes sense. A term that people will understand on sight.

I’ll think further about this one and if anyone has any great ideas. Please let me know.