Here are a couple examples of how my stock collection of vector people can be modified and incorporated in to custom illustrations.

How to add the power of social media sharing to your email campaigns.

An email newsletter is a great way to simultaneously accomplish two important marketing goals. On the one hand it’s a way to keep your current clients or customer base informed of your services and products. If the content in your newsletter is informative and of value it’s also a great way to attract the interest of new contacts. If you can get an existing subscriber to share your newsletter with friends you now have the attention of potential new customers or clients. So how do you get someone to share your newsletter?

Make sharing easy for your recipients

The best way to encourage sharing is to make it easy. We need to give recipients the ability to share your email with just a couple of clicks. You’ve probably already noticed that in most email campaigns there is usually a link somewhere on the page that allows you to forward to a friend. This is a good method for encouraging people to share your newsletter. It’s a standard feature available from most email campaign services. However, what if there was a much easier way to let your recipients share your newsletter with dozens or perhaps hundreds of friends? This is where we can put the power of social media to work.

Campaign Monitor is my favorite email service and the one I use with my clients. Campaign Monitor makes it very easy for me to create links that allows a recipient to share an online version of your email with friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. I especially like the fact that Campaign Monitor gives me complete creative control over what these links might look like. The links can be text or they can be custom graphics that I’ve created for you.

Here’s an email that I recently created for Capital Management Associates. It features a side bar near the top of the email in which I’ve added prominently placed sharing links.

Track the results

Once your campaign has been sent you can now log in to an account I’ve set up for you on Campaign Monitor and track the results. You can watch in real time as recipients click the Facebook Like button or tweet about your email.

Logo and uniform kit for a local cycling club

This one is going to get filed in the “Just for Fun” category but I’m still proud of the logo and uniforms I designed for a local cycling club. Having never designed a uniform of any sort in my entire life, I was a bit skeptical that I could actually produce something that could be worn in public. I’m perfectly comfortable designing for 2 dimensions but trying to visualize how something will look when wrapped around a human body is a different challenge. I surprised myself and I think they came out looking pretty nice!

Fitting in to this thing? That’s a different story. Sheesh…can I exhale now. Time to hit the treadmill.

I recently completed design development of new site for San Francisco based Langtech.

Langtech is an IT consulting agency. They provide clients with a wide range of services including software development, mobile application development, CRM, hosting and website design. They’re so busy doing fabulous work for their clients that when it came time to redesign their own site they requested my help.

The top portion of the home page consists of standard navigation elements and a large banner promoting featured products and services with a call to action. Prominently located on the home page as well on pages through out the entire site is a highlighted client testimonial. Below this area are call outs describing specific areas of expertise as well as a column devoted to recent news.

Second level pages are streamlined, text focused designs that provide product and service descriptions. A unique header graphic is used to distinguish each primary section and also provides a splash of color. A sidebar column is reserved for contact information, client testimonials and supporting visuals.

OutdoorGearLab is an exciting new company that recently hired me to develop their logo. I was very happy with the result. Below is the final design and a short case study that describes the process.

Outdoor Gear Lab is a brand new company founded by Chris McNamara, the creator of SuperTopo. The OutdoorGearLab mission is to create world’s best outdoor gear reviews. Each product is put through a set of real world field tests. The result is side-by-side comparative reviews designed to aid a potential buyer faced with overwhelming choices.

Logo development requires many different areas of design focus. Color, typography and illustration all demand attention. However, I think the single most important criteria is an understanding of the business in question. What does the business actually do and how can this be refelected visually? In this case I kept coming back to the concepts of “testing” and “outdoors”. I knew that I wanted to somehow combine these two subjects in an engaging visual symbol. The word “Lab” made me instantly think of a glass beaker. I’m sure there are other companies with “Lab” in their name that also use a beaker as a visual reference. However, I needed to somehow combine this idea with a connection to the outdoors. I wanted to do something a bit different. I wanted to drop a mountain range in to the beaker! My attention shifted to what this might look like.

Once I had a beaker element that I was happy with I began the task of pairing it with typography. I experimented with dozens of different font faces in an effort to find something that felt contemporary and yet friendly and approachable.

None of these initial variations were quite right. Eventually I found a font face on Veer.com called LFT Etica that had the character the client was looking for. Some additional design elements were added in order to pull everything together as a cohesive whole.

Developing an HTML Email design for The Cooperative of American Physicians

The Cooperative of American Physicians recently hired me to develop the visual design for a new email promoting their Risk E-Notes newsletter.

In the process of designing an HTML email I frequently incorporate images. However, I’m also very conscientious of what the email will look like if it arrives in an inbox with images turned off or temporarily disabled. I make a concerted effort to make sure that all headers, body text and call to actions are rendered as HTML and typically let images work in a secondary supporting role. This email design was no different. Images were important ingredients but I carefully aligned elements in such a way that all text could be rendered as HTML.

I used Campaign Monitor’s testing service to produce screen shots of the email as it would look in a variety of major email applications. I double and triple checked that the email would look consistent across all applications. Everything worked great until we noticed that tables blew up when the email file was moved from one Outlook folder to another.

We were faced with a decision that occurs frequently in email design. Redesign the email using a simplified layout or convert the entire top portion of the email to a single image in order to maintain design consistency.

Email design best practices tend to embrace developing for the lowest common denominator and we’ve all been told to avoid heavy images and concentrate on legible and consistent text display. This is great advice but there is a reason companies like Apple Computer often still send emails that consist of little more than one large static image. Sometimes image is still king. There’s a chance that a large image at the top of your email will mean a small percentage of recipients delete the email before taking the time to display images. However, perhaps the greater fear should be that a vast majority of recipients receiving a dull and inspired looking email. If you believe your message and/or promotion works best with a large engaging image that just might be the correct design solution.

I recently discovered my business people illustrations in this Taleo Campaign

I’ve managed to sell my business people icon sets many times over but I rarely get to ever see how they’re being used. My wife found an email from Taleo in her inbox this morning that show cases examples of both my vector and 3D illustrations effectively combined in a single campaign.

I’ve uploaded some new springtime photos of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Over the past year the park service has removed a grove on non-native eucalyptus trees which has opened up some brand new un-obstructed views of the Golden Gate Bridge. It became more impressive this spring when wild flowers started to bloom. I decided to capture some new stock images of this view.

Granted there’s nothing terribly innovative about these shots. I think I like the technical challenges involved in scouting a location; figuring out what the best time of day and weather would be as well as determining the ideal vantage points. If you happened to walk by early one morning and see some nerd perched on the very top step of a ladder trying to take hand help photos with out toppling over that was probably me.

Ok, this is just for fun and doesn’t actually have much of anything to do with business.

Some how my 7 year old daughter has turned in to a pretty good little skateboarder. It’s her favorite thing to do so I spend more time hanging out at skateparks than I would have ever imagined. Occasionally I like to make a complete fool of myself by trying to keep up with her. I decided it was time to have my own board and that I should design it myself. Here it is, my own company branded skateboard. It includes subtle(ha!) instances of my DS logo and a design element that references color swatches.

Here’s Zoe putting the board together for me:

Deck and custom printing from BoardPusher

All components purchased from Skate Warehouse

I recently developed a custom Facebook page for Gavin Historical Bricks.

Not long ago I wrote a brief article regarding some of the visual enhancements that can make for a more interesting and informative Facebook profile page. Historical Bricks contacted me with a request to put these concepts to work on their company Facebook page.

Gavin Historical Bricks is a supplier of gorgeous antique specialty bricks, pavers and cobblestones. My goal was to build an engaging custom Facebook page that offers visitors an overview of Historical Brick’s services and products. I incorporated a series of tabs that allow one to navigate between sections. Content for these sections included condensed variations of the same categories that exist on their primary web site. You can view their Facebook page in action here.