5 Must Have iPad Apps For Web Designer Needs

Though the iPad is more known for allowing easy consumption of online content, there are a wealth of apps that make it easier to create content on the Internet. Some apps help gather ideas, some keep those ideas organized while others help with the design of the site. Below is a list of apps that can help those designing websites using an iPad.

iMockup Screen shot
iMockups screen capture from iTunes

1. iMockups – This app comes into play after the ideas have been gathered and it is time to create a mockup of the potential website. It contains templates specifically for the iPad and allows designers to quickly drag page elements into the workspace from a sidebar. Those items can then be resized.

2. Dropbox – Saving files on an iPad can prove difficult, if not impossible. The app Dropbox serves as a file-saving system. Documents and photos can be uploaded and saved, as well as easily shared with anyone else who might be working on the project. An added bonus is that many other apps work seamlessly with Dropbox, making it extremely easy to save items from multiple sources. It also works with other platforms, meaning something saved in Dropbox on an iPad can later be accessed on another device, even a traditional desktop computer.

3. Evernote – While Dropbox is a place to save documents and photos for later use, Evernote’s goal is to act like a second brain to help people remember things. This app uses notebooks to store ideas a user may find while surfing the Internet but they are too busy to do anything with at the time. There is no limit to the number of notebooks that can be created and web pages can be clipped right into a notebook. Photos and audio recordings, as well as notations, can also be added. As with Dropbox, Evernote works with a wide range of other applications, and more are being designed for it every day.

4. HTML Cheat Sheet – Experienced web designers as well beginners can use this app to help them with HTML coding. It has a quick reference guide and has the bonus of being developed and written by experts who use HTML every day. Once code has been written, it can be tested in the app to make sure it works.

5. Paper  – This is one of the easiest drawing apps that can be used for designers. It has a friendly user interface, while also maintaining a wide array of powerful and realistic tools, such as a watercolor brush and ink pen, that will appeal to any illustator. Paper makes it easy to add realistic sketches to wireframes of potential websites.

While an iPad may not be the first choice of tool for those looking to design a website, a wide array of powerful, yet easy to use, apps make it possible. They give designers the ability to start the process or make refinements even when away from their personal computer.

Author Simon Phillips of TouchLogic.co.uk specializes in mobile website design and develops apps for small business owners.

The Marketing Minute: Help for Untouchability

I’m a big fan of writer and writing practice guru Natalie Goldberg. If I have a writing mentor, Natalie Goldberg is it. In 2008 I went to one of her writing workshops in Taos and took a bunch of photos.

Natalie Goldberg is going to be speaking at our wonderful local bookstore, Bookworks, next week about her new book The True Secret of Writing. I’m always torn when I go to events like this because I want to support my local bookstore and buy the book from them. Yet I’m at a stage in life when I’m trying not to bring home more stuff. Especially since I already have a row of autographed books by Natalie Goldberg on my shelves. And it’s always in the back of my mind that the Kindle edition is less than half the cost of the hardback. Do I really want one more hardback? What if I could get an electronic edition via Bookworks, not from Amazon? I wouldn’t be depriving Bookworks of a sale, and I wouldn’t be dragging home a hardback book.

It turns out that many writers and booksellers have considered this question and have come up with some excellent technological solutions. The latest newsletter coming from  Marcia Yudkin, Marketing Expert and Mentor of The Marketing Minute, addressed some of these new ideas. I’m reprinting the newsletter here:

Traditionally after a talk or reading, an author’s fans line up and buy the brilliant one’s books, taking home a token of their long-awaited experience that night.  Intangible and invisible, digital-only products like ebooks or downloadable audiobooks have much less appeal in that situation.

To replace inviting stacks of books or CDs at the back of the room, place QR codes on flyers handed out to everyone or on large colorful posters at a display table.  Audience members who have smartphones and the right app aim their phone at the code and arrive at a web page where they can buy the digital product.

To provide the delight of being able to walk out with something of the author’s in one’s hands, sell download cards at the event.  These credit-card-sized items show a book or album cover and contain a unique download code the buyer redeems later online.

Both ideas work only for a technologically savvy crowd, of course.  If you’ve gone digital-only and you speak to folks without the requisite tools and buying habits, you have a problem!

Reprinted with permission from Marcia Yudkin’s free newsletter The Marketing Minute.  Subscribe at www.yudkin.com/markmin.htm.

My fingers are crossed in hopes that Bookworks has implemented some of these high tech solutions to buying a book from a local bookseller.

10 Best Design Freebies of January 2013

Designers make their mark by staying one step ahead of the pack. Itís your job to be design-savvy, so don’t let clients catch you using last year’s tools and
templates. Thankfully, there are plenty of successful (and generous) designers out there willing to throw you a bone. The following 10 design freebies were
released this month so you can stay competitive without breaking the bank.

1. Simple Icon Set by Joshua Andrew Davies

When it comes to design, the devil’s in the details. These eye-catching icons will instantly give your work a fresh, modern feel. Clean. Simple. Free.

Simple Icon Set

2. Leo Restro Joomla Template by LeoTheme

This template is the ultimate time-saver. The themes adapt to smartphones, tablets, and desktop screens, reaching a broader audience with your portfolios,
blogs and project sites.

Leo Restro Joomla Template

3. Insect Photoshop Brushes by Lileya Brogu

These 42 realistic insect brushes will make your skin crawl. The detail in these illustrations really stand out, down to the veins in a fly’s wings.

Insect Photoshop Brushes

4. Hand Drawn Speech Bubble Photoshop Brushes by Kerby Rosanes

Get 30 unique speech bubble shapes in one download. Use these brushes when you want a hand-made, personalized design that still pops.

Whether it’s an advertisement, web site or comic, there’s a speech bubble to fit.

Speech Bubble

5. Free WordPress Theme: AyoShop by AyoThemes

WordPress is still the go-to platform for personal and professional sites. Unique, user-friendly themes are in high demand.

This one fits the bill without sacrificing quality, contemporary design.

Free WordPress Theme

6. Responsive Blog/Magazine Themes by Design Bolts

More WordPress themes! A handful of basic themes that can help you transition to responsive design. Think of them as one-size-fits-all templates for when you
need to get your client up and blogging fast.

Responsive Themes

7. Portfolio Layout Template by Bloom Web Design

Online portfolios aren’t just for designers. Artists and professionals of all kinds want to showcase their talents. This template is simple enough to be versatile, yet bold enough to make an impression.

Portfolio Layout Template

8. Wispy Fire Brushes by Dustin Schmieding

These five abstract brushes will inspire you. Do you see wispy fire or squid ink?

Fire Brushes

9. Responsive HTML5 Template: TXT by n33

If you’re using HTML5 Up!, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better starting point than TXT. It’s fully responsive and works across mobile, tablet and desktop.

Responsive HTML5 Template

10. Gemicon Icon Set by Turqois

Dig into more than 600 fresh icons in one place. When you need an ultra-specific icon (Cassette tape? Chicken leg?) Gemicon saves you from scouring the
internet — a designer’s most dreaded time-suck.

Gemicon Icon Set

Writer Brian Morris writes for the PsPrint Design & Printing Blog. PsPrint is an online commercial printing company. Follow PsPrint on Twitter @PsPrint and Facebook.

10 Rules of Minimalist Design

creativity must not end

Minimalist design gets a lot of hype; a quick Google search will yield dozens of lists boasting outstanding examples of minimalist design.  But what criteria do those lists use?  Is minimalist design subjective?  Is it simply a design without a lot of elements?  Is it easy to create a minimalist design?

The fact is, there’s more to good minimalist design than meets the eye; great minimalist design can take more time, effort and skill than more traditional designs.  The best minimalist designers painstakingly ply their craft to ensure their designs have purpose, and most minimalist designs incorporate the following 10 rules of minimalist designs.

White space is paramount

White space is key to a great minimalist design because the absence of clutter helps viewers focus on the content.

Purposeful design

Every graphic, image, and content element should have a clearly defined purpose.  It’s important to understand the goal of your design before you create it, so you can ensure that only those elements that serve your end-goal survive.

Cut until it breaks

Never settle on your first draft; instead, cut elements one-by-one until your design no longer meets its goal.  Remember that minimalist designs uses the fewest elements possible to achieve its goal.

The usability factor

Your minimalist design should feature a layout that makes it easy for users to find the information they want at a glance.

Grid it

Designing to a grid isn’t absolutely necessary, but it makes for a clean, natural layout that’s easy to follow; and it also makes crafting a minimalist design all the easier.

Color for impact

Accordingly, minimalist design incorporates minimal use of color.  Colors should be used to draw attention to specific words or design elements, either to help convey a mood or motivate a response.

Content is king

One of my friends is an incredible drummer, but when he plays with his band he does little more than keep time.  When I asked him why, he said the role of the drummer is to make the rest of the band sound better, not to show off.  Minimalist design works the same way; its role is to make the content more appealing, rather than steal the show.

Less is more

The less text and fewer design elements you need, the more impact your minimalist design will have.  A more focused design motivates greater response.

Typography tells a story

Big, bold typography is a hallmark of minimalist design.  Font choice, positioning, color, textures, and other features work together to stir emotions, brand a company and motivate response.  Your typography tells the story of your design, both textually and visually.

Take risks

These rules are not absolute, but rather guidelines to get you started.  Don’t be afraid to take risks with your design.  Doing so will undoubtedly reveal cool new ways to craft a compelling design that achieves its goal.

Writer Brian Morris writes for the PsPrint Design & Printing Blog. PsPrint is an online commercial printing company. Follow PsPrint on Twitter @PsPrint and Facebook.

Why Running Ranking Reports Is a Fool’s Errand (Reprint)

Fool's Errand
Image Credit: davehamster

By now you’ve heard the news that a few of the major SEO tool companies will no longer be providing ranking reports as part of the website data they supply. While you are probably still in shock and scrambling to figure out what to do about it, if you’re serious about your online marketing, it’s actually the best thing that could happen to you.
Now you can start focusing on stuff that matters.
I’m pretty sure I just heard a collective:

“But I need to know my keyword rankings!”

No, you don’t!

I’m not going to lie to you. Obviously, there’s a correlation between having a high ranking for a high-volume keyword phrase and having that phrase bring you search engine traffic. But whether or not you know what that ranking is doesn’t stop you from receiving that traffic.

There’s no such thing as a ranking

The fact of the matter is that for many years there’s been no such thing as “a ranking.” Oh, sure, there’s the ranking that a keyword had when someone clicked to a page of your site, but just because that page showed up #1 or #2 or #10 for one person doesn’t mean that anyone else saw your page in the same position in the search results. Someone else may have not seen your page show up at all.

Ranking reports can only tell you what position your page was in for a keyword phrase at the exact moment that the bot checked the rankings — and still it was only the ranking for that particular bot. While you might think that at least whatever the bot shows you can give you some idea of where you rank for that phrase for most people, even that may or may not be true.

Search results are highly personalized

Nobody using Google these days has a clean browser with no cookies set and no historical searches. (Well, nobody but SEOs who are trying to check rankings!) So even if you think you’re getting a clean ranking, your target users (those you want to buy your stuff) aren’t. There’s a good chance they’re seeing very different results from the bot than someone with a cleaned-up browser.

Your target audience is going to see pages from websites that Google thinks they specifically want to see. There are many things that can affect this, such as:
Geography
Past search history
Social media circles / friends / followers
And who knows what else?

Think about this: If your target audience is usually logged into their Google accounts and use a lot of Google services, there’s no end to what Google knows about them. It certainly makes sense that Google would use this information to personalize their search results. These days Google often knows about the words contained in emails, voice messages, information related to purchases, and travel. For those with Android phones, Google likely knows even more than all that. They may know where you go every day (based on GPS) and how often you go to certain places. My Google phone thinks that my daily “commute” is at 7 p.m. when most nights I head to my local bar! (I know this because a Google Now card shows up each evening telling me what the traffic will be to get there.)

As scary as this all sounds from a privacy aspect, the point is that in addition to what they’ve been previously using to personalize results, Google is gathering more information on people every day. They will most certainly be using it to try to show each individual searcher the best search results for them. The more people who use Google products, and the better that Google’s personalized algorithms get, the more the search results will vary for everyone.

Every website contains an unlimited pool of keywords

If none of that persuades you to stop thinking that you need to run ranking reports, then think about this: Most websites get found and clicked on in Google and other search engines for thousands, if not tens or even hundreds of thousands of different keyword phrases. While you may have your list of a hundred phrases that you think are important to you, even if you could know where those particular ones rank for most people (which we’ve already established you can’t), it doesn’t tell you anything about the other hundred thousand keyword phrases that are or might be bringing you actual targeted visitors.

Today’s SEO isn’t about optimizing for a handful of keyword phrases (or even a hundred). It’s about having amazing content that fulfills some need of your target audience. It’s about figuring out what that searcher on the other side of Google is seeking. They may have a question they want answered, or a desire to purchase a specific product, or a need for information. If there are pages on your website that very specifically provide that information in a way that is different or better than other sites, Google will want to show those pages to that searcher.

But every searcher is different and every searcher uses different search queries to find what they’re looking for. While you can research keywords and pretty easily find those that get lots of searches, that only tells you a piece of the story. Those high-volume keyword phrases will also have thousands of variations that get searched upon — many of which don’t even show up in keyword research tools. Even if you could predict all the hundreds of thousands of keyword phrases that somehow relate to your website, what good would it do you to check where you rank for them? They may or may not bring you targeted visitors.

Rankings don’t equal traffic and sales

When high rankings — rather than satisfying the needs of your target audience — is your goal, you’re on a fool’s errand. Rankings give you a false sense of security that distracts your focus away from the things that do matter: gaining more targeted visitors and converting them into customers (or whatever your conversions might be). Rankings don’t tell you which keywords people actually came into your site for, and which ones really matter. And rankings don’t tell you what content on your site is satisfying your target market.

Automated rank checking could cause Google penalties

If all of the above doesn’t convince you that you really and truly don’t need to run ranking reports to do SEO and measure your success, then think about this: Scraping Google to check rankings is against Google’s terms of service. While they have been lax about penalizing for this in recent years, the fact that they’ve started putting real pressure on companies to stop doing it tells me that they’re serious about enforcing their TOS. Which means it’s possible that they may also penalize those websites that do a lot of automated rank checking for their websites.

Penalties of that nature are something that Google has definitely done in the past when they could be sure that the rank checking was being done by the site owner. Plus, lately I’ve been seeing a correlation between sites that have been hit by Panda or Penguin and the sites running ranking reports on a regular basis. Now, correlation is certainly not causation. And the types of people doing automated rankings checks are usually doing other SEO type things, so I wouldn’t say for sure that they’re related.

But it wouldn’t surprise me if it caused some sort of red flag to be raised with Google — one that may cause them to take an even closer look at a website. I’d personally be very nervous about setting up an account with any SEO tool provider who decides to blatantly disregard Google’s new warnings about scraping the search results. Google is obviously very serious about it now. They may even decide that the best way to get the message out is to start directly penalizing all the sites that continue to run automated ranking reports.

This post is reprinted with permission from High Rankings Advisor. Guest Author Jill Whalen has been an SEO Consultant and the CEO of High Rankings, a Boston area SEO Company since 1995. Follow her on Twitter @JillWhalen.

10 Video Tools for Graphic Designers

The mass popularity of video presents opportunities for graphic designers to dabble into video editing. Even if youíre not going to do video editing professionally, learn enough to make it part of your skill set, because video is likely to rule the future. Get started or become a pro with the following 10 video tools for graphic designers.

1. Adobe After Effects

Adobe After Effects is often considered the de facto program for video effects, titling and compositing. The cons? It is not user friendly for those with no video editing experience, and the learning curve is steep.

Adobe After Effects

2. BorisFX

BorisFX is a plug-in suite that takes basic video editing programs to the next level. Superior keying and compositing tools adds another dimension to a basic editing platform, allowing you to do more with graphics and fonts. More importantly for novices, it simplifies effects so you can quickly add a professional touch to your videos.

BorisFX

3. Motion

Motion is the effects program that works in conjunction with Final Cut Pro ñ in other words, it is Apple’s answer to Adobe After Effects.

Motion

4. Adobe Photoshop

How does Photoshop fit into this equation? Not only can you alter video files, but you can also share work seamlessly with other Adobe programs such as Premiere Pro and After Effects. Photoshop puts most designers on familiar ground.

Adobe Photoshop

5. Smoke

You want high-grade, super-impressive special effects? Look no further than Smoke, available only for the Mac.

Smoke

6. Toon Boom

Toon Boom allows you to make quick and easy animations that maintain a premium appearance, without a steep learning curve.

Toon Boom

7. 3Ds Max

With industry-leading 3Ds Max, the only thing youíre limited by is your imagination.

3Ds Max

8. Adobe Premiere

Adobe Premiere is a fairly basic editing program, but when you combine it with the power of Adobe Creative Suite, it is so much more. Working in conjunction with Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects, you’ll have all you’ll ever need to create high-quality graphics and compositing in one package.

Adobe Premiere

9. Final Cut Pro

Much like Premiere, Final Cut Pro is a basic editing program, but with a decidedly Apple twist. It was a long-time industry standard for video editing; combing graphics, titling and compositing with ease.

Final Cut Pro

10. Ultimatte

Ultimatte started out as keying software, but then transitioned into hardware. If you are serious about compositing and getting the cleanest possible work on green or blue screens, then Ultimatte is a must-have tool.

Ultimatte

Guest Author Brian Morris writes for the PsPrint Design & Printing Blog. PsPrint is an online commercial printing company. Follow PsPrint on Twitter @PsPrint and Facebook.

10 Awesome New Tools for Graphic Designers

Looking for some sweet new graphic design tools? The apps, software and web tools listed here have all made names for themselves in the graphic design market in recent years.

1. Paper

This iPad app lets you use your tablet like a notepad, allowing you to sketch your ideas as if you were using a traditional notebook.

paper

2. Adobe Ideas

This is another idea notepad, except this one is integrated into the Adobe Creative Suite so you can use it seamlessly with Illustrator and Photoshop.

adobe ideas

3. iFontMaker

This iPad app lets you make your own handwritten font in minutes.

ifont maker

4. Pictaculous

Sometimes choosing a color palette can be challenging, but not anymore! Upload your photo to Pictaculous and it will automatically generate a matching color palette for you; thus saving time, effort and guesswork.

pictaculous

5. ColoRotate

Color editing has always been a mundane task for graphic designers, but ColoRotate takes a lot of the busy work out of it. The app promises quick color editing that is intuitive and easy to use.

colorotate

6. Trevor Morris Photoshop Scripts

Here’s a host of tools for Photoshop CS6: a collection of scripts by Trevor Morris that will make your image editing quicker while reducing dull and dreary busy work.
trevor tools

7. Sketch

Sketch is more than just another sketchpad; it’s a powerful vector image creator and editor that is sure to satisfy even the pickiest graphic designer.
sketch

8. Sketchbook Express

This is a sketchbook for Mac that takes the idea of MS Paint to the next level.
sketchbook express

9. Neat Image

Digital photos are convenient, but they can often be noisy. Neat Image is a plugin for Photoshop that turns noisy, grainy photos into sharp, crisp, vibrant images.

neat image

10. iStudio Publisher

If you are looking for software to layout pages for a magazine or brochure, then iStudio is for you. The learning curve is low compared to InDesign or QuarkXPress, so you can be up and running in no time.

istudio publisher

Guest Author Brian Morris writes for the PsPrint Design & Printing Blog. PsPrint is an online commercial printing company. Follow PsPrint on Twitter @PsPrint and Facebook.