The Blauugh

Earlier this year we started receiving more than usual requests from clients for web site updates & redesigns. It is important to keep your web site current with the latest & greatest technologies such as a blog, a link for your clients to upload their photos, or even a page where you can list those articles that have been published about your company.

But, what about a printed brochure, pocket folder, or an invitation to an upcoming event? Printed materials are still a great way to market your company. The printed piece can be put directly into a person’s hand to be looked at over and over again. Given the current state of the economy we are all looking for ways to make the dollar stretch further. Panoramic Press, Mousegraphics, O’Neil Printing and Heritage Graphics are a few of the vendors we use to ensure that we offer the best possible price for your printed materials.

Your web site and printed collateral should work together to bring you more clients.

So whether you are looking to update your web site or have that special collateral piece printed call us for a quote.

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I am putting hardwood floors in my house and came across this review of the wood flooring I am purchasing. I just had to post it.

Saved My Marriage

By MacGyver from Pottstown, PA on 4/27/2009

Pros: Attractive Finish, Beautiful Color, Durable, Easy To Clean, Easy To Install

Cons: Waited this long

Best Uses: Bedroom, Dining Room, Family Room, Living Room, Office

Describe Yourself: Avid Do-It-Yourselfer

Bottom Line: Yes, I would recommend this to a friend

My marriage has been on the rocks for a couple years now. We have been to counseling several times but nothing seemed to help, then I installed this flooring. Since then, our marriage has never been better. Installing this floor costs much less than half of everything I own, so it was clearly the best choice.

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R Squared recently completed an identity for Frisbee Golf company “Chain Seeker”. Aimed at merchandising and other frisbee golf related goods, this logo really hits frisbee golf’s unique target audience.

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If you are like us, you have clients who are wanting more and more to do email marketing campaigns and newsletters. And like the rest of you, our ultimate goal is to give our clients the best solution and product we can. So I set out to find the best way to accomplish this.

We had been using every designers favorite program, Publisher, to do our newsletters and email campaigns. For those of you who have done this you know the pain involved so I will spare the rest of you the gory details. This post is not about horror stories, but about the tools and resources we have come across which helped us to successfully send out an email marketing campaign or newsletter and accomplish the ultimate goal.

I admit I am not a wizard at HTML and was having trouble finding out how to create HTML emails and send them out. Microsoft Outlook 2007 dropped the ball and got rid of their HTML capabilities. And there are not any other mail programs that I found could send out HTML emails (if you know of any please let me know). There is always Constant Contact, which is a good program, if you like to stick within a pre-designed template and you are sure your email address are strong. Don’t get me wrong, Constant Contact is a very large and successful company and there product works, just not for us or our clients.

So what else is out there? I did a search for HTML emails on google and came across some good sites. One in-particular helped me realize that it is not as easy as I thought. To my surprise you have to go back like 10 years and design your email using inline CSS and tables (no div tags allowed). There are also many different mail programs and they all read HTML different. Here is the link to that article http://www.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters/ I would highly recommend it. It gives you a great overview of how you need to code your HTML emails and a few examples too.

You cant just copy and paste you HTML into a mail program (guilty of trying that), you need a delivery service, and luckily there are a lot of options to look at. I chose to list the two I found to be the best. Even though they are similar, one offers a few more bells and whistles. I would recommend looking around and compare the following and other options before you make your choice.

MailChimp, which is one of the better options, is an easy option to deliver and manage your email campaign, they are also a great resource to see how they recommend formating your HTML. They have a few generic templates you can download too. These templates give you a base for how to design an HTML email that will work on all of the mail platforms.

There is another program out there that I cam across that works even better for what what our clients need, Campaign Monitor. This offers all the same features as MailChimp, but allows you to set up 100% custom templates for your clients to manage and send themselves or you can manage and send them yourself on your clients behalf. They also have basic templates you can download and modify if you choose to. Their support and tips & resources pages are great resource as well. The other thing I found very useful was Campaign Monitor will automatically put your css inline once you have uploaded your campaign. This made it a lot easier for me.

As you can tell for the previous paragraph we went with Campaign Monitor. We started using it for one client and now have four on it, one of which is using a custom template we designed and sending out their email newsletters on their own. 

I hope this has been somewhat useful, even though it is just a very brief overview of a few things I have found and learned about HTML emails. If any of you have any other great resources or tools let me know, the more the better.

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As part of an article I had read about a new brand, there was an interesting paragraph that I felt I had to write about.

The brand that was being written about was HTV (Hispanic TV) which is available in the US, Europe, and Latin America. I personally have never heard of it, I doubt many have, but that’s not really the issue. The paragraph that caught my attention was this one: “Unfortunately the HTV web site requires that you use Internet Explorer so, because this is not 1999 and Microsoft abandoned the OS X ship years ago, there is probably some information or visual application that I may be failing to provide. But I believe you get the gist.”

For those of you whom aren’t web designers, the concept might be a little foreign to you, but one of the major issues associated with web design is the variation that occurs based upon which browser is being used. Something viewed in Firefox might not read the same in Internet Explorer if you are doing something more complex than basic html. This causes a whole lot of issues cross-browser and is a thorn in the side of most who work on websites. But, a weird decision (or an extremely lazy) decision by the creative team at InJaus (pronounced In-house, a cleaver play-on-words) to have a site that only works in Internet Explorer.

Now, it is most likely that you are viewing this in Internet Explorer, it’s the most widely used browser at around 74% of internet browsers. But that leaves 26% of viewers who can’t view your site and will not go through the effort to get a new browser to see it. In fact, Internet Explorer hasn’t made a version for Mac in almost 10 years, so if your a mac person you have no chance of getting to it unless you hunt down a pc. A very curious decision to actively design a site that is not accessible to a quarter of the internet population.

If you get a chance, go check out their site http://www.htv.com. If you happen to take a look, let us know how it works, because we don’t have a clue.

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R Squared is happy to welcome Chelsea MacPhearson to R Squared as our intern for this summer! Chelsea is going to be a senior in the Visual Communications Design program at ASU. She will also be a new writer to the R Squared Blog and will bring a female voice to the Blauugh (since Susan won’t post). She hopes this summer to learn design from the “real world” perspective, but honestly, there is nothing more fantasyland than working with us.

So, a warm welcome to Chelsea, and here’s to hopping her summer experience is a great one!

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There are many advantages to text messaging, Instead of calling a friend after 10PM to see if they are still awake, you can just send them a text - if they don’t respond they are more than likely catching some Zs. You can sneak a little love message out during class or while at work and best of all you can still communicate when you have Laryngitis.

Call me an old fart - but when it comes to true life interaction, face-to face or even a simple phone CALL is the only way to go. With text messaging, expressions and verbal articulation are lost - LOL - ILY & IMU can only say so much. A SRY or sad face is a poor substitute for compassion when someone is heart broken. The same goes for work etiquette - you wouldn’t send your boss a text message letting him/her know you’re sick…. or maybe you would, and in that case you are probably one of the 8.6% unemployed. Would you text message a break up? It’s all a matter of tact and accepting personal responsibility.

Just another thought, you might want to avoid texting anything you might regret someone reading later. It’s much safer to have the full blown argument with your significant other, face-to-face or at the very least on the phone, It could save you costly legal fees or worst….. time in the big house.

So in closing, some things need to be left to personal interaction. Text messaging has given us a quick and easy way to interact with others on the fly, but it has left us with more responsibility. Common sense and good judgment are essential when typing with your thumbs - the phone and the screen may be small, but the consequences might not.

PS (every-time I received a LOL from my buddies, it made me uncomfortable - I could not figure out why they were sending me “Lots Of Love” )

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Do think that being outdoors is loads of fun? Is long trips in the woods with guys your thing? Do you imagine hanging out with Rick is the bee’s knees? Then the under-development website for 4 Amigos Adventures is going to interest you. Check out the cool things these guys have got going!

Visit the site Here!

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