understanding your audience is the essence of communication

Website development is inherently challenging, and when a website is complete the temptation is often to take a break and move on to other things. Unfortunately, a brief rest can easily turn into a hiatus of several months or more.

Our company is trying to help our clients break this pattern by thinking of online marketing as an ongoing process involving a coordinated effort among a variety of roles and tools.

One important tool that people can overlook is analytics – or traffic analysis. There are many tools available that perform this function, but the one we recommend is Google Analytics – which is both powerful and free.

Analytics works through a small code that’s embedded in your site that tracks who visits your site, how they found it, and what they do while they’re there. Here is an overview of some of the many things you can learn from Analytics, and how it can help drive your marketing efforts.

measure performance of inbound marketing tools

If your organization uses Facebook, Twitter, email broadcasts, or other online marketing tools, you can easily learn which tools are drawing people to your site in addition to what type of content is creating interest. Folding this information into an internal decision making process can help you continually learn about your audience, refine your content, and invest your time and energy in the tools that have the most impact.

learn what your audience is interested in

Features such as the Inpage Analytics create a data overlay on top of your existing pages that creates a “heat map” of what people click on and (more importantly) what they don’t click. Analytics makes it easy to identify pages and links that receive virtually no activity so you can then adjust your content or navigation concept, and create links that are more compelling and relevant to your audience.

In addition, each page has a “bounce” rate. A bounce is a site visit where only one page is reviewed, a  indication that the visitor either found exactly what they were looking for or (more likely) left instantly thinking they would find it elsewhere. Though of course the bounce rate means different things depending on the page, a common rule of thumb is anything larger than 50% is an indication that something is wrong – most likely in the content.

There are a number of tools in development in Analytics that lay bare the flow people follow when moving from page to page, the things that make them continue to explore, and the things that make them leave. Seen as a whole, the movements become like studying flocking behavior in birds – the fascinating patterns of groups and the individuals that comprise them.

foster an ethic of continuous, relentless self-improvement

The wealth of instantly available information rewards a patient, ongoing pattern of experimentation/evaluation that can help you learn quickly and reasonably painlessly. Studying click through on a series of Facebook posts, for example, can help safely and inexpensively guide a print based campaign.

Email broadcasts provide a good measurement of improvement.Though the people we reach out to continues to grow, a few key numbers – such as the percentage of people who read email and who visit our site – remain remarkably consistent, usually within a single percentage point month after month. This stability helps us make predictions accurately, it also creates a number of ‘what if’ scenarios where we can change one variable to see the impact on our numbers.  The goal is always to do better and to let the audience show us how to do it.

A strategy of continuous observation coupled with healthy curiosity about doing things better, year after year, help us to be better communicators and a better company. It can for you, too.

I thought The Devil Wears Prada had a wonderful insight into the culture of design and the mindset of designers. You may be able tell at a glance that I am somewhat a stranger to fashion, but there was much of this movie I could relate to – none more so than the scene above.

I think the reason I could so easily relate is I feel that, fairly late in life, I made the transition from being like the Anne Hathaway character to being like the Meryl Streep character. I can see this scene from both character’s point of view.

Here’s a design / branding version of the Meryl Streep’s cerulean sweater, and it comes from another “devil” of sorts: Martha Stewart.  In just over ten years, a distinctive type family linked with her personal brand went from iconic status to something nearly despised by some as the “next Papyrus.” Here is how this played out.

Archer back in 2000 when it first emerged. It is quintessentially "Martha."

Archer is what’s known as a slab serif, a type of typography that is industrial in a graceless masculine way. It would be at home in 50s and 40s boy scout manuals, US army paperwork, electronics kits, and hardware catalogs. I speak in generalities because there are many exceptions. Hoefler and Frere-Jones rethought the concept of a slab serif, preserving the sturdiness of it but adding an element of grace. From a type nerd point of view, it was like something totally new under the sun, a brilliant reconciling of two opposites: boiling, frozen water. This was in 2000. The font was Archer, the client was Martha Stewart Living magazine.

Archer is a graceful, beautiful slab serif type family

And it suited her to a T. The typeface was a masterpiece – versatile, beautiful, tough as nails, smart, smart, relentlessly smart – just like Martha. And (so far as I could see) possessed by her and her alone. It was used brilliantly, and part of that brilliance was that it was invisible to all but a few. You’ve doubtless heard of Martha, but this is probably the first you’ve heard about her typography – yet it continues to be a powerful presence in her brand.  Archer is her font.

I coveted it and  searched for it for years until I stumbled on an announcement of its release as a “new” font from H&FJ. Later, I figured it out that type families are commissioned for private use and then often later become available to the public. That was in 2007. There were seven years between Martha’s use of this font and it’s public release.

You can surely guess the rest of the story. Now Archer is everywhere and designers of a certain type are starting to roll their collective eyes in horror of it all. I guess they’re right. Archer has become the go to font that buttoned up organizations are using to create a home crafted, earnest, but still sophisticated voice. Once this goes stale, they will move onto the next thing.

Twelve years later

Enough already

I look forward to that cycle – including the inevitable backlash among the designers – finishing soon. This type family can then enter into a cultural equilibrium, joining the pantheon of wonderful, time honored type families that designers use (and use sparingly) for years to come. This will only happen in the distant, distant future when all recent goings on have long faded from memory. Say 2016.

For those of you who haven’t followed the controversy, Komen recently announced they would (in effect) not provide funding for cancer screenings for Planned Parenthood. Public outrage forced them to reverse this decision – at great, probably permanent expense.

Komen represents a more traditional approach to communications. Though active on social media, their efforts seemed like an anemic translation from old media – abstract, dull, perfunctory. It suggested to me a marginalized intern tasked with completing Facebook posts with no real say in the matter.

Planned Parenthood’s communications were more dynamic, interesting, and timely. They used the immediacy of the Komen decision to lend a sense of urgency to the discussion. This momentum fueled a tidal wave of outrage. It was deftly handled, and Planned Parenthood looked nimble and smart.

Compare and contrast two posts from Planned Parenthood and Komen on February 1.

Brevity is ever the telltale sign of mastery of craft. Though Komen has many more comments, the bulk of them are negative – many even scathing.

There are many great analysis of this incident (this piece by Adovcom is the most interesting and insightful I’ve found) and though they vary in the details, there is a general agreement that the Komen, Planned Parenthood incident is symbolic of a profound shift that is taking place in how organizations think about how they communicate. More than anything else, it’s not a matter of being big, wealthy, or famous, but using the tools you have resourcefully and being imaginative and smart.

Even a simple campaign benefits from this approach. Here is a poster we recently designed for Pickford’s unofficial Oscar event.

Our “toolkit” is comprised of

• a simple typeface treatment enclosed in a circle,
• a halftone filter very subtly applied to photos to give it a slight newsprint quality
• a cropping concept of only including portion of the face (this last concept was inspired by the camera work in Rosemary’s Baby, which torments you by hiding critical details from view)

These elements were later used to create a series of screen ads, a few of which are shown here.

By making simple choices, the resulting system plays well with others – in this case Mark Michael French’s excellent photography.

Striking images of local people having a great time, playing with the concept of Oscar in a tongue and cheek way is a far better emotional draw than any logo or type concept. The best design strategy, therefore, is one that supports – instead of interferes with – the story told by the photography.

In this way, consistent use of a few simple elements allowed us to quickly create additional designs that were instantly recognizable as being part of the same event. Additional materials could be easily made that would follow these simple rules. Try taking this approach for your next event. The ability to include both variety and consistency in designs should satisfy any team, from large to small.

We’ve tried to design it so everyone will know a few of these ads, but few will know all.  Do your best.

It’s simple!  Visit this link and complete the questions. The reward? The people with the highest scores will receive – as always – a chance to win $50 gift certificate from  Boundary Bay or Amazon in addition to Shew Design’s brand new Fresh Ideas 2012 book. You have until the end of February 2012 to enter. The winner will be announced the first week of March.

Randomly selected among those that got 100% right was Craig Margaret. Nicely done! We will be sending him a $50 gift certificate go Amazon.com in addition to a set of our hand printed coasters.

Stay tuned for our second contest – titled William Shakespeare, marketing copywriter – to be delivered later this month!

In case you wanted to know the answers, they are 1: The Matrix, 2: The Godfather, 3: Harry Potter, 4: Twilight, 5: The Lord of the Rings, 6: Star Wars, 7: Woody Allen.

Yet, I have had my fill of some Microsoft products and practices, Office in particular. I basically use 1% of Word’s capabilities, but that 1% seems to be hidden afresh with every new software release. I’m struck by how incredibly large the programs are, the myriad options for customizing them, the constant clutter, the complexity, the cost.

Ultimately, I’m struck that there are other products out there that do the job better. Google Docs has changed the way we develop copywriting concepts. Google Docs uses a super stripped down Word interface and allows a single document to be accessible to multiple people at the same time. Also: it’s easy.

Open Office is a non-cloud based solution. In some ways, it is a “low rent” version of MS Office in terms of visual appeal, but for our purposes it holds its own. It’s free and it can reliably do things like read and write to the Microsoft Word format – a process that it does *mostly* reliably. Open Office has its own version of Excel, PowerPoint, and Access. You could, as we have, install it alongside Word and implement a gradual phase in strategy for the products that work best for you. There are no shortage of options.

In truth, Shew Design has not completely extricated ourselves from Office. The final, probably painful, departure from Outlook will be the last step in the process. However, I think our company will be the better for it. In this era of collaborative creativity and ever dwindling budgets, there are much better ways of spending your money than the endlessly spooling upgrade for software that has essentially stayed still for decades.

Apple used the condensed form in the late eighties, and it became the quintessential typographic solution for business communications in the early nineties.

People who make lists of the most readable fonts tend to pick Garamond first.  It is ideally suited for book design. The Harry Potter books were set in Adobe Garamond, as are The Hunger Games books – even Dr. Seuss. It is also a staple for technical documentation for high end technology firms (like Nvidea).

It’s a remarkable thing that a 500 year old design would be perpetually connected with innovation and fresh, modern storytelling. The reason is at heart very simple: Garamond is a masterpiece of form and function. It works. Seen from distance or up close, it is simply beautiful *and* functional.

Designers categorize Garamond as a humanist typeface, meaning that it comes from a human (i.e. handwriting). Upon inspection, you can see how the forms were created by a brush with a wedge tip by a right handed person. If type is like an illustration, what does the quality of line reveal about the person who made it? To my mind, Garamond reveals a combination of intelligence, warmth, and mastery of control. It reminds me of Bach’s music -  particularly such things as the Brandenburg Concertos or the Goldberg Variations.

Yet, there are ways in which the type departs from its humanist origins. In translating handwriting to movable types, type design began to evolve from being about ink to being about metal. In the example above, Jenson – which predates Garamond by only a few decades – is more closely linked with handwriting. In comparison, Garamond seems sturdier, more in alignment with a horizontal and vertical grid. This is the reason why Garamond (and not Jenson) is fresh and relevant today and will remain so for years to come. It is merely a first step in an evolution of type that would unfold for centuries to come – with successive type designers each attempting to reconcile an organic flowing motion of handwriting within an outlying grid.