Let them take something with them ...

When you attend a trade show, exhibition, conference it goes without saying that all the companies exhibiting their products or services will have to have a wide range of give-away items for their prospective customers to take away with them. These items serve two purposes - to remind the person who took them of the company or product and to facilitate collateral marketing where someone else sees the item and adsorbs the message from it.

So, the thing that suprises me continually with the web-in-general, is that comparatively few websites follow this metaphore through to their online activities. Provding downloadable or subscription driven content from your website is an easy way for your customers to continue their exposure to your brand after the point where they have leftyour website - and allows for the collateral marketing to take place.

Producing PDF versions of your printed materials, desktop wallpaper e-Zines and even desktop toys or games can provide a range of items that appeal to a broad cross section of your audience and allow them to pull your brand messages.

The range of desktop wallpapers available from the Pale Heretic website continually draws a significant amount of web traffic and continues to remind our audience of our brand and our website address even after they have left the site.

Stitching things together - Second Life, Twitter and the web.

Stitching things together - Second Life, Twitter and the web. Second Life is a wonderful experience once you have acclimatised to it. Integrating it with your web presence is a little more tricky. The next release of the client will include the ability to integrate websites more closely with your parcel of land - more on exactly how that works when it's been released.

There are however other options for getting traffic flowing between SL and your website, tying your website more closely to your SL presence. SLURLs are a key component to this as they allow a web page URL to point to a specific SL location. This means that you can link to an SL location of your choice from your webpage. Thats a good start, but we can go further than that.

www. twitter.com is an increasingly popular mini blog (posts are limited to 128 characters) that has been designed to talk about what you are doing right now or give brief news updates. These is also a feature on the Twitter site that allows you to include your top 5 posts on your website simply by pasting in a little javascript or a small flash movie.

This makes for an interesting combination, when you add to the mix the fact that you can script a SL device that allows you to complete a twitter post from inside SL simply by typing a command into the local chat box. This is something I have been working on and I will be producing a small item that has some useful functionality packed into it. The effect is that you can blog to your twitter account directly, and easily include things like SLURLS (I have added some code that will create a SLURL for your current location) in your post so that people surfing your website or your blog can easily find the location about which you are posting. When I have a fully packaged device I shall post and let you know how I'm gonna make it available - I may charge a small amount and sell it, but think the price will be www.tumblr.com provides you with a perfect solution for blogging your experiences and the media that goes with them.

Found inspiration

A key element in my creative process is being aware of what is possible. Some of this comes from experimentation or re-working elements of previous projects, but just as important is seeing what everyone else is doing. It's always a great inspiration to me to see other people doing great stuff. It encourages me to raise my game and new ideas get incorporated on all sorts of levels.

This is my top list of sites that I watch for inspiration (in no particular order):

1. www.styleboost.com - One of the best sites I know of that lists the best-of-the-best websites from a design and interaction perspective.

2. www.newwebpick.com - A great design portal that both indexes great websites but also sells (at a very reasonable subscription) a great Flash based magazine - and they also give away a free version that has about 20% of the content from the full version. Well worth a look!

3. www.conceptart.org - This is an all time-favourite of mine and is the home of some amazing resident artists as well as a busy forum that covers both 2D and 3D, digital and analogue artwork. It's a great place to see a lot of amazing work, get help and feedback.

4. www.juxtapoz.com - An interesting selection of works from modern artists. Always a lot going on and covers a good range styles. Covers launches and gallery shows.

5. www.plasticandplush.com - Like toys? Like character design? I love this site, it's an amazing source of fun inspiration.

6. www.eatpoo.com - One of my long standing favourites amongst the main art forums, because of the high standard of the artwork that gets posted here and the quality of the people that make up it's uses. Much more focused to 2D artwork than 3D.


There are a few more sites that should also get a mention just for being so cool or useful:

1. peaceloveandhappiness.org - A really great site 'free software for art, music and personal creativity'. You will find things like fonts and images in this site as well. Very useful!

2. www.morguefile.com - A great source of community generated hi-rez photography, most of which is free to download and use, as long as you check the licence for each image and credit where necessary.

3. www.pdf-mags.com - If you are stuck for something fresh to read, this is a great place to look - lists all the latest released PDF magazines. Very handy.

4. www.colourlovers.com - Sometimes the thing that I get stuck on is designing colour palettes and colourlovers is a site dedicated to just that - great colour palettes. Very useful, well worth a visit. An the palettes can be downloaded as a variety of formats including photoshop palette files.

5. www.tokyoplastic.com - This site has been around for a while and is just stunning. The best example of content = interface = brand that I have found.


Alan