The dreaded blank canvas! For many web artists, the first hurdle, and a would-be stopping block to creativity, is the wide open space of a blank Photoshop canvas. My first tendency is to accumulate and study a multitude of bookmarked sites that will hopefully help to influence my design style, whether its a site with great examples of color harmonies, or a site that’s got some outstanding button designs, the bookmarks keep multiplying with each new project.

I recently run across a site that has helped me to cut through all of the nonsense that’s out there, and find a range of quality website examples based on “Color Usage”, “Design Elements & Techniques”, “Site Types”, and more. Design Meltdown is an accumulation of the best site designs, categorized for easy review. Each example is discussed in a blogging-type format with samples, links, and user comments.

With interesting articles like, “Top 20 Most Popular Blog Colors“, has tons of really useful opinions and examples to help give you design inspiration…

… or at least, help you get past that stinking blank canvas.

No tags

PepsiCo Inc. has taken it’s Mountain Dew brand to a new level. Packaged in a newly designed 16 oz. green aluminum bottle, they have invited well-known artists to come up with “their expression of Dew”. The result is a limited edition bottle series they call Green Label Art.The website http://www.greenlabelart.com/contains a gallery of the bottle designs, along with a short video from each artist discussing their inspiration and the process they used.

No tags

I love this new Starbucks site. Based on the web 2.0 concept of community/networking, it allows visitors to plan offline meetings with friends via an online interface. Plus, they’ve got a catchy new headline: “Friends Make Mondays Feel Like Saturdays!”

In their email, if you click “Invite Friends Now,” it takes you to this site: www.letsmeetatstarbucks.com where you can choose an invitation, select a date from the calendar, pick a Starbucks location via map, and invite your friends.

I like any reason to go to Starbucks, but this is an especially compelling one.

No tags

Mother’s Day brings out some seasonal emails, check out the hottest set:

(more…)

No tags

Anyone who’s seen the SuperBowl probably remembers the “Working With Monkeys” campaign for CareerBuilder.com, created by Cramer-Krasselt. What you may not know, however, is that CareerBuilder.com ranks first in job seekers and job postings. By partnering with huge portals like AOL and MSN they helped find more jobs and employees than any other company. No seriously, more than Monster.com too. The problem they had was that because users were going through the portals they didn’t associate the experience with CareerBuilder.com.

Cramer-Krasselt clearly defined their strategy (which can be viewed in this great download) by identifying their 1. campaign objectives, 2. target audience, 3. creative strategy and 4. media strategy.

The objective, simply put, was to increase brand awareness. By making job seekers and job posters more aware of CareerBuilder.com they will generate much higher intent to use from both sides. In this case, they didn’t have the luxury of figuring out whether the chicken or the egg came first, they needed both to happen at the same time or neither would.

The target audience was pretty clear, appeal to people looking for jobs and for the employed who are surfing for the greener grass. It seems that to develop a creative strategy Cramer-Krasselt had to dive into the mentality of the job surfer. When they asked job seekers who had recently changed jobs they noticed a common phenomenon, at one point or another they had all faced a “moment of truth”. This epiphany was the point in which they had all decided it was time to move on, that they couldn’t take anymore work at their current job. This was jokingly referred to as “working with a bunch of monkeys”.

With all the pieces falling into place they had to figure out how to strategically plan the media spending with a limited (compared to competitors) budget. Timing was critical, with most employees suffering from a case of the “Mondays” (term made popular in the movie ‘Office Space‘) spending was targeted for Sunday and Monday, days of most impact. To maximize spending they needed “home run” placements like the SuperBowl and Academy Awards, which were perfectly situated on their peak days of interest.

The results far surpassed even THEIR expectations, with unaided brand awareness jumping 36%, unique visitors to their website increasing 34%, and job postings increasing 50% all in Q1 YOY.

You can view all case studies for the 2006 Effies here, and view some of the commercials here.

No tags

There have been way too many times, in my career, when I’ve been tasked with locating credible stock photography sites, and all I could find were the standard Corbis, Getty, Veer, iStockphoto, etc.

(more…)

No tags