Something that’s bothered me for years is the lack of flexibility I have with typography in my web designs. Every web designer has struggled with the limitations of using only HTML standard fonts on their websites and using images are time consuming, both for servers and for designers.

Using real fonts on the web is no longer something to look forward to – the technology is ready, the industry has responded and designers are building sites with them every day.

How is this possible you ask? Open source font directory servers such as Google Font Directory and Typekit have made it possible and easy to use real fonts on the web. The implementation works by simply copying a code, which then links the font you would like to use from their server to your website.

Cost is extremely affordable! Google’s solution offers the service free of charge, but has a smaller library than Typekit, which offers a free trial and subscription plans starting at $24.99/year.

Welcome to the future, let the possibilities of typography on the web begin!

Based on a recent survey conducted by Netcraft, there are over 111 million websites on the internet.  That comes out to roughly 4.3 billion pages being indexed by Google!  So, how do you get potential clients to your website? Well, there are some things you can do to help get your site noticed.

Many people out there may not understand the importance of keywords and where those keywords should go. One of the most important tags to address when it comes to your ranking on Google and other search engines is the title tag.

You must create unique, accurate page titles if you want to drive traffic to your site because search engines consider the keywords found in the title tag to be extremely important. Below are the 5 things to remember when creating a title tag:

• Your Web page title tag is the most important aspect of Web page design in regards to ranking well on all search engines.  The title tag tells the search engines what your page is about.

• Your title tag is what Google and most other search engines use as your Web page’s link within the search results.  It confirms to your potential site visitor that your page has what they searched for.

• Create unique title tags for each page – Each of your pages should ideally have a unique title tag, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from others on your site. Avoid using a single title tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages.

• Use brief, but descriptive titles – Titles can be both short and informative.  If the title is too long, Google will show only a portion of it in the search result. Avoid using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users and stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags.

• Accurately describe the page’s content – Choose a title that effectively communicates what the page is about. Avoid choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page and using default or vague titles like “Untitled” or “New Page 1.”

What other tips do you have to improve search engine optimization and help drive website traffic?

Let’s be honest folks, there are more sites, platforms and opportunities popping up every day that you can spend media dollars on, and the landscape can be completely overwhelming.  In this video, I review a few simple, yet crucial tips to keep in mind when planning and measuring online advertising performance.

To recap the video, in the event that you don’t have 90 seconds to spare since you have additional media research to get to before your deadline, check out the tips below:

• Set goals.
• Set performance metrics to measure those goals.
• Test new options and continually evolve the buy.
• Rinse and repeat – tweak what’s not working and support what is.

Any other tips you want to share about online media planning?

So this past Tuesday, two fellow BG comrades, Ryan and Saya, gave a little presentation on what’s ahead for advertising and digital design with regards to HTML5 and Flash.  In case you were dead the last few months and just awoke, there is a tussle going on between these two for the crown of preferred platform to design/develop. Apple has thrown their weight behind HTML5 and therefore the iphone and ipad don’t support Flash.  Ouch.

Adobe, seemingly on the defensive, recently has come out with some interesting communication from their camp and I believe we are in store for some quality banter in the coming months.  On nytimes.com, I came across the following leaderboard.

On the same page, Adobe also had a 300×250 flash banner (two frames below right).

Pretty bold statement there, Adobe.

I am not a designer, however I do feel strongly that people buy devices (iphones, ipads, etc) and want to get the most out of them.  When a device doesn’t support a platform, everyone lose out because the experience isn’t as great as it could be.  Our designers have opinions on the future of the web and where this is going, but I’m curious if any other designers or web developers have any thoughts?

Are we in for a Mac vs PC type standoff coming in the form of HTML5 vs Flash?  I hope so because I love the slightly below the belt shots that they throw at one another.

In general, museums of all kinds are often viewed with a certain stigma of being stuffy and academic.  To be honest, it may be well-deserved for the most part because of common stereotypes we associate with them and the type of people who go to them.

I am here to tell you that there is good news for museums.  I bet most museums share a similar goal in that they want to expand their customer base and attract a younger audience.  After all, this younger demographic is tomorrow’s museum member and donor, and which museum doesn’t need that?

In order to attract this younger demo, museums must go beyond their traditional ways of operating and reach out to the younger audience (ie Males/Females 25-45) in the places they frequent, which is online.  Smart museums are also catering to this younger demo by creating new events that appeal to them to get them in the doors.  An example of an event catering to a younger demo is The San Diego Museum of Art’s Culture & Cocktails.

We have been entrenched in the challenge of utilizing the tools the Internet provides to accomplish various goals for our client, The San Diego Museum of Art.  We have recently rebranded the Museum and will also be unveiling a completely new, revamped website in a few short weeks.  There were many objectives that were taken into account during the website redesign, but I’d like to focus on just two. First, we wanted to utilize high quality imagery to showcase the awesome works of art on display in the Museum and second, incorporate social media tools so that people who wish to interact in that capacity can do so.

Bailey Gardiner has worked with several museums in the past so we understand the challenges they face in marketing themselves.   We redesigned the website for the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
Two years ago we also rebranded and designed new collateral for our client SUSHI, A Center for the Urban Arts last year (see an example below).

THE NEW BARBARIANS

Our most recent undertaking is with the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) to redesign the website for Balboa Park. This new website will encompass roughly 85 organizations in San Diego’s famous park, including several museums and be the main portal for visitors to gather information.

Are there any museums out there that you’ve come across that you feel are innovators in regards to interacting with people and showcasing their various offerings?  I’d love to see who you think the leaders in this space are.

If you happened to open the San Diego Union-Tribune over the past week you probably know that Seaport Village’s Spring Busker Festival happened this weekend. This year, I inherited the job of finding, organizing, and communicating with our buskers (aka street performers) and, with this being my first festival, I learned a lot about event planning.

Here are 5 lessons I learned from working with street performers

1. Phone > Email - While most people rely on email for the majority of their professional communication, that doesn’t hold true for everyone.  Some people just work better on the phone (some of our buskers couldn’t even open attachments) and if you need information or an answer quickly; just call. Make sure you’re prepared to leave a short, but detailed message. This may seem like common sense but if people know what you want when you call, they can be prepared when they call you back.

2. Not Everyone Reads Documents – We had a performer who was letting people staple their tips to his body with an industrial strength stapler. That would have been cool and all, except we had already told him in one of our documents, that he had to split his tips with the other acts.  Clearly he didn’t read everything we sent him.

Even if you think you’re being redundant, ALWAYS emphasize important directions verbally, especially when it comes to money. He probably wouldn’t have let people staple 20’s to his forehead if he had known he was going to split them three ways. (To note, we didn’t know he was going to do this ahead of time.)

3. You Can’t Anticipate Every Need – We tried. We took into account the size of our pitches (a.k.a. performance areas), how long certain acts were there, and what their expectations might be. We moved acts around the day of if they couldn’t perform, to the best of our ability, and asked for feedback. This year, a couple buskers suggested we provide water for our performers. I mean, they are only juggling fire and knives, standing on top of six to ten chairs, swallowing balloons, and riding 6-foot unicycles in the sun for hours at a time. Definitely noted for next year!

4. “Business” hours aren’t the same for everyone – Technically, I work 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. If you’re a street performer, you don’t and you’ll probably call me anytime. The same can be said for many journalists, media members, freelancers, and performers. While most of the world operates on a certain time schedule, there are many important people who don’t and it’s important to answer their phone calls too.

5. Have Fun! – Not that I’m about to leave my job for circus school, but you have to love what you do to excel at it. Most of our buskers travel the country, if not world, performing everywhere they go; it’s not a conventional lifestyle, but they would never do anything else.

I wrote and produced the video for this blog entry because I wanted to share a little insight on what goes on behind-the-scenes at an agency that does marketing and advertising for home builders.  A client of ours, Brookfield Homes, recently had their model grand opening of their newest community, Rockrose, which is based in Carlsbad, CA.  This community, designed with eco-savvy features from the inside out, serves a growing niche within the housing marketplace. We were tasked with sharing this message and getting people excited to come out and learn more about it.

We started work on marketing the Rockrose grand opening all the way back in December. BG worked with the Brookfield team to produce banner ads, page peals, print advertising, radio spots and mobile marketing projects; all designed to raise awareness about the model home grand opening event.

After months of getting the word out, we were excited to see the results of our marketing efforts this weekend. We headed up to North County, equipped with our flip cam, and took some video footage to show you exactly what makes these homes so cool.   Enjoy the tour!

Are you familiar with The San Diego Museum of Art?  We work with them on advertising and PR and fortunately for me, I get to work with them on a ton of cool stuff.  Many people have no idea how much activity takes place at the Museum so I wanted to take this opportunity to spotlight a really cool event they throw every other month, Culture & Cocktails.  At this event last Thursday, I interviewed the artist behind one of the exciting new exhibitions, Brutal Beauty:  Drawings by Hugo Crosthwaite. Check out the video to hear Hugo’s own vision for the drawing he’s working on at the Museum until March 14th.  You can also see a really cool time lapse video on his current drawing here, but make sure you check out the exhibition for yourself.

Today, there are more ad dollars going towards perceived environmental impact and awareness than ever before. Ten years ago “green” referred to having a green thumb, being green with envy, or  wanting greener pastures, but that’s definitely no longer the case. Whether it’s telling customers about a 100 percent recyclable water bottle (cool!) or Prius ads that combine humans with the earth; companies are dying to tell us that they too care about the environment. But which companies are actually influencing the public’s perception of their environmental impact?

Lucky for us, Newsweek has already been ranking 500 of the biggest U.S. companies based upon their environmental impact, green policies and performance, and reputation. Yet, there are some major discrepancies between the Environmental Impact and Green Policies and Performances Scores and the Reputation Survey Score. Keep in mind that Newsweek polled CEO’s, corporate social responsibility professionals, and other environmental experts (a.k.a. people who know a lot about this) to form the Reputation Survey Score and all scores are out of 100. The Green Score, again out of 100, is a combination of the previous scores.

So, which company scored a perfect 100, A+ on the Reputation Survey Score? Good Ole Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, that was the only category they scored a perfect 100 in; their environmental Impact Score, based on things like green house gases and water use, was only a 59.2 and their Green Policies and Procedures Score, based on “a comprehensive analytical assessment of a company’s environmental policies,” was only 41.06. Even the professionals think Wal-Mart is a lot greener than it is. Perhaps commercials like this, which is dated from this January and may accurately represent a new effort, are creating and reinforcing this very positive perceived environmental impact. Overall, Wal-Mart ranked 59 and had a Green Score of 80.38.

On the flip side, Hewlett-Packard, which ranked #1 in 2009 with Green Score of 100, and Dell, who came in at a close second with a Green Score of 98.87, both had a reputation score under 90. Dell’s reputation score was only a 70.8 despite having a Green Policies and Performance Score of 100.

Green marketing is powerful stuff. Companies are successfully changing their perceived environmental impact, for better in the case Wal-Mart, and it’s a category that is only gowing to grow. Consumers who care about environmental impact need to look past the advertising to see which companies are truly green and which are just full of fluff.

If you turned on a television, radio, or computer this morning you probably noticed that Tiger Woods was making  his highly anticipated first public statement since, well, all chaos broke out in his personal life and his reputation was tarnished – majorly.  This very public first appearance was calculated, thought out, and had specific goals, but was Tiger successful?

His thorough apology to just about everyone was expected, but the task for him was to do more than just read an apology. He needed to start winning fans back. While, yes, his family is more important and he did talk about them, they weren’t who he was speaking to today and he doesn’t need a live CNN feed to reach them. Given the severity of his actions and the length of time that has elapsed since Thanksgiving, he wasn’t going to convince everyone that he is really, truly sorry and that he’s definitely on the road to recovery in 14 minutes. Very similar to regaining trust, today needed to be the start to a long road of recovery. In order for Tiger to successfully start winning people back he needed to:

- Not say anything anyone could question

- Show emotion that people could sympathize with

- Give enough information about the past so people can start forgetting about it

- Make concrete statements about the future

Was Tiger successful in beginning to regain some respectability? I think so. He touched on and apologized to every group of people that would care: fans, his foundation, children, etc. He spoke emotionally about his family and gave concrete examples of how this has impacted their lives. He took complete

responsibility for his actions and provided insight into why they happened. He also talked about the future and what he thinks will lead to change.

Was Tiger sincere? Is he really going to “regain his balance and be centered?” Only time will tell.