In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug gives a spot-on guide to website usability— all that stuff that helps visitors to your site find what they’re looking for. What Krug’s book doesn’t touch on is the relationship between usability and search engine optimization (SEO) —how visitors actually find your site in the first place.

I really don’t fault Krug for this (too much) since it’s not his area of primary expertise, and there’s plenty written elsewhere on SEO. Still, a nod to SEO might have been nice since some principles of usability that Krug advocates can appear to be in conflict with best practices in SEO.

If you’ve read Krug’s book along with a few guides to SEO, you probably know what I mean.

The current maxim for SEO is “content is king” with textual content sitting high atop the searchability throne. If you want search engines to find your site, you need good copy. A picture may say a thousand words to most of us, but to bat-blind Web crawlers, a picture only whispers whatever you can squeeze into its alt tag.

In contrast, to make sites more user-friendly, Krug suggests you “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” (Cue hearty shouts of approval from graphic designers everywhere.) Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I’ve noticed a lot of what I consider braggadocio in the marketing world. Of course this is nothing new, but according to the rules of today’s branding etiquette, it seems out of place. I’m not talking about companies throwing out empty advertising claims like, “We’re the Best” or “Our Quality Is Unsurpassed” (all statements that can’t be quantified). No, what I’m addressing lies within the marketing community itself.

As I peruse LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ as well as other professional social sites I see marketing people describing themselves as Visionaries, Gurus, Luminaries and Pioneers. There are enough people out there labeling themselves as such that I can’t help but think, “C’mon, all these people can’t be Visionaries!” Besides, “Visionary” and “Guru” are such subjective titles—especially when ascribed to oneself. And for whatever reason, most of the people describing themselves with these monikers seem to be involved in the social media arena, which seems ironic.

As far as I know Albert Einstein never described himself as a genius. He left that to others. Read the rest of this entry »

Each year, the American Dialect Society, which is a board of linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, historians, grammarians and other qualified individuals, publishes a list of “Word of the Year” nominations. It can be quite entertaining and it’s generally a good reflection of contemporary American culture. As expected, the trend for the last few years is that the nominations have been increasingly tech-related, especially with regard to social networking. However, at the end of 2009 it was time to decide on the word of the decade.

Here is the list of nominees, who can guess the winner?

9/11

blog

google

green

text

war on terror

And the winner is…

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in late 1998 or early 1999 I got called by a marketing director from a newly launched search engine company named “Google” (founded in 1998). She asked me if I wanted to do an illustration that would be a playful takeoff on their logo for their homepage. If they liked it, she continued, there would be more assignments forthcoming, especially on holidays and other important dates. They had seen my illustration work in the Directory of Illustration and liked my style. Sure I’d heard of Google but I was far more familiar with their competitor Yahoo, which had been founded 4 years earlier and had a glitzy national advertising campaign (remember the hillbilly yelling, “Ya-hoo-oo-o!”).

At this point I should mention that I had recently pulled an all-nighter on a stressful advertising illustration for an unpleasant and demanding client. My energy level was running on empty and at that particular point in time my enthusiasm for my craft of illustration was negligible. Did I even want to be an illustrator? I wasn’t getting any younger and I didn’t know a lot of other people pulling all-nighters in their mid 40s. And then I did something I’ve only done a handful of times in my career. I passed on the project. Besides, the deadline was too tight and I was too tired. The company probably wouldn’t even be around in a year or two. Yahoo would probably buy them out or run them out of business.

Note to self: If Google ever calls again, take the gig.

P.S. After a good night’s sleep I was all about being an illustrator again!