...And the winner is...

Today's the day we announce the winner of our Raspberry Pi giveaway! We're super thankful for the entries we received, and it was tough to decide between the projects. 

We're very pleased to announce that the Pi is going to Saravanan!! Congratulations!! Here's the winning entry…

How exciting! We  can't wait to see how this project works out, we'll be following Saravanan's progress on the blog, so hopefully we'll all get to see this great idea come to life. 

Thanks again for the entries guys, stay tuned for more Giveaways in future, we had so much fun with this one. 

We're off on a very special trip this week folks (more details coming over the weekend!), normal service will resume next week. But do stick around and have a look around. You could learn how to set up and manage a Facebook page for your business or maybe take a look at my tips for new graduates! The world (or blog) is truly your oyster. 

We'll see you next week guys! (and we'll be in touch Saravanan!)

Thanks again!

Svea & James xo

Girl Power

Last Friday I had a very interesting meeting with Gemma of Well Made and the lovely Bee. We were meeting because one of Gemma's posts on her studios' blog about Women in design had inspired us to get together and toss some thoughts around.

Before I carry on, I just want to say, this post isn't going to be about inequality in the workplace, how women have a raw deal blah blah blah. Don't worry your heads. This is more about why the drop out rate of female design students moving on to paid work in the industry is so high. Gemma's article tells us that on average, women make up 70% of the design related degree populous but in the work place, a massive 60% of employees are men. At what point did all the female students decide to check out of this career option? I can't understand why so many would suddenly do a U-turn after investing three years of their life into this path?

I've seen it argued that men will market themselves more aggressively in an interview situation. They will promise the world upfront, where us girls tend to give a more realistic approach to what we can bring to the table. Are employers the world over being blinded by the yes men? Possibly. Maybe we're just not doing ourselves justice when it comes down to competing for work. I read an article a few weeks ago stating that women are quicker to say the words "I'm sorry" in everyday situations even when we're not at fault - ever had someone walk into you on the street? And which one of you apologised? This default reaction could be working against us. Maybe it's time we started to take a leaf out of the boys book. We should fight for our place in the studio, because we sure as hell deserve it just as much as our male peers. 

So last Friday found us in the garden of the Fee State Kitchen in the sunshine, wondering about what we can do to tackle this problem. We're thinking we'll start small. Probably a group of local ladies in the industry that will support each other in any way we can - even if that's only a place to get your bad day off your chest. Maybe we'll branch out - hopefully we'll show that it is possible for girls to break through and carve out great careers in design for themselves. It's totally worth the effort. 

TBC...

Svea xo

SEO, what is there to know? (Part 2)

Welcome back all, feels like a long time since my last post. Just to get you up to speed I have been building my equipment for the Raspberry Pi (still time to enter our competition), I’m just waiting for a USB hub so I can connect my mouse and keyboard to the Pi, I had to get a Wi-Fi dongle just because plugging the Ethernet cable into it would require a lot of back and forth…personally that’s too much effort for me.

Back to the matter at hand, we chatted about SEO last time and because it is such a lengthy topic I thought it best to split up the intricate nature of search engine chit chat. So, as promised this brings us to Part 2. Let me begin….

After you pick the right keywords, it’s important to start making your content. Search engines have little things called bots that automatically flick through your website, "reading" it to find out what it’s about and then deciding which keywords each of your pages should rank for. You can influence their "decisions" by strategically optimizing your content for certain keywords.

This is especially true if you’re creating content bots can’t read. It’s easy for bots to interpret text, but they aren't advanced enough yet to watch videos, look at images, or listen to audio. You’ll need to describe them, so they bot can understand and rank your pages for the appropriate keywords.

For search engine bots to properly index images, alt tags need to be added to each image, adding a brief description. For example, if there was an image of a “Bubble Gum Ice Cream”, I would tell the search engine that the image is a Bubble Gum Ice Cream by using an alt tag. It would look something like this:

<img src=”http://loverstif.com/images/bubblegumicecream.jpg” alt=“Bubble Gum Ice Cream” />

In addition, make sure your image names are relevant to the image. The picture of the blue widget would be called bubblegumicecream.jpg instead of image3.jpg.

A quick word of advice!

Writing solely for search engines usually makes your content boring, and typically, that won’t help convert your visitors into customers. It’s far better to focus on people first, making your content as easy as possible, and then optimize for search engine bots where you can, without sacrificing the persuasiveness of your content.

The main thing’s to look out for are:

• Titles | Create eye-catching titles that raise the reader’s interest. You only have one chance to make a great first impression.
• Keywords | Pick keywords that will help bring people to your site and are relevant.
• Links | Link to quality sites that compliment what your website is about. It’ll encourage sites in your niche to link to you as well.
• Quality | Try to publish unique content. This prompts users to come to your site because they cannot easily find the content elsewhere.
• Freshness | If you are publishing content that does not age or become outdated, that’s great, but you also need to add new content on a regular basis.
• And most importantly, do not publish someone else’s content on your site. This creates duplicate content, and search engines can penalize you for it.

URL Structure

If your URLs are messy, search engines will have a hard time crawling them, and if search engines have a hard time crawling them, they will not be able to index your site, which means you will not rank in the search engines.

Keep these factors in mind to make your URLs more search engine friendly:

• URLs should not contain extraneous characters ( $ @ ! * % = ? )
• Shorter URLs typically rank better than longer ones
• Numbers and letters only should be used in URLs.
• Do not use underscores. Search engines prefer dashes. 
• Sub-domains can rank better than sub directories.

Site Structure

The way you link web pages together will make a big impact on your rankings. Here are some tips when cross-linking your web site. Links within your content tend to carry more weight than links within a sidebar or footer and try to keep the number of links on each page under 100.

Links

Links are maybe the most important part of SEO. The more web sites that link to your web site, the higher your web pages will rank.

The reason links have a high value in SEO is that it is easy for anyone to do research, modify their content, or create content, but is hard to convince hundreds or thousands of web sites to link to you. In the eyes of a search engine, the more trustworthy, non-spammy sites are linking to you, the more authority you must have on the topic.

Before we get into how to build links, here are some things you need to know. In general:

• Links within content are more effective than links in a sidebar or footer
• Links from related sites are better than links from non-relevant sites
• Anchor text plays the most important role in link building. If you want to rank for “bubble gum ice cream” then you want the anchor text of the link to be “bubble gum ice cream”.

Some things to avoid:

• Links from spammy or irrelevant sites.
• Site wide links can hurt more than they may help.
• If all of your links are rich in anchor text, it can hurt you.
• Reciprocal links (I link to you and you link to me) are not too effective.
• If you buy text links and get caught, you can get banned from a search engine.

Here are a few ways you can increase your link count:

• Social media | Listing on sites like Digg or StumbleUpon don’t just drive a ton of traffic. The increase in visibility also improves your chances of getting linked to.
• Directories | There are many directories on the web. Take the time to submit your web site to the ones that compliment your content.
• Forums | Many forums allow you to create signatures, in which you can link back to your web site. As long as those links are not no-followed, they will help with your rankings.
• Competition | The easiest way to get links is to see who links to your competition and write them an email telling them the benefits of your web site compared to your competition. Roughly, 5% of the web sites you email will also add your link.

So that was my round up of SEO and helping you get started. You only have a week left to win our Raspberry Pi, the entries that we have had so far have been great and if you want your name in the hat you have till Friday the 26th, so don't leave it late.

'Til the next time.

James x 

Why Graphic Designers are uptight about kerning, and other stories.

I am a Graphic Designer, therefore I am perfectly within my right to get screwy when I notice bad kerning and/or leading. I will exercise this right at will as will 99.9% of all Graphic designers. We will also point out when an image is pixelated, a typeface is wrong or a layout is awful. We just will. 

We can't be blamed for this reflex and it should be taken with a pinch of salt by the masses. We're not judging you, just your branding (FYI we are judging you, if you have clipart on your website, I've got beef with you). This eye for detail - and disdain for Comic Sans - is instilled in us from the second we step in to uni and stays with us for life. We're hardwired to want to make things beautiful, we get excited about laying out type - no, really. I don't think I'm alone in saying that I get sad when I see a decent business with shoddy branding. Even if you're not a creative, I defy you not to appreciate this bakery's packaging. Just looking at it makes me happy before i even get into the baked goods.

That's what a great designer can do for you people! We can sell people on your business before they've even scratched the surface. You need to meet us half way, but we can make you look pretty darn cool doing it. 

So please, trust our eye and let us make your print & website awesome, everyone will be happier for it!

Svea xo

SEO, what is there to know? (Part 1)

Welcome back back for another Monday! Hope you enjoyed your weekend. I managed to get started with un-packaging my Raspberry Pi (Competition to win one right here. It's starting to hot up so get your entry in quick) but had to pick up some more wires to get it set-up. I'll be keeping you up to date on how I get on.

I thought for my next few posts I would talk you through the three little initials that go around plenty of offices and that is SEO. It's a pretty big area and I'll talk you through the finer points over the next few weeks so I can help you get up to speed with making better use out of your site.

The reality is, SEO isn’t rocket science, lots of marketers make the mistake of seeing SEO only as a source of free traffic. It’s true, free traffic is the end result, but it’s not how SEO works. The real purpose of SEO is to help people to find you. To do that, you have to match the content on your website to what people are trying to find.
For example: Jeff sells custom hand made gloves. On his site, he shows how he makes the gloves by hand, often talking about the different yarn he uses. There’s not much competition for keywords relating to yarn, and Jeff is publishing lots of great content about it, so before long, he has front page rankings for several different types of gloves. Do you see the potential problem? The people searching for gloves most likely knit themselves, and it’s unlikely they’ll be interested in purchasing Jeff's gloves. He’ll get lots of traffic, sure, but none of the traffic will convert, because the visitors have completely different goals.
The lesson here: if you want SEO to work for you, you need to make sure your goals match the goals of your visitors. It’s not about traffic. It’s about figuring out what you want, and then optimizing for keywords that bring in visitors who want the same things. How do you discover what those keywords are? Simple: research.

Sure, research is a little tedious, but it’s an indispensable part of finding the right keywords. You want to uncover keywords that:
Have a high search volume (people are looking for the keywords)
Have low competition (smaller amount of results will mean your chances of ranking higher improve)
Are supported by your content (the keywords are relevant to your site).

There are lots of tools to aid you in finding the right keywords, the most popular being Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool. It provides results based on actual Google searches, and if you are logged into an AdWords account, it will also give you a list of keyword ideas customized to the site on the account.
Before you get too far though, let’s discuss an important concept for deciding how broad or narrow you want your keywords to be. It’s called, "The Long Tail." The Long Tail describes a phenomenon where lots of low traffic keywords can collectively send you more visitors than a few high-traffic keywords. For example, although Amazon may get thousands of visits from the keyword “DVD,” they get millions of visits from all of the individual DVD titles (i.e., Dark Knight, Toy Story, etc.). Individually, none of those titles get anywhere close to the traffic of a term like, "DVD," but collectively, their volume is a lot larger than any one keyword. How does the long tail apply to you? When you combine them all, your long tail (unpopular) keywords should make up roughly 80% of your traffic. So, when you’re researching keywords, don’t just focus on the ones getting massive amounts of traffic. Take note of some of the less popular ones too, and then incorporate them into your overall strategy.

I'll leave it there for the time being because it's a pretty hefty subject to get into for one post. I will bring you other key areas in my next post and hopefully an update on my Raspberry Pi project.

'Til the next time

James x

Gospeltronic Sneak Peek...

Happy Weekend one and all! We hope you're all having fun in this glorious sunshine! Today we thought we'd share with you something we've been working on recently, some pretties for your Saturday, sound good?

Our friend Chris is a DJ in the middle of launching his own night at one of our locals and a few weeks ago he kindly asked us to help him with bringing his visuals for the night to life. We were excited to take up the challenge!

So here's the brief:

Create a look & feel for the brand 'Gospeltronic'. Primarily this will include a logo and a blog layout but should be designed with a view of the brand being extended outwards.

With this in mind, this is what we came up with...

So far, this has been adapted for CD cases and a poster but as the night grows, we'll be expanding the arsenal. 

His first night went really well. Awesome music and good vibes, he nailed it! Here's some of our pics from the night...

I can't wait to get stuck further into this project. The first stage sort of happened in a whirl! I've got some big plans for his logo (remember the screen print summer project?!) and James is working away on his site as we speak! 

We hope you've enjoyed this little peek at some of our work, have a great weekend!

Svea & James xo
 

How to (really) get the most from your mornings

This is what I'd like to be doing every morning..

The French really know how to nail breakfast! Unfortunately, my days mostly begin with a brew & a prayer. I'd love to be one of those super duper productive people that seem to spring out of bed ready to attack the day, I never quite seem to manage it though.

I recently read this article from the Fast Company that talks about how supposedly 'successful' people get the most from their mornings before us normal people have even got the sleep out our eyes. I was pretty on board with it until I got to the part about 'reading some scripture to teach yourself about the Human nature'. Ok stop. Religious affiliations aside - find me someone who has time for this in the morning?! I found it hard to understand how someone like myself would benefit from incorporating this sort of activity into my morning routine. (For the record, the suggestions continue to get more elaborate from there, we're talking train for a marathon, do your kids' art project or take an online class etc etc). 

In light of that article, I want to talk about how the rest of us can get the most out of our mornings. From a personal perspective, obviously. Please feel free to partake in some scripture or art projects at your leisure. 

1// List List List. 

Boring but essential. At the end of every day I make a list for the next morning. Mainly because I know that things will evaporate from my brain in between going to bed and waking up. It's just safer for me to list to avoid confusion later.

But seriously, write a list, and prioritise. This way, your mornings aren't spent trying to get your head together, and are instead spent getting stuck into what you need to do. (List items can in fact include, wake up and brush teeth...they're legitimate priorities).

If you're a list fiend like me, I would highly recommend using Wunderlist. Lists, sub-lists, deadlines...heaven!

2// Organise ahead

Remember when you were a kid and your packed lunch was made and your clothes laid out the night before? Yeah, do that. Make your lunch and just figure out what you're going to wear the next day already. Bundles of time saved that would have otherwise have been spent throwing out everything from the wardrobe, then everything from the fridge. Simple but effective.

3// Set the alarm 10 minutes earlier than absolutely necessaryy

I can't tell you how much difference it makes to have those minutes to lie in bed and gather a game plan for the day ahead. I might be losing 10 minutes sleep, but I'm gaining 10 minutes of valuable planning time (the fact that I have my eyes closed while I'm doing this isn't important). By the time I need to get up, I'm psyched for the day and ready to make the leap.

4// Catch up on the go

This one might be slightly specific, but if you read a lot of blogs then I can't recommend Bloglovin' highly enough. It's essentially a hub where all your blog feeds live (a lot like that reader that recently went under...but we won't talk about that). They all sit within the Bloglovin' frame work and you can organise your blogs into categories and lists - do you see a list based pattern emerging here?

I use my commute to catch up on my Social Media and my blogs. It's important for me to have this time, I like to see something inspiring before I get into work. Be that a new blog or a cute Instagram photo - it's nice to arrive into work with your head full of new content. Everything is potential reference for later on.

5// Dedicate some time to answering your emails early in the day.

Prioritise them into urgent, ones that can wait, and just plain junk. Then set yourself a time limit to get them actioned. Urgent ones should be sorted out within the first hour or so of your day before you get distracted. The less urgent ones can stretch to the end of the day or possibly to the next morning if necessary. If you carry them over, make a note of them and get them in the urgent category for the next day. Is it junk? Get it the heck out of there straight away. A clear inbox is a happy inbox.

6// Lastly, if you must exercise before work, pre-prepare some breakfast.

I'm talking a shake or some granola. Don't exercise then take yourself off to work on an empty stomach. The result will not be pleasant for anyone involved - I speak from experience. Prepare something the night before that you can grab after you work out and eat on the way to work if you have to. But please, eat something.

I hope these have been helpful, We'll be back over the weekend sharing a peek at some of our work!

Svea xo

psst...you can still enter our giveaway to win a Raspberry Pi, just hit the link in the Right Nav to take you to the post with details on how to enter!

Scrolling V.S. Clicking

When you land on a website sometimes you notice, sometimes you don't, but the navigation of a site is vital to what information is presented. Since mobile have became the norm for anyone to view online content, it seems that users prefer to scroll rather than click these days and that leaves designers in a spot of bother when creating page flow for a site.

Earlier thoughts about page design was, if you made your page too long, users would only view and read the top half (above the fold) and only glance over or ignore the bottom half completely. Today, things have changed. Many users do scroll to the end of the page and have no problem doing so. Mobile and tablets have made scrolling second-nature and clicking a chore.

So, lets see the pros and cons for both...

Scrolling is faster for users than clicking. With mouse wheels and touchpad swipes, users can scroll through content with a flick of a finger. Compare that with clicking, where users have to find the link, read it, target it, click it and wait for the page to load. Users get content in the order that it’s designed on the page with a glimpse of everything. With clicking, users can skip a link and go to the next one without ever visiting the pages they skipped.

Scrolling keeps perfect flow and feels more like a story that a page driven exercise. People scroll to continue reading until they read the end of the page. Clicking breaks the user’s reading flow because after they’re through with a page, they have to stop and click the link to the next one. Users also don’t have to wait for a new page to load, which can further break reading flow. All they have to do is scroll to the next section.

Clicking doesn’t win out on speed or ease of use, but it also has its advantages. Clicking allows you to track clicks to a page with analytics. Which in building a more structured site is vital. You can’t do this with scrolling. The only thing you can track is the top-level page, not the sub-sections. Each page will have a link that you can share with others. This link will also index in search engines and linking building to help your trust rank (more on this another time). With scrolling, only the top-level page will index.

Knowing theses advantages of scrolling and clicking will help you decide which way to go. Depending on what you're building decides the best function for your site. Personally, if its a short detailed site, with great photography and visuals then scrolling feels far better. Building a click through is for a more structured site and offers more room to grow.

So think hard about what you want to build, because the users are are always after a unique experience.

'Til the next time

James x

p.s.

Don't forget you can still enter our competition to win a Raspberry Pi! Just hit up the link in the right hand nav to take you to the post!

the Life of Pi (Now Closed)

The day has finally arrived! We're super excited to announce that today we'll be giving away a Raspberry Pi!

The Raspberry Pi is the brainchild of Pete Lomas, designed originally to make coding and programming accessible and easily understandable to children, it is now taking the world of technology by storm and is being used for loads of cool projects. Here are some of the best...

1// Disaster Relief Drones  2// Prosthetic Knee  3// Home Brew Controller  4// Musical Vegetables  5// Translation Glasses

(Via Wired.co.uk)

Coming in at a mere £16, the Pi is super accessible, and just begs to be played with. We're so happy (and just a little bit jealous) to be giving away one of these beauties to a lucky reader.
The winner will receive a Raspberry Pi B Model, a clear case to keep it safe, plus a copy of 'The Raspberry Pi User Guide' by Eben Upton. Sound good?

As well as your Pi, there are a couple of everyday bits and pieces that you'll need to get hold of to get up and running...

1// An SD Card 2// A HDMI to HDMI lead 3// A Keyboard and Mouse 4// A Power Adaptor

Easy Peasy!

To win the Pi, we need two things from you. First we want to hear what you'd make with the Pi if you won, and secondly, we want to know what is your favourite flavour of Pie?
We also want you to promise that you'll check back in and share your project with us all ok?

To enter yourself into the draw, just leave your answers in the comments on this post along with your name and email.
You've got 3 weeks to get your entry in (that's until Friday 26th July), then James will announce the winner in his post on Monday 29th.

So, get thinking and leave us a comment!

Good luck!


Svea & James xo

Summer Projects

Anyone that knows me will tell you that I love a good list. I love getting everything out of my head on to some pretty stationary then ticking those suckers off (and yes, this includes such things as brushing teeth and taking a shower...for real. Those things are important too!). I also loved that whole thing of getting projects to do over the Summer from Uni.

So with that in mind, and in light of the apparently imminent heat-wave, I thought I'd make a little Creative Summer to do list and tick those off in (hopefully) spectacular fashion on here. Sound good?

So, on with the list!

1// Bust out my screen printer 

I finally got my hands on a Gocco a few weeks ago, and I'm super excited to make some prints. I've got some plans brewing for some prints I'd like to try. 

2// Spend some time working up my own DPS publication

I've had the software for a few months now and I'd really like to make something all of my very own. I'm really inspired by the publication Trendenser (search it in newsstand!). It's a Scandinavian interior design mag that's absolutely beautiful

3//  Get mine & James' site up and running

We've been threatening to do it for a while and this summer, I want to launch. 

4// Brand and print me some sweet labels for the home brew.

Yes, we brew now. Wheat beer to be precise. There is a post on that coming soon, so stay tuned! We've got to make it look legit and I've got some branding in mind. (There is potential for some screen printing cross over action to happen here!).

And that is my creative summer wishlist. I'm determined to work more on my own projects outside of work this summer and these are my top four projects. I'll keep updating as I tick them off, wish me luck!

What projects have you got up your sleeve for this summer?

Svea xo

Get a little help from your friends

Crowdfunding can be a wonderful thing for accomplishing your startup goals. Whether you’re looking to jumpstart your efforts, expand your customer base, or reach out to friends and family for funding, crowdfunding provides a platform to rally support around you. Having seen a lot of creative people get the funding for projects that would have never got off the ground, it's fascinating to see the kindness of strangers in action. I've looked into some of the key things that really can get your crowdfunding off the ground

Tell your story
A campaign with a good story is always a bonus, so you should not be afraid to tell it. Tell people about why you're doing this. Did you have an unfiliflled dream? Obstacle in your path? Major life event? Let people connect with you, let people see the heart of your vision and how your product will help benefit people. Keep everything personal and people will care for your project.

Provide value
Crowdfunding campaigns hinge on reciprocity. If your startup offers fantastic products, rewards or opportunities, you’ve created a huge incentive for backers to pledge to your campaign. When choosing your reward tiers, reflect on whether the incentives would appeal to you if you were the consumer; ask friends and  family members if they would be happy with them, after all these are the potential people that you need to get things going.

Create an event 
People love to feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves. Try to build a feeling of excitement and rally others around your crowdfunding campaign by tying the launch to a large, well known event. You can connect your product to a holiday, sporting event, or season to increase the momentum surrounding your launch. This is especially useful for connecting with backers through social media, and trending topics and popular hashtags to get more eyes on your fundraise!

Highlight your backers
Show how cool your startup is by letting everyone see influential advocates joining in. Do you have someone notable as an adviser, backer or endorser of your startup? Share your list of partners and patrons to give confidence to new backers and let them know that they won’t be the only one at your party.

Credibility
Show your backers what they’ll be supporting in detail—how it works, how you came up with the idea, and even pictures or videos if you have a prototype. Remember that you will likely never meet your backers, so the more proof you can provide that your startup is legitimate the better.

Interact
Don’t leave your backers in the dark for weeks after they’ve supported your project. Interact with your audience through frequent updates, thank-you emails or social media and responses to their questions and feedback.You can build anticipation and increase engagement in many ways. When interacting with your backers, always encourage an open dialogue. In general, people would rather talk than listen. Treat your updates and outreach as a conversation rather than a one-sided message

After seeing how you can start. You can check out some crowdfunding campaigns for yourself on theses sites:

Indiegogo | http://www.indiegogo.com/
Kickstarter | http://www.kickstarter.com/
Crowdfunder | http://www.crowdfunder.com/
RocketHub | http://www.rockethub.com/

'Til the next time, James x