So here’s the pitch: 365 days. One sketch per day. A little pithy commentary after each sketch.

I’ll do it all on free platforms. Sort of a digital verison of Walden without the trancendental insights or intelligence. I’ll make every sketch available as a t-shirt, coffee mug and poster. If I’m lucky, I’ll break even on the hosting.

The only thing I’ll pay for is hosting and Moleskine notebooks.

There, I wrote it on the internet so it must be true.

I just had a powerful experience with Twitter that has cemented it in my mind as a powerful marketing tool.

In preparation for a meeting on a site UI this morning, I revisited An Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design on 37signal’s site. It’s a fantastic overview of Christopher Alexander’s approach to design based on “chunks” or patterns.

After I read the article, I tweeted about it. I was sure that any number of my followers might have an interest in it. If not for their personal use, then for a reference if and when they work with me.

Here’s the tweet:

Doodlehaus tweet about Designing with Patterns by Ryan Singer

Here’s where it gets interesting. Minutes later, Jason Fried, owner of 37Signals tweets about the same article. He noticed someone was revisiting some older content produced by his company and saw it as an opportunity to promote 37Signals’ expertise on the issue.Check it out:

Jason Fried of 37Signals tweets about Pattern Design

From a random shout into the Twitter void to nearly instant recognition from the owner of one of the Web’s most innovative companies. Now that’s cool.

There are other halo effects from this exchange. Ryan Singer gets props for his article. 37Signals gets more exposure as a leader in clean, usable interface design. Christopher Alexander sells some more books. Hey, I write this post that references all these things.

All because of one little tweet.

I can imagine these meetings: “We need new energy! We need a new brochure…no…a new SLOGAN!…a new NAME!!” Imagine broad sweeping arm gestures accompanying that sentence as if the speaker were expanding her arms to embrace the entire expanse of her new empire.

Both these moves are classic branding mistakes. A slogan is not a brand, it should sum up what’s already there. Otherwise don’t bother. The best take on this was in the book “Cutting Edge Advertising” where the authors advised, if it’s not as good as “Just Do It”, don’t. Especially don’t if the slogan’s been beaten like a rented mule.

In regards to Sci Fi’s name change, Bonnie Hammer, former president of Sci Fi is quoted in the New York Times, “We couldn’t own Sci Fi; it’s a genre. But we can own Syfy.”

Let me ask everyone who watches Sci Fi, do you care if the channel can own it’s name? I sure as hell don’t. What does that have to do with the quality of your programming? When I thought of T.V. and science fiction, I thought of Sci Fi. Now I’ll cringe every time I linger there.

What’s even more surprising about the Sci Fi name change is that their audience is one of the most cynical and dismissive of this kind of chicanery. These are the people who will point out plot holes in comic book story lines from decades ago and you’re going to try to jam brand-speak down their throats? Why don’t you see if the folks over at D.C. Comics can get Batman into therapy and get a cheerier disposition. Because, you know, women from 18-35 think he’s too negative.

It’s all ridiculous. It’s like giving yourself a nickname and insisting everyone else use it. People either think you’re nuts or arrogant. The internet exposes these flimsy excuses for real branding as weak and inauthentic. Just stop. Please.

The article, When is e-mail like a bad website?, deconstructs an HTML email sent from a major cell phone manufacturer, presumably with plenty of resources to perform usability testing (Be sure to look at the screenshots to see how mangled the messge gets).

The last sentence drives the point home: “Responding to this post by saying, “Funny, it looks okay in my e-mail client” will miss the point that e-mail, as a medium, really doesn’t want to carry all this freight.”

Let that sink in for a moment.

“…email, as a medium, really doesn’t want to carry all this freight…”

Consider that as you plan your email marketing campaigns. Email is primarily a text-based medium. Adding images complicates things a bit. Trying to shoehorn a pixel-perfect newsletter design into email adds an exponential amount of complexity.

The fact that a company as large as Nokia encountered difficulties using this medium should be enough to give us pause.

How much time and effort do you have to devote to testing and design of graphically intensive e-newsletters versus the ultimate benefit of adding the extra complexity. Is the risk of having your high-gloss layout break on a large percentage of your users’ email clients worth that extra time and resources?

In many cases, your time may be better spent crafting a better message and a killer subject line than tweaking that last pixel on your email layout (only to be betrayed by a glitch in Hotmail, Wiscmail, Gmail or some other web-based email client).

The maps on the left are very precise. They are geographically pure. This would be great if they were intended for geographers or anyone else who needs a precise map.

However, these are graphics to inform people who ride the subway. They could care less about the surrounding landscape. They just need to find the right transfer, to get in the right tube. The information and clarity of the subway lines themselves is what’s most important.

The maps on the right are redesigned with the user in mind. They clarify the relationship of the subway lines to one another. Geographical purity is sacrificed, but the result (in theory) is a happier and more civil subway commuter.

Who is your audience? Do they need every tiny detail? What can you remove to provide more clarity to the message.

Remember, design and communication is the practice of subtraction.

What it does is tack on extra information to the URL for analytics tools (like Google Analytics and LiveStats) to chew on.

Here’s an example:

Every month the Office of Marketing and Communications sends out the School of Business Gazette in the form of an email. That email contains links to web pages on the school’s site that have the following format: http://www.bus.wisc.edu/gazette/month2007/article_name.asp

To track the number of clicks on a particular story in the email, we need to find a way to differentiate those clicks from other clicks, say from folks stumbling around our site and getting to the Gazette through the administrative resources section.

So, what to do? If we go to the URL Builder we can define specific information about the link. I enter the following information:

Campaign Source: gaz042007 (short for gazette 04/2007, note that I left out the slash since it’s a reserved character for use in URLs)
Campaign Medium: email

And the tool spits out the following URL: http://www.bus.wisc.edu/gazette/april2007/article.asp?utm_source=gaz042007&utm_medium=email

Notice the information we added comes after a question mark as follows: ?utm_source=gaz042007&utm_medium=email.

Both URLs load the same page, but the URL-Builder page tags extra information for the analytics tools to consume. That’s the information that we can use to track the campaign. Google Analytics will consume that auto-magically (assuming you’ve got the proper tracking code on your page, (email me with questions on that)) and LiveStats would require some custom report definition.

Please leave questions or comments below. Thanks for reading!

People read faster and retain more if copy is formatted in a manner that is easily scanned, easy to read from top to bottom. That means subheads, bullets and good use of whitespace. This approach allows readers to answer the questions “where am I?”, “what am I reading?” and “do I want to be here?”

The bottom line is that good, clean text formatting is far more important than a random pretty picture. So be sure to ask yourself if the images you’re using are vital to the page you’re publishing.

Remember: good design is the practice of subtraction, not addition.

So, are we spinning our wheels? What are the best practices? Are people even reading these things?

Well, because your Webmaster loves you, I went to great lengths to type “e-newsletter best practice” into Google. I found this gem: It’s time to raise the bar on e-newsletter best practices.

The best advice is item #1: Content is King. Seriously folks, this is 80% of the battle. Content trumps fancy design every time. If you’re pressed for time, groom the content. Get an editor to look at it. See if you can take out words. Make it punchy. Make it lean. Design is the art of subtraction and good writing is the art of reducing the number of words and making each word carry its weight.

This article is rich with good advice and required reading whether you’re thinking about doing a newsletter or want to improve your current newsletter.

PageRank is complicated.

My motivation for posting this is entirely selfish. Next time someone asks “can you tell Google to put my page at the top?” I can reply “that all depends on your eigenvalues, here’s a link.”

I don’t know about you, but in my experience, using the word eigenvalue usually puts an end to any conversation.

Sorry about that.

Because of this, I plan to make my next collection of posts on the topic of search engine basics. We’ll start at the beginning, a very good place to start: What search engines are important?

Taking a peek at the statistics for October 2006, the search engines that drive traffic to www.bus.wisc.edu break down as follows:

Google: ~88%
Yahoo!: ~9%
MSN: ~2%
AOL: ~.4%
Ask Jeeves: ~0.3%

For this reason, we’ll focus mainly on Google for optimization. It should be noted, however, that these results are skewed since we use Google’s public service search for our internal site search.

Here’s your homework: go to google.com/toolbar and install the Google toolbar (if you haven’t already). Visit some pages and make note of the green bar titled “PageRank.”

Hover over the bar with your mouse, it should pop a little yellow box that reads something like: “PageRank is Google’s measure of the importance of this page (X/10).

This is a logarithmic scale that Google uses to assign importance to pages. (Sidenote: the Richter scale that’s used to measure earthquakes is also logarithmic, so the difference between a 2 and a 3 is much less than the difference between an 8 and a 9…it’s a math thing). Check the page rank of big sites like cnn.com, yahoo.com, etc. How do they compare to the page rank of your site?

Wouldn’t it be nice to get a hunk of that PageRank? We’ll talk about that another time.