Great Read: Why you have to engage in social media, even if you don't want to

Here is a fantastic blog post from Jason Cohen on Why you have to engage in social media, even if you don't want to...

Some key takeaways:

Today, a new website is invisible on the Internet.

The days of "have a website and advertise" are over. It's too expensive to be noticed on an Internet that's already full.

If Darren Rowse or Brian Clark talks about it, it's visible. If it hits the front page of Digg, it's visible. Once it's visible, once you have things like incoming links and lots of regular traffic, then you have a shot at using traditional SEO techniques for staying visible. But social media is the only way to overcome static friction (short of spending crazy money).

Social media is already changing the rules of the marketplace, just like the web did a decade ago. It's still early of course and no one -- not even the experts -- knows where all this is going. But it's clear that times are changing again, and those that don't jump in will go the way of print media.

Will all these social networks and websites survive? No.
Do we understand how to use them most efficiently? No.
Will there be another new thing someday? Sure.

But today and for the foreseeable future, this is the world. You have to jump in even if you don't yet understand it.

Read the entire article...

Great Article on Mashable: Should Your Company Have a Social Media Policy?

Done in the lens of the 5 W's... here's a great article that helps you decide if your company should adopt such a policy. The reality is, this is still very new for a lot of people and many people want to help... but simply don't know how (or what and what not to discuss).

Even once you decide to embrace social, what's the best way to operationalize it? There are tons of options to automate messaging across all of your social sites. Which ones make the most sense for you to go after and how (your customers should already be telling you this one). Have ideas? Need ideas? Leave a comment...

From the article...

Companies are realizing that people are talking about them whether they like it or not. As a result, they’re deciding whether they should consider having a social media presence, and hence, a policy. A social media policy outlines for employees the corporate guidelines or principles of communicating in the online world.

Social media is quickly moving from an emerging form of communication to the mainstream. So, just like in the old days when companies had to figure out how to deal with email, now they have to figure out how to deal with Facebook (Facebook reviews) and all other new media venues.

Read the entire article...

Great Article: In Defense of Eye Candy

Great article on the function of aesthetics.

From the article:

We’ve all seen arguments in the design community that dismiss the role of beauty in visual interfaces, insisting that good designers base their choices strictly on matters of branding or basic design principles. Lost in these discussions is an understanding of the powerful role aesthetics play in shaping how we come to know, feel, and respond.

Read more...

Thanks to Qwan Pham for sending me this link.

Let's Play a game called... What the - er, Font?

It was a matter of time...

For those of you who stay up at night trying to figure what's the name of a font you saw (you know you're out there), help is finally here from the fine folks at MyFonts:

Seen a font in use and want to know what it is?
Submit an image to WhatTheFont to find the closest matches in our database. Or, let cloak-draped font enthusiasts lend a hand in the WhatTheFont Forum.

Thanks to Tim Doyle for sending this to me.

10 Tips for Surviving The Economic Downturn

For smaller design-focused companies, Web Design Depot offers some pointers on how to navigate the economic downturn. For larger companies, like Intuit where we are taking a entrepreneurial approach to bringing products to market, some of these mindsets can still apply where appropriate.

From WDD:

The immediate challenge for smaller web design companies is how to attract new business and keep old clients in a downturn economy.

Customers are falling off of maintenance contracts and smaller businesses may not be looking to start a website right away.

Enterprise level clients are becoming more price-conscious. What can we do to make sure our collective heads stay above water in this tough climate?

File Under "Cool" - The Periodic Table of Typefaces

I shared this several weeks ago when I stumbled across it on Gizmodo, but this is worth sharing again. The Periodic Table of Typefaces is great (and educational) eye candy for all you designers and typography lovers at large out there.

For those who don't know about this gem, here's some background from its creator:

The Periodic Table of Typefaces is obviously in the style of all the thousands of over-sized Periodic Table of Elements posters hanging in schools and homes around the world. This particular table lists 100 of the most popular, influential and notorious typefaces today.

As with traditional periodic tables, this table presents the subject matter grouped categorically. The Table of Typefaces groups by families and classes of typefaces: sans-serif, serif, script, blackletter, glyphic, display, grotesque, realist, didone, garalde, geometric, humanist, slab-serif and mixed.

Each cell of the table lists the typeface and a one or two character "symbol" (made up by me simply based on logic), the designer, year designed and a ranking of 1 through 100.

Ranking was determined by statistically sorting and combining lists and opinions from the the sites listed below. The final overall ranking was achieved depending on how many lists the particular typeface was presented on and it's ranking on the lists (if the particular source list used a ranking system; some did not, in which case just the typeface's presence on the list boosted it's overall score.) After averaging the typefaces appearances and rankings a composite score was given and the list was sorted on a spreadsheet then finally given an overall score of 1 through 100 based on its final resting position.

Read, enjoy... download or order a print today! :)

Welcome to my Blog!

This was a long time coming... really long in fact. Try almost 3 years of procrastination.

After doing Teah's blog for almost 2 years now, I figured it was time to expand into my own world of blogging. Also, the fact I can tie in my Twitter, Facebook and my social media micro blogging here made it the perfect storm of reasons to finally give in.

This blog will cover all aspects of my life:

• Personal happenings
• Family happenings (no dirty laundry, sorry)... LOL
• My professional life at Intuit
• My professional life as owner of Directly Creative LLC

In other words, this hopefully will be one stop shopping for all things Robert David Torres. Stay tuned!