Directly CREATIVE - The Blog

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noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:56:00 +0000

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Apple And Google Just Tag Teamed The U.S. Carriers (TechCrunch Article)

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 03:42:00 +0000

Google’s event today was supposed to be about one device, the Nexus One. Instead, we heard a lot of: “more devices,” more manufacturers,” “more carriers,” “this is just the beginning.” Today was not about one device, it was about Google’s first step in helping to reshape the mobile landscape in the U.S. And thanks to the groundwork laid by Apple, it just might work.

Read entire article...

Chrome OS - The Picture is Getting Clear... and the "Desktop" Should be Worried

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:37:00 +0000

For those following Chrome OS, Google unveiled The Chromium OS open source project and some more details about the upcoming Chrome OS (scheduled to launch next year). A great and not so subtle article on Mashable titled "With Chrome OS, Google Intends to Destroy the Desktop and Microsoft" speculates the thinking behind the upcoming Chrome OS and it's hard to argue the logic. The Google Chrome Blog offers info on Chromium and a demo from the Chrome OS announcement event.

Below is a great video from Epipheo that explains Chrome OS:

Coolest Thing Ever... 10/GUI

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:14:00 +0000

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

The Difference Between Art and Design

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:37:00 +0000

Web Designer Depot has a great post about art vs. design that is intended to be a conversation springboard into what separates art and design. The images used as part of the post can also be downloaded as wallpaper.

From the article:

Artists and designers both create visual compositions using a shared knowledge base, but their reasons for doing so are entirely different.

Some designers consider themselves artists, but few artists consider themselves designers.

So what exactly is the difference between art and design? In this post, we’ll examine and compare some of the core principles of each craft.

Introducing Sociability: Usability for the Social Web

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 19:28:00 +0000

Great and quick read on Mashable today about social usability and personas. Here's the meat of the article:

In social media, many individual users, each different from the next, combine to form a social experience. Those users will have all manner of motives and interests that don’t necessarily overlap. The degree to which your social media efforts capitalize on these user habits results in sociability, and this starts with taking a user-centric perspective. In fact, you need to take multiple perspectives.

For the purpose of developing these different user perspectives, it is helpful to create user personas to describe the different types of social behavior. I like to group users into self-oriented, other-oriented, and relationally-oriented types.

Self-oriented users are those who extend their presence online, building audiences and posting content. Experts, pundits, and those sometimes called “creators” are self-oriented users.
Other-oriented users are those who start with the conversations and contributions of others. Where the self-oriented user talks about him or herself (expresses him or herself), the other-oriented user responds, replies, or comments. What he or she reads and finds interesting provides a springboard for conversation.
Relationally-oriented users gets involved in social activities. They see what’s going on between other users, and may be drawn to these more social interactions. Involvement puts these users in relation to other users, with all the dramatic and nuanced activity this can result in.
These are extremely oversimplified descriptions, of course, but they’re not meant to describe real individuals. Rather, they’re a heuristic model intended to expand your thinking about your users.

Corporate Twitter Toolbox: Twitter Tools for the Enterprise (on Mashable)

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 20:45:00 +0000

Mashable is featuring a great article on top corporate Twitter tools to manage your social media engagement with your customers. From the article:

Twitter is a great listening post for companies to monitor conversations related to their brand and engage with customers; and there are a variety of tools available to help groups and corporations tweet, collaborate, and generally manage their Twitter (Twitter) workflows... Finding the right Twitter applications is a challenge for social media managers, though, because new apps seem to spring up each day and they often have overlapping feature sets.

The article covers the market leaders in each category, like Hootsuite...

Christine Jean Chambers, Interactive Producer and Online Media Planner for BET, uses Hootsuite to track which content is resonating with their audience. “For example, during the BET Awards ’09 in June, we took over the entire top 10 trending topics on Twitter, which is pretty extraordinary,” she said. “We monitored this flux of activity using Hootsuite and were able to gauge the success of the delivery of our content on Twitter precisely because of trackable links Hootsuite provides.”

Enjoy the entire article...

20 Tips on How to Write for the Web

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:55:00 +0000

Web Designer Depot has a great list of 20 mistakes writers on the web make today. I've been guilty of a few myself. :)

From amateur bloggers to pro writers in leading publications and blogs, I've seen many of these mistakes littered across what I have read. My OCD (obscure acronym use is #16) never handles it well and encourages you to read this article. :)

20 Simple Productivity Tools for Bloggers

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:16:00 +0000

On Mashable today, Barb Dybwad runs through some great tools to make you a lean mean, blogging machine...

Very Cool... But Will it Work? Google Wave

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:11:00 +0000

On May 27, during the Google I/O keynote, Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, laid out a grand vision for the direction Google sees the web heading towards with the move to the HTML 5 standard. It's called Google Wave.

From Google:

About Google Wave
Google Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year.

What is a wave?
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time

There is also a great article about the announcement on TechCrunch named "Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web."

Featured on Mashable... Top 18 Social Media Resources for Developers

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Fri, 29 May 2009 17:38:00 +0000

For those of us who are development savvy, or if you are are not a developer but the DIY type when it comes to building out web sites, Mashable once again wrangles up some great resources for the social cause. This time the focus is for resources developers can leverage for their social offerings.

From the article:

The stereotypical view of a coder is that of an anti-social hacker, sitting alone in a darkened room, banging away on a keyboard by the glow of a monitor (or six) until all hours of the night. But that’s not true to life - today’s programmers, developers, and code enthusiasts have fully embraced social media. Whether you have a simple code question or are embarking on a collaborative code project to build your company’s next big product, code is best done learning from and working with others.

80+ Online Resources for the Digital Enterprise

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Tue, 26 May 2009 22:26:00 +0000

Here's a very comprehensive list from WebMama of online resources that all of us (creative types included) can leverage. Best of all, most of these tools are FREE!

From WebMama:

There are a plethora of tools available on the Web to help you develop and optimize your Web site, and during this miserable economy, it’s especially important to have all the tools, tricks and tips at hand and easily accessible.

That’s why we’ve created this list of over 80 resources to make your life easier. You’ll find everything from general site research tools, to analytics, to social media monitoring, to technical performance; many of which can be used for competitive analysis, visibility and growth.

Featured on Mashable: 85+ of the Best Twitterers Designers Should Follow

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:25:00 +0000

Here's a collection of designers who Tweet in service of others in their field. I'm planning to follow a few of these fine individuals myself... :)

The power of Twitter (besides figuring out how to monetize it) is exactly what these people are doing. Designers, get connected! If not with these 85 "strangers" then I challenge you to find a way to use Twitter like this in your own "community" of people you do know.

Go connect!

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

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:45:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:40:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:21:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:56:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:03:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:32:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Robert) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:09:00 +0000

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!