Category Archives: Business Communications
Constant Contact, by far the leading email marketing service for small businesses and nonprofits, held a webinar yesterday for Constant Contact partners — people like me who provide email marketing services to their own clients, using Constant Contact. Gail Goodman, the CEO, knows more small business people and more about how things go for them than almost anyone else in the country. She should; she built an Inc. 500 company on catering to their needs. She brought up one statistic … Continue reading
We have been surveying owners of local small and medium-sized businesses about how they handle advertising and promotion. It’s a simple survey; because we wanted to get a feel for how we might help make our local area more commercially successful, and being in the graphic design business, this was an obvious subject to find out about. The news was not good, but it is interesting. About 60% of business owners consider promotion an expense rather than an investment. For … Continue reading
It’s a fact of the Internet that things can be copied far and wide with very little control. In some respects, that’s fantastic. You can get information about almost anything, any time. Some it is even accurate. But when it comes to betting your business on something you find “in the cloud,” it’s a good idea to be cautious. Designer Steve Douglas recently posted a fine object lesson for anyone looking to get a logo done “on the cheap.” I … Continue reading
Microsoft Office 2010 is now on sale and it is well worth the effort and expense to upgrade if you’re using Office 2007 for your business. The applications are fast, and although the new navigation takes a little getting used to, it makes life much easier for newbies and those who never have attained familiarity with all the different menu options and where they were hidden. For those of us who are very familiar with the ways of Office 2003 … Continue reading
One of the things that messes up a design faster than almost anything else is the choice of fonts. Lots of fonts. As many fonts as the person feels he or she can use. The result is a fragmented mess that screams “amateur!” to anyone who reads it. There are good font choices, and bad ones, but the first bad choice is “Lots!” There are almost no ads, magazines, fliers or other documents that need more than two typefaces, one … Continue reading
Issues 16 and 17 of the Creative Tips newsletter are now live on the newsletter page. Number 17 covers “capital offenses” — all those places where people commonly use ALL CAPS, but shouldn’t. (Hint: It’s most of the time!)
If you write business letters or other company documents, there are almost certainly some terms (like your company or product name), that you end up typing a lot. This might not be an issue if your company name is “Acme, Inc.,” but something like “Serious Business Strategies” or “Life Enhancement Supplement” might get a bit tedious after the third of fourth time you type it. There’s a solution built into every modern word processor: Auto-Correct. Back in the day, auto-correct … Continue reading
Ever since Sprint’s success with their “movie trailer” marketing campaign for the Instinct cell phone, it seems every tech marketer has to have movies. Now it’s Microsoft, with “Office 2010 — The Movie.” It’s been up on YouTube for a couple of weeks, so if you haven’t caught it yet, here’s the link. Actually, it’s kind of fun. It won’t really tell you anything about what 2010 will do differently, but there are various screen shots about the net and … Continue reading
At Microsoft’s annual Partner Conference in New Orleans, they announced the “Technology Preview” of Office 2010. This means the new programs will be available to members of Microsoft’s partner network and developers around the world to examine, test and provide feedback. Part of the plan for Office 2010 is an online service, some of which will be free, that will allow users to work with Word and Excel in a web browser. How they will compare (and compete with) Google … Continue reading
Type designer Thomas Phinney posts in his blog that Microsoft Office 2010, due to be released as a “technical preview” in July, will make a giant leap forward in its handling of typefaces: it will begin to support some (not all, by a long way) of the many advanced typesetting capabilities built into modern fonts (a standard known as OpenType, which I’ll expand on later in this post).
