In general, I was less concerned by how attorneys would dress when they appeared in our courtroom (though there were a few notable exceptions), but I was often struck by the horrible business cards that would be handed to me. You see, it is a common practice in courtrooms in this part of the world for attorneys to check-in with court staff by handing over a business card or two. So in my time with the court, I’d probably received 1,000 different attorney business cards. And they can ran the gamut. From the basic information in a simple serif font, to a full-color photo with a list of qualifications, business cards can range from cheap to expensive, minimalistic to extravagant, informative to enigmatic. And like my fashion-conscious friend, I was quick to judge the attorney who handed them to me.

But who cares what a court clerk thinks about a lawyer and his business card? Well, I could go on for hours about why a lawyer should care what a clerk thinks, but for the purposes of this post, let’s consider the following: do you think these attorneys are using a different business card for court than they would hand to a prospective client they meet on the street? Are lay people you meet at a cocktail party any less judgmental when they’re considering whether or not to have a professional relationship with you?

Things like neckties and business cards make the first impression. They let us know if you’re somebody with good taste, or if you have the good sense to recognize that you need to connect with somebody who does have good taste. When somebody hands you a business card that still has remnants of being torn from a do-it-yourself printer page, are you really listening to what that person has to say, or are you wondering why that person couldn’t be bothered to buy professionally-printed cards at Staples?

But beyond the quality of printing, isn’t the content of your business card, or stationary, or website, significant to how we judge a person and their work? When you get handed a business card that features a photo of an attorney in a zoot suit and fedora (true story), are you considering the glossy finish of the card? Would you think any differently if you found this person’s website and it looked like his 10 year-old nephew put it together?

Doesn’t it make sense that we should put our best foot forward when we initiate a business relationship, that we should wash our clothes and comb our hair, and act like we know what we’re doing? Then why is it any less reasonable to hire a professional designer to put together your visual package: our signage, our stationary, our business cards, our website? Should we not do everything we can to succeed?

We All Judge Books By Their Covers originally appeared on Andrew Brennan Design on May 17, 2012.

What if you’re not as diligent in your blogging as you’d like to be? What if that “news” category runs out of ammunition after 2 weeks? Do you want your clients to think you haven’t been up to anything in the last few months or years?

Or, even if you do add regular blog posts, are you sure you want your client to question the accuracy of your information when they notice the date of the post is “March 10, 2008?” Even if the information is accurate and up-to-date, do you really want your clients to question it?

But there is an easy solution to this conundrum. Utilize an easily customized platform like WordPress and remove the date tags from the blog templates. Thus, you retain all of the benefits of a blogging structure without weighing down your message with date restrictions. You have information that must include a date and time? Type it in longhand:

Updated May 12, 2012

Worried that you might lose the immediacy and intimacy conveyed by connecting to followers through a blog? Utilize Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus account to share your microblog messages and links to your business website. Social media helps with marketing and adds the bonus of improving your site’s search engine optimization.

Keep your social media loose, current, and authentic. Use your business website to establish your permanent credentials and maintain a long-term authoritative brand.

Blogging on Your Business Website? originally appeared on Andrew Brennan Design on May 12, 2012.

There is a danger, especially among people who are creating their first website (or hiring somebody to create their first website) to put as much information as possible on the thing. It’s sort of a MySpace mentality, where you find yourself with unexpected creative freedom so you try to cobble together every pretty thing you’ve ever seen on the web. Flashy logos, tons of “useful” widgets, everywhere you look there’s something. This represents me, so I want as much stuff as possible. Except it doesn’t make you look good, and it doesn’t make your website more effective.

It’s like if you finally bought your first expensive car and decided to get every option redone in 24 karat gold. Sure, you have the freedom to get the tackiest car available (looking at you, Justin Bieber), but is that really what you want to do?

Instead, shouldn’t you be considering what options will best help you and your business? Sure, there are benefits to having an informative website — it attracts hits from search engines, it makes you appear well-informed — but is it really selling your services to customers?

Which is to say nothing of the aesthetics of a good looking website. If you’re not visually oriented, trust me when I tell you that there is actually a science to this. The are formal elements to design, and proven ways that your eyes move over a well-designed object. You’re simply not conveying the right information when you clutter your website with extraneous blogrolls and comment lists.

Which is to say nothing of how a messy website could affect your reputation. Remember the old saying, a cluttered desk is a reflection of a cluttered mind? What does a cluttered website say about you and your professionalism?

Against Cluttered Websites originally appeared on Andrew Brennan Design on April 13, 2012.

Now I have no problem with patriotic, red-white-and-blue designs, but that doesn’t mean the colors shouldn’t have some contrast to them. Even the U.S. flag has a darker blue field to set off the white stars. But by using reds and blues with similar values and saturations, and in equal amounts, makes it appear that the team can’t decide which is their dominant color. When you pair two colors so even-handedly you lose the effect of both colors. Unless you’re going for the harlequin look of Clipper Darrell’s two-tone suit. But does a sports team really need to evoke the comical aesthetic of a clown?

I would suggest that the Clippers make blue their dominant color and use red as an accent where needed. Why choose blue over red? Because a team with no visual personality, and a nickname that isn’t being utilized at all, might as well get a little more literal. Clippers were fast sailing ships of the 19th century. They sailed on the ocean. (Which is why they got the name when they moved from Buffalo to San Diego in 1978.) Might as well base your color scheme around a shade or two of blue.

As for their logo, I don’t think they need to get too specific. No need to have the waves and sails that the Columbus Clippers use. But I do think the Clippers are missing out by not having a more distinctive typeface. For one thing, they share an arena with- and are perenial afterthoughts to the Los Angeles Lakers, a much more successful and glamourous team. They need to stand out in general.

They also need to take advantage of the general “LA” logo market that exists. Spend some time in Los Angeles (or any other city for that matter) and you’ll see many people wearing “LA” gear who have no real affinity for Los Angeles teams. They’re wearing Los Angeles hats, not Dodgers hats. Hence the market for “LA” hats in colors other than Dodger blue.

If the people in the Clippers’ front office were paying attention, they would have noticed that the Lakers have done very little to develop an “LA” logo that could also serve as a universal symbol of the city. They would also notice that the Clippers’ color scheme (current or future) is probably more attractive to a non-sports fan than the Lakers’ distinctive purple-and-gold. If the Clippers talked to their neighbors at the Los Angeles Convention Center, they’d find that tourism is still big business in Los Angeles, so you might as well try to tap into the general, Los Angeles/Hollywood souvenir market.

The Worst Designs in Sports, Part II originally appeared on Andrew Brennan Design on April 9, 2012.

For my blog, abrennan.com, I wanted to be able to link to a page that would only display posts that I would consider “writing samples”. I have a category called “writing samples,” but I want to add a category of short stories that, for organizational reasons, needed to be in a category with a different parent. (Incidentally, that would’ve been the easiest solution: combine the two categories into a parent category called “writing”, then link to that parent category. I could even make a custom category-writing.php template.)

So I started by adding a query_posts() tag on the pre-existing template. Basically query_posts() allows you to filter out certain categories, authors, etc. for a loop. For my project, I wanted to include posts from the categories 923 and 885. I also wanted to display 5 posts per page, instead of the usual 3 posts that my template shows.

Thus, this code…

<?php query_posts ('cat=923,885&posts_per_page=5'); ?>

…is insert just prior to the main loop code…

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

My hope was that I could simply save this modified template as “writing.php” then be able to link to it. This did not work, so instead I wrote it as a custom page template. This is essentially the same as a regular category.php or index.php template, but with the following text at the top:


<?php
/*
Template Name: Writing
*/
?>


I saved this as page-writing.php, uploaded it, then created a new page entry within WordPress. I left that page entry blank, but designated “Writing” as the page template.

The drawback?  Query_posts() wrecks pagination. It might display 5 posts as called for in the code, but the “next page” link leads to the same 5 posts over and over again.

So after a bit of Googling, I found a few different hacks to fix this glitch. On this page, I found the simplest, easiest-for-me solution:


<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1; query_posts("category_name=somecat&paged=$paged"); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>


Which for my template leads something like this…


<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1; query_posts("cat=923,885&posts_per_page=5paged=$paged"); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>


So far so good. Except this pagination fix wrecks the “More” part of the the_content() tag. In other words, if you have a 100 word excerpt, with a “More” quicktag leading to an additional 5,000 words, the code above will remove the separation and just display the entire post. Which, for my writing project is disastrous.

So instead of changing the_content() to the_excerpt(), which clips the posts arbitrarily, I went back to Google and discovered “global $more”. Simply put, you can manually code whether or not the “More” quicktag works or not. If you enter the following code after the loop, it turns back on what was previously automatic in WordPress:


<?php global $more;
$more = 0; ?>


If for some reason you want to “turn off” all automatic “More” quicktag, you can simply change the zero above to one. But if you’re long-winded like me, prepare yourself for the flood of text that will come when WordPress shows you just how long your posts really are.

In any case, putting these three pieces together led to this skeleton:


<?php
/*
Template Name: Writing
*/
?>

<div id="content">>
<h3><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
<?php the_content('More','',''); ?>


Which is basically a long, complicated way to create a two-category WordPress page in a form that looks exactly like your regular, one-category template.

WordPress Query_Posts(), Pagination & “More” originally appeared on Andrew Brennan Design on April 3, 2012.

The point of a DIY website operation is to treat all customers the same: to present a set number of options in order to allow a certain amount of customization, but to ultimately guarantee that all websites in the system will follow the same design structure. Which means that, despite slight variations in color and font, all of the web sites offered by a company will all look remarkably similar. But that’s the nature of a DIY website: if these websites were truly 100% customizable, the process of making them DIY would be so cumbersome, they wouldn’t be profitable. Likewise, a turnkey website that can’t be easily created in an afternoon can’t truly be sold as DIY.

Which touches upon the main problem with DIY websites. You buy a turnkey website to put yourself online and set yourself apart from your competition. But in the process of using a recognizably cookie-cutter website, you announce to the market that you aren’t anything special. Before you can hope to create your brand online, you’ve painted yourself into a corner of having negative brand value.

A business website (or a website for any other unique entity) needs to be designed with the specific goals of the business in mind. And those goals must be accomplished with respect given to the brand and reputation you’re trying to build. If you were operating a high-end fine dining restaurant, you wouldn’t decorate it with the furnishings of a mom-and-pop taco stand. So why would you launch a website for a law firm with a DIY template that’s being used by a teenager blogging about her favorite popstars?

And what would your prospective clientele think of your operation if they come looking for fine dining and find themselves in Nacho World? Would they trust you with their business when you’ve demonstrated no interest in your own reputation? Perhaps, you might be thinking, my customers will understand that I’m not a visual person or I don’t have any artistic talent, so that’s why I have a simple, no-personality website. But then if you signal to the world that you’re not willing to hire an expert in website design, you also signal to your customers that perhaps the expertise you’re selling isn’t worth paying for either.

And thus, the brand-negative website you’ve launched to cut corners and get your operation off the ground, has actually worked against you, to hurt you in ways that the lack of a website never could. You may have saved time and money by utilizing a DIY website package, but you certainly haven’t taken advantage of the benefits that a business website has to offer.

D.I.Y. Websites are a Waste of Time originally appeared on Andrew Brennan Design on April 2, 2012.

And, in the interest of full disclosure, in this situation, I am both perpetrator and perturbed. I attend a lot of concerts, and the occasional ballgame, and I enjoy taking photos of interesting things as I experience them. But I also get annoyed when the person standing in front of me insists on documenting the entire event by holding a phone up in front of me.

I often wonder how our day-to-day lives have been irretrievably altered by our dependence on our mobile devices. When a topic of interest arises during a conversation away from home, I inevitably seek more information on my phone. We’ve reached the point where I don’t say “remember what it was like before the internet?” Instead I say “remember when we used to have to go home to look up something on the internet?”

Nevertheless, this is the reality we live in.

People now interact with the world around them through their cell phones and other mobile devices. And if your website is designed without consideration given to how it will be perceived on mobile devices, you are limiting access to your website.

Further, when a prospective customer happens upon your website, and it is virtually illegible (i.e. the text is too small, or the layout is mangled), you run the risk of ruining your reputation. As the internet goes increasingly mobile-friendly, competing websites wil be more likely to be optimized for viewing on a cell phone or tablet. You need to keep up with the Joneses: websites that are not responsive to the screen size of their customers’ devices demonstrate a failure to keep up with the times.

And while the younger set is most likely to be using smartphones to view websites, and perhaps you don’t feel a need to market to that demographic, the fact remains that the percentage of people who are tech saavy is growing exponentially, and without regard to age, gender, or ethnicity. One only needs to look below at the photo I took at my birthday dinner two years ago. Amongst the takeout containers sitting on the table, you’ll find three adults, each over 40 years old, ignoring each other to tend to their cell phones.

You Must Design for Mobile Devices originally appeared on Andrew Brennan Design on March 31, 2012.

The entire episode was a good listen, but what really caught my attention was the mention (beginning around 15:13) that the Toyota company deliberately intended to make the Prius car completely different from all other cars in order to send the signal to consumers that this hybrid car was something special.

“They didn’t care what it looked like, so long as it looked different.”

While that’s a significant statement to a designer, “we don’t care what it looks like,” one that most designers would view with a significant amount of skepticism, it does point directly to an important part of branding: how you set yourself apart from your competitors. But there are finer points to that concept that should be addressed.

First, it helps to actually be different. It’s an advertising cliche that companies are always pushing their products as being “new and improved,” but consumers are not so easily fooled and will quickly figure out if you’re just selling the same, old product. The difference you’re pushing may just be psychological, in the sense that your product makes customers feel better about themselves than a competing product, but that’s still a difference. Consider that iPod or iPhone that you own and question whether the product itself works much better than any other mp3 player or smartphone. Chances are you like these products just because they’re ‘cool’.

Second, you shouldn’t be different just to be different. People might be intrigued by the flashy, new thing, but they’re also drawn to things they know, and the comfort of maintaining routines. If you’re trying to convince somebody to try something new, you need to convince them that the change benefits them in some way. In the case of the Prius, car owners might have been excited by an opportunity to drive a more environment-friendly vehicle, but they weren’t going to jump onto the hybrid bandwagon unless they were sure that they would still be able to drive 65 on the freeway. It takes more than a good idea, or a good cause, to get people to change significant portions of their lifestyle.

Third, you don’t want to be too different. No matter how great your product is, people will be wary of trying it out if it sets them too far apart from their friends and family. We are pack animals at heart and often don’t want to risk standing out, for fear of appearing foolish. Consider the case of the Segway, that “people mover” that resembled a stand-up, three-wheeled golf cart. Despite all the convenience and efficiency that the product promised for people who would otherwise be walking or biking, the public ultimately couldn’t get past the oddness of Segway riders, and stuck to methods of transportation that were more physically taxing.

So while its crucial to differentiate yourself, to rely upon more than just randomness to be successful, seeking those differences must be done with careful consideration, even when those differences come naturally, or even in your own mind.

Being Different originally appeared on Andrew Brennan Design on March 9, 2012.

The standard way of creating transparent elements with CSS is as follows:

div.transparent {
filter: alpha(opacity=50);
opacity: 0.5;
}

As you may have deduced, the example above applies a class that makes the div 50% transparent. Which can be modified to reflect whichever percentage you prefer. I typically use 80% or 85% in my designs. The problem with this method is that it makes everything in that div transparent as well, including text that you would probably prefer to be legible to your user.

In considering this problem, I conceived of two possible solutions. The first would be to place text in a separate div and move that text div with positioning and z-index so that it was directly above the transparent background div. The problem with this would be that if either of the two divs are fluid, the divs won’t remain lined up. That is, any change in the size, shape or number of words in the text div would cause the words to not “fit inside” the transparent div. Plus, positioning can be tricky and should probably be avoided if possible.

The other solution, the one that I prefer, is to create a transparent png in Photoshop and use it as a background image.


div.transparent {
background-image:url('images/transbg.png');
}


The advantage of this option is that the shape and size of the div are entirely flexible and can be fluid to whatever content you put in it. I’m liking rounded corners these days and haven’t noticed any weirdness caused by combining them with transparent png backgrounds. The disadvantage of this method would be that if you want to adjust the level of transparency, you would need to create a completely different png file. The use of a graphic file also adds some extra weight to your page, but if you use a 10 pixel by 10 pixel png, that difference won’t make much of a difference. The image I’m using on my current project (here) is 2.7 KB, and I don’t think that’s going to kill anybody’s bandwith.

A final note: I seem to remember reading somewhere that transparent png patterns can cause weird striations if they are smaller than 10×10. I don’t know if that’s accurate, or if it’s something that’s been fixed in current browsers, but it’s probably better to not to go smaller without testing it thoroughly.

Random Transparency Tip originally appeared on Andrew Brennan Design on March 9, 2012.

Let us also assume you are not an active news aggregator, sending out 5 to 10 tweets an hour. The only stream you’re dominating is your mother’s, since she only follows you, your younger sister, and Oprah.

Instead, we must accept that we are merely a single source of information in a world flooded with data. By tweeting, we are tossing out a small piece of information to a handful of people who may or may not be giving you their full attention. Who may or may not accept your implicit offer to look deeper into whatever you are talking about.

If you seek out current data on how people use Twitter you’ll likely see that the vast majority of users are not very active. Using the year-old numbers I found online, approximately 80% of Twitter users follow and are followed by under 50 people, a sharp contrast to the 7-figure numbers we like to talk about with celebrities and prominent media figures. Twitter statistics also show that most people infrequently send out tweets (less than 4 a month), and many never even tweet after they sign up. The statistics indicate that as the numbers of Twitter users increased, the measurable pro rata activity on Twitter decreased.

Or, to paint a fuller picture…there are a relatively small portion of Twitter users who are very active on Twitter, while the vast majority of Twitter users joined later and did not maintain the activity level of the early adapters.

Conversely, there is no data (that I could find) concerning how people read or perceive tweets. Nevertheless, there are certain logical conclusions one can draw based on what we know about out-going Twitter communication. While there are certainly people who treat Twitter like a constantly-changing passive source of text, it does not seem likely there are many people who send vastly more tweets than they read, or read vastly more tweets than they send: the most active tweet-readers are likely the outspoken minority who are most active in sending out their own tweets.

In other words, those 20% of Twitter users with more than 50 followers are the people most likely to be reading your tweets. They will be seeing your tweet on a screen with 10 to 15 other tweets from the 50+ other people they are following. Depending on the refresh setting of their particular Twitter app, and how active the Twittersphere is at that particular moment, your tweet will be appearing on the screen of your average, active Twitter user for a minute or two at most, before it is replaced by other sources of visual stimulation.

Whether your particular tweet caught the attention of that active Twitter user and spurred him to react in some way is anybody’s guess.

I say all of that to say this: trying to increase the reception of your tweets by trying to increase your followers is illogical. Yes, if you have more followers there is an increased chance that people will happen upon your tweet. But an atmosphere that promotes how many followers a user can accumulate also increases the amount of data being pushed at each Twitter user, leading to less productive, more scatter-shot form of communication.

The more followers you have, means the more people your followers are following. Which means your followers will be less likely to perceive your particular tweet. A race to collect followers is a race to diffuse a message.

When considering Twitter followers, it should be about quality, not quantity. Better to engage with 10 active Twitter users than to lob a tweet at 100 passive Twitter users. Better to use Twitter as a tool, in conjunction with other means of communication, than to think there’s a magic number that will make a social media campaign all worth while.

Focus on the big picture, not the easy numbers.

It Doesn’t Matter How Many Followers You Have originally appeared on Andrew Brennan Design on March 3, 2012.