When developing marketing campaigns for your clients, creating a face and voice for that entity is the most important aspect of your job. Whether you’re branding a Fortune 100 company or an individual entrepreneur, how you interpret the branding in your designs, copy, photography, Tweets or Facebook posts are all informed by your branding platforms. Though Social Media offers new branding channels, the initial premise for your client remains the same as it always has been: the branding and marketing strategies should inform every media channel in which you work.

And as you move forward learning about these newer channels, adapting your strategies to these channels, and applying your plans in a cohesive marketing campaign, you may just evolve the media.

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Color-trending is a fascinating subject. And when economic conditions combine with wartime sentiments, colors take on some interesting and unusual hues.

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Back in 1995 when I began my transition into web design and development, and there were literally thousands of sites on the web, every single one was designed in a way which accommodated the means to build the site – by the chunk. And there was a huge battle between designers and coders, much like today. Though I only hear it whispered in storage rooms and alleyways, the battle builds between traditional web designers and those specializing in W3C compliant CSS-driven CMS sites.

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Just took A List Apart‘s yearly survey for people who create websites. Each year, the survey results are invaluable to our industry as they create predictors for the coming years. If you make websites, take the survey too!

An odd combination, if you think about – typography used on bowls, cups and plates. But then you see the works of Asya Palatova of gleena ceramics and see the natural combination.

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The re-emergence of the popularity of grid systems, in web and print design, harkens back to the advertising design of Josef Müller-Brockmann. Müller-Brockmann began his career in the 1930′s,  perfecting the Swiss Grid System and clearly defining his work as an artform unto itself. More interesting to me is his use of positive and negative space, almost Gestalt-like, with backgrounds and foregrounds melding into one another.

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