I used to be an annoying fancy-pants graphic designer. I thought design was arty and it was the most important thing ever. Everything needed to be a battle. Oh, how silly that sounds now! Here’s a list of things that I said I would never do and then ended up doing at some point in my six-year stint as owner of LimeRed Studio. I hope you learn a thing or two from my mistakes.

#1. Use gradients.

Some designers won’t use gradients. Really. I just read a post somewhere about this very topic. And it made me think about how annoying designers can be. Fancy designers like things flat and I have to admit: so do I. I like flat, MoMA-esque design. I like Marimekko and Crate and Barrel and musem books and plain, arty design. I even liked the Tropicana packaging design. But as you can see from that link: sometimes deisgners make stupid choices based on personal taste. Some people (clients, consumers) don’t like flat blocks of arty-farty color because it’s unfamiliar. A lot of users are used to buttons and navigation that have gradients. So there’s a fine line to walk here. There’s a big difference between designing for the design crowd (think museum) and designing for everyone else (who doesn’t care and just wants to find what they are looking for). And when a client asks for something to *pop* or to make it more *exciting*, sometimes a silly gradient does the trick. And if a gradient button gets more traffic than a flat button, then I’m all for gradients. Whatever works, people!

#2. Give design away.

I do free work all the time. I almost always get a tax credit. It’s not a bad thing to do, but I recommend to everyone who isn’t me to do this sparingly. Once you start doing anything pro-bono, it will surely eat up all of your spare time. People assign value to things that cost money. It’s just how our culture works. If you get something for free, there’s a good chance that you will treat it with a little less respect and diligence than if you had to pay for it. It’s why we join gyms. Think about it.

Discounts are even worse than giving things away. I would much rather do a design project for free than discount it any day. And don’t even get me started on trades. No trade is an even trade. Ever.

#3. Not use a contract.

This is just stupid. I got burned so badly in the early days of LimeRed that I learned quickly: always always always get a contract for everything. Especially if a potential client is skittish about signing the contract or sends it back and forth a thousand times. Actually, if a client does this, fire them immediately. In my experience, people who can’t play fair end up cheating in the long run anyway.

I can’t tell you how serious I am about this one.

#4. Design on spec.

I just did this today! I designed a header concept for a potential client before I even had a signed contract. Ridiculous. But you know, I had a great idea. And it looked great. And I just had to do it. Sue me. I won’t make a habit out of this. And doing work on spec is disastrous unless you are a big agency and can afford the time. Even then, though… eek. Do you know what “on spec” means? It’s when someone says: Can you design a few concepts so we can compare you to a few other people and then make a decision on whether or not to hire you? It’s horrible because if you win the job, you’ve already done a bunch of work without getting the whole picture and you’re definitely in store for tons of rounds and changes. Or, you don’t win the job and you’re out all that upfront research and concepting which is usually the bulk of the work. And there’s no way to tell if your concept ends up getting used in in the future. It’s a no-win. Unless you don’t care.

Here’s some great information from the AIGA: http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/position-spec-work

#5. Work for The Man.

I work for The Man sometimes. Big companies and big agencies contract me all the time. Most of this work is proprietary and I’m not allowed to post it here or tell anyone that I’ve done it. So I’m not officially telling you anything. The Man has big budgets, pays well, and I end up learning a lot which I then use for my small business and nonprofit work. It makes me feel like Robin Hood.

Is that so wrong?

EVENT: March 16, 2010 Homepage Design Bootcamp for Small Business

Terrific web design is at once beautiful, functional, and intuitive. It takes a bit of talent and a lot of experience, yes, but the basic concepts are universal. And we’re going to reveal them.

Come for website design, stay for wine!

At this After Work Special, we’ll learn what makes the best small business homepages work the hardest. We’re talking design, audiences and usability best practices for design AND content. PLUS, we’ll spend the second half looking at attendee’s homepages and suggesting changes that can make a big, immediate difference!

Bring your company’s homepage and let The Web Farmers whip it into shape.

Learn:

• How to get in your users’ heads.
• What kinds of things your users are looking for
• The psychology of web usage
• Easy fixes you can make right away
• Ideas for long-term improvements

Instructors: Emily Lonigro, online branding and user testing specialist
Location: OfficePort Chicago, 9 W. Washington, just west of State
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Format: Interactive presentation, getting down and dirty with your webpage, tasty drinks
Cost: $20 per person

NOTE: After you register, make payment via PayPal

Hi. I know I’ve been quiet for a while, but I’ve been working on somehing BIG. It’s this, my new business: The Web Farm. Yes, in addition to LimeRed Studio… that’s still here!

Keidra Chaney and I launched The Web Farm last month. We’re teaching the tools the big guys have had access to for a while now—things like web analytics, user testing, social media planning, and more.

Here’s our pitch: http://www.thewebfarmers.com/what-we-do/

We’re doing things like: giving 2-hour after work trainings on web analytics, home page redesigns, landing page testing and social media metrics. We’re giving a Saturday workshop soon on website planning, too. And guess what? It’s NOT EXPENSIVE! And the tools are mostly free and available for you to start using right now.

The problem is: no one has time to dig around and find the documentation to learn the stuff. And there’s a lot of planning that needs to happen first. Well, good thing Keidra and I have been doing that very thing for years now and we’re ready to teach you so YOU have the keys to your own site. And you know how to use the tools well.

So get ready. This is going to be HUGE.

Oh, and please come to our next After Work Special. It’s only $20 and there will be lots of wine.

Have at it!

REGISTER HERE

Did you know LimeRed Studio can set up Ecommerce websites? Well, we can. Thanks to the wild west of online software development, we have plenty of options to chose from. And some of them are well-priced and give you tons of options, like order tracking, inventory management, newsletter subscriptions, custom coupons and so much more.

You know: this is more than graphic design, folks. You have to get eyebrow-deep in someone’s business to be able to do this right. We ran into questions ranging from how to accept payment, whether to use FedEx, UPS or USPS, how to deal with shipping, to whether or not to collect sales tax. Luckily, I’ve done these things before and helped many a small business get the ball running.

The basic rules to designing for e-commerce are:

1. Make it totally intuitive. You shop online all the time and probably have two or three favorite sites. Copy those. They work.

2. REMOVE ALL OBSTACLES. The minute people have to think to find what they want (unless they really want it) you run the risk of losing them. I’m not saying people are dumb, but you are competing with everyone for the same dollars. So get it right.

3. Get rid of all of your extra junk. Each page should have ONE MISSION: Sell something on one page, get them to sign up for something on another page. if you need to do more things, make more pages! You can add more elements, sure, but you wouldn’t want to snowboard down the whole mountain before you learned how to navigate the bunny hill. It’s dangerous.

I designed and set up this site with some help from my ever-amazing developer, Nathan. (Thanks!)

Let you area schools know about this terrific fundraising opportunity or just buy a sign for yourself. It’s so cute. And there are signs for the nerds, too. I was on the yearbook staff in highschool and I would have totally stuck a yearbook sign in my front yard!

This site is a work in progress. They are making new signs all the time and will be adding more details about school fundraising opportunities, so check back soon.

Go check out Wealth Strategist Partner’s new site.

Here’s how this site came to be:
I was asked to redesign Wealth Strategist Partner’s site to make it less about their book, Wealth, and more about their core business—consulting, courses and recommended readings. Great, I thought: easy-peasy. But let’s all remember that good sites begin with good content. And a pretty site without intuitive architecture and relevant, easily-accessed content is a major waste of money. Right? Right.

Conclusion: This site needed a complete overhaul.

A redesign is rarely a mere reskinning. What almost always needs to happen is: re-imagination of content and how USERS will access and use the site. Here’s what we did to reach this goal, while keeping the site’s users needs in the front of our brains at all times:

1. We created a huge wireframe document that outline the content on each page, where it came from and where it would go if clicked. (see above)
2. We remapped the structure of the site so the content would make sense in groups.
3. We added landing pages, places for timely content, audio, video, lists of outside sources and more.
4. We worked with an SEO specialist to gather keyword research, suggest page descriptions and titles, and review all of the copy for optimization.
5. Then we developed the site.

And launched it today!

Oh, and we applied the existing branding graphics to the page designs with some small updates and upgrades. See? Not a whole lot of actual design work here. This project was mostly about content and usability. Design helps to visually communicate that content. Design is incredibly important to create a brand image, to portray a personality, to cue content, etc. but it only supports the overall mission: to communicate the company’s messages.

Now, LimeRed Studio and friends are going to develop a Spanish language version of the site, add some premium member content and rejigger a little of the content and how it displays. All in all, this was a HUGE accomplishment for us! We love this client and many many many thanks to Nathan Hiemstra, my hugely talented developer.

More to come soon; we have some big projects underway right now.

Hi everyone. Would you all do me a favor and go to the LimeRed Studio website and resubscribe for email updates? Sorry about this. I moved the site to Wordpress and need to re-do all of the email subs. If anyone knows a more elegant solution, please let me know.

Emily

Alive and well and built in Wordpress, that is. Yes, I can make your blog shine in Wordpress—it’s only the best blog platform out there. Don’t you just love that little Twitter birdy image? I didn’t make it, but I found it!

Here’s what I did for Sally:

- Created a custom Wordpress template
- Designed three different header graphics, relating to her overall brand image that I also designed
- Set up the pages, navigation and underlying structure
- Added tags for posts, keywords, and various SEO plugins (there are tons of plugins for Wordpress. Check these out.)
- Connected her site to her Twitter account
- Set up the email subscription mechanism and preferences via Feedburner

And some other things, I can’t remember it all. Bottom line is: Wordpress is awesome and the customization is limitless, really.  Get to it!

Oh, and Wordpress is so stellar you can customize the blogginess right out of it. It’s true, folks. You can use it as a light content management tool for traditional, portfolio-type sites. (This requires some serious customization know-how and a bit of developing). And then you can add in a blog later if you have something relevant and interesting to say. And please, not before then.

Go Sally On!

To WordPress. You didn’t notice, did you?

I think this platform will be way more fun, easier to manage and a lot more custom than TypePad. Sorry TP, but our affair must come to an end. I like to try all kinds of things/platforms/services/whatnot out so I can recommend them to my clients based on their needs and skill sets, but I think I’m in love with Wordpress. The easy 5-minute install is super easy, the SEO is way more rubust and the options seem limitless.

So yeah, here’s the new site. And I’m going to make some big changes very soon.

<3
Emily