One of the leading gurus of word-of-mouth marketing, Dave Balter of marketing firm BzzAgent, is out with a new book: The Word Of Mouth Manual, Volume II. The book, which costs $45 at Amazon, can also be downloaded for free in PDF format from a bunch of other smart marketers that Balter reached out to, including Todd Deffren of PR-Squared, Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures and Jason Fried of 37 Signals. See the whole list of resources here.
Now a note of fair warning: I am a registered BzzAgent myself, and Dave sent me a free copy of the new book (along with a previous book he wrote) for signing up to help him promote the book. That’s smart—and that is just what BzzAgent does. Also, I haven’t read the book yet but eagerly look forward to it. Because let’s face it–everyone wants to generate better word-of-mouth marketing, but few really know what it is or how to go about it.
carbonhouse was fortunate to have one of Dave’s top notch colleagues, Joe Chernov (BzzAgent VP Communications), stop by our office recently. He was in town to give a talk to an PR group on the whole subject of WOM. The following are excerpts from Joe’s talk, which no doubt are expanded upon in Dave’s book.
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Any creative shop, large or small, will understand what happens when you ask a client to supply a Vector or EPS logo for a project. You inevitably receive a JPEG version at 72 dpi, ripped from their website or a partner’s site. This happens too many times to count. Since most of our focus at carbonhouse is web-related, we can generally address these bitmap messes and make them work. But what happens when you need to place the logo on a dark background and the supplied logo is stuck to a white ground? There are many different hacks to achieve a workable end product—some of which are more successful than others. I wanted to share an Adobe Fireworks tip that can make it easier to work with logos on dark backgrounds.
Remember, this is an Adobe Fireworks-only tip.
Step 1
Obtain said nasty JPG logo from the web site or client. In this case we will use the Lex Mundi logo.
Step 2
Place logo on the dark background in your layout
Step 3
Turn the logo into grayscale. Either adjust Hue/Saturation under Filters or convert to grayscale (Menu> Commands > Creative> Convert to Grayscale)
Step 4
Invert the logo (Filters> Adjust Color> Invert)
Step 5
Add a color fill (Filters> Adjust Color> Color Fill) and in the Color Fill Dialog box adjust the Blending Mode to Color Dodge. Adjust levels as needed for clarity.
Step 6
Choose the background color as the ground in the logo in the Blending Mode dialog box
That’s it. Hopefully you will receive a vector logo, but this will help when in a bind.
Posted in Design, Web Design | No Comments
carbonhouse has launched a new website to showcase our VenuElements℠ content management solution.
VenuElements is specifically tailored for venues, facilities and performing arts centers. It currently powers the websites for a number of major facilities around the U.S., including Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, Prudential Center, Sprint Center, Target Center, RBC Center and more.
Posted in Web Design, Web Development | No Comments
The logo for our content management system, known as Greenhouse℠, is featured in the new book Really Good Logos Explained. The logo was part of a “family” of product logos designed by our talented friends at A3 Design.
Some of the judges comments included:
“The execution of the green leaf is very nicely echoed in the liquid inside the flask, complete with the white inline.”
“This is a very well-executed logo. The curve of the leaf is a perfect arc to represent flowing water and it possesses great color combination that says ‘environment and modern.’”
“‘Greenhouse’ is well centered between the secondary type and the illustration. If the flash were a bit larger, it would definitely be the focal point instead of being equally important as ‘greenhouse.’”
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