As a Mac quack and visual comm professional, I browsed mostly with Safari and Firefox for a few years. I've tried Opera and BlueDolphin (or whatever it was called on the Android OS), but Chrome won me over this year with its speed, privacy, task manager, and especially its address bar as a Google search box. Task icons on the address bar make accessing your personal apps so fast, that you can customize and minimize clicks, which is every graphic designer's dream. Chrome still needs more apps and optional extensions, which I'm sure will improve over time, but adding and removing extensions is so easy. Pretty much anyone would benefit from switching to Chrome. People, you need to get off IE already (re: http://www.favbrowser.com/november-2011-google-chrome-share-up-internet-explorer-firefox-safari-opera-down/). Someone please tell me if they disagree.

I read an article today that made me proud to be a working digital artist amid this decade's technology developments. Pat LaPointe from Metrics Insider at MediaPost Publications mentions some interesting points about marketing experimentation that complements my career philosophy; that the art side of good marketing creatives needs the science side of research and data, plus the ability to suit each medium.

Pretty much every day, I beat myself up about keeping up with the latest technologies, from iPhone apps to webfonts. I am repeatedly challenged to perfect this changing art of scalability, interactivity, and imagery, where "shifting sands are the rule, not the exception," as LaPointe puts it.

The article doesn't really give us the magic formula to excel in marketing communications, but the challenge is the reason I chose this career in the first place. Anyway ... thought I'd share.

Article: "Why Does Marketing Have To Be So Damned Hard?"

Me ke aloha,
~d*

One of my career heros, Al Ries, author of 1996's Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends on It, wrote an article last year "Marketing Success Comes From the Right." This subject of common sense versus marketing sense came up again, as I'm making some visual identity determinations today.

I am famously right-brained--a visual thinker, fierce in writing, cowardly in person.  I much prefer an email or text message to a phone call. The challenge is that CEOs and managers are totally opposite.

Ries reminds us that business solutions are routinely left-brained: Improve the products. Cut the costs. Reduce the prices. Then hold employee meetings and talk about loyalty, enthusiasm and team building; but, that we right-brained folk really need to push our marketing sense through all the facts and statistics.

While it's illogical to present unproven ideas, I have to remind myself that my wild right-brained ideas sometimes serve a good purpose =P. Steve Jobs would agree. I thought I'd share the article in case you need encouragement for the day.

Article (excerpt): "Marketing Success Comes From the Right: Are You a Left Brainer or a Right Brainer?"

Me ke aloha,
~d*