Copy-Driven Design
Copy-driven design. My most successful brochures (and ads) have been the ones in which I analyzed the company/product and then arranged the information in sequences and gave the art director thumbnails of what should go where, what attributes should be illustrated, etc. I give the art director a strong foundation to build on–and the result […]
Information vs. Information Technology
I’m reading a Substack page by Donald Jeffries. He says, “My old industry, Information Technology, is being taken over by H-1B Visa workers, mostly from India.” That’s something that everybody knows, but it made me realize that “information technology” has been reduced to “I.T.” in everybody’s vocabulary. The IT Department is devoting to […]
Macintosh blab
Macintosh Blab, 12-23-23 Part of my normal morning browsing schedule is to look at the forums at MacRumors.com, and I’m bemused at how dead the forums are. The excitement after the Halloween announcement of the new m3 chips has bloomed and faded, and now nobody has anything to say about anything. Maybe it’s due […]
My Superpower
Last year at one of the Startup Circle meetups, a woman asked me what my superpower was. She apparently was asking everybody the same question. I was taken aback by the question. Never considered it before. A search reveals that “What’s your superpower” is a standard surprise question in an employment interview. Normal HR […]
Chat-GPT-4
I signed up for Chat-GPT-4 ($20/month). Maybe I can figure out something to do with it. Maybe I can use it to write blog posts. GPT-4 is made by OpenAI, which also sells the DALL-E image generator. The publicity about GPT-4 led me to believe it integrated DALL-E, but, nope. I opened GPT-4 and uploaded NANO.9, […]
All marketing text is worthless–unless somebody reads it.
All marketing text is worthless unless somebody reads it. If you make it easy to read, they will read it. I know, it sounds corny. All humans and search engines prefer easy-to-read, easy-to-understand text. The readability of text has nothing to do with the complexity or seriousness of the subject. Making it easier to read […]
Battling Elementor
Today I’m battling Elementor, the website builder overlay for WordPress. I need to fix my problem with headers. I have two different angles of attack to try. Elementor is still telling me that page so-and-so’s header is conflicting with a previously assigned header, HeaderXYZ, but that header has long since been deleted and extirpated. I […]
June 9, 2023
A local Santa Barbara web design shop asked me for a bid on a copywriting project. I looked at their site to see what they had to say about copywriting: not much, except that they were extremely good at it, just like they are extremely good at everything else. According to them. I’ve examined the […]
June 1, 2023
First thing every morning, I go to my Google Analytics account to see which pages on my site were visited yesterday. Today I saw that a visitor to colin.org looked at my recruitment brochure for Brooks Institute of Photography, a now long-gone outfit. It was another one of my “first person” brochures. I interviewed the […]
I made a flyer for an outfit called Keep Your Keys.
I answered a CraigsList ad asking for “flyer modification.” I met John Shaver at a coffee shop in Goleta. He said he had a lot of responses to his ad but I was the only one who was truly local to Santa Barbara. He showed me his existing flyer (right). He wanted a better one.The […]