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  • Featured  / Web Design

    Why frameworks such as Bootstrap do not have a place in a professional web development workflow.


    A framework is a standardized set of concepts, practices and criteria for dealing with a common type of problem (Forsyth, 2014) and translated to the world of web development a framework often is defined as a "package made up of a structure of files and folders of standardized code (HTML, …

  • Featured  / Graphic Design  / Leadership  / Marketing  / Research

    A call for updated ethical frameworks accounting for today’s new methods of marketing and design.


    Today's efficient methods of marketing grounded in Neuroaesthetics and Neuromarketing making it practically impossible for consumers to make sound judgment demands new updated ethical frameworks with supporting strong legal systems. The digital revolution and social media have democratised marketing and to some extent equalised the playing field between billion-dollar brands and …

  • Featured  / Graphic Design  / Web Design

    What you know about the grid is probably wrong.


    A big part of my job as a creative director is to evaluate the work of designers and it never stops to surprise me how even some of the world’s largest agencies lacks fundamental knowledge of grid-based design. To understand “the grid” it is first important to recognise the different …


Leadership
A guide to better negotiations.

Posted On 15th May 2020

This short guide presents a basic framework for efficient negotiations and is primarily based on leading research by the Harvard Negotiation Project (HNP) [2018] from which many of today’s leading authors of negotiation literature has borrowed their best ideas. Employing this framework in your next negotiation will help you prepare an efficient strategy, bargaining more efficiently and to build profitable, long-term business relationships.


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Graphic Design
Incentivized research and the importance of paying participants fairly for their time

14th May 2020

This post discusses the importance of incentivizing research participants to enable large scale surveys which have become an important part of academic research enabling small research teams and even individual …


Graphic Design  / Leadership  / Web Design
Goal driven marketing planning; the key to effective marketing.

14th May 2020

Efficient marketing planning derives from short- and long-term organisational Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) communicated, not only to the constituents of administration and management but also to staff and external …


Leadership  / Marketing  / Web Design
Digital and traditional marketing, what’s the difference.

14th May 2020

This post gives a brief introduction to digital marketing, how it differs from traditional marketing and why digital marketers need to have a technical understanding web technologies. The digital marketing landscape …


Marketing  / Web Design
A crash course in app development methodologies.

14th May 2020

This post discusses the differences between responsive and web friendly websites, app development methodologies and everything you need to know about sub-domains and whether you should publish your mobile website …


Featured  / Web Design
Why frameworks such as Bootstrap do not have a place in a professional web development workflow.

13th May 2020

A framework is a standardized set of concepts, practices and criteria for dealing with a common type of problem (Forsyth, 2014) and translated to the world of web development a …


Leadership  / Marketing
PERT vs. CPM in Waterfall planning

13th May 2020

In this post I discuss two core Waterfall project management techniques: Critical Path Management (CPM) and PERT; the differences between these methods and why the CPM-method never should be …


Marketing
Keyword research, the core of marketing strategics.

13th May 2020

Keyword research is about recognising customer- and user intent for a product or service and the explicit words and phrases used by the target audience when they want to satisfy …


Graphic Design
Academic research in the creative industry

13th May 2020

Why research lead to better design. In my professional work, when planning projects, it is not unusual that the initial discovery phase many times can constitute as much as 80% of …


Marketing
A marketer’s cheat sheet to building great market strategies.

12th May 2020

When building market strategies I have come to develop a model with some basic steps that have proven to work well in my marketing work for multinational brands and campaigns, …


Graphic Design  / Leadership  / Marketing
How to use the Kanban for efficient project management

12th May 2020

In this post, I give a short introduction to using a s k Kanban for effective project management. Just a few years ago, most creative projects followed the s k "waterfall …


Graphic Design
A design strategy for creating logotypes.

12th May 2020

In this post, I briefly discuss my process for developing logotypes and brand marks in general and how I implemented this process in the work with creating the project logotype …


Leadership
Going from analogue to digital.

12th May 2020

Helping the world’s largest organizations in digital transformation processes McKinsey & Company (2018), arguably the world’s leading management consulting firm, have defined a system of six shifts for digital adoption …


Leadership  / Marketing
How to calculate the return-of-investment on marketing efforts

12th May 2020

While measuring the true value and effect of brand building activities can be challenging, doing so, nevertheless is vital for organizations who want to understand the ROI on their marketing …


Graphic Design  / Leadership  / Marketing  / Uncategorised  / Web Design
Why marketers need to learn how to read and write web-code

12th May 2020

To illustrate the importance of marketer being able to read and write web-code the website of a leading SEO-firm is assessed in this post. What I will show is that …


Marketing  / Web Design
Responsive or mobile friendly;
what’s the difference?

12th May 2020

A number of studies show that loading speed is one of the most critical elements of websites and web apps. Both Nielsen (2017) and KissMetrics (2017), as an example, state …


Marketing
Knowing your Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition Cost; the key to efficient marketing planning

11th May 2020

Central to a successful marketing strategy is two vital concepts which need to be comprehended by all digital marketers: the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). A Customer …


Graphic Design  / Marketing  / Web Design
Can audience adapted web-design be used to communicate more efficiently to cultural diverse website vistor segments?

11th May 2020

This post discusses how the perception of web design varies between cultures, the importance for designers in today's global market to ascertain the needs and preferences of their target audiences …


Featured  / Graphic Design  / Leadership  / Marketing  / Research
A call for updated ethical frameworks accounting for today’s new methods of marketing and design.

11th May 2020

Today's efficient methods of marketing grounded in Neuroaesthetics and Neuromarketing making it practically impossible for consumers to make sound judgment demands new updated ethical frameworks with supporting strong legal systems. The …


Featured  / Graphic Design  / Web Design
What you know about the grid is probably wrong.

10th May 2020

A big part of my job as a creative director is to evaluate the work of designers and it never stops to surprise me how even some of the world’s …


Leadership
Five imperatives of organisational change

10th May 2020

Organizational expert Jim Hemmerling has created a model for organizational change which brilliantly summarizes brick-stone books about management into five simple points which are easy to understand and implement. This …


Graphic Design
How the internet is changing the rules of typography and why designers need to adapt to this new paradigm in graphic design.

8th May 2020

One of the most important roles of graphic designers working on editorial projects such as books, articles and magazines have been to reflect the connotation of the text in the …


Graphic Design
It’s not the designer who decides the meaning of his work.

8th May 2020

Like most people, you probably recognise the portrait of Cuban Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara made by Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick in 1968 based on a photograph by Alberto Korda shot …


Graphic Design  / Marketing  / Web Design
Web personalization; what it is, how it works and to what price?

7th May 2020

This post discusses the concept of web personalisation, potential benefits of this methodology from a digital marketing standpoint and some of the implications of a personalised web from the perspectives …


Graphic Design
Why you should stop using the computer when generating ideas, and why you should not.

7th May 2020

Paul Rand (1914 – 1996) is one of our time's most influential graphic designers. You might not know him by his name but most certainly you have seen his work …


Graphic Design
You are your best CV

7th May 2020

After working with freelancers for almost 20 years as editor-in-chief and creative director, what I have come to learn to look for, is not the best writers, photographers, programmers or …


Graphic Design
What is culture and how does culture affect the perception of design?

7th May 2020

Culture is one of the most complex words in the English vocabulary which not only elaborate over time but also has numerous definitions. Culture also define how design is perceived …


Marketing
How to build a viral campaign

7th May 2020

'Going viral' has become the holy grail for marketers and business leaders. However, not all brands and campaigns are suitable for social media and going viral sometimes can become a …


Featured  / Graphic Design  / Marketing
How to use design to win voters in political campaigns

7th May 2020

In political marketing, microtargeting and personalization of campaign messages have become a well-established communication strategy. What I will show in this post, though, is that tailoring the visual design of …


Graphic Design  / Research
Research methodologies explained

7th May 2020

This post discusses the importance of research in a design process and some of the research methodologies which can be used to better understand how to create designs which are …


Graphic Design
Obey the giant

7th May 2020

By the early 1990s, vinyl stickers with a two-tone silhouette of a viciously looking supervillain-alike character turned up on pretty much every big city street corner in the US. The …


Web Design
Do graphic designers need to learn how to write code?

6th May 2020

There is a great debate among graphic designers about whether it is OK or not for graphic designers to use ready made website templates in their work and also whether …


Graphic Design
The moral dilemma of personalised design.

6th May 2020

Mark Zuckerberg's famously told his team that "a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa” (Zuniga Navajas, …


Featured  / Graphic Design
No fluff for fluff’s sake.

6th May 2020

Great web design is not about full-screen backgrounds and advanced animations. This post discusses why the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's "bare-bone" website represents one of the most progressive web-designs published …


Graphic Design  / Research
Cultural frameworks; the key to great design.

6th May 2020

A persons culture is established by factors such as ethnicity, geographic locale, social connections, life experiences and biology. This post presents the result of a performed analysis of five leading …


Graphic Design  / Marketing  / Web Design
Personas; the good, the bad and the ugly

6th May 2020

Personas is an important tool for audience research. In this article, I explain what personas are and common misconceptions in how to use them correctly. I also share a methodology …


Graphic Design  / Marketing
Using Pecha Kucha’s for better presentations

6th May 2020

Pecha Kucha is a format of presentation where you show 20 images which each advance automatically after 20 seconds which forces you to really understand the topic you present and …


Graphic Design
Contradictions of the academics

6th May 2020

In many academic institutions of the creative arts, web design still is considered as some secondary specialist discipline which there is no reason for introducing students to and students are …


Graphic Design  / Web Design
Test driven design; why it is important and how to do it.

5th May 2020

After 20 years working as a designer and ten years as a creative director I have learned the importance of testing every step of a design process and it never …


Graphic Design  / Marketing  / Web Design
Important considerations when creating design guidelines.

5th May 2020

Most larger agencies are great at creating inspiring design guidelines, the problem, however, is that guideline documents often do not account for the limited capacity of the teams who are …


Leadership
How digital technologies transform innovation

5th May 2020

The last 150 years has seen an astounding advancement of technological innovation. Just considering your grandparents. If they are in their 90's and grew up in the countryside, it is …


Featured  / Leadership
The importance of keeping a balanced innovation portfolio

4th May 2020

Every new ground-breaking product and service, in the end, will become obsolete, commoditized and outcompeted by new and better solutions, products and companies; maybe best epitomized by Kodak. Ones an …


Marketing  / Web Design
How important is a Google page-one listing for SEO?

3rd May 2020

How important is a page-one listing on Google and should a top SERP-position always be digital marketers main priority? Recent data from the US-leading SEO consulting firm Ignite Visibility (2017) …


Graphic Design
Smith’s model of design research.

1st May 2020

Hazel Smith's and Roger Dean's model of design research shows is the importance of having an open mind and to dare trying new directions in creative work, in research, in …

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