publicreative lab » Design

Selling SEO

Gary — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:38:03 +0000

I have been catching up on some SEO articles in the past few weeks and I have really started to detest the whole marketing and sales of SEO. SEO is not something that should be forced, but should be natural, if a site is well built with clear naming conventions then it should be easy for the user to navigate as it should be for a spider to crawl. If a site is usable and accessible to a human then it is only natural that a robot will have a similar experience with your site.

It takes far more skill and knowledge to build good, useable websites than it does to make sure that keywords/links are forced into places where they are not comfortable.

Forcing SEO can also be a distraction for a designer, when SEO is sold it can result in the designer being forced to add elements to a page that that suddenly become out of context, this could result in an unhappy designer who’s time could be better spent making the site user friendly.

There is also an argument to suggest that fully optimising a site for search can affect the user’s experience due to additional content that could possibly deemed as confusing to the user, and also taking up space on the page that would have been better holding a more functional feature such as a search box itself.

For me it is simple, if you want to pay for SEO then pay for sponsored links, otherwise spend extra money on a well thought out site, built and designed by a team who build and design sites properly.

Typography in the times of communism

Isabell — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:56:50 +0000

Some beautiful 3d typography from Budapest – and conveniently letterpress has just been described as a current design trend…

Tilt-Shift and Lomography Photoshop actions

Joe — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:30:56 +0000

Tilt-Shift photography and Lomography have for years had their own obsessive enthusiasts, but both have enjoyed a recent surge into the relative mainstream; Lomography over the course of the past few years and Tilt-Shift photography over the past few months. Both essentially represent a conscious regression in photograph quality at odds with rocketing mega pixel values in contemporary digital SLRs, in favour of more a more fun and stylised photographic approach.

Lomography, best illustrated at the Lomo fan website lomography.com, uses cameras based on very cheap Russian cameras from the 80’s to produce over-saturated colours, off-kilter exposure and out of focus shots. Lomo cameras will set you back at least £40 however, so I developed an action for Photoshop CS3 and above which will mimic the style of the Holga Lomo camera which you can grab from here. The above photo is an example of the kind of effect you can get from using the action, and for further excellent actual Lomo photos visit this Flickr photostream (it’s not mine.).

Tilt-Shift Photography has been around since the 1970s but until recently was primarily used in architectural photography to control perspective, and in landscape photography to get an entire scene sharp. Recently however it has experienced a resurgence among photographers due to its ability to make a normal photo or video look like a miniature model. The cost of a tilt-shift lens is wildly prohibitive for most though, and people have taken to faking tilt-shift photos, see this Flickr group for some fairly good examples. I put together a Photoshop action to imitate the Tilt-Shift style which you can get here (CS3+ only), it works best on landscape orientated images between 600-2000 px, any bigger and you’ll probably have to crop it slightly; you can see the result of the action in the photo above. Also check out some great Tilt-Shift videos here and here.

Ps. for instructions on how to install and use a Photoshop action go here.