#now if only people could learn to actually keep the medium in mind when analysing and theorizing and writing meta

[nellasbookplanet]

Today I’m going absolutely bonkers thinking about stories where the medium itself becomes so interwoven with the narrative that the two are inseparable and the story borderline unadaptable into other formats.

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Portal and listening to the Malevolent podcast for perhaps the third time, and as any slightly obsessive fan who desperately wishes for more when I run out of story I find myself thinking ‘man someone should adapt this into a movie/tv show/novel/etc’. And then I stop and think, ‘wait a minute, how?’

How could you possibly adapt the puzzle aspect of Portal into anything other than a game? Sure you could make some cool action sequences out of it, but that would get old quick, and you never get any chance to solve the puzzles yourself. And how could you adapt it without them, when the tests are a deeply intrinsic part of the narrative? You would end up with a vastly different story.

And Malevolent. Malevolent! Rarely have I experienced a story that so masterfully not only gets around the limitations of its medium, but uses them to their full advantage. How do you explain your lead constantly speaking out loud to themself (since the dialogue-only format doesn’t allow for internal monologue)? Why, put a possessing entity into their head, so that they’re literally never without a conversational partner! How do you fit visual descriptors into the story, since characters explaining their surroundings out loud would be weird? Make one of them blind and the one possessing him his seeing-eye entity, of course!

How could you possibly adapt any of that into, say, a movie? Having the entity describe visuals the viewer can already see would be distracting, but having him not do it would break suspension of disbelief because why is Arthur not constantly bumping into things? Of course, you could remove the blindness, but aside from being a shitty thing to do it would also remove the delicate balance of power between him and the entity that forces the two to co-operate.

I’m thinking about these two stories especially because it’s where my obsession lies right now, but there are lots of examples of similarly interwoven narratives and medium. Think of epistolary books, webcomics with animated images and music, webnovels so adapted for a digital format with links and gifs and layout that actually printing them would take away from the experience (everyone go read What Football Will Look Like in the Future and An Unauthorised Fan Treatise right now, you can thank me later), or other podcasts that give their narrator an intrinsic reason to speak and describe everything aloud, such as The Magnus Archives and The Mistholme Museum (which I need to catch up with, by the way). It drives me insane! The medium is the message!

[ailuronymy]

Book Club: Tallstar’s Revenge, chpt. 10-18 overview.

Human voices as heard by cats, courtesy of two experts in the field of ailurolinguistics:

"ghghtaa'ppgthannneetltssssa!” - S. 

“Nnghavva'thalpssasann!” - K.

This week we’re discussing this chapter through these nine questions. Please feel welcome to do the same and @ailuronymy + use the tag #ailuronymy writing challenge. Happy reading and I’m looking forward to seeing your feelings about this book.

1. First impressions? 

K. Everyone has many important discussions, that actually hold zero weight at all. Many things happen for absolutely no reason. I'm in pain.

S. REAL.

2. How did you feel reading this section?

S. Emotionally conflicted. There's always some frustration, but there were also moments of genuine joy, which was a very welcome surprise.

K. But for real: pleased to see some genuine growth and goodness from my favourite characters, but so upset at the bad directions taken.

3. What chapter did you find most interesting/moving/effective, and why?

S. I keep forgetting to mark things out by chapter in my notes, but I feel like the time Tallpaw spends with Reena really brought me the most pleasure to read.

K. I think I got the most out of the first half of Chapter Twelve, the Gathering. I loved the back-to-back of Heatherstar making good choices, the new warrior trio jumping around and being sweet, and Dawnstripe Finally Giving Us Some Good Fucking Advice. K. Honorary shout-out to Tallpaw finally telling his dad off in Chapter Eleven though.

S. YES. 

4. What chapter did you find least interesting/effective/most frustrating, and why?

S. Most frustrating is absolutely the aftermath of both Brackenwing's death and later Sandgorse's. I was not coping with how stupid and unreasonable everyone was being, but in a way that felt entirely manufactured, and not actual grief.

K. Chapter Eighteen pissed me off to see Tallpaw be taken in such a tangent. Like, everyone else I can kind of ignore because I wasn't expecting Windclan to be very good about any of it since Erin's doing her bullshit.  K. But Tallpaw.... I was hoping Tallpaw would be better.

5. Is there a passage that stuck in your mind–for good, or not-so-good reasons? What is it, and why did it stand out? Try breaking it down and analysing what this passage does and how.

S. I really loved Dawnstripe's conversation with Tallpaw. That stood out to me as basically unique in Erin Hunter's writing so far, especially in this book.

K. “Tallpaw stiffened. Did Sandgorse think he’d change his mind about becoming a moor runner now that he’d been underground?” K. I loved seeing him just finally Snap. K. Not to mention the very real young gay feeling of having that dread in your stomach, of going "Oh no, am I going to have to keep this up?"

6. Have your feelings changed towards any character in this next section? What caused this change?

K. Sandgorse lost all rights! K. Can't believe I almost liked him for a second, the hope for an okay dad got me there.

S. It’s okay. I was too jaded to be taken in, but your optimism isn't a weakness. S. I hate their relationship and I Love that Sandgorse died but God I Hate Tallpaw's reaction to that so much. It's so jarring and feels way off from reality.

K. Also: I would die for Doespring/Stagleap/Ryestalk, I adore them so much. Same with Reena, she can stay.

S. For me, the biggest change is that I'm losing a lot of affection and attachment to Tallpaw the longer he keeps up this Sandgorse whinge. Like, I was ecstatic when Sandgorse died, but now that Tallpaw's only personality trait is being miserable about Sandgorse, it's really like he never left and I hate that passionately. 

7. How do you feel about pacing in the book so far? Is the story moving too fast, too slow, just right? Why do you feel this way?

S. Way too slow.

K. The pacing is dry and slow and sad. So much of what's happened so far could be condensed and written so much better.

S. You could cut out a solid half of what's written and it'd be a better story. It's all fat right now, where it could be lean and tasty, medium-rare spiced narrative.

8. How do you feel about the visitors in this section? Is it a new element you really like, or does it feel out of place? Share your thoughts on this new development!

K.  From the notes: Okay, I don’t like what’s happening with the visitors and I don’t think they should even be here, but I do think that they seem like fun little people. Like for all intents and purposes the visitors should not exist, but boy am I always glad to see characters I don't hate!

S. Oh, that's so interesting! I actually feel quite positively to the idea of Windclan's regular visitors, and it's definitely something in my canon. I don't like any of how canon's handling it (surprise, surprise) but I like that this idea has been broached, and it feels entirely right to me that Windclan is the one to do it.

K. I don't disagree with you there, I think for me it's just frustrating seeing how the Erins are introducing and handling it that's bugged me. Like, Windclan is on the outskirts of everything and it makes total sense that they'd be much more likely to run into like... farmcats and the like more than other clans. That doesn't bug me. It's just like... literally everything about how they've been set up and how secretive things are and blah blah blah that makes me lose it a little. 

S. Totally. I’m with you. 

9. If you could change one significant moment in this section–a piece of dialogue, an event, a bit of world-building–what would you want to change, and what do you think would be the ramifications of that for the rest of the story?

K. THE CLAN NEEDS TO STEP UP FOR TALLPAW, END OF STORY K. But yeah no, there's lots of shit that needs fixing but DAMN if the clan doesn't need to stand up for Tallpaw and defend and support him. Boy takes SO much blame and he deserves none of it.

S. I honestly wonder how much difference there would be if Palebird had more support/Brackenwing half-adopted Tallpaw (you know, the way queens are said to co-raise kittens but never do). Because this boy is so unloved and his self-esteem comes from feeling totally unwanted and undervalued, so he clamours for Sandgorse's approval because he doesn't get it from Palebird, but Sandgorse rejects him and makes it worse, so Tallpaw is stuck really craving validation and not really having any outlet to develop his sense of self or confidence in his own value and abilities. Obviously Dawnstripe is doing her best, but that's not a substitute for parental neglect and abuse.

K. Dawnstripe: Look at him! You fucked him up, is what you did. He has anxiety!

Final notes:

S. I knew Sandgorse was going to die because it was mentioned in some of the pages I looked at for the story I'm writing. And I thought he was going to be murdered by Sparrow, because that's how all the wikis talked about it.  S. So when he died of his own idiot hubris, I was like, "wait what" and kept waiting for it to be revealed that Sparrow killed him in the tunnel and then made it collapse to cover that up. S. So I thought it was going to be a story of Tallpaw Solves A Murder No-one Will Believe Was Committed. And that... didn't happen. He just got shitty and hateful. K. Tbh that would make more sense and also be leagues cooler than. Any of this S. Yeah! I thought it would be kind of dope and then Talltail would confront Sparrow and be like, "you're not worth it," and be the bigger man or whatever, that whole thing, learn the meaning of friendship or whatever, and go home.   S. Instead! Sparrow didn't do it, so now Tallpaw's just a wreck out of control lashing out at everyone and decides to hunt down someone to kill them for not dying and/or saving his outrageously shitty dad. S. To me, a much more likely story is Tallpaw experiencing guilt because he's relieved that Sandgorse's gone and he's like, 'oh my god I'm a bad person I shouldn't want my dad to be gone.' Like that's a trauma narrative that people who've, you know, experienced significant abuse can actually relate to. K. Not to mention that like. Before Sandgorse dies, his one action is to blame his son for being awful at everything and to pretty much disown him.  K. But YEAH, lets feel Sad for That Guy

K. [Shrewpaw] was bad before and frankly I am beyond tired with him now. S. He has no real narrative purpose, is what peeves me. I know that's a bit highbrow for an Erin Hunter story, but like. You should be thinking about function in a story, especially one for children, because in children's lit., you don't really have the space for excess. You should keep the story trim and clean. S. Giving Erin Hunter more pages, like they do in these super editions, enables their worst habits, which is the fact I don't think they consider function like ever. So you have all this... flabby, pointless dialogue that doesn't move anything forward or reveal any new characterisation.

K. Oh, some other choice notes from the Gathering: K. Stagleap: Hey bro, come see this hot Riverclan babe with me.  Tallpaw, gay: Uhh I’m very interested in the announcements, actually, K. Dawnstripe accidentally playing wingman for her apprentice is coincidentally very funny. “Tallpaw didn’t like the way the young tom was eyeing him—like a hunter assessing prey.” Hmmmmm Okay Buddy, S. I was genuinely so charmed by Stagleap's crush on Shimmerpelt. That felt real and true and I loved it. The rest of the gathering let me down a lot, but like. Erin Hunter gatherings always do. They don't know how to let a scene breathe. K. Stagleap, Ryestalk, and Doespring are so charming. I love when they come onscreen. They inject a lot of cute moments into a very dour book. K. Gatherings are my favourite in concept so I always get SO excited to read them. But they almost always suck.  S. It's wild to me that Erin Hunter is never like, "maybe fun is fun." I do resent it. S. I love the organised chaos of a gathering, and how different it is to literally every other part of warrior life. It's something that I actively have to resist putting in stories, because I always want to do it even when it adds nothing to what I'm telling. It's just so fun to write and to read. S. Literally one of my notes is just "Ahh!!! A Gathering! Finally!" K. Me too!! Mine was "GATHERING TIME, GATHERING TIME, my favourite part of any book!" S. [dabbing frantically because cats are going to hang out under a full moon] K. Like if you were going to let a scene have its moment and play it out, it would be the Gathering. Like I'd love for the announcements to happen and then they all just mingle and enjoy themselves until the moon clouds over. Instead of Announcements, Moon Over, Scene Done, Go Home.  S. Gathering speedrun: if you clip through the deputy, you can skip the personal connection and go right to the leaving while being kind of bored and miserable.

S. [after Sandgorse’s suggestion of hiding from invaders in the tunnels or using them to run away] why. [Raiders are] literally not going to be like, “oh I guess Windclan’s not here and we should go home,” they’ll be like, “great Windclan’s not here, this IS our new home.” Sandgorse talks a big game about not being a coward, but the tunnellers’ solutions are literally only “just hide in a hole” or “run away.” S. I got so mad about that. The tunnellers being like, "we were doing important tunnel business to protect the clan, we could be here to protect the clan," and they get chewed out for that and Sandgorse has the brass balls to be like, "well our tunnels will save lives." S. I'm like, will they? S. Or will you die in one in a pathetic final display of defiant idiot masculinity?

S. That said, something that did chatter my suspension of disbelief like cheap glass: the visitors' names. K. They’re bad.  S. Algernon???? K. ALGERNON K.  ALGIE??? S. "They were named by twolegs" please say psyche S.  I just... cannot believe in a world where a cat hears some word humans repeat at them a lot, and goes, "that's my name, I will introduce myself to other cats using this sound." Instead of like... getting a name from other cats, or picking a name for themselves. Especially if the cat doesn't live with those humans. S. It's more real to me for a cat to be like "oh yeah that's what the humans think my name is, they don't speak cat very well but they're trying," than being like, "I will take that garbled junk as my name." K. I love that so much better. S. I find it so funny that cats would hear human languages basically like cthulhu speech, and be with a friend like, [listens] Human in the garden: ghghtaa'ppgthannneetltssssa! Cat: "hold on, my person is calling, I need to check on them." Cat, returns: "It's fine, they forgot where the door was so I showed them. What were you saying?" K.  Cat: "Are you good?? Do you need assistance?" Human: Nnghavva'thalpssasann! Cat: "Ohh, you want pets. Here, I can give you some chin rubs. You like those? God, you're so stupid and I love that about you." S. Cat: "my humans are so smart, they know about seven words, kind of." S. Cat: "I call that one 'Very Tall Getter of Things From the Shelf' and I call that one 'Cuddles Me Warmly.'"

[ophelialmx]

Theory/Conjecture on Caleb’s ‘Other Book’

Alternative title: Caleb and his Keen but Imperfect Memory

This is a bit long. Ordinarily I do believe in brevity, but this is more of a discussion than a pitch. This is about what Caleb uses his second book for, and where it came from.

I have read people suggesting that Caleb’s ‘other book’ is used for journaling, and I’m not staying from that much. My thought is that it is more for record-keeping of sorts. What if he uses it to record the tiny details which his photographic memory can hold onto for only a few weeks before that information is lost forever. It’s a weird facet to having a ‘keen mind’, and an element of the feat which is only occasionally referenced: an incredible amount of information gets recorded – but after a while, it does disappear.

An aspect to Caleb that was discussed a lot early on, but has taken a back seat, is how much time he has lost, how much memory he does not have. On a personal note, this is actually one of the various reasons found myself so sucked into Caleb as a character. While I have not lost over a decade to amnesia and mental illness – it’s honestly not far off. When Nott said that before the Mighty Nein she and Caleb were not really ‘living’, I couldn’t help but think… yeah but that was a time in which he developed a new relationship (albeit shakily), survived around other people, and was able to track time and retain memories. That ticks a lot of boxes that haven’t always been ticked for him, and which most people take for granted.

When you’ve lost memory, at least in my experience, you learn not to do that. You think about the thoughts and memories that you will lose, and I think that would be even more the case for someone like Caleb who is good at puzzles and more or less wants to know everything.

It makes sense to me that Caleb would be constantly aware of the limitations of his memory, and know that a lot of his recollection is only temporary. Thus, when it comes to a situation he doesn’t necessarily understand in its entirety, he experiences something he does not yet know how to analyse, or he suspects there are details he will need to be able to recollect in the future, it makes sense to me that he would record these memories. He knows that, in order to retain information over the medium to long term, he needs to record and reabsorb it later. And he would know that he can put it right back in his brain by re-reading it.

So I think it would make a lot of sense for him to have a book he carries on him, mundane but perhaps for some kind of protection magic (it is, after all, hardy enough for Nott to shoot when they do ‘Modern Literature’). It makes sense that he might consider this more personal than his spellbook (which he shared with Professor Waccoh to avoid being pressed for information on his Second Book). This is especially true given his difficulty in social situations, and the weight he places upon the precise words that other people use.

At no time in the campaign have they needed to stop and check when certain information was discovered, to see if it is within the time frame for Caleb’s perfect memory. Beau had a copy of Avantika’s cypher, and presumably Caleb did too, but there has never been an explicit explanation as to where to keeps it. Nor has there been an explanation of where he might have recorded the teleportation circle runes, and presumably he recorded some of the library information regarding time magic and the Cerberus Assembly somewhere. Liam has that stuff written down, and I don’t think Caleb would leave it up to his imperfect extended memory to keep track of that after thirty days have passed.

And, as for a thought/conjecture on where it came from:

Caleb describes the book early on as a ‘family heirloom’. He mainly says that to brush off questions.

Now, I started writing CR fanfic entirely due to my fascination with the Soltryce Academy/Ikithon period of time in Caleb’s life, and in particular the amount of fondness and defensiveness with which Caleb describes the time in which he and his friends were being psychologically programmed into becoming executioners.

I think it would entirely make sense for this book to be a relic not from his blood family, but from his time studying, isolated with Ikithon, Astrid, Eodwulf, and the unnamed traitors they killed. I think it would make sense for Master Trent Ikithon to gift his extremely talented favourite student an item that could so easily and so effectively improve his power and knowledge base in the long term.

And I can imagine Caleb being unwilling to let that go, particularly if it does, after all, carry a protection charm of some sort. That’s knowledge, safely stored, and some of it is knowledge he would have a hard time getting back once it is lost.

(There is more on this I have yet to articulate, but here is also my earlier post on Caleb being the favourite… https://ophelialmx.tumblr.com/post/184143677558/theory-caleb-then-bren-was-singled-out-for)

[fantroll-purgatory]

Ellara Aphros

@ghostlyshoes

Yeah, I know for now she looks a tad like a certain canon character we know. Though she’s a trollsona and somewhat based off me anyway. I’m open to changes in design you might want to put forward though! (Note: the one on the far left was created by a friend for me!)

Hmmm… I might want to play with this idea of her looking like Vriska a little bit, actually. It’s very uncommon for trolls to share signs, which means they’re very closely related if they DO share a common sign. So I think… Usually I don’t jump the gun on talking about themes and ideas like this all the way at the beginning, but I think I want her ancestor to be at least related to Mindfang. Maybe her ancestor was one of Mindfang’s Hypothetical on-planet descendants… 

I want to do this connection link if only because of her interest in the zodiac, interest in history, interest in destiny, stuff like that. 

Planet: Alternia

Name: Ellara Aphros ‘Ellara’ is close to ‘Helena/Helen’ which means ‘bright shining light’ or Torch. It may have connections to ‘Helios’ the Greek sun God in lexicographical meaning. ‘Aphros’ comes from ‘Aphrodite’ Venus’s Roman counterpart. It also links to both ‘Phosphorous’ (A Chemical element which is highly reactive and glows with a bright white light, ‘phosphorescent’ meaning to glow, particularly in the Dark which could also relate to her god-tier Sylph of Light which means ‘Creator of Light’. And the word ‘Amp’ a unit of electric current.

Eilidh might be a better option than Ellara, because it is the Gaelic version of the name Helen. 

Aphros might be good, though the amp thing doesn’t feel particularly related to her name or her theme… And she’s not particularly focused on beauty, so referencing Aphrodite might not be the best option? Maybe Vernal instead. Vernal references the Vernal Equinox, which is the solar position from which the Zodiac was determined. 

Eilidh Vernal. 

Trolltag: ghostlyCensurer, predeterminedSpectre [GC, PS]

‘ghostlyCensurer’ refers to her being the ‘watcher’ from far afield. Unspotted and unnoticed by most everyone. As well as her silent analysis on the suburb which she lives above of. ‘preterminedSpectre’ is pretty similar. ‘Predetermined’ In her need to know the future and 

extrasolarObserver instead, maybe? Extrasolar implies a far distance away but also references her light theme, and Observer links back to the watcher thing but just… sounds better with extrasolar than Censurer does. Oooooh or extrasolarAugur to reference her interest in things like tarot… 

Typing Quirk: Replaces ‘E’ with ‘3’ (Reference to her lusus, who is a Cerberus so three heads) Uses the ‘V●ᴥ●V’ Dog Puns wherever possible Punctuation in packs of three (!!!, ???, …) (Especially when excited about a certain topic)

I think the 3 could still work with the Papillon mom because 3 looks like a butterfly’s wing. 

Blood Colour: Cerulean

Symbol: True Scorpio (Originally ‘Venus’) (Venus can also mean ‘Morning Star’ (connected to the meaning of Lucifer, which again connects to the light theme (light bearer) and well as her Cerberus lusus))

Lusus: Corgiberus (The Pack-Mind) Slightly air-headed but rather friendly. Can be intimidating due to her massive size and loud barking noises. The closer trolls come to approaching the hive the louder it starts barking. It can reach levels that deafen the odd rust or brown blood.

Alternate (this one might keep with the Cerulean colour more) Butterbark A giant ‘Papillion’ or butterfly dog. It has it’s ears set as it’s wings and three giant compound eyes, two in the standard place at the side and one acting as a ‘third eye’ in the centre. It’s very friendly despite its oddly terrifying features. (Butterflies are thought to be spirits of the dead watching over you in many cultures and circles. This links back to her ‘ghostly’ and ‘spectre’ trolltags)

I like the Papillon idea a lot better! Butterbark… Barkflymom… I like the idea of this cute papillon dog with earwings that is also a little bit armored. Friendly, cute, a pal. Butterflies are also often references to the Impact of the past and also the potentiality of the future, so I think this adds some additional layers to her theme. 

Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Strife Specibus: Stationarykind (Using several types of stationary, pens, pencils, rulers etc. Although she is generally less skilled at using each one of them, it’s also what she uses in order to note down a lot of her findings and obviously more practical than tossing a book.)

I actually like the idea of her using Tarotkind. She pulls a combination of cards and has to utilize the attack that is produced by that combination. Example: Say she pulls a two of swords, a two of wands, and the magician: she’d have access to a 2x1 sword, both sides of which can function as a magical focus. But if she pulled the hermit, the fool, and a three of cups, she might summon three old banged up juggling cups. 

Fetch Modus: Zodiackind Yep all 48 signs. She builds up association between objects and what she uses to read people/the future and they go into 1 of 48 different ‘sections’. Although, she has to work out which section the object has actually gone into herself.

You should have this visually look a bit like a constellation map and each of the items is a “star” in a constellation. She has to map out the entire constellation and then pick out the appropriate star corresponding to the item she wants to retrieve. 

Powers: None (As typical for most highbloods)

She gets Blueblood Psychic Resistance, at least. 

Title: Sylph of Light

(Explanation for this will be lower down and referenced in her personality/interests) 

I actually have to protest that she’s a Seer of Light. A passive observer, someone who utilizes mediums through which to obtain and analyze information. Someone who searches for information, cares deeply about collecting and understanding it… But it would also push her to learn how to engage with other people, because passive classes are all about the good of the group.

Land: Land of Blockades and Gleam (LOBAG)

Land of Meteor and Twinkle. I wanted to give her a LOMAT acronym to reference Vriska as well. It could be a landscape covered in observatories, with the meteors circling the planet also metaphorically referencing her distance from others. AND meteors give off light. Fun.

Denizen: Paris (Paris kidnapped Helen of Troy, which is where the route of her name comes from, it makes sense that they would be a challenge for her.)

Here might be where you use the name Aphrodite instead. An image-focused deity who is somewhat motherly… It was Aphrodite’s fault that Paris kidnapped Helen of Troy, so it feels more appropriate to use a deity.

Dream Moon: Prospit

Hive Location: A hill overlooking a suburb, her hive being mostly apart from any others. It has a large window which has a view of the town in almost it’s entirety. She’s looking upon the lives of others without interacting with them. It’s fit with a telescope which can be used to look at the stars and planets above. Or sometimes ca be used to look across various sections of the planet (but not too far.) She finds herself analyzing (or over analyzing) these things.

Hive: Generally, a large mess; mostly consisting of various half written essays and complaints, half read books and other materials strewn across floors and desks. Many plush animals also lay around the hive, a lot of them rather pristine (she uses them as kind of a comfort, rather than to demonstrate anything). Doesn’t stop her from losing her a lot of her supplies, she’s really good at loosing things.

Personality/Backstory/Interests: Ellara has spent most of her time observing people and observing the lives of others through her own eyes rather than interfering with them or making them better in any way. She’s a hermit with an interest in people but with no actual friends. She generally considers herself a critic and sometimes finds herself critiquing several types of literature across troll history. She’s fond of finding metaphors within them, even if they make little sense or are just kind of esoteric. She has a hard time completing everything she intends to or sets out to do, however, either due to her fear of failure, lack of commitment or general sense of laziness.

Although her main issue perhaps that she is too pushy and critical and this leads her to come off as unwelcoming, defensive and antagonistic. Since she’s not all that good at getting on with people, mostly due to her isolation and common state of introspection (even if it leads to her frequently doubting herself). She finds it hard to tell when her criticism is welcome or needed and gets herself worked up when she dosen’t really need to. She’s really quick to think of the worst possible outcome to a situation and isn’t afraid to remind people of it. She states she would rather be ‘right or pleasantly surprised’ which gives her an air of arrogance. She’ll rather plan out her steps into the unknown and gather the knowledge she needs before attempting anything, she’s very wrapped up in analysing the possibilities of the future and the past. Whether this be through scientifically trying to analyse trends or through using tarot cards and analysing star placements. Although she has been known to make the occasional impulsive decision, normally leading to bad consequences.

I do like the idea of this character being an outside watcher. I want to push that a little bit by having her fascinated with people. Enjoying researching their histories and who might be related to them and all that. Gathering useful data that she can then interpret through the lens of her zodiac signs or tarot cards. Create a kind of fascination with ancestors in general. Knowing their histories and how people are likely to mirror those lives…  

And I think you should have her be just a little interested in pirates. Maybe not interested in sailing or combating herself, but maybe have her be interested in the history of them, the strategies they employed, and the superstitions they believed in. 

In fact, having her be superstitious in general may be a good idea? 

If you want her to be a prospit player, you can’t have her decisions be Too analytical or rational. I think you should make her have just a sort of bet-on-it feeling with regards to fate and destiny and the future-seeing objects and predictors she uses. She can be ultimately worried about the decisions she’s making, but have her fall back on these interests and habits instead of Thorough Thought. 

And now for design!:

Oof my tablet started throwing a fit halfway through this so it’s not my best work, but here we go! 

Horns: We never see horns that are different heights and it was a little too obvious that her horn was just Vriska’s horn with a bit erased. So I gave her some horns that look like butterfly wings and antennae. 

Hair: Just a few more fun flips for effect. 

Glasses/eyes: I edited them so that there was a jeweler’s magnifying glass over her one eye, along with a light attachment. I thought it was a good way to reference her wanting to analyze things closer. I also edited her makeup to be a bit less thick, got rid of the eyebrows, and edited her left pupil to be shaped a bit like a butterfly. I wanted to create 3 pupils to keep with the three concept. 

Mouth: I thicked the lips a little and added some fangs. 

Scarf: I wanted to create some visual difference between her jacket and Vriska, so the best way to do that for me was… make a scarf. Like the kind fortune tellers wear in movies, with the tassels. 

Pants/Shoes: I redid them entirely, mostly because everything looked a bit clunky and proportionally off? I wanted to keep the kind of platform shoes, though, so I did that. I also added some butterfly wings to her shoes in white. 

Thanks for sharing her!

-CD

[golshxd-blog]

  Blame Tony Northrup for the dire thought.

His (great) recent video analysing the downfall of so many camera / lens manufacturers leaves very little to the imagination. Going down, going down, now.

What happened to the digital dream? It came true. You’re looking at it.

    Digital opened up avenues for exploration. And some adventurous manufacturers explored. Some actually brought really interesting ideas to the market. Sigma, Sony and Ricoh come to mind.

But innovation is diamond shaped and realist consolidation always follows creative divergence. And norm got the better of inventiveness. In photography, of all industries.

Much as in the automotive sector (check out Adrian’s post comparing the two worlds) those interesting ideas came packaged in weird and “wonderful” shapes that strayed too far from convention for their own good. When electric cars became the new Eldorado, most models introduced were so ugly it took a good look at a politician’s agenda to bring the design fiasco back into perspective. The same thing happened to some oddly shaped cameras (which is kinda worrying for the Zeiss ZX1, by the way).

And their performance priorities, at odds with rapidly coalescing market consensus, hit the final nail for them.

    Because, yes, somehow, in a art-based industry, performance became the fulcrum on which success and undoing eventually hinged.

For what it’s worth, the photographs on this page were made using a second-hand Hasselblad camera that has the overall speed of fingernail growth (but is utterly brilliant in areas that actually relate to picture making). And a 45mm lens that’s not that optically fast either, come to think of it. I hope that doesn’t put anyone off reading the rest. Because now comes the link to photography-as-Art. And to mathematics, one of the ultimate artforms. And to farming in China, as a free bonus, because why not?

    Performance-based marketing led every manufacturer with a death wish to basically pay huge lumps of money to shout out to a message-saturated audience : “Hey, we are introducing a camera that’s exactly the same as all the others on the market”. Because performance is so closely tied to internal components, they were basically shouting “Hey, Sony inside”, just like everyone else. And guess who became quite good at having Sony components inside? And who’s doing rather well in today’s deflating pudding of a market?

The irony, of course, is that so much of this performance (and more) can be achieved through the brute force computational photography abilities of the devices in our pockets. Oh, worry not, this is still in its infancy. It’s not quite there yet. It’s far, far, far, more convenient, but only 50% of the way there, when it comes to IQ. Give it a few years, though, and you may expect profuse, phone-induced, poultry roosting. Reaping what you sow, I guess?

    Performance-base appreciation of gear has had far more interesting consequences than winner-takes-all market dynamics can capture, however.

The ever indispensable Ming Thein recently re-posted an article describing the influence of sensor format on rendering. Every photographer in the world interested in photography as a creative pursuit (yes, all 28 of us) should read this 10 times, 100 times. As many times as it takes to fully grasp the implication of what Ming is writing.

Many things and, most important of all, that all formats are interesting and useful for different things, which is distinctly at odds with what those hideous machine tests – spewing out metrics that have more in common with car radios than photographs – jabber on and on about. A pox upon both your houses, lab tests and tech metrics

    It’s not just photography, you know. Variety matters. Everywhere.

In China (and probably elsewhere) farmers are pollinating their trees manually because all the bees have been killed by intensive practises. That fact is similar to Tony’s Northrup excellent roundup of the photo market. It’s just a warning of things to come if we continue to kill off diversity.

I’ll miss fanboys. At least they root for different brands for very human reasons, much like football players supports different clubs. Nothing is worse than the single-metric approach that is performance-based evaluation of cameras.

    Robert May, an Australian born scientist, made great contributions to theoretical ecology, putting into simple maths a model of the evolution in time of the number of existing species or individuals in a species. Very simple maths. Stuff most 10 year olds could do on a calculator.

In this work, the “richness” of one generation is linked to that of the previous via an equation containing both a damping factor (simulating competition for limited resources, for instance) and a fertility constant (which he called lambda) that plays a spectacular role:

Low values of lambda create worlds in which a very small number of species co-exists in balance. The word balance may be too positively connoted for my purpose. Stasis, immobilism may be better suited. Things never change. And that’s it.

High values of lambda lead to chaos. Utter randomness. Mankind disappears, three-eyed ravens take its place. Until next week.

Goldilocks values of lambda lead to rich, complex systems, such as our planet and universe today. Zillions of species living together, disappearing, appearing, reappearing, in a constantly evolving world for as long as there’s sufficient energy pouring in.

In that sort of world, that most controversial of scientific phenomena becomes possible and useful: emergence. ie, the apparition of a mechanism that is not contingent on any preceding mechanisms or factors (cue Zarathustra).

    Chaos Theory pioneer Mitchell Feingenbaum studied those equations, and others found everywhere in nature, and showed that a thriving, diverse world such as the one we are blessed to live in today walks a very narrow path between crystallized stagnation and nonsensical randomness. Move the constant too far to one side or to the other and it’s goodbye forever. Irreversibly so.

In the photo world, it’s not hard to imagine what chaos could look like. Just look at the grips and rear backs of most cameras today. Not totally chaotic, but, if you’ve used a 30 year-old film camera more than 2 seconds, you can see where I’m going with the analogy.

Emergence can be illustrated by the mirrorless revolution. Sony brought it to the mass market, but the concept emerged seemingly from nowhere and received huge traction, in spite of what Ricoh are now saying. No diversity, no mirrorless emergence. We’d all still be slapping slabs of glass about and perfecting damping techniques, whether we liked it or not.

As for stagnation, I invite you to view Tony’s conclusions and extrapolate a few years.

    So, what’s the lambda constant of photography?

It seems to me that 30 years ago, we were shooting perfectly nice cameras and looking at 6×4 prints that ended up in shoe boxes. Today, we’re shooting cameras that are often perfectly nice, looking at 6×4 images on our screens that end up inside the silicon shoe boxes of cloud servers. What’s changed is mainly that we make more. Many, many, more.

Hmmm … full circle status quo?

    And you can count on today’s incumbents to try their darndest to keep brand variety at the lowest possible setting, with the help of flaccid specialised media. We need variety.

To me, we now live in that strange old world where cameras used day-in-day-out, by people who get paid 10 large for a print, are deemed unfit for amateurs, based on a machine-led evaluation, because of a metric so utterly unrelated to creativity that it actually seems alien: speed. Screw speed!

But don’t! That’s just my bias speaking. What matters is variety.

For some, speed is both important and enabling. For others it’s fast glass. For others it’s slow, light glass. For others it’s sharp glass. For others it’s old, characterful glass. For others still, it’s tone subtlety. For others: robustness, weight, viewfinder clarity, WYSIWYGness, tactile pleasure, evocative power, price, size, noise … and any combination of a slew of other criteria that are completely unrelated to the currently dominant market forces but totally in line with personal desires, creativity and the etymological meaning of art: making personal stuff.

Art is the expression of human feelings and ideas through making stuff. By its very definition, art is exclusively about diversity. How gear is built, reviewed, and purchased should mirror this at all times.

If photography was art, surely we’d see diversity grow, not dwindle, right?

    So, what if …

We gave performance-based marketing the stern kick-in-the-nuts it so rightfully deserves for destroying photographic biodiversity? And thought twice before buying the next camera that comes along doing more than the current one rather than doing different or better? (No, higher fps isn’t inherently better, neither are higher ISO or higher AF pixel counts. These are just succubi of that evil speed divinity.)

Acknowledged that not only is photography art, it’s one of the most beautiful forms of art. One that makes technique so much easier to learn than most others that anyone can express his/her ideas freely. And that we are all artists with our personal dreams, ideas, drives, fears, talents, regardless of what manufacturers and our education have tought us? Are we pushed so hard down the hierarchy of needs that we refuse to listen to our daemon? Are we so indoctrinated as to refuse to even recognise its existence?

Acknowledged that creativity and art are hard. And that the quantitative substitutes offered by the industry are just luring us into believing that spray and pray shooting will maybe get us that magical pic, because-you-never-know, taking our minds off the real work of trying harder? (and also believing that shooting and storing millions of pics has no environmental cost) This sells for close to a hundred grand. It was shot with a manual medium format film camera (this, with a wide lens), as were most of Nick Brandt’s non-composited photographs (TRILOGY 2001 – 2012).

…

    What if we gave our lambda constant the boost it so desperately needs, before all that’s left are one mirrorless brand and smartphones?

  Posted on DearSusan by pascaljappy.

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COVID-19: How governments and businesses should respond?

Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, countries as well as businesses were used to studying how the various disruptions have been changing lives and the world. They used to plan and tried to mitigate the effects of disruptions. Some even tried to be the disruptors so they can be in the leadership position with competitive advantages.

While all that has been going on, COVID-19 took everyone one by surprise. The virus outbreak disrupted everything in a very short period, in less than three months and still continues. It has brought the whole world; people, governments, and businesses; to a complete standstill.

The current outbreak of COVID-19 has affected all major parts of the businesses. Governments and businesses are encountering an unprecedented crisis combined with uncertainty of how long it will last and how deep the impact could reach. Most countries and businesses are in a very enigmatic situation on how to plan and what to do to minimise the effects and be ready for the future.

This article aims to provide some tools that should help governments and businesses as well as individuals to respond and act now, before it is too late when the post-COVID-19 era dawns. It focuses on practical solutions and ways of handling the current overwhelming crisis and uncertain situation. These are tools to be used and applied to overcome the challenges transpired out of this unprecedented global crisis.

Pro Act and Fast: The first tool to be applied by people, government, and businesses is to be more proactive and act as early as possible. It is imperative to act fast to mitigate the losses or worse conditions could emerge. What happens is that many get busy with analysing and thinking of how and why the crisis happened and give less time for action to what could be done fast. As Voltaire said, “Perfect is the Enemy of Good.” Having a good service or product in a short period is more valuable than having a perfect service or product after a long period. The market simply would not be waiting for them.

Governments and businesses should get accustomed with the new normal way of working. The current and future normal will be highly dependent on technology and digital solutions. So, act fast to provide online services and products which is the key to survival and growth. Focus on easy to use online platforms, browsing showroom, ordering system, delivery & tracking system, and after sale services follow up mechanism.

Quickly Let Go: We tend to hang on to the old and comfort zone life fantasy. We normally fear to confront the new reality, so we keep thinking of the good times, or at least of the better than now times.

The normal advice given the failing businesses or ideas is: Fail Fast, and Go On. When a disruptive crisis occurs, governments, businesses and even individuals need to let it go, and move forward to new opportunities and solutions. Focus on the current and future. Don’t waste energy or resources. Use them wisely and quickly.

For this point, governments and organisations need to be smart and act like the mice in “Who Moved My Cheese?” Don’t be fully attached with good past resources or keep dreaming that they “must come back.” The mentality would focus on the following: The life must be in a “comfort zone”, and oil prices are not always low. The “Cheese” moves and in many times vanishes (actually it happens over time, but many times we don’t observe or don’t want to observe) by consumption with no replenishment plans and processes.

Organisations need to have very forward thinking and positive action-oriented culture that encourage innovative and active teams. Peter Drucker said it very well, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Failing to fail-fast or fail to do new things or work with new ideas and ways would always lead to a worse situation. On the contrary, it will consume all your efforts, time and resources. The faster you fail and let go, the faster you learn and grab new opportunities and the faster you stand up and grow.

Life Cycle: In business, we study the product life cycle. We understand and believe in whatever the product is. Go through the normal life cycle stages (Launch, Growth, Maturity, and Decline or Revive again). Yes, some part of the life cycle could be very short and some could be very long. It all depends on managing strategies and continuous improvement. However, nothing is safe from the inevitable down-turn of the product life cycle. This does not only apply to products in businesses, but also to governments’ performance. It is also very vivid when studying the strengths and the weaknesses of civilisations. Nothing would last forever.

Thus, the current crisis and uncertainty should encourage the governments and businesses to evaluate their products and services in addition to the strategies and priorities based on the stages of the product’s life cycle. They need continuously to revive and reintroduce current products or create new ones. The name of the game is to stay in the growth and the maturity stages.

Embrace Change: Take the crisis and uncertainty opportunity to embrace the new way of life and doing business. Consider it as an opportunity you always wished for. This is life; and you tend to get some hardships occasionally. Of course, some could be very severe such as the one COVID-19 has created while others are less traumatising. Smart organisations are always ready for the change as it is the only constant factor in life. Be ready to accept the new reality quickly after the change occurs due to the new conditions imposed by COVID-19. Plan new strategies, processes, and provide the products that create new value and help to sustain the crisis period and prepare the organisation for growth. New ways of working and creating value should be adopted as fast as possible. Businesses that cannot operate as usual due to the crisis would need to change their business model, create a new value chain, and reposition their most valuable assets, their employees.

Planning should be based on the worst scenarios; that lock-down and business closure could last longer than expected. Embrace the change and create your own new opportunities.

The Future: The universe has set its own law of cause-effect; your future is molded by your actions. Accordingly, actions and decisions taken today will shape how tomorrow would look like. Edward Deming rightly said: “Your system is perfectly designed to give you the results you are getting.” So, if you are not happy with the results, then the first thing you must do is change your current system and workflow.

Organisations and governments ought to start thinking on how to operate and create value while the situation is under complete or partial lock-down. More and fast actions need to be taken and implemented with the future in mind, all relating to the economy and survival under crisis and uncertainty conditions. This means the governments and businesses need to think and plan the important things that need to be available in the medium and long term that have great effects on competitiveness of each country and company.

Check List: -Do you have future thinking teams that are working on new opportunities? -Do you believe in letting go of the past and the sinking costs? -How many new products and services were created during the past two months? -Are you providing services and products online? If yes, is your online services user-friendly? Do you have an easy delivery and tracking system? -Do you believe in change as a normal life fact? -Are you waiting for things to get better? -To act, are you waiting for someone to make your conditions better?

The post COVID-19: How governments and businesses should respond? appeared first on Businessliveme.com.

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The 10 Best Keyword Research Tools to Find the Right Keywords for SEO

Let’s get right down to it: The key to successful SEO is concentrating on long-tail keywords. Although these keywords get less traffic than more generic terms, they’re associated with more qualified traffic and users that are typically further down their path of intent. The good news is that choosing the right long-tail keywords for your website pages is actually a fairly simple process — one that’s made all the more simple and quick when you use the right tools to perform your keyword research. Download our free SEO template here to organize your keyword research into an actionable plan for your site.  In this post, we’ll cover the nine best tools out there for performing keyword research for your website content. Before we get started though, let’s briefly go over two important things to consider as you do your research: relevance and (if applicable) location. Keyword Relevance Relevance is the most important factor to consider when choosing the right keywords for SEO. Why? Because the more specific you are, the better. For instance, if you own a company that installs swimming pools, it’s likely that you’d attract more qualified prospects by targeting a keyword such as “fiberglass in-ground pool installation,” rather than “swimming pools.” That’s because there’s a good chance that someone searching for “fiberglass in-ground pool installation” is looking for information on installation or someone to perform the installation … and that could be you! Sure, optimizing for “swimming pools” has its place. But there’s no doubt that this keyword will attract a much more generic audience that may not be looking for what you have to offer. Go for the relevant, long-tail keywords instead. Location-Based Keywords Another major factor to consider when optimizing for the right keywords is location-based searches. When looking for contractors and services in their specific area, search engine users will usually include their location in the search. So, “fiberglass in-ground pool installation” becomes “fiberglass in-ground pool installation in Boston, MA.” If you operate in one geo-location, you may want to consider adding location-based keywords to all of your pages, since traffic from other locations isn’t going to be very much help to you. If your business operates in several geo-locations, it is also a wise choice to create a separate web page dedicated to each location so you can make sure your brand is present when people are searching for individual locations. Now, how do you choose the right keywords for your business? We certainly don’t recommend guessing, for obvious reasons. Instead, there are many ways to research and find long-tail keywords that are right for your business. Here are nine awesome free and paid keyword research tools you can use to quickly and easily identify strong long-tail keywords for your SEO campaign.

Free Keyword Research Tools

Google Keyword Planner Google Trends Keyword Tool.io

Free Keyword Research Tools 1. Google Keyword Planner Google has a few tools that make it easy to conduct keyword research, and their free AdWords tool called Keyword Planner is a great place to start — especially if you use AdWords for some of your campaigns. (Note: You’ll need to set up an AdWords account to use Keyword Planner, but that doesn’t mean you have to create an ad.) When you input one keyword, multiple keywords, or even your website address into Keyword Planner, Google will spit out a list of related keywords along with simple metrics to gauge how fierce the competition is around each one and how many searches it gets on both a global and local search level. It’ll also show you historical statistics and information on how a list of keywords might perform — and it’ll create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together. Since it’s a free AdWords tool, it can also help you choose competitive bids and budgets to use with your AdWords campaigns.

Image Credit: Google Unfortunately, when Google transitioned from Keyword Tool to Keyword Planner, they stripped out a lot of the more interesting functionality — but you can make up for it somewhat if you take the information you learn from Keyword Planner and use Google Trends to fill in some blanks. Which brings me to the next tool … 2. Google Trends Google Trends is another free tool from Google. It lets you enter multiple keywords and filter by location, search history, and category. Once you enter that information in, it’ll give you results that show how much web interest there is around a particular keyword, what caused the interest (e.g., press coverage), and where the traffic is coming from — along with similar keywords. The best part about Google Trends is that it doesn’t just give you static keyword volume numbers like most keyword research tools. Instead, it generates colorful, interactive graphs that you can play with, download, and even embed on your website. It’ll also give you more dynamic insight into a keyword with information like relative popularity of a search term over time. Interestingly, its data doesn’t include in repeated queries from a single user over a short period of time, which makes results cleaner. It also groups together searches that it infers to mean the same thing, like misspellings. One way to use Google Trends? If you’re trying to decide between two keyword variations for your latest blog post title. Simply perform a quick comparison search in Google Trends to see which one is getting searched more often.

3. Keyword Tool.io Keyword Tool is pretty rudimentary online keyword research tool, but if you’re just looking for a list of long-tail keyword suggestions related to one you already have in mind, then it can be useful. It’s also totally free — to use the most basic version, you don’t even need to create an account. What Keyword Tool does is use Google Autocomplete to generate a list of relevant long-tail keywords suggestions. The search terms suggested by Google Autocomplete are based on a few different factors, like how often users were searching for a particular term in the past.

This type of suggestion tool can help you understand what people are searching for around your topics. For example, bloggers might use a tool like this to brainstorm blog post titles that’ll do well in search. Again, all the free version does for you is generate other keyword suggestions in alphabetical order — it doesn’t tell you anything about search volume or cost-per-click (CPC). To get that information, you’ll have to upgrade to Keyword Tool Pro. The Pro version will also let you export the keywords and use them for content creation, search engine optimization, CPC/PPC, or other marketing activities.

Best Keyword Research Tools Term Explorer Moz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool SEMrush Ahrefs Accuranker HubSpot Serpstat

Paid Keyword Research Tools  4. Term Explorer Price: $34/mo. for Basic; $97/mo. for Pro; $499/mo. for Agency Term Explorer offers probably the deepest research reports of any keyword research tool on the market. From one single seed term, you can get over 10,000 keyword variations. Best of all, the tool does a great job of keeping the results as relevant as possible and pulling through lots of supporting metrics with them. It’ll give you data for all the results on page one of search engine results pages (SERPs), including the number of results, link strength, trust score, and keyword difficulty. To help you get a handle on your competitors, you can use the tool to research domain age, page ranking, and links, as well as the word count, page rank, links, outbound links, and the number of keyword occurrences in title, URL, and headers for individual webpages. You can also export all this data into a CSV for your own analysis.

Image Credit: Term Explorer Note: If you only plan on using it a few times a day, there is actually a free version of this tool that’ll do five tiny keyword jobs and five keyword analyses per day, with no queue priority. 5. Moz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool Price: $99/mo. for Standard; $149/mo. for Medium; $249/mo. for Large; $599/mo. for Premium The keyword difficulty tool from Moz is one of the most useful components of their paid suite. It’s a fantastic resource for analyzing the competitiveness of a keyword and for unearthing low-hanging fruit. When you input a keyword into this tool, it’ll find the top 10 rankings for that keyword. Then, it’ll assign that keyword a “Difficulty Score” based on the pages that currently rank for that word. You can look at search volume data for your keywords, then pull up the SERP to see the top 10 results for each term.

Image Credit: Moz Want to do some competitive keyword analysis? You can use the tool to see who else is ranking for your targeted keywords, along with information like each site’s page authority and the number of root domains linking to their page. You can also export all this data into a CSV for your own analysis. 6. SEMrush Price: $69.95/mo. for Pro; $149.95/mo. for Guru; $549.95/mo. for Business SEMrush is a competitive research tool that lets you keep an eye on on your competitors’ keywords to find opportunities to bump them out for a top position in Google’s and Bing’s organic search results. You can compare a number of domains against one another to evaluate the competitive landscape, including their common keywords and positions in Google’s organic, paid, and shopping search results. Position tracking is kind of like a sophisticated version of Google Trends, letting you see a keyword’s position in SERPs and analyze the history of rises and drops. Their colorful, visual charts are also super helpful for more quickly understanding trends and analyzing results.

Image Credit: SEMrush 7. Ahrefs Price: $99/mo. for Lite; $179/mo. for Standard; $399/mo. for Advanced Ahrefs Keywords Explorer is similar to SEMrush, but with some extra bonuses and a much more intuitive design.For example, it’s able to estimate how many searches become real page visits. Not all of them do so, since Google gives instant answers for some queries. With Clicks and Clicks Per Search metrics, you’ll figure out traffic-generating keywords and skip dead-end options.

When it comes to the number of relevant keyword suggestions, Ahrefs goes the extra mile. It runs the biggest database – 5.1 billion keywords for over 200 countries – which means it can detect opportunities other tools could be missing.Ahrefs can also help you with competitive research. Their Site Explorer tool lifts the veil on competitors’ keyword strategies, while Content Gap lets you compare competitor keywords with your own to identify your might-have-beens.

Ahrefs will also email you about even the smallest ranking progress of your competitors. Backlinks have a direct impacton ranking, and backlink research is one of Ahrefs’ strongest muscles. Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko, say that Ahrefs is his #1 go-to tool for backlink analysis: “I’ve tested over 25 link analysis tools and none come close to Ahref’s in terms of index size, freshness, and overall usability.” 8. Accuranker Price: $19.95/mo. for Beginner; $29.95/mo. for Pro 300; $44.95/mo. for Pro 600; $74.95/mo. for Pro 1K Accuranker is a keyword rank tracking tool with a key differentiator: It’s lightning fast while being extremely precise. So if you’re used to spending hours monitoring the rank progression of your keywords, this’ll end up saving you a ton of time. Other advantages of this tool? It has built-in proxies to get a quick glance at whose ranking within the SERPs for any given keyword. If you plan to report keyword metrics to your manager or your team, you’ll like its scheduled weekly reports feature.

Image Credit: Accuranker It’s also one of the best rank trackers out there that offers highly localized search engine rankings for your keywords. So if you’re marketing your business to an international audience, it’s a great tool for analyzing which pages are ranking in different countries. Finally, it has integrations available with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Social Monitoring, and YouTube so you can keep an eye on statistics and estimated search traffic for your keywords straight from your AccuRanker dashboard. 9. HubSpot HubSpot also has its very own Content Strategy tool within the Marketing Hub. The Content Strategy tool helps you identify and research topics, find keywords or subtopics to go after, and ultimately help grow your content presence for generating more organic traffic over time. If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can access the Content Strategy tool, click on Content > Strategy. 

  10. Serpstat Price: $69/mo. for Lite, $149/mo. for Standard, $299/mo. for Advanced, $499/mo. for Enterprise Serpstat provides you with a list of historically profitable keywords used by competitors to make them rank high in search results. It also figures the value of your keywords using different factors, like number of search results and cost-per-click.  The software will offer suggestions for more suggestive keywords as well as provide long-tail keywords, which are low-volume keywords related to your business. Plus, if your business is international, you can adapt keywords to different countries in the tool’s database.  Finally, with Serpstat, you can check the relevancy of your webpages and analyze the trends that might be attractive to browsers.  Serpstat will be extremely useful to you if you want full analyses of keywords that work well for competitors. It’s also a great tool for making sure your page has a lower chance of losing a favorable ranking on SERPs.  Now that you know about all these great tools, get out there and start discovering your best keywords for SEO. What tools and methods do you use to find long-tail keywords? Share your favorites with us in the comments below.

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The Best SEO Reviewed

The main search engines optimization (SEO) is usually an important design feature associated with the website that enables the particular spider or robot to very easily can get on, thereby improving its visibility on the internet. Digital Marketing and advertising and SEO would be the particular most trending topics across the particular globe so when a issues goes trending a number associated with other new and trending issues get connects with it. Such as AMP, Voice Search, AI plus Mobile friendly website are the particular preferred and trending part associated with SEO now. Are outstanding but their SEO potential might be lower compared to sole links. Right here are 8 off-page SEO strategies to expand your page search positions on search results. By 2010, marketers began to see the growing significance of social media content within SEO, so both Google plus Bing added ‘social signals, ' which would show any created Facebook posts that matched a homeowner's search. For me, I sense as though I gained the valuable, all encompassing picture associated with SEO and it will assist me to create a method to move forward with position goals. Simply by incorporating an actual SEO technique into your overall content advertising plan, you will be capable to climb the major research engines rankings within a issue of months. Google is producing sure it requires longer to observe results from black and white hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, and intent on ensuring the flux in its SERPs centered largely on where the searcher is on the planet at the time associated with the search, and in which usually the business is located close to to that searcher. With voice search comes 2 parts of interest to SEO people desperate to connect with consumers: purpose and context. I actually released our content strategy on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Hacker's blog to help other SEOs improve their website's articles. Within this blog we will discuss away SEO 2019 PDF page SEO is detail plus will discover some effective away from page SEO techniques which a person must try in first associated with all we would like in order to discuss the importance of away from page SEO” and how this can be good for web site owners. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION has more aspects related in order to your problem and it furthermore helps you know drawbacks associated with your website, so, promoting by means of SEO will not only assist you land on first web pages of Search engines like yahoo, but it furthermore lets you the find the particular defects on your website that will further assists with removing all of them. Tips you suggested for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Advance are valuable as Sites need to undergo SEO Review from timt to time in order to stay On top of lookup engine results, I was presently taking care of SEO progress Strategies to Improve website rating, Found Out your post related. The tone of voice search is getting vital regarding SEO. The moot stage of any SEO strategy, really still imperative to learn how in order to use keywords the right method. It means ensuring that will your site is designed, constructed, maintained with SEO best methods to make sure that research engines don't have any specialized limitations with indexing or knowing your content. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION activities when boosted with each internal and external resources, that will is On-Page optimization techniques in addition to external Off-Page tactics like visitor blogging and social media marketing and advertising gives speedy outcomes. SEO trouble and top 10 google outcomes for keyword. The initial action for top-tier local SEO will be claiming all local listings such as Google My Business (obviously one of the most important) as well as other people like Yellowpages, Bing, and 411. Using AI and even more semantic search engines, how SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is conducted will change. For way too long, SEOs have obsessed by looking from the Pagerank or whatever metric of the linking page. For SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION particularly, it is important in order to comprehend where voice search ultimately gets its data from. In 2018, we can be seeing citations ceasing in order to have a major impact upon SEO efforts, and similarly, jooxie is able to be encountering a good even stricter standard on key word stuffing as semantic (topic-based) SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION matures. Google is also maintaining track of Accelerated Mobile Webpages as this format enables quick loading, giving a much much better reading experience and improves SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION of the website. Nevertheless NATURAL backlinks from real high quality sites, that will ALWAYS assist you with your SEO. Your own monitors are covered with dashes from Google Analytics, an SEO ranking band like Moz or SEMrush, reports through your CMS or marketing software tool, and a few Search engines sheets keep your results arranged and keep a watch on your own search engine rank position.

In 2018, SEO marketers require to up their game plus shift their focus beyond position and towards revenue. In this content, I will be talking regarding 7 On-Page SEO techniques that will will boost your ranking. I obtained Best off-page SEO strategies through this post it helps all of us a lot to build even more links. Listed below are few SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends which are to turn out to be kept in mind as these types of factors will be advantageous regarding your business growth by permitting you to shine among a number of. If your own content has answers of consumer questions, then you will have a win-win SEO 2017 pattern. The optimization processneeds to be continued round the particular clock after consulting with the particular experts who guide you in order to best shape content that a person publish on your website that will might lead to optimum overall performance at that moment in period. Traditionally, that is why affordable SEO providers in Toronto and elsewhere are usually a rarity. Screaming Frog is a tool that crawls websites to better analyse onsite SEO. The SEO trends 2018 want to cover all this really well. Search Engine property says that As early because 2014, 55% of teens plus 41 percent of adults had been already using voice technology daily, plus in 2017 there is the drastic change in the entire world of SEO according to Search engines study 41% of USA grownups use voice search in the daily basis to avoid keying in on devices. Just since the SEO world is modifying, so should we. Here are usually three SEO trends quickly reshaping the keyword research concept plus with it the way within which we brainstorm, create, plus optimize content. Best SEO techniques are usually based on writing content centered on popular search keywords yet it also depends on the particular responsiveness of your website. Therefore, in accordance along with the latest SEO trends plus techniques, make sure you enhance your site with both video clip and image searches. DareBoostย โ€By using DareBoost, you can get a very detailed web performance and quality report of your website. ย They also explain how to fix the problems from the report precisely so that you can optimize your loading time and technical SEO. While that won't get resolved in 2018, we need incorporate the SEO team alongside some other marketing, both paid and possessed initiatives. It does not really take essence of SEO today and something of the most notable ranking factors Google uses in this point. Ranking for seo tips” is a bit easier (medium tail keyword). In addition, lookup engine optimization is infusing key word focus and SEO best procedures across other digital marketing stations, including social, paid, display, plus PR to create optimal outcomes and benefit. Are usually you wondering if keywords is usually going to be crucial in order to SEO in 2018? I think the particular biggest SEO trends in 2018 are the personalization of lookup engine results, featured snippets, cellular first indexing and voice lookup. Backlinks are usually still the most significant component of SEO, but it is usually not concerning the number of inbound links you build it really will be about creating high-quality backlinks. Mobile responsiveness, page load velocity, image optimization are really great for a site UX. Furthermore, checking and fixing broken hyperlinks, 404 error are good exercise of on-page SEO. Although recommendation links will still provide several rankings to the site, the particular highest rankings will most most likely come through the integration associated with link building to SEO content material. You also wish in order to ensure that your images nevertheless index with Google when shifting to a CDN For customers of the Yoast SEO wordpress plugin, you will want to include the following code to the particular bottom of your file. Whichever way you choose to categorize keywords, one of the most important steps in SEO is doing keyword research. Properly, chosen SEO keywords help individuals to get your site through search engines. Very first of all, SEO is a good acronym for Search Engine Improved. Users don't desire to wait for a internet page so if your internet page is slow in 2018, forget about SEO and your own bounce rate will down. Since this has been a major change in the particular SEO landscape, I took this upon myself to gather stats and present what mobile research optimization actually is, and publish this on our company's blog. In 2018, the particular user experience could be the center associated with development and also the the key point for the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategies. As the mobile-first index, page speed ranking element, as well as other changes continue to move out this year, be guaranteed that SEO which focuses upon quality over short-term gains is definitely what can help you shift up in the SERPs. Many SEO campaigns begin along with keywords - knowing what the particular audience within your niche is definitely searching for is really the powerful advantage. Authoritativeness is a important metric for SEO these times, and when you read that will Google rater's guide, it indicates a lot more than simply having lots and lots associated with backlinks. It is definitely the first SEO trend that will will make your site even more visible on search engine. SEO is carried out on the understanding that internet pages rank because of how appropriate a webpage is to the search query and how numerous links point to that web page. If you have SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION done for your site, a person will get a much much better ranking in the search motors because of the keywords or even keyword phrases used. Schemas are what help Search engines display rich snippets in research results, continuing t make all of them an important part of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in 2018. Without question, 2017 is the great year for search motor optimization (SEO) marketing. In the event that you want a free technique to see search ranking enhancements, or simply want more information (which can't hurt), install this particular free SEO dashboard to your own analytics. Image SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is a crucial part associated with SEO different types of internet sites. SEO market has seen the rise associated with many game changing SEO styles in 2017 The industry will be looking forward for big adjustments in 2018. Before we all lay out our SEO forecasts 2018 will bring, let's get a look at the method the marketplace and digital marketing and advertising trends changed this year. Because Google can still monetize its product plus push organic results further straight down, SEO-ers will need to broaden their practice and locate organic visitors outside of Google's organic position. Regarding example, considering the keyword tea” or marketing” may take very a long time for enhancing the ranking for every upon Google, however, using less explored terms like home tea-maker” or even SEO marketing for your business” can improve your chances associated with raking high in Google. Search Motor Optimization is done through composing SEO optimized content for the website. I WOULDN'T 301 REFOCUS users blindly to your house page in case you anticipate any SEO benefits from 301s. Nevertheless, 2018 SEO trends will prove in order to be the clincher. Canonical: This particular plug-in handles content syndication, which usually essentially allows other blogs in order to publish your projects (similar to franchising) without hurting your website's SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ranking—simply with the addition of a rel=canonical may get your brand and content material out on the web within multiple outlets, ensuring a better reach and bigger audience with no hurting your own search outcomes. Rich snippets and schema markup language is the the one that one particular needs to work on even more to get a good increase in SEO score and furthermore for having a better positioning searching engine results page (also referred to as SERP). ” The wealthy snippets are a way in order to communicate with Google regarding the articles contained within the site. In today's internet age group, you must be careful along with conventional SEO standards like key phrases in content, leaving comments, plus even reusing content on several pages. Taking a few extra moments to make sure your blog post is fully optimized will permit you to harness WordPress' incredible SEO and content marketing energy for your blog post's articles. Search Console (Webmaster tools) will be one of the SEO fundamentals. With the increase of voice search, over fifty percent of Google searches coming through mobile devices, the impending mobile-first index, and mobile-friendliness as getting a ranking factor, you just can't afford to ignore cellular SEO anymore. When you create fresh content based on your concern keywords, you have several benefits with an SEO online marketing and advertising strategy. On-site SEO can consist of tasks for example adding keywords in order to your titles, images, and web link, adding multi-media like images plus videos throughout your content, inner linking, and updating your content material regularly with new information. Excellent it's time to focus specifically upon content creation for off-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. It after that follows that black hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION involves techniques which are believed to be tricks and tricks, whereas white hat is thoroughly clean, honest SEO- the kind helpful to humans and much favored by search engines. Yet according to the SEO craze 2018, today page speed may focus on mobile searches as well. Which means that will SEO will have to concentrate on producing content that solutions multiple intents to be capable to maximize the odds plus increase ranking probability. As we've seen, 1 of the major advantages associated with SEO is getting more visitors because of better search rating. The main premise to obtain out of this is the particular fact that speed is a good important factor for Google plus one of the important SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends to consider. SEO trends evolve year-after-year and so you should maintain up with the pace in order to influence Google algorithm and remain up in rankings.

Excellent rule in my SEO agency which usually i instill in all the clients which is ‘if a person want your business top associated with Google, it must DESERVE in order to rank top of Google'. At the same time, the growth of voice search and virtual assistants can become an ideal basis for your development of artificial intelligence systems as well as the promotion of those SEO strategies that take into account current trends. Within the below-mentioned publish, I did drop my key word SEO” in the beginning by itself. Alexatmedia is an marketing agency with 5 years' encounter In E-Marketing Field, We are usually using that technology to improve any kind of business plus help the business owners in order to be in the first of them Competitors, Alexatmedia with the professional team had all the particular secrets to accomplish that, using Interpersonal Media and search engine optimisation (seo), web designs, web growth, mobile app designs, mail marketing”, Alexatmedia leading your business in order to the top. Intended for this post, we decided in order to include some top digital advertising blogs that aren't hard-core SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. So, to make it easier to suit your needs, we compiled a list of the 25 best SEOย tools you need to know and grouped them into five neat categories: keyword research tools, technical SEO, backlink analysis, link building and rank tracking. We looked at hundreds associated with SEO companies to decide which usually ones would make our search positions list. Thus, is actually time for mobile optimization with regard to better SEO result. SEO means helping businesses perform everything they can to create more money from those that are visiting their website through organic search. Google offers been actively encouraging businesses in order to convert their websites to HTTPS, and those websites are becoming rewarded with a minor SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION boost. Now please bear in mind most of this is my viewpoint on SEO but remember that will is from someone who is definitely getting results with search motor optimization and to prove this particular you can run a couple of Google searches to see that will yes Infobunny gets results towards some very, very strong respected competition. At the particular end of the day, exactly what matters the most may be the visibility of your website plus the quantity of traffic that will has been driven to this. Every blogger should be conscious of the best possible off-page SEO strategies required, and a person have described every one associated with them very neatly. -> Just just before the Google's Mobile First criteria rolls in, SEO users are usually now pushed to prioritize their particular ranking factors (Page Speed plus so forth, ) based upon mobile search analysis to maintain the changes. Inorganic SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is good for populating hyperlinks for the website, even upon other websites which signed upward for online ads to turn out to be shown on their web webpages. This SEO-optimized description helps inform Google and YouTube what your own video is about without getting spammy. In 2018 there will be an also bigger focus on machine studying and SEO from data. ” Of course, the amplification aspect of things will continue in order to integrate increasingly with genuine general public relations exercises rather than shallow-relationship link building, which will turn out to be increasingly easy to detect simply by search engines like google.

But if wish looking for a bigger tendency it's that SEO and specifically what we call real marketing” will continue to blur the particular lines together as the work of an SEO becomes that will of a traditional marketer : having to comprehend the consumer, the competitors, the marketplace simply because well as the implementation aspect. For years, hyperlinks have been the trust indication for search engines — a single which SEOs spent the almost all time on optimizing (and usually manipulating). This is the major factor for all associated with us, and we can discover why this is a huge one of the SEO developments in 2018. Companies ought to devise their SEO strategies whilst considering the users of just about all such devices. I guarantee that even though you're experienced with SEO, you will find a trick or two in this post that will assist your blog or wordpress site climb higher on Google. In 2018, local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION makreting will focus more upon mobile-first with Google using cellular pages as the primary catalog for search engine results. Organic SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION: is the phrase used in order to describe an all natural positioning within the free listings associated with Google search results. Video marketing, infographics, link building were among the particular most talked SEO trends with regard to quite a while now, nevertheless if you have limited your self with only those may not really earn you benefits that are usually to be offered by various other effective methods that you may not have known. Correctly, chosen SEO keywords assist people to find your web site via search engines. When it arrives to creating an SEO technique, website owners need to concentrate on question-centric long-tail keywords within natural language because they are usually close to user's conversational conversation. If you are searching for an SEO consultancy or even someone to manage all your own digital marketing or digital education, please e mail us to know just how we can help bring site visitors your website and enhance your own sales. Because hidden articles will probably be ignored by Google which usually will impact your overall SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategies of 2018.

You must end up being witty enough to select greatest SEO Company that handles sociable media marketing technique very nicely. The SEO trends with regard to 2018 and the years in order to come are not some unattached concepts you need to deal with separately. SEO, within general, covers all types associated with businesses, blogs, and websites. I suggest, most websites outsource their SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION for an agency - really just not cool ripping lower someone's online presence for activities they did not take. You can build links through Digital Marketing or content marketing and advertising blogs too, because these are usually (SEO, Digital Marketing or Content material marketing) closely related topics. A successful SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION campaign always begins with key word research. SEO strategies that as soon as were along with the sport may not apply to the particular current search engines like search engines. But, the most substantial SEO announcement might have already been Google's mobile update of 04 2015 - this update triggered non-mobile-friendly websites to get reduce rankings.

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Five Secrets You Will Not Want To Know About SEO 2019

Making money on the internet is difficult for many individuals, but if you combine the particular power of article marketing along with SEO, or search engine optimisation, then you have an nearly unbeatable combination. 55 The difference from SEO is the majority of simply depicted as the distinction between paid and unpaid concern ranking searching results. I get into much more detail in SEO Titles on pages: 15-Point Checklist for B2B and B2C Brands, which explains the right way to work in relevant keywords that will accurately reflect the page content material. Are good nevertheless SEO potential may be reduced in comparison to single links. The schooling behind our SEO expertise has been developed from years and many years of learning from mistakes marketing and advertising with our other businesses. The in-depth guide contains the most recent SEO best practices so a person can improve how your content appears in search results, plus get more traffic, leads, plus sales. Keyword study Ten Places That You Can Find SEO 2019 definitely belongs to the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION basics. I'll start by stating that social mass media and SEO are heavily linked to each other. Black head wear SEO attempts to improve ratings in ways that are disapproved of from the search engines, or even involve deception. This particular is more tedious and tasking than inorganic SEO because this particular is how all the key phrases get a full blast associated with attention. SEO: It stands for Research Engine Optimization. Within this post, we will break this down in the complete first timers guide to SEO: what SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is, how it works, exactly what factors affect search and exactly what sorts of changes you may make today to improve your own search optimization. The no follow hyperlink has been contradicted many instances over where SEO is included and it depends on the particular web owner regarding if they will allow them on the web site or not. Upon the subject of speed, with the beginning of 2017 generally there was still much resistance in order to AMP in the SEO neighborhood overall, but as we mind toward 2018 that feels in order to be dissipating now somewhat along with a reluctant acceptance that AMPLIFIER looks as though it's not really going away sooner. The biggest way that individuals misuse SEO is assuming that will it's a game or that will it's about outsmarting or deceiving the search engines. Both are crucial to the particular success of an SEO marketing campaign, but they're on completely different edges of the fence when this comes to improving your search motor rankings. Greater than 50% of mobile phone customers started using voice search correct from 2015, and so we all can expect that in 2019 and after that not much less than 50% of searches will certainly be in the form associated with voice search. Within the past, getting a great SEO was only about making use of keywords. Just remember that , SEO will be about targeting real people, not really only search engines. When you do these on-page plus off-page elements of SEO in least along with your competition, you can achieve higher lookup engine ranking positions in the particular organic section of search motor results pages and have the quality website capable of keeping your revenue goals. In my opinion that 2018 is going to be the particular year where voice search changes how users search and SEOs need to optimize. SEO or Search engine optimisation is a term coined collectively to describe the techniques that will the website should use in order to boost its rankings on the search engine. Selecting the most appropriate key phrases is critical for successful SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and it is easy in order to choose the wrong ones through falling into the trap associated with optimization. Lookup engine optimisation, or SEO, is the procedure of enhancing your site's rating in search results. Web Marketing SEO, and in specific, Google SEO is the essential. Get into your competitor's URL into the particular SEMRush search bar and you will become provided with a list associated with SEO keywords, with their ratings and traffic. About: Brighton SEO is made up of courses and a one-day search marketing conference. Before this change, the greatest practice was to avoid concealed content at any cost since it wasn't as effective intended for SEO (it was either as well much to crawl for the particular bot in some instances or even given less important by Search engines in others). This is due to the particular fact that you will require contents to be submitted in order to the websites for whom a person are working as an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, when you build the hyperlinks, you will need to offer the profile information, and a person will also have to provide articles for submissions as nicely as numerous other types associated with written work. If you've actually searched for something online (and most of us have), a person already know read more regarding SEO than you think a person do. We all already see this trend within several places, like extremely exact targeting of social ads : some brands still approach SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and content creation with the one-size-fits all attitude. Carrying out technical SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION for local search engines is usually really a similar process. Search engine optimization (SEO) is definitely a way to generate even more (and desired) traffic to your own site with the help associated with better search engine rankings regarding a keyword. SEO had gone through drastic changes over the many years and getting higher rankings upon search engines by stuffing the particular information with too many key phrases is a thing of the particular past. This should become a important part of any local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION checklists, as reviews and rankings could make it easier to stand out in search engine results. Lookup Engine Optimization, or SEO, need to rank in as one associated with the biggest part of your own finances for online advertising. SEO or even Search Engine Optimisation is the particular name given to activity that will attempts to improve search motor rankings. Search engine search engine Blog9T optimization (SEO) is the procedure with regard to affecting the visibility of the website or a web web page in a web search engine's unpaid results—often referred to since " natural ", " natural ", or "earned" results. Nearby SEO utilizes a variety associated with strategies — getting your web site ranked on search engines such as Google, business directories such because Yelp, Superpages, Foursquare, Yellowbook, Search engines My Business listing, Bing Areas for Business page, localized content material on your website, online evaluations and other strategies. We frequently create in-depth analyses on the method SEO and digital marketing is usually used to improve the traffic in order to various websites. Since her business, web traffic, plus customer base grow, Sue will certainly require some outside support intended for keeping her SEO on trail so she could sell the particular best shoes on the stop. Whilst links continue to be essential and it's incredibly difficult in order to rank well without links through other websites, content and on-page SEO has become increasingly essential. For businesses searching to raise their search search positions, what this means is that will a comprehensive social media technique could be in order - within addition to all of the particular usual SEO tactics. Because of formula changes and the trend in order to more local searches, it actually is no longer an huge cost to implement good SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Whether you're killing it along with SEO, or struggling to split the very first page, a good SEO audit can assist give your own rankings a shot within the particular arm. According to web marketing experts, the impact associated with AI and Voice Browse SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION can be expected in 2019 after that. Which it. If you'd like in order to speak to us about a good SEO campaign, or even multilingual SEO marketing and keyword study then get in touch associated with just start a live conversation if we're around. Moreover, Google will keep on to elevate the importance associated with usability and technical SEO aspects, like site security, page acceleration, mobile friendliness, and navigability. As a consultant, this individual has helped many different businesses—including, Lonely Planet, Zillow, Tower Information, and literally numerous medium plus small businesses—with SEO and online-marketing advice. Head associated with Marketing at @impressiontalk specialising within user-centred SEO, PAGE RANK, content marketing and digital technique. Primary is definitely on inbound marketing, including almost everything from SEO to social press. However, a good agency providing SEO services will be all about being proactive in order to keep up-to-date with the most recent search engine news and adjustments in SEO techniques. Video marketing provides new opportunities to drive even more visitors your site and enhance its SEO status. Lookup Engine Optimisation (SEO) in 2018 is really a technical, conditional and creative process to enhance the visibility associated with the website in search motors. Off-page SEO relates to the actions taken outdoors of your own personal website that may help boost your search powerplant rankings. Since of this insufficient visibility this can be hard to create a sound business case with regard to SEO, even though it will be strikingly obvious of the advantages to most companies of the particular number one position on Search engines. This particular is a time-honored SEO exercise called broken link building. Positively engaging in reputation management, content material management and SEO (Search Motor Optimization) can give even the particular smallest business a chance in order to compete globally. Whether you are already adding SEO into your online advertising mix or not, you may ask yourself how aCO site stacks up against acom. With recent Google modifications, failure to look after cellular SEO could result in research invisibility, and mobile's bringing additional changes you'll need to end up being ready for. Join us for a new three-day, one-track conference full associated with forward-thinking, tactical sessions in SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING, growth marketing, the mobile scenery, analytics, content marketing, and a lot more. The objective involving SEO is to get a new website ranked as high because possible on search engines, for example Google. In case you are improving user encounter by focusing primarily on the particular quality of the MC associated with your pages and avoiding : even removing - old-school SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques - those certainly are usually positive steps to getting even more traffic from Google in 2018 - and the type associated with content performance Google rewards is definitely in the end largely with least about a satisfying consumer experience. For instance, when I'm logged in to Google+ and I actually search for SEO, I have the following in my top 5 search results. Black head wear SEO practice involves breaking just about all of the rules and rules of the search engine. Every time you discover or hear the phrase research engine optimization, ” substitute exactly what create quality and indicating relevance” and you'll have the correct mindset permanently SEO work. SEOs conveniently call this effect ‘domain authority' and it appeared in order to be related to ‘PageRank' -- the system Google started in order to rank the web within 1998. When you have more time plus are keen to follow the particular SEO industry, subscribe to Moz and Search Engine Land. Integrating these keywords into the write-up allows you to add range while still retaining SEO energy. If your business does not have SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Internet marketing strategies, she or even he will need help through SEO experts. One of the particular most commonly asked questions, Light hat SEO in layman's vocabulary is applying the right strategies along with a legal technique to boost your ranking plus increase your popularity. To help our own client's future-proof their businesses plus maximize online Return on Expense (ROI), we have caused the global partners to develop a good SEO methodology that aligns along with Google's recommended best practices. Off-page SEO will assist make your website most well-known and visible on the internet, so you can get even more traffic and users for your own website and product. You might be the proprietor of a growing and growing business, the webmaster of the dozen sites, the SEO expert within a Web agency or the DIY SEO ninja passionate regarding the mechanics of Search: this particular guide is meant for a person. On their organization blog, Demand Wave also provides a great article about 2016's tops trends in B2B electronic marketing and SEO. Let's take a explore some roles that cultural media plays in SEO. You will craft your own SEO strategy around the keyword phrases that will lead customers in order to your most profitable products. Google for example, states that will the no follow link end up being taken literally as well because the link will not become followed at all however within reports done for SEO reasons it shows some conflict in order to this. SEO differs from local lookup engine optimization in that the particular latter is targeted on enhancing a business' online presence therefore that its web pages will be going to be displayed simply by search engines when a consumer enters a local search intended for its products or services. The challenge for webmasters plus SEO is that Google does not want company owners to rank regarding lots of keywords using autogenerated content especially when that generates A LOT of pages upon a website using (for instance) a list of keyword variants page-to-page. In time, the range between social media marketing management, channel advancement, and SEO will be considerably blurrier than it really is usually today. In 2016, SEO experts have got determined which factors are almost all likely to affect your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION rankings. Customers and marketers will need in order to begin implementing multiple forms associated with digital marketing tactics including compensated search, social media marketing, nearby SEO, in addition to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION if they hope to control a given Google SERP. Before beginning with this, the SEO professionals should visit your business and realize each and every aspect associated with your company so that these people can help your achieve your own marketing goals. What really matters in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in 2018 is what a person prioritise today to ensure that will in 3-6 months you may see improvements in the high quality of your organic traffic. Mobile will account for 72% of US digital ad invest by 2019. An SEO on the web marketing strategy is a extensive plan to get more individuals to your website through lookup engines. A few search optimizers try to tip Google by using aggressive techniques that go beyond the simple SEO techniques. Subscribe to the particular Single Grain blog now intended for the latest content on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, PPC, paid social, and the particular future of internet marketing. SEO can furthermore stand for search engine optimizer. Like the rest of the particular digital landscape, SEO marketing is usually continuously evolving. Search Engine Book — Read information right after Moz's guide to solidify knowing regarding it of the basic parts of SEO. If a person do not have the period or have insufficient training upon web design or SEO, Appear for web design experts plus hire a professional SEO support agency to keep your internet site and your good reputation usually you business may depend upon it. I ended with the website number 1, 228, 570, 060. This particular generates SEO anchor text, which usually helps you in improving your own search engine rankings. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION marketing is focused on the keyword choice that will attract a excellent deal of unique visitors in order to your website. Maybe you have ponder what will be the brand-new changes and updates that we all can experience in SEO back links sphere in 2019? A Cisco research found that by 2019, eighty percent of all consumer Web traffic will be from Web video traffic. If might spent time online recently, you might have probably look at the term "SEO, inch or "Search Engine Optimization. If you work in lookup marketing, you'll know that SMX is one of the greatest search engine marketing conferences associated with the year, covering topics which includes SEO and PPC. SEO is conducted each on-site and off-site via various resources that are the existence of your web identity associated with different social media platform plus prominent display of your cyberspace link on other well-reputed sites. Our unique data science-driven SEO & content marketing platform can help your eCommerce business discover millions of dollars' worth of formerly untapped organic search marketing possibilities. On the other hands, if the website doesn't make use of any digital marketing strategies or even SEO services, no one troubles to search for pages plus pages on Google just in order to find your website and check out it. Some dentists, who have got tried applying SEO, have not really been very successful in moving their website to the best of Google search engine. Just before we do, let's check away a couple essential areas intended for SEO: social media and cellular. SEO can price between $100 and $500 for each month if you do this yourself with a keyword study tool. This SEO manual explains acquiring links from exterior domains. Let's review the basic principles of SEO (search engine optimization). SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is conducted on the knowning that webpages rank because associated with how relevant a webpage will be to a search query plus how many links point in order to that webpage. Business professionals try to rely on these SEO techniques with regard to optimization wishing for a larger profit. For blog websites the greatest SEO practice would be in order to set the title of your own post in a heading1 label. Search engines is the gatekeeper to substantial amounts of traffic and qualified prospects - search engine optimization (SEO) opens the doors. Simply because long as they are gained naturally, inbound links are most likely the most dependable authority contractors in the world of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. We all call this new methodology AdaptiveSEO so that as its title suggests, it is made in order to adapt to the evolving plus sometimes unexpected changes in lookup algorithms. Numerous get confused in this region of SEO article writing suggestions for either they in place too little or maybe the particular wrong kind of keywords, or even they mention the keyword method too much which is occasionally called keyword over stuffing. Social SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION isn't a separate branch associated with SEO and it won't quickly be replacing traditional SEO, yet social signals are becoming significantly incorporated into search engine methods. Perhaps the particular most important aspect of lookup engine optimization is how a person can actually leverage SEO in order to assist drive more relevant visitors, leads, and sales for your own business. Just browse through the various types of our SEO blog page to find those important on-page ranking factors. According to him, key phrases have already lost their significance and in 2019 this pattern would only get stronger. Seo (SEO) is definitely the most efficient way in order to drive traffic to your web site. Several search engines have also supplied to the SEO industry, plus are frequent sponsors and visitors at SEO conferences, webchats, plus seminars. If a person have a website that a person want to become easily discovered by a search engine, you have to increase your site rank by means of SEO as well. Some SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION companies focus on link building” and increasing the authority associated with their clients' websites. Through an SEO perspective, we had been introduced to RankBrain nearly 2 years ago, a machine-learning synthetic intelligence that Google's been making use of to process an extremely big proportion of search results. Specifically, you'll observe exactly how to make use of advanced on-page SEO strategies (like Bucket Brigades”) to get higher Google ranks and more organic traffic. Search engines has introduced (at least) the ‘percieved' risk to publishing plenty of lower-quality pages on your own site to in order in order to curb production of old-style SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION friendly content based on manipulating early search engine algorithms. Grey hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is entirely centered on enhancing search engine rankings. There are various aspects to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, from the words on your own page to the way some other sites link to you upon the web. So, rather than viewing SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING as an umbrella term covering SEO, it's more accurate in order to view SEM (paid search) plus SEO (organic search) as distinct entities to use as a part of your Search Marketing arsenal. SEO focuses upon rankings in the organic (non-paid) search results. SEO hence helps you get traffic by search engines. With Ahrefs, a great kick off point for keyword research with regard to SEO is the Keywords Explorer tool. Topics: SEO, backlink, articles marketing, social media marketing plus advertising, analytics, and more. 60+ sessions on hot topics, good results stories and strategies in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, SEA, PPC, Social Media, On-line Marketing and SMX Future Monitor. 2018 (I believe) will be a lot associated with catch up on current SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION themes, with the biggest trends” occurring around voice queries to find results. Therefore, SEOmonitor tracks all of the related data that could influence SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION performance and displays it within the Keyword Events Timeline. If you forget that will quality content is a best priority, then you can definitely forget about having an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy. The particular way we asking the device is different from person in order to person. therefore, optimizing your site 100% mobile friendly to accomplish cellular voice search is very essential to SEO 2019. We am just newbie and significantly i do get frustrated whenever articles doesn't rank on best or near top, but individuals like you and many some other also inspire me to by no means give up. There are various points that i wasn't recognized up to now but appreciate to you, you are often make us learn important items about seo. Register and raise the free donation for SEO London, uk every time you shop on the internet. Local SEO - Optimize that localized content on your web site to properly leverage local signs, online reviews and business goods. Learn more about content material optimization for SEO here. Along with paid-search it offers a very focused audience, visitors referred by SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION will only visit your web site if they are seeking particular home elevators your products or even related content. From keyword filling to link buying, the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION landscape has seen numerous black-hat tricks — and Google usually catches on. Chris Gregory, founder plus managing partner at Jacksonville centered firm, DAGMAR Marketing, predicts that will AI and machine learning might have a big impact upon SEO in 2019 and SEOs who aren't technical will end up being left in the dust. Some SEO professionals also advise that anchor textual content should be varied as several pages linking to one web page using the same anchor textual content may look suspicious to look motors. SEO trickery such because keyword ‘stuffing' in irrelevant content material simply won't cut it within the current day, with Google's algorithm taking over 200 aspects to ensure that it's ratings provide results with valid plus authoritative sites, it is close to on impossible to complete anything additional than work with the look for engines to make sure top rated quality SEO results. From a SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION perspective, the principal keyword ought to be at the beginning implemented by the other relevant key phrases.

[luxus4me]

Design your way http://j.mp/2AIRMHD

Breaking apart the subjectivity.

On my very first post on medium, a reader asked a question that really resonated with me. She started by saying that design is subjective and then wondered if someone could ever devise a list of principles that could define good design. So, I thought, “Why not give it a try?”, and here it goes.

There are two parts to the question, being the first one the affirmation that design is subjective. Personally, I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of design but I understand where it’s coming from. People tend to mix design and art in the same bucket and the proprieties of one sometimes drip on top of the other.

Art is subjective, it’s like a game where there are almost no rules. Design is different, and the fact that someone can put together a list of principles should already tell you that there are some rules to the design game.

If there are rules, then we can tell whether or not these rules are being followed, which means that design is not subjective.

However, to be fair, I can’t really say that design is 100% objective, there are always things that come down to personal preference that is determined by your culture and experiences.

Now, this “tiny” level of subjectivity doesn’t mean that you can’t tell good design from bad, it just means that you might find a good design “ugly” or in the other side of the spectrum, you might find something that looks beautiful that actually is a pretty bad design. Let’s look at one example.

The famous Juicy Salif by Philippe Starck.

I think almost all can agree that this is a beautiful piece of design but the million-dollar question is, does that make it a good design?

Nope.

Why? Because it has so many functional problems that I won’t even bother to write them here (just go to amazon and read the reviews if you are interested and/or want to have a laugh, or read this), but in short, it doesn’t do a good job in the only thing that it’s supposed to do, help you to get that fresh juice.

This to say that it’s possible for something to be “good looking” but still be a bad design. You just need to look beyond the looks, and to help you do that I devised a list of 6 “check points” that you can use to filter the good from the bad. There is a lot of nuance involved, so I’ll try to expand each of these check points.

Based on the lemon squeezer, I think you can already guess the first one…

1. Is the design effective?

The need for design is usually driven by a problem that needs to be solved. It might be a website that needs to be easier to use, a product that needs to appeal to a certain audience or a new business that needs a logo, the problem can be literally anything.

This is the first check point to diagnose whether or not a design is good. If it doesn’t solve the problem, you don’t need to go any further, it’s definitely not a good design. It doesn’t matter how good it looks if it doesn’t even accomplish the main purpose of its existence.

I find this one of the main reasons why many designers get so frustrated with their clients/bosses. They tend to jump into “design mode” without fully understanding the problem and just try to make something cool, that will improve their portfolio. They forget that we’re not designing for us but for someone else, and we need to address their needs, not ours.

In order for your design to be effective is crucial to understand and empathise with your client/user. Before you start designing, ask “Why?” until you really understand the true goal that your design needs to accomplish. Sometimes the client might think that they need one thing but after a few questions you’ll realise that they actually need something entirely different. This is the only way that you can be certain that you’re trying to solve the right problem.

If your design is effective, you can move on to the next check point.

2. Does it reflect the right tone?

For you to be able to tell whether or not the tone is appropriate, first you’ll need to figure out two things, the brand and the audience.

The brand

The term “brand” is usually associated with businesses but it’s not limited to them, many things can have a brand, even you. Your brand is the perception that people have of you, the same applies to companies and pretty much everything else.

Good design helps a company take control of their brand, and shape the public’s opinion to match how they want to be perceived.

The audience

A company usually has a target audience and it might vary from something broad to a very small niche. If you know how the company wants to be perceived and who the design is for, the remaining question is, what is appropriate for them?

Generally speaking, the broader the audience the cleaner and more conventional the design needs to be, that’s why you see many companies losing part of their “soul” as they grow. This happens because certain design gimmicks that will work for small niches won’t stick with a larger audience, therefore the company “sacrifices” that to attract more people. On the other end of the spectrum, when your audience is smaller and very specific you can rely on those gimmicks to make the design attractive and engaging to them.

A good example to understand this is to compare McDonald’s with your local burger joint. They basically sell the same thing, but they communicate in very distinct ways.

http://j.mp/2AKUgFO

Your local burger joint usually capitalises on the latest trends in design that attract people who identify with that, like the funny illustrations you can see on Byron’s website. On the other hand, McDonalds communicates in a more conventional way to cover a more general public trying not to patronize or alienate anyone.

www.mcdonalds.com

In short, to understand if a design passes this second check point, you just need to know what is the appropriate tone and if the design is successful in communicating it. If it is, then you’re one step closer to a good design.

3. Does it stand the test of time?

Good design is sensitive to time.

Ideally, you’d want a design that is timeless, however, that is not always necessary or even advised. It really depends on what the design is trying to accomplish and its life span.

If you’re designing a webpage for a product that will be replaced or updated in two years, for instance, it probably makes sense to take advantage of the trends of the year to get ahead. This will help your design seem contemporary, modern and relevant. However, you should try to stay ahead of the curve and see where the trends are going. There’s nothing worse than catching the wave too late, this will only make you look bad, like you’re trying to catch up rather than being the one setting the trend.

In the other hand, if we’re talking about a logo that is supposed to last for years or decades, then yes, you should definitely avoid design fads that come with a short expiry date. If you look at well-known logo redesigns like the Starbucks logo, the trend is to make them simpler as time passes, thus the simpler you make it, the longer it will last.

Starbucks logo iterations from 1971, 1987, 1992, 2011

With this in mind, to pass this check point, you just need to understand what’s the life span of the design you’re analysing and judge it accordingly.

Is the design appropriate for it’s life span? If so, hang in there, there’re only three more check points to go.

4. Is it frictionless?

Friction is whatever is in the way of the person reading/using something. The more friction you add, the harder it is for them to get what they want from your design. Basically, friction is generated by things like text that is hard to read or a website that is difficult to use.

That moment when the text is too small.

This might seem like an obvious mistake, but you would be surprised how many times designers end up sacrificing readability and usability to make their design “look better”.

It’s important to measure the amount of information that you want to present very carefully. Avoid information overload, that will only add friction to your design. For that, you really have to understand what your viewer/user needs, and in a lot of cases, you even have to distill that information and make it digestible.

“A wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention.” — Marty Neumeier

If the design is well done, it will become invisible and people will easily find what they need. If it’s not, then you’re most likely staring at a bad design, because good design is frictionless.

You’re close. There’s only two more things to consider.

5 . Is it visually appealing?

Back into subjectivity land. This is the part that most people like to focus on, and the part that generates more discussions and controversy. This happens because it can be subjective at times and it’s hard to agree on something when all we have are opinions.

However, there is a way to break part of this subjectivity. You just need to learn the principles that make design visually appealing. These are the elements that you’ll find consistently across examples of good design. I wrote an overview about them in the post I referred in the beginning of this article, and will do a more thorough breakdown in the future.

Besides learning the theory, you should also enrich your visual culture. You can do that simply by looking at design that is featured by the design community in websites and books. If you do that, you’ll start to see the patterns that keep reappearing in good design like well-balanced compositions, beautiful typography, precise alignments, delightful colour combinations and many other things.

This should be enough to get you in a good path, nonetheless, in the end of the day, this check point will always be a bit subjective to go through, but since this is just one out of six, it shouldn’t disable you from distinguishing good design from bad. As I said in the beginning, good design is not always beautiful to everyone.

The next check points is not only the check point but also the finishing line.

6. 1+1=3?

If the design passed the previous 5 check points, you have already a really good design in front of you, this check point is what takes it from good to extraordinary.

To reveal if a design has more than the sum of its parts you just need to look closely. Essentially this is when a design goes beyond a combination of good typography and colours, it’s when there’s a brilliant idea that supports everything and takes it to a whole new level.

FedEx logo (1994)

A simple yet perfect example of this is the FedEx logo, just take a close look at it. Between the E and the X you’ll notice a small arrow cleverly hidden in the negative space. This arrow is meant to symbolise the company’s accuracy and speed.

This is what differentiate good from great designers. Good designers will rely on their technical skills and base their design on principles (a machine could learn that by the way), but great designers bring more to the equation. I think that this is what creativity really is.

Final thoughts

In a nutshell, good design has more than what meets the eye, it’s not only about how it looks, but a combination of a series of thoughtful decisions that are made with the end user/viewer in mind.

Alright! I gave it a shot. If you find this useful or interesting, please consider sharing it. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out in the comments or on twitter @zecarlostorre (I just recently got into that) I would love to know what you think, how do YOU identify good design? And what things do you consider more important?

Also, if you have any ideas or questions for a future post, I’m all hears. :)

Thanks for reading!

The post How to identify Good Design in 6 steps appeared first on Design your way.

http://j.mp/2ywmnlO via Design your way URL : http://j.mp/2arS45r

[jamiekturner]

How to identify Good Design in 6 steps

Breaking apart the subjectivity.

On my very first post on medium, a reader asked a question that really resonated with me. She started by saying that design is subjective and then wondered if someone could ever devise a list of principles that could define good design. So, I thought, “Why not give it a try?”, and here it goes.

There are two parts to the question, being the first one the affirmation that design is subjective. Personally, I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of design but I understand where it’s coming from. People tend to mix design and art in the same bucket and the proprieties of one sometimes drip on top of the other.

Art is subjective, it’s like a game where there are almost no rules. Design is different, and the fact that someone can put together a list of principles should already tell you that there are some rules to the design game.

If there are rules, then we can tell whether or not these rules are being followed, which means that design is not subjective.

However, to be fair, I can’t really say that design is 100% objective, there are always things that come down to personal preference that is determined by your culture and experiences.

Now, this “tiny” level of subjectivity doesn’t mean that you can’t tell good design from bad, it just means that you might find a good design “ugly” or in the other side of the spectrum, you might find something that looks beautiful that actually is a pretty bad design. Let’s look at one example.

The famous Juicy Salif by Philippe Starck.

I think almost all can agree that this is a beautiful piece of design but the million-dollar question is, does that make it a good design?

Nope.

Why? Because it has so many functional problems that I won’t even bother to write them here (just go to amazon and read the reviews if you are interested and/or want to have a laugh, or read this), but in short, it doesn’t do a good job in the only thing that it’s supposed to do, help you to get that fresh juice.

This to say that it’s possible for something to be “good looking” but still be a bad design. You just need to look beyond the looks, and to help you do that I devised a list of 6 “check points” that you can use to filter the good from the bad. There is a lot of nuance involved, so I’ll try to expand each of these check points.

Based on the lemon squeezer, I think you can already guess the first one…

1. Is the design effective?

The need for design is usually driven by a problem that needs to be solved. It might be a website that needs to be easier to use, a product that needs to appeal to a certain audience or a new business that needs a logo, the problem can be literally anything.

This is the first check point to diagnose whether or not a design is good. If it doesn’t solve the problem, you don’t need to go any further, it’s definitely not a good design. It doesn’t matter how good it looks if it doesn’t even accomplish the main purpose of its existence.

I find this one of the main reasons why many designers get so frustrated with their clients/bosses. They tend to jump into “design mode” without fully understanding the problem and just try to make something cool, that will improve their portfolio. They forget that we’re not designing for us but for someone else, and we need to address their needs, not ours.

In order for your design to be effective is crucial to understand and empathise with your client/user. Before you start designing, ask “Why?” until you really understand the true goal that your design needs to accomplish. Sometimes the client might think that they need one thing but after a few questions you’ll realise that they actually need something entirely different. This is the only way that you can be certain that you’re trying to solve the right problem.

If your design is effective, you can move on to the next check point.

2. Does it reflect the right tone?

For you to be able to tell whether or not the tone is appropriate, first you’ll need to figure out two things, the brand and the audience.

The brand

The term “brand” is usually associated with businesses but it’s not limited to them, many things can have a brand, even you. Your brand is the perception that people have of you, the same applies to companies and pretty much everything else.

Good design helps a company take control of their brand, and shape the public’s opinion to match how they want to be perceived.

The audience

A company usually has a target audience and it might vary from something broad to a very small niche. If you know how the company wants to be perceived and who the design is for, the remaining question is, what is appropriate for them?

Generally speaking, the broader the audience the cleaner and more conventional the design needs to be, that’s why you see many companies losing part of their “soul” as they grow. This happens because certain design gimmicks that will work for small niches won’t stick with a larger audience, therefore the company “sacrifices” that to attract more people. On the other end of the spectrum, when your audience is smaller and very specific you can rely on those gimmicks to make the design attractive and engaging to them.

A good example to understand this is to compare McDonald’s with your local burger joint. They basically sell the same thing, but they communicate in very distinct ways.

www.byronhamburgers.com

Your local burger joint usually capitalises on the latest trends in design that attract people who identify with that, like the funny illustrations you can see on Byron’s website. On the other hand, McDonalds communicates in a more conventional way to cover a more general public trying not to patronize or alienate anyone.

www.mcdonalds.com

In short, to understand if a design passes this second check point, you just need to know what is the appropriate tone and if the design is successful in communicating it. If it is, then you’re one step closer to a good design.

3. Does it stand the test of time?

Good design is sensitive to time.

Ideally, you’d want a design that is timeless, however, that is not always necessary or even advised. It really depends on what the design is trying to accomplish and its life span.

If you’re designing a webpage for a product that will be replaced or updated in two years, for instance, it probably makes sense to take advantage of the trends of the year to get ahead. This will help your design seem contemporary, modern and relevant. However, you should try to stay ahead of the curve and see where the trends are going. There’s nothing worse than catching the wave too late, this will only make you look bad, like you’re trying to catch up rather than being the one setting the trend.

In the other hand, if we’re talking about a logo that is supposed to last for years or decades, then yes, you should definitely avoid design fads that come with a short expiry date. If you look at well-known logo redesigns like the Starbucks logo, the trend is to make them simpler as time passes, thus the simpler you make it, the longer it will last.

Starbucks logo iterations from 1971, 1987, 1992, 2011

With this in mind, to pass this check point, you just need to understand what’s the life span of the design you’re analysing and judge it accordingly.

Is the design appropriate for it’s life span? If so, hang in there, there’re only three more check points to go.

4. Is it frictionless?

Friction is whatever is in the way of the person reading/using something. The more friction you add, the harder it is for them to get what they want from your design. Basically, friction is generated by things like text that is hard to read or a website that is difficult to use.

That moment when the text is too small.

This might seem like an obvious mistake, but you would be surprised how many times designers end up sacrificing readability and usability to make their design “look better”.

It’s important to measure the amount of information that you want to present very carefully. Avoid information overload, that will only add friction to your design. For that, you really have to understand what your viewer/user needs, and in a lot of cases, you even have to distill that information and make it digestible.

“A wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention.” — Marty Neumeier

If the design is well done, it will become invisible and people will easily find what they need. If it’s not, then you’re most likely staring at a bad design, because good design is frictionless.

You’re close. There’s only two more things to consider.

5 . Is it visually appealing?

Back into subjectivity land. This is the part that most people like to focus on, and the part that generates more discussions and controversy. This happens because it can be subjective at times and it’s hard to agree on something when all we have are opinions.

However, there is a way to break part of this subjectivity. You just need to learn the principles that make design visually appealing. These are the elements that you’ll find consistently across examples of good design. I wrote an overview about them in the post I referred in the beginning of this article, and will do a more thorough breakdown in the future.

Besides learning the theory, you should also enrich your visual culture. You can do that simply by looking at design that is featured by the design community in websites and books. If you do that, you’ll start to see the patterns that keep reappearing in good design like well-balanced compositions, beautiful typography, precise alignments, delightful colour combinations and many other things.

This should be enough to get you in a good path, nonetheless, in the end of the day, this check point will always be a bit subjective to go through, but since this is just one out of six, it shouldn’t disable you from distinguishing good design from bad. As I said in the beginning, good design is not always beautiful to everyone.

The next check points is not only the check point but also the finishing line.

6. 1+1=3?

If the design passed the previous 5 check points, you have already a really good design in front of you, this check point is what takes it from good to extraordinary.

To reveal if a design has more than the sum of its parts you just need to look closely. Essentially this is when a design goes beyond a combination of good typography and colours, it’s when there’s a brilliant idea that supports everything and takes it to a whole new level.

FedEx logo (1994)

A simple yet perfect example of this is the FedEx logo, just take a close look at it. Between the E and the X you’ll notice a small arrow cleverly hidden in the negative space. This arrow is meant to symbolise the company’s accuracy and speed.

This is what differentiate good from great designers. Good designers will rely on their technical skills and base their design on principles (a machine could learn that by the way), but great designers bring more to the equation. I think that this is what creativity really is.

Final thoughts

In a nutshell, good design has more than what meets the eye, it’s not only about how it looks, but a combination of a series of thoughtful decisions that are made with the end user/viewer in mind.

Alright! I gave it a shot. If you find this useful or interesting, please consider sharing it. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out in the comments or on twitter @zecarlostorre (I just recently got into that) I would love to know what you think, how do YOU identify good design? And what things do you consider more important?

Also, if you have any ideas or questions for a future post, I’m all hears. :)

Thanks for reading!

The post How to identify Good Design in 6 steps appeared first on Design your way.

from Web Development & Designing http://www.designyourway.net/blog/design/identify-good-design-in-6-steps/

[painterontheblood]

How hand movements reveal hidden thoughts

We all lie, and only a liar would really try to deny this. Men, it seems, like to boast quite a bit in their daily interactions, according to a lie diary study. They often extend the truth when they are boasting, sometimes to breaking point. The same study suggests that women tell lies more frequently than men do (with some female samples telling double the number that males did), but they often tell lies to make others feel better.

‘Of course you don’t look fat in that dress.’

‘You are just as attractive as the day I met you.’

‘Eating that will not put on the pounds.’

‘That dress really suits you.’

Lie diaries, where you record each and every lie told in the day relative to each interaction, reveal these findings and much more besides (DePaulo et al. 1996). Many lies are routine parts of our everyday life, designed for self-presentation and self-enhancement, or designed to smooth our interactions with others, to promote harmony, by allowing others to feel better with us, as we feed them some porky-pies. Lies are a part of the great social function of everyday talk, and we do most of this without any planning at all. In the words of Erving Goffman:

The legitimate performances of everyday life are not ‘acted’ or ‘put on’ in the sense that the performer knows in advance just what he is going to do, and does this solely because of the effect it is likely to have . . . In short, we all act better than we know how.

(Goffman 1959: 73–4)

In essence, we tell lies regularly and we are very good at it. DePaulo and her colleagues also noted that ‘Consistent with the view of lying as an everyday social interaction process, participants said that they did not regard their lies as serious and did not plan them much or worry about being caught’ (DePaulo et al. 1996: 979). In other words, they are routine and without any real consequences (although, of course, we may grow dependent on the lies told to us, and that may be quite serious enough).

However, sometimes there are much bigger lies. Lies that we need to think about and plan, lies that cause us to feel terrible guilt in the telling and sometimes acute anxiety about being discovered, lies that can tear us apart. We try to disguise these both in terms of our planning and in terms of our emotional response. We rehearse what we are going to say and then we try to control our emotions in the moment itself, and we hope we can get away with it. Lies require a degree of extra cognitive planning; it is more difficult to make up a story about why you were late and what you were doing rather than merely recounting the true version of events. Lies sometimes are associated with significant emotion in the telling – fear, guilt, anxiety, apprehension; most of these associated emotions are very negative, but occasionally we feel positive emotion – pride, relief, joy that someone is falling for it (Ekman 1985). Some individuals habitually feel positive emotion when lying; often these individuals have a personality disorder, but sometimes they do not (Ekman 1988). Lying is a complex blend of cognition and emotion that varies from lie to lie, from relationship to relationship and from situation to situation. There are no universal telltale signs of lying because of this variability in their construction, function and effects, but there are indicators of additional cognitive planning, and indicators of emotional response. Unfilled pauses increase with the demands of extra cognitive planning (Beattie 1978, 1979), but these planning pauses may not be necessary with sufficient mental rehearsal of the lie. We may feel strong negative emotions when we lie, but emotional expressions on our face can be covered quickly by a mask by efficient liars (Ekman 1988). The mask is usually a particular type of smile, called a non-Duchenne smile,

characterised by a degree of facial asymmetry (stronger on one side of the face than the other side) and by its rapid onset and offset. It would be hard to find a single behavioural indicator of lying that is truly reliable given that each lie varies on the cognitive dimensions of difficulty, and degree of rehearsal (if any) and a wide variety of negative and positive emotional dimensions, where the emotional expressions may be masked or not. There may not be a single behavioural indicator but there are trends, and one interesting trend is the attempted control or inhibition of behaviour. We seem to know instinctively that our behaviour can leak a great deal, so we attempt to inhibit it, as Charles Darwin (1872) noted. After all, the most general conclusion possible about lying is that people do not want to give the game away, even in the routine lies of everyday life, where there really is no consequence, except perhaps losing face (‘Alright then, you do look fat in that dress. Are you happy now?’). Therefore, we try a strategy of general behavioural control – keep normal eye contact (people usually watch our eyes), smile as naturally as possible (they watch our faces), look relaxed, do not fidget too much, try to move the hands less, keep the feet still.

Darwin (1872) had actually very little to say about either deception or lying in his seminal work on nonverbal behaviour The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. But what he did have to say was that such nonverbal behaviours ‘reveal the thoughts and intentions of others more truly than do words, which may be falsified’ (1872: 359). But he also wrote that

when movements, associated through habit with certain states of the mind, are partially repressed by the will, the strictly involuntary muscles, as well as those which are least under the separate control of the will, are liable still to act; and their action is often highly expressive.

(Darwin 1872: 54)

In other words, people try to repress or inhibit certain expressive movements when they are lying, but they will not always be successful. Some behaviours are harder to inhibit than others. Ekman (2003) refers to this as the inhibition hypothesis – ‘if you cannot make an action voluntarily, then you will not be able to prevent it when involuntary processes such as emotion instigate it’ (2003: 206). Therefore, it follows that certain emotional expressions that cannot easily be inhibited may be powerful indicators of felt emotion. Ekman (2001, 2003) calls this ‘nonverbal leakage’. However, Darwin, of course, is also implying that other move ments will be inhibited during deception (those that are under volitional control, like hand movements and gesture, for example), and that their form and morphology will not be so revealing of the real underlying state. Although, of course, we should note that the inhibition (or attempted inhibition) of these behaviours may be itself highly revealing.

Ekman adds one major complication to this argument, namely that although hand movements, for example, through the medium of gesture, or foot movements would be easy to inhibit . . . most people do not bother to censor their body actions. Because most of us do not get much feedback from others about what our body movements are revealing, we do not learn the need to monitor these actions; and so, we hypothesized, when people lie, they usually do not fine-tune their body actions. (Ekman 2003: 208)

In other words, he is arguing that although gestures could be inhibited they often are not and that therefore ‘the body will be a good source of deception cues – exactly the opposite of what Darwin predicted’ (Ekman 2003: 208). Elsewhere Ekman has explicitly criticised Darwin because he ‘failed to note the existence of gestural slips (Ekman 1985), which leak concealed feelings and intentions, and other forms of body movement that can betray a lie’

(Ekman 2009: 3451).

Therefore, if we consider the arguments of these two great pioneers in the field of nonverbal communication we end up with a number of specific hypotheses. First, when it comes to deception, there may well be an attempt on the part of those trying to deceive to suppress or inhibit certain

behaviours that are potentially highly expressive, and a decrease in the frequency of certain behaviours may itself be one potential indicator of deception. Second, because the conventions of everyday talk shape our awareness of our bodily actions, then we may not monitor sufficiently certain behaviours that we could volitionally control (like gesture, which, after all, we can volitionally control quite easily by locking the hands). Some behaviours like gesture (potentially controllable but not always monitored) may, therefore, be quite revealing in terms of their manner of execution.

There is research evidence to suggest that whereas people generally think that many behaviours increase when people are telling lies, meta-analyses of various research studies reveal that only a small number of behaviours change reliably during deception, and these behaviours tend to decrease when lying as a function of behavioural inhibition. Sporer and Schwandt (2007) conducted just such a meta-analysis of the published literature on deception and found that only three forms of behaviour were reliably associated with lying, and they were ‘nodding’, ‘foot and leg movements’ and ‘hand movements’. All three were found to decrease in frequency. It is worth remembering that in their classic 1969 paper on ‘Nonverbal Leakage and Clues to Deception’, Ekman and Friesen predicted that because people are generally unaware of the behaviour of their feet and legs, they should be ‘a good source for leakage and deception cues’. They predicted more movements in the feet and legs during deception (things like ‘abortive restless flight movements . . . frequent shift of leg posture, and in restless or repetitive leg and foot acts’, Ekman and Friesen 1969). This prediction has been proven wrong in the vast majority of studies (including in Ekman’s own research, see Ekman 2003: 211). People do seem to inhibit their behaviour during deception, even the feet and legs.

The hands, of course, are particularly interesting in this regard for one very important reason. I would argue that it is really quite difficult to fake the form of iconic gestures when you are lying and make it accurate. It is also very complicated to split meaning into the verbal and gestural channels in a way that might look natural or normal. You would have to get the division of meaning between the two channels just right, as well as the precise iconic form of the gesture and the right degree of anticipation of the associated part of the verbal message by the preparation phase of the gesture. In Chapter 13 on metaphoric gestures, you can see what could happen if you get it wrong. This would all be quite demanding, and it seems that many people do not attempt this and opt for a safer (and easier) strategy. People tend to inhibit their hand movements when telling lies, and gesture frequency decreases in deception (Cody and O’Hair 1983; Davis and Hadiks 1995; Ekman 1988; Ekman and Friesen 1972; Ekman et al. 1976; Ekman et al. 1991; Greene et al. 1985; Hofer et al. 1993; Kalma et al. 1996; Mann et al. 1998; Vrij et al. 1999; but see Bond et al. 1985; DeTurck and Miller 1985). Indeed, a decrease in gestural frequency would seem to be one of the more reliable indicators of deception. It suggests perhaps that at some unconscious level, liars do not want to risk giving the game away through revealing hand movements. Therefore, they try to inhibit this form of behaviour by clasping their hands or using similar kinds of strategy. Aldert Vrij (2000) has a useful summary of this research in his book Detecting Lies and Deceit. He also summarises the empirical evidence that most people believe that gesture frequency actually increases during deception, which shows that most people have a false belief here, as in so many other areas when it comes to deception.

—Geoffrey Beattie

From “Rethinking body language: how hand movements reveal hidden thoughts” de Geoffrey Beattie, pp 204-208.

[golshxd-blog]

  Blame Tony Northrup for the dire thought.

His (great) recent video analysing the downfall of so many camera / lens manufacturers leaves very little to the imagination. Going down, going down, now.

What happened to the digital dream? It came true. You’re looking at it.

    Digital opened up avenues for exploration. And some adventurous manufacturers explored. Some actually brought really interesting ideas to the market. Sigma, Sony and Ricoh come to mind.

But innovation is diamond shaped and realist consolidation always follows creative divergence. And norm got the better of inventiveness. In photography, of all industries.

Much as in the automotive sector (check out Adrian’s post comparing the two worlds) those interesting ideas came packaged in weird and “wonderful” shapes that strayed too far from convention for their own good. When electric cars became the new Eldorado, most models introduced were so ugly it took a good look at a politician’s agenda to bring the design fiasco back into perspective. The same thing happened to some oddly shaped cameras (which is kinda worrying for the Zeiss ZX1, by the way).

And their performance priorities, at odds with rapidly coalescing market consensus, hit the final nail for them.

    Because, yes, somehow, in a art-based industry, performance became the fulcrum on which success and undoing eventually hinged.

For what it’s worth, the photographs on this page were made using a second-hand Hasselblad camera that has the overall speed of fingernail growth (but is utterly brilliant in areas that actually relate to picture making). And a 45mm lens that’s not that optically fast either, come to think of it. I hope that doesn’t put anyone off reading the rest. Because now comes the link to photography-as-Art. And to mathematics, one of the ultimate artforms. And to farming in China, as a free bonus, because why not?

    Performance-based marketing led every manufacturer with a death wish to basically pay huge lumps of money to shout out to a message-saturated audience : “Hey, we are introducing a camera that’s exactly the same as all the others on the market”. Because performance is so closely tied to internal components, they were basically shouting “Hey, Sony inside”, just like everyone else. And guess who became quite good at having Sony components inside? And who’s doing rather well in today’s deflating pudding of a market?

The irony, of course, is that so much of this performance (and more) can be achieved through the brute force computational photography abilities of the devices in our pockets. Oh, worry not, this is still in its infancy. It’s not quite there yet. It’s far, far, far, more convenient, but only 50% of the way there, when it comes to IQ. Give it a few years, though, and you may expect profuse, phone-induced, poultry roosting. Reaping what you sow, I guess?

    Performance-base appreciation of gear has had far more interesting consequences than winner-takes-all market dynamics can capture, however.

The ever indispensable Ming Thein recently re-posted an article describing the influence of sensor format on rendering. Every photographer in the world interested in photography as a creative pursuit (yes, all 28 of us) should read this 10 times, 100 times. As many times as it takes to fully grasp the implication of what Ming is writing.

Many things and, most important of all, that all formats are interesting and useful for different things, which is distinctly at odds with what those hideous machine tests – spewing out metrics that have more in common with car radios than photographs – jabber on and on about. A pox upon both your houses, lab tests and tech metrics

    It’s not just photography, you know. Variety matters. Everywhere.

In China (and probably elsewhere) farmers are pollinating their trees manually because all the bees have been killed by intensive practises. That fact is similar to Tony’s Northrup excellent roundup of the photo market. It’s just a warning of things to come if we continue to kill off diversity.

I’ll miss fanboys. At least they root for different brands for very human reasons, much like football players supports different clubs. Nothing is worse than the single-metric approach that is performance-based evaluation of cameras.

    Robert May, an Australian born scientist, made great contributions to theoretical ecology, putting into simple maths a model of the evolution in time of the number of existing species or individuals in a species. Very simple maths. Stuff most 10 year olds could do on a calculator.

In this work, the “richness” of one generation is linked to that of the previous via an equation containing both a damping factor (simulating competition for limited resources, for instance) and a fertility constant (which he called lambda) that plays a spectacular role:

Low values of lambda create worlds in which a very small number of species co-exists in balance. The word balance may be too positively connoted for my purpose. Stasis, immobilism may be better suited. Things never change. And that’s it.

High values of lambda lead to chaos. Utter randomness. Mankind disappears, three-eyed ravens take its place. Until next week.

Goldilocks values of lambda lead to rich, complex systems, such as our planet and universe today. Zillions of species living together, disappearing, appearing, reappearing, in a constantly evolving world for as long as there’s sufficient energy pouring in.

In that sort of world, that most controversial of scientific phenomena becomes possible and useful: emergence. ie, the apparition of a mechanism that is not contingent on any preceding mechanisms or factors (cue Zarathustra).

    Chaos Theory pioneer Mitchell Feingenbaum studied those equations, and others found everywhere in nature, and showed that a thriving, diverse world such as the one we are blessed to live in today walks a very narrow path between crystallized stagnation and nonsensical randomness. Move the constant too far to one side or to the other and it’s goodbye forever. Irreversibly so.

In the photo world, it’s not hard to imagine what chaos could look like. Just look at the grips and rear backs of most cameras today. Not totally chaotic, but, if you’ve used a 30 year-old film camera more than 2 seconds, you can see where I’m going with the analogy.

Emergence can be illustrated by the mirrorless revolution. Sony brought it to the mass market, but the concept emerged seemingly from nowhere and received huge traction, in spite of what Ricoh are now saying. No diversity, no mirrorless emergence. We’d all still be slapping slabs of glass about and perfecting damping techniques, whether we liked it or not.

As for stagnation, I invite you to view Tony’s conclusions and extrapolate a few years.

    So, what’s the lambda constant of photography?

It seems to me that 30 years ago, we were shooting perfectly nice cameras and looking at 6×4 prints that ended up in shoe boxes. Today, we’re shooting cameras that are often perfectly nice, looking at 6×4 images on our screens that end up inside the silicon shoe boxes of cloud servers. What’s changed is mainly that we make more. Many, many, more.

Hmmm … full circle status quo?

    And you can count on today’s incumbents to try their darndest to keep brand variety at the lowest possible setting, with the help of flaccid specialised media. We need variety.

To me, we now live in that strange old world where cameras used day-in-day-out, by people who get paid 10 large for a print, are deemed unfit for amateurs, based on a machine-led evaluation, because of a metric so utterly unrelated to creativity that it actually seems alien: speed. Screw speed!

But don’t! That’s just my bias speaking. What matters is variety.

For some, speed is both important and enabling. For others it’s fast glass. For others it’s slow, light glass. For others it’s sharp glass. For others it’s old, characterful glass. For others still, it’s tone subtlety. For others: robustness, weight, viewfinder clarity, WYSIWYGness, tactile pleasure, evocative power, price, size, noise … and any combination of a slew of other criteria that are completely unrelated to the currently dominant market forces but totally in line with personal desires, creativity and the etymological meaning of art: making personal stuff.

Art is the expression of human feelings and ideas through making stuff. By its very definition, art is exclusively about diversity. How gear is built, reviewed, and purchased should mirror this at all times.

If photography was art, surely we’d see diversity grow, not dwindle, right?

    So, what if …

We gave performance-based marketing the stern kick-in-the-nuts it so rightfully deserves for destroying photographic biodiversity? And thought twice before buying the next camera that comes along doing more than the current one rather than doing different or better? (No, higher fps isn’t inherently better, neither are higher ISO or higher AF pixel counts. These are just succubi of that evil speed divinity.)

Acknowledged that not only is photography art, it’s one of the most beautiful forms of art. One that makes technique so much easier to learn than most others that anyone can express his/her ideas freely. And that we are all artists with our personal dreams, ideas, drives, fears, talents, regardless of what manufacturers and our education have tought us? Are we pushed so hard down the hierarchy of needs that we refuse to listen to our daemon? Are we so indoctrinated as to refuse to even recognise its existence?

Acknowledged that creativity and art are hard. And that the quantitative substitutes offered by the industry are just luring us into believing that spray and pray shooting will maybe get us that magical pic, because-you-never-know, taking our minds off the real work of trying harder? (and also believing that shooting and storing millions of pics has no environmental cost) This sells for close to a hundred grand. It was shot with a manual medium format film camera (this, with a wide lens), as were most of Nick Brandt’s non-composited photographs (TRILOGY 2001 – 2012).

…

    What if we gave our lambda constant the boost it so desperately needs, before all that’s left are one mirrorless brand and smartphones?

  Posted on DearSusan by pascaljappy.