#time for a refresh!! also because i changed my header recently too

[starflungwaddledee]

at first I saw Starstruck's new bow in your pfp as as butterfly wings, and had a moment of "oh NO"

oh, good spotting! i JUST changed that; it's my new october/halloween icon!! i love designing fun festive bows for starstruck!

though i can assure you she'd look quite pretty with butterfly themed wings!

[we-rate-tmnt]

I request: Leonardo. Please and thank you 🙏.

Idk if everyone loves Leo or if my header and avatar just remind everyone about this amazing blue boy. (This one’s super silly btw. I’m just sillier as time goes on. Character development I guess?) 

The iconic leador Leonardo (1987)

Bro idk why but I loved this Leo. I have a tiny memory, especially with this version but I clearly remember that I thought he was the funniest and the coolest. I mean, he had swords, what was I supposed to do as a 7-year-old. NOT like him??? Anyway, while Raph was the best at insult comedy, I think Leo had the best puns and punchlines. I really like how nonchalant this Leo is compared to his iterations, going along with really silly ideas and having fun along the way. But because of this, his leadership is a little forced at times, he seems like such a chill and fun dude that when he gets serious, I have to squint and ask ‘are you Leo? Or were you just putting on act a moment ago?’ Or my perception is entirely warped over time. Either way, good turtle boy, could have used some work tho. 5.7/10

Here comes grumpy lad wooo this is all read very monotone btw Fearless Leader (2003)

What. What the fuck happened. I was actually so confused when Leo turned really angry and serious and almost manic. I thought that episode when he popped into Casey’s window and was like ‘Hey bitch lets go beat the shit out of some lowlifes’ I was WOAH THERE BUDDY BACK UP BACK UP BACK TF UP. It was so sudden to me and when it was finally explained, it made some sense??? Like yeah, character development is great an’ all but this ain’t it chief. I can’t imagine what it was like having to wait for these episodes to release one at a time. Bc I watched every episode back to back on Youtube and I was genuinely bamboozled. But when you have an experience like that where guilt is weighing down on you from a situation you couldn’t control, it would’ve been HELLA HELPFUL to have at least a flashback, like a line saying ‘I was so useless!’ at BARE MINIMUM. Like right after Shredder is booted off to Planet Zula, Donnie would notice that Leo didn’t seem all that happy and would ask why and Leo would get upset and yell at Donnie saying that ‘You wouldn’t understand’, ‘You don’t know how I felt, how I feel because of that’, etc. Like you don’t even have to say he felt guilty or helpless, just give us something to grab onto. We’re merely six-year-olds who thought they could climb the YMCA rock wall in easy mode but instead the script riders harnessed us up on the hard one and wouldn’t let us come down until we rang the little bell at the top. I think that is the only problem I had with his Leo. The sudden change of calm and decisive to angry and irrational was so jarring that it felt unnatural without that crucial context. If you want a surprise reveal, at least hint at the reveal (like just about every Disney movie with their ‘twist’ villains) not wait until the very last moment. I think this might be my least favorite Leo and I think the season where he stood out the most and seemed the strongest was Fast Forward (Which was GOOD FIGHT ME), especially in scenes with Dark Leo, his clone. He sees so much of himself in Dark Leo but he also sees something he had once grasped (AKA the poorly written character arc, I CANNOT stress how bad I thought it was). Although, I honestly think he’s a really good character and he’s a pretty neat guy. However, this score is entirely held up by Fast Forward and his connection with Usagi, sword bros to the end of time. 3/10 (2 for FF and 1 for Usagi)

And now a Leo that makes me genuinely feel UWU Leo (2012)

I cannot stress how much I like this guy! Like his design is so appealing, his dedication, his obsession with Space Heroes, like I FUCKING LOVE IT. And everyone knows, that shit with Karai, at first when they didn’t realize they were related, I can let slide but kajsdflksadf what even like why did the writers feel the need to add in more ‘love interest’ implications like yuck yuck yuck. The only two interactions with Leo and Karai that I really like are when Leo defeats her using the healing hands technique and when Leo has a goth/emo/punk/idk I’m new here phase and they team up and EXPLOSIONS. He was introduced to us as being incredibly naive and his idea of leadership is from some old cartoon that’s basically star trek but ethically questionable. After his fights in season 1, to the finale with the technodrome, you can see his growth. He’s able to formulate plans and make life or death decisions. BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE. When Leo got hurt, I felt like the oof sound effect mixed with some tears I normally shed at some Shojo manga bs. While the episodes following were super weird, it was a nice way to help Leo recover, not only physically but spiritually (Although I don’t remember the spirit arc at all except the epic Raph vs Fishface fight, so we’re skipping that). When Master Splinter really died, you could tell there was a huge impact on Leo, but he had to remain stoic and lead the family now. A lot of heartbreaking moments in this series came from Leo and I’m glad they took at least some thought into developing him. Tiny head Leo will haunt my nightmares, but the giggly fanboy will warm my heart constantly. 6/10

I only have one word for this Leo (Heroes in a Half Shell: Blast to the Past)

This is a super crazy bad idea accent on the super crazy bad part have I mentioned it’s also a really terrible idea/10

Okay, spoiler alert, didn’t really think this Leo was that grand Leo (2014/2016)

Painfully average. He didn’t stand out that much, Raph was part of the focus and had that touching scene at the end, Donnie was ICONIC and Mikey (with his weird-ass eyes) was super lively and funny! Leo? Uh, I don’t remember a single line he said. Because he never really grabbed my attention, I don’t have too much to say on this version. The Raph and Leo fight felt forced and the whole ‘keep this stuff that could turn us human a secret’ was pretty pointless and was added just to cause drama, I don’t even remember what that Splinter and Leo conversation was about. Design-wise, really neat! You can see some more traditional Japanese clothing/style mixed with modern (I’d feel a lot better about this assumption if some could tell exactly what the heck he’s wearing, but I get traditional Japan warrior vibes from it) in his look which was super neat! Other than that, if you like him, please tell me why because I don’t get. He was just kinda eh. 5/10

AHHH MY BOY YASSS WHOOO!! Neon Leon (2018)

Okay, I loved Ben Schwarts already from Parks and Rec but like him being Sonic AND Leo, like DUDE. He’s super funny by himself but teamed up with this shows writing and animation, it makes it hilarious. I literally love this Leo so much, maybe because we’re alike but honestly, he’s amazing. I love his design with the red and yellow crescents accenting his skin and livening up his color pallet. He has a very healthy and natural dynamic with his brothers, he’s the first to know what’s wrong and tries his best to make up for his actions. This is really prominent in the most recent episodes, along with the episode portal jacked. In both, Leo is separated from his brothers. Portal Jacked is in a more literal sense, while Air Turtle handles in more of an emotional sense. While both are brief, Leo sees his error and tries his best to make it up to them. I love his dynamic so much and it’s so nice to see something like this compared to the unnecessary drama and tension between the brothers in the previous series. It’s refreshing and this is something a younger audience needs to see; instead of fighting, it’s better to work together and improve yourself along the way. Improvement is a big theme for Leo here. He’s a goofball, makes jokes at every opportunity and isn’t quite skilled at fighting or using his weapon. But he grows over time, he learns to manage his power and he’s working on mastering it. He’s trying to put aside his narcissism more and focuses on his family. I think the approach they took with him rising to leader rather than slapping it on his forehead was the goddamn best decision they could make. He’s making plans, finding loopholes, helping out and getting out of his comfort zone. I cannot stress how well this show has handled Leo, along with the other characters. I can’t wait to see more episodes about his growth and I am awarding him with one of the greatest honors I could give... 10/10

Storytime: I drew a super cute 2012 Leo, you should look at him. Shameless self-promo, but you should follow me on my main blog bc I’m nice and I draw pretty pictures. Also. I have a little 2012 Leo Happy Meal toy??? I think??? guarding my window and he’s been there for YEARS. I need to bring him in and refresh his paint job.

Wow! I didn’t expect this many requests for Leo, so the blog will be momentarily spammed with the requests, but it shouldn’t be too much! Up next should be the last turtle (Mikey) and then we can get to some REALLY great requests I’m eager to answer. As usual, please comment and reblog! I’d love to hear your opinion!

[crappyfics]

Coco [part 1]

Summary: It wasn’t about impressing him. It was about becoming the best version of yourself.

Word count: 2k

Notes: Couldn’t find the owner of the header.

It was a hot summer day and it seemed like it was never gonna end. Stuck at your job, you worked the stock since ten in the morning piling up boxes, moving away trolleys, receiving supplies and sending out products. Your coworkers would show up every once in a while to grab a trolly piled up with products, and only be back once they were done placing the stuff in the respective shelves. The customer traffic was at its peak that day with everyone coming by to purchase something for a refreshing drink. You had received a great shipment of gin and rose wine which were highly requested this time of the year. The store was going to close soon and you looked forward to it. Though you hadn’t finished moving things around in the stock which was a bummer, really, because it meant you would have to deal with it the next morning. So you took off your gloves and apron, placed them on top of a box pile then retreated to the bathroom to splash some water on your face. 

The cool water refreshed your skin that was hot and sweaty not only from the physical effort, but for the heat in the warehouse that you could swear was also slowing down your productivity that day. You wash your face one more time then dry it with some paper feeling much better now. Coming out of the washroom, you get startled with the inconvenient Chanyeol who’s been getting on your nerves a little more than usual. Arms crossed against his chest, he stared down at you with a smile you really didn’t appreciate right now. 

“I’m not doing overtime, Chanyeol,” you said, managing to move past him and towards the lockers. You heard his footsteps behind you, his presence was always like a shadow following you. At least at work, he always made sure you were under his supervision. 

“I wasn’t gonna ask that,” he responded with a tranquility you recognized well. He liked to play that game with you, the rat and the cat, it was ridiculous. 

“It’s almost eight and you never have anything nice to say to me after five p.m.” you spoke as you opened your locker and pulled out your sneakers dropping them on the floor and proceeding to undo the laces of your work shoes. They were heavy and dirty, so much like how you felt at that moment. 

“You’re funny,” he laughed knowing very well it was all true but he kept the commentary for himself. “I was going to tell you to arrive one hour early tomorrow,” he said, making you snap your head towards him, giving him a death glare he was so accustomed to. “We have a lot of boxes to place here in the back, and another 50 or 60 to put out in the front.” 

“Yeol, I was working in the back on my own all day,” you whined much to his surprise because he really thought you were going to attack his stomach with a punch or something. But honestly speaking, you would never hurt your boss, especially not at work. He just was never used to hear you whine if it wasn’t for special occasions, such as asking for a day off or whatever. “You gotta make one of the boys come out here and help me out if you want the stock to be done in two days. One and a half if we’re being optimistic.” 

You sat down on the bench in front of the lockers and continued to take off your shoes and change for the light weighted sneakers you had. You placed the heavy ones very carelessly back inside your locker and reached further up there to grab your jacket that was pretty useless that day given the high temperature in the city. 

“Okay, I’ll call Lay tonight,” he said. He moved closer and searched for your face in hopes to find a sign of contentment. 

“Can you call Sehun instead?” you looked up at him finding his knitted eyebrows quite funny the way they judged you. 

“And I was here all this time thinking you didn’t like the boy,” he responded leaning on the locker right beside yours and not taking his eyes off of you now that he heard something new. 

Footsteps were heard coming from the front of the store. In a trail, your coworkers walked in going directly to their respective lockers. Baekhyun came last, rolling the keys of the front door around his finger and playfully making his way to you and Chanyeol. Yeol opened his hand for Baek to drop the keys back to him. 

“He’s the fastest at moving shit around,” you simply responded. 

“Are we talking about Sehun again?” Baekhyun asked, throwing an arm around your shoulder and smiling now copying the knowing smirk of Chanyeol’s face. 

“Again?” Chanyeol asked. “So this conversation has happened before.”

“I can’t with you two.” you grabbed your bag and moved past both boys who shared a knowing look now finding it hilarious how worked up you got with the silly teasing. You headed to the backdoor but stopped before leaving. You looked back towards the boys and saw Chanyeol still chatting with Baekhyun by the lockers. They noticed you still there looking at them. “I’ll wait in the car.”

Chanyeol passed around the bottle. Only the three of you, it didn’t take too long for it to get to you. The hard whiskey was not doing wonders to your throat, but it sure was making you feel lighter, freer. You hissed with the alcohol sliding down your throat, you could feel it reach your stomach. But after that pain was gone, you were ready to take another swig, though, you passed the bottle back to Chanyeol. Baekhyun, as the designated driver, stopped after his first swig. It was always the three of you. The three of you sitting in the car, listening to Chanyeol’s rock playlist, drinking something cheap you bought, chatting, singing, and crying the night away until it was time to go home. Though growing older meant that the nights were shorter, drinking was a little more responsible, and chatting was more mature as well. Though these small things shifted, the habits were still there, your friends were still the same. 

When Chanyeol turned eighteen, he applied for a job at the liquor store and it sounded like the coolest thing in the world. After six months of working there, he had a good front with his boss at that time which facilitated the hiring of Baekhyun who just recently had lost his job at the bakery. You were only fifteen when that happened, and being the youngest of your friends sometimes took a toll on you. You couldn’t go out to the same places, neither drink, or go clubbing. It was hard for you to also see them working for the same company. You had a part time job at the grocery store which gave you some good cash for your needs as a teenager. But when you were no longer a minor, Chanyeol was already a supervisor at Spirits and saw no problem in adding you to the team. The three of you were like the dream team. You enjoyed doing a lot of the heavy work because you were good at it, Baekhyun was a master at customer service, and Chanyeol was a diplomat earning him, later on, the post of manager.

“So what is it with you and Sehun, huh?” Chanyeol’s indiscretion was probably the thing you hated and liked the most about him. He wasn’t like that at work, but once you were outside, all the teasing and bickering was maximized since there was no policy code holding him back. 

“She likes him,” responded Baekhyun, taking a huge bite on his burger. He didn’t even bother looking at you in the backseat, but Chanyeol sure looked behind to find your obviously blushed cheeks. 

“No, I don’t,” you snapped back not knowing if you were convincing enough. You shouldn’t even try lying to them because it was useless doing so. Baekhyun already knew you were clearly interested in the tall boy who ever so often makes you shake in the base whenever he towers over you. Chanyeol was a little more oblivious because he didn’t spend much time out in the back with you, he was always very busy inside his office. 

“He gave her a stupid nickname,” Baekhyun said raising up the corners of his lips which were a little dirty with ketchup and mayo. He looked stupid. “He calls her Coco.”

“I think it’s sweet,” responded Chanyeol turning back to you waiting for a response. You just looked away not knowing exactly how to get away from that conversation. You weren’t very good with boys and talking about them made you extremely uncomfortable. “Why Coco though?” he looked back at Baekhyun.

“Because she looks like a dry coconut,” he laughed causing Yeol to laugh as well. 

“No! It’s because I smell like coconut, he said.” you explained in an urge to defend your honour, to defend the nickname Sehun gave exclusively to you. “You’re an ass, Baekhyun.”

“Why don’t you ask him out?” Chanyeol suggested as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. You sighed, he would never understand. You could not just go up to Sehun and set up a date. C’mon, the guy was the most handsome man you’ve ever seen. And you… You were always a mess, sweaty and exhausted from work. 

“Don’t be stupid,” you snapped. 

“He likes the smell of your sweat,” Baekhyun pointed. “Shouldn’t be too hard to get him to go out with you.”

“I honestly cannot tell if you’re mocking me or being supportive,” you responded to his mockery advice. 

“I just think you need to smile a little more, you know?” he continued purposefully ignoring your inquiry. “With that ugly scowl on your face 24/7, no one is going to make a move on you.”

“Well, excuse me,” you gasped. It was unexpected to get attacked at such an odd hour. “I smile! I get stressed at work because my boss leaves me alone in the back for eight hours.”

“Don’t act like I always do that!” Chanyeol defended himself from your also very unexpected attack.

“We’re gonna work on your smile and then we can move on to your wardrobe,” Baekhyun continued not giving a single flying fuck to whatever you were saying.

“What’s wrong with it?” you questioned looking down at yourself and finding the uniform you’ve been wearing for the past twelve hours now. You stopped for a moment. Even outside work you didn’t make much of an effort to look good. You didn’t even care if you were wearing your uniform or another tshirt, because you never felt the need to look good. You didn’t care about how others perceived you either. But hearing Baekhyun point out your flawed and lazy outfits was taking a toll on you. 

For the first time ever you felt like you had to impress somebody. If you wanted Sehun to look at you the way you wanted, then you should get rid of the oiliness of your skin, the messy hair tied up in a lazy ponytail, work on a smile… And for when, one day, you guys finally go out, you will definitely need new clothes. It wasn’t about making it to impress a man, it was about looking like the best version of yourself! 

Your reflection ended as soon as Baekhyun stopped listing all the wrong things about your Walmart plain t-shirts. You hated to admit it, but he was… right. You could have a little more fun next time you go shopping and maybe spend a little more than ten dollars on a top. You looked back, finding Baek’s eyes on the mirror and he looked back at you. You could tell by his eyes that he was now smiling. You braced yourself. 

“Did you hear me, Coco?”

[vankoya]

Welcome to this half-assed guide on how to start up a writing blog! Hopefully, it will manage to provide some important and/or useful information for all of you aspiring fic writing bloggers out there. 

Please note that many visual examples have been linked to certain steps. If my explanation is not clear, click on the link provided for a visual example of what I am saying. The whole album of examples is right here.

Without further ado, let’s get to it!

1. THE BLOG

The very first step of our journey, and perhaps, the most important. Your blog is the face of your writing, and the face of you, the writer. And by blog, I mean your desktop theme, your mobile theme, and your master list. This section here will be dedicated to formatting all of those things.

The desktop theme.

Your desktop theme is the layout of your blog as displayed on a computer screen. As a generality, you want your blog to be as readable as possible because that is the main thing people will be doing on your blog. Reading your stories. My main tips for your desktop theme are:

The bigger the font size, the better! Try to avoid anything under 10px, and attempt to go for any theme that has a font customisation of 11-12px. Despite that you can zoom on a desktop page when reading a fic to make the text bigger (ctrl and + on PC, ⌘ and + on Mac), not everyone knows this. The bigger the font size, the more readable your blog is.

Minimalist, single column themes are ideal! Readers can be deterred by cluttered themes, where they go onto your blog to find that it has three columns, the sidebar is so long that half of your links are cut off, etc. You want to keep it simple and easy. Having a sidebar and header is completely fine because it can add some flare to your theme, but a single column is something I stress. It allows the reader to take in one post at a time, and it generally allows for a larger font size, too. Multiple columns can make your blog seem cluttered, especially if your more recent posts are all text-based, which can literally appear like a massive, confronting wall of words. Keep it simple, keep it single.

Visible, easy to access links! Links are super important, as the first thing your reader is likely to do on your blog is search for your master list link. Most themes will have some kind of coding for links, so they are very simple for you to set up. But the more visible your main links (master list, faq, messages) are on your desktop blog, the better. As you can see in this image, my links are one of the first things you see on my blog.

That is pretty much the basics of your desktop theme. Now, for some quality theme makers that I recommend sourcing your themes from: @shythemes / @sorrism / @odeysseus / @acuite / @pohroro / @neonbikethemes / @felinum / @neothm / @theme-hunter (which is a blog that sources loads of themes!)

The mobile theme.

Your mobile theme is the layout of your blog as displayed on the mobile app. The main elements that you can customise here are your header and description. The most important aspect of the mobile theme is your links, so I am going to show you how to make a link for your master list. Please note that you cannot make links on the mobile app, it must all be done in the Edit Appearance section of your desktop blog.

Go onto your blog and click on Edit Appearance.

Under Appearance Options, go to the Description. This is where we will be entering the code for your link.

Copy and paste this code: <a href=“Insert Link Here”>Link Name</a> and alter the bolded sections to be the link to your master list, and whatever you wish for the link name to appear as. ‘Master List’ and ‘m. list’ are the most common, but feel completely free to think out the box! This is what it should look like.

Save the theme. When you go onto your mobile theme, the link should be activated and looking something like this. Test it out by clicking on it, and if it redirects you to your master list, then you have successfully created a link!

This process can be done for all of your links on your mobile theme, such as your FAQ and fic recs. All you have to do is copy and paste that code into the description and alter it as desired. If you wish for the links or any other text in your description to be on a new line, just add <br> to the start of each line of text that you want on a separate line, as seen here.

Important note: If you are wanting to change the header of your mobile theme, make sure you are doing it on desktop, with your desktop theme customisation page open in a different tab. This is because whenever you alter your mobile theme header and save it, all of your link coding will be erased (this is what it will look like on your desktop theme customisation after you save the new header – see how all of your coding is gone?) and your mobile description layout screws up, like this. Having your theme customisation page open in a different tab before you edit your mobile theme allows you to highlight and copy your description code. So, after you save the new mobile theme adjustments, you can refresh (remember to do this, but only after you have saved the mobile theme) your desktop theme customisation page and re-paste that code into the description section and save it so it all looks normal again without having to rewrite it all.

The master list.

The final part of the blog section is setting up your master list. There are many, fancier ways to create a master list, such as a coded page that arranges your stories by filter, etc. But this is going to be the simple, mobile-friendly master list that I use.

Create a new post. If you want to have a header for your master list, make it a photo post. If you do not want to have a header for your master list, make it a text post. For example, mine is a photo post, as I wanted to have a header for my master list.

The layout of your master list depends upon you. Some writers like to section their master list by series, oneshots, and drabbles (like me). Other writers like to section their master list by the members. Some writers like to add a small description of the fic in the master list (like me). Other writers only add the genre of the fic, eg. fluff, angst, a specific AU. Decide how you would like to present yours, but for the sake of this mini tutorial, I am going to section it by member, and only add the genre of the fic.

On your new post, title your master list however you please. Then, begin setting up your preferred layout.

Now, to add the links to your stories. What you will want to do is highlight the title of your story (or whatever text you are wanting to be the link to your story, eg. on my blog, it is the chapter number, or ‘read here’ for my oneshots). When you do that, a row of eight circular icons will appear above the highlighted text. Click the infinity symbol.

The infinity symbol will open up into a bar where you can enter a link. Copy and paste the link to your story here, and then click done.

Now, your story will be hyperlinked to that text! Rinse and repeat this process for all of your stories in your master list. Save and post, and your master list is complete! The end result will look like this in the post, and will look something like this on your blog. 

With every new story that you post, all you have to do is go back and edit your master list post to add in the new story. You can do this by opening up your master list post and then clicking the edit symbol in the top right corner, which will take you to the post editing screen.

Note: The link that is created when you post your master list is the one that you will copy and paste into the coding for the master list link we created back in the mobile theme section!

2. THE POSTS

Our second step gets down to the marrow of all this. Posting your stories. The layout/format of your story post depends upon you, though there are a few general guidelines that I recommend following, as all of us fic writers do it too.

The story post.

Make sure your layout is readable! A good, clear format is what draws a reader in; it encourages them to give your story a chance. One that is vague, or extremely cluttered and nonsensical will deter a reader. You know those general guidelines I just mentioned? They are including the pairing involved, the genre of the story, the word count, and a brief, yet intriguing description the details what the story is about (like a blurb). Warnings are also important to list, if there are any that you think may heavily affect certain readers (eg. character death, or dealing with tough topics like suicide). If it is a series, it is recommended to link your already posted chapters to every chapter post, too. It saves the reader from having to constantly go back to your master list to find the next chapter.

Create a header (optional)! It has become common over the past year to add a header/banner to your story. Doing so adds a bit of colour to your story post, and somewhat acts in the same way a book cover does. Here is a tutorial on how to make a header with Photoshop. If you decide to do headers, then I suggest making it unique to you! Creative, original headers are what catch the eye of the reader.

Tag your story appropriately! The process of tagging your story is what makes your story appear in the search results whenever someone looks up that particular tag. It is really important to tag your story appropriately, as in, do not tag your story with ‘bts smut’ if there is literally no smut at all in the story. Here is where you tag your stories and what the tags look like after you have entered them (separate each tag by using the comma button).

Use ‘keep reading’ links! This is mainly for stories that are over 450 words. The ‘keep reading’ or ‘read more’ separator makes it so that the reader has to click on the link to open up the rest of your story post in order to read it. The purpose of this is so that your entire story does not clutter up the dashboard, and make your followers have to scroll past thousands of words just to get to the next post. They keep everything tidy! Place this separator anywhere after your genre/pairing/word count/warnings format, as those details will still need to be visible for your reader on the dashboard.

Licensing your stories.

After many incidents of plagiarism, it has become common to clearly copyright your stories. Since everything you post online is technically copyrighted to you (as long as what you are posting is your own original content), all you need to do is state: All Rights Reserved © [Your Blog Name]. For example, mine is: All Rights Reserved © Vankoya. I copy and paste this license after the author’s note at the bottom of all my story posts.

3. EXTRA NOTES

Now that all of the technical stuff is out of the way, I am going to mention a few things here that all new fic bloggers should keep in mind when starting out.

Be patient when it comes to receiving feedback, followers, and notes! It is very rare for a new writer to receive plentiful of the above straight off the bat. Yes, there are certainly a few who manage to dive into the fic writing community and have their stories receive loads of notes and messages within their first month of blogging, but as I said, that is a very rare case. To put it in perspective, on my first fic writing blog, I had nearly twenty oneshots posted by the time I breached my first thousand followers, and started getting more than 50-100 notes on my stories. It can take time. Just remember that everyone started with nothing. Even those that receive daily messages, who have 500+ notes on their stories, and thousands of followers. Besides, how popular your stories are within the community does not define whether your writing is good or not. Trust me!

On that note, try not to channel all of your focus on popularity! Do not let the reason why you started writing and posting your stories in the first place get away from you. This has been a pretty big thing within the fic writing community lately, where an unnecessary divide has been created between writers who receive more recognition, and those who receive less. Please, do not let popularity define the reason why you write, because it will only eat at you until your passion/hobby becomes something that you resent. Please, do not play in this current game of blaming more recognised writers for ‘stealing’ the spotlight from everyone else, because that is not true. As a reader myself, it takes a lot for me to stray from a writer that I am familiar with (especially when I barely have enough time to read their writing as it is), so I recommend keeping that in mind if you are ever wondering why you may not have tons of readers. It just takes the right reader to stray out of their limits one day and discover you! 

Taking requests for your first month or two can help a lot! Readers love requesting ideas, and that is something that I did a lot in my first two or three months of writing on my first blog. It draws in an audience who can take part in what you are creating, and you will be able to get an idea for what it is that the readers are desiring to read. My main points with requesting are you do not have to write every single request you receive, and you do not have to write a request that does not inspire you, or involves a topic that makes you uncomfortable. These requests do not have to be full-blown oneshots (unless you wish for them to be), they can be simple drabble requests for some fun, and can act as a break in-between you writing your own original stories. From my own experience, most of my audience was gained this way on my first blog. Though it is not necessary for you to do, especially if you are mainly writing for your own enjoyment, and not for consistent feedback.

Well, that’s about it! I hope this guide can help you out in some way. If there is anything further you feel like I can add to this, please send me a message and I will look into it.

Good luck with your new endeavour. Enjoy writing!

[suzanneshannon]

How I Created a Code Beautifier in Two Days

I recently drew up a wireframe for a code beautifier. The next day, I decided to turn it into a real tool. The whole project took less than two days to complete.

I'd been thinking about building a new code beautifier for a while. The idea isn't unique, but every time I use someone else's tool, I find myself reapplying the same settings and dodging advertisements every single time. 🤦🏻‍

I wanted a simple tool that worked well without the hassle, so last week I grabbed some paper and started sketching one out. I'm a huge fan of wireframing by hand. There's just something about pencil and paper that makes the design part of my brain work better than staring at a screen.

I kicked off the design process by hand-drawing wireframes for the app.

I was immediately inspired after drawing the wireframe. The next day, I took a break from my usual routine to turn it into a something real. 👨🏻‍💻

Check it Out

The design

I knew I wanted the code editor to be the main focus of the tool, so I created a thin menu bar at the top that controls the mode (i.e. HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and settings. I eventually added an About button too.

The editor itself takes up most of the screen, but it blends in so you don't really notice it. Instead of wasting space with instructions, I used a placeholder that disappears when you start typing.

The Dark Mode UI is based on a toggle that updates the styles.

At the bottom, I created a status bar that shows live stats about the code including the current mode, indentation settings, number of lines, number of characters, and document size in bytes. The right side of the status bar has a "Clear" and "Clean + Copy" button. The center has a logo shamelessly plugging my own service.

I don't think many developers really code on phones, but I wanted this to work on mobile devices anyway. Aside from the usual responsive techniques, I had to watch the window size and adjust the tab position when the screen becomes too narrow.

I'm using flexbox and viewport units for vertical sizing. This was actually pretty easy to do with the exception of a little iOS quirk. Here’s a pen showing the basic wireframe. Notice how the textarea stretches to fill the unused space between the header and footer.

See the Pen Full-page text editor with header + footer by Cory LaViska (@claviska) on CodePen.

If you look at the JavaScript tab, you’ll see the iOS quirk and the workaround. I’m not sure how to feature detect something like this, so for now it’s just a simple device check.

Handling settings

I wanted to keep the most commonly used settings easy to access, but also expose advanced settings for each mode. To do this, I made the settings button a popover with a link to more advanced settings inside. When a setting is changed, the UI updates immediately and the settings are persisted to localStorage.

The most common settings are contained in a small panel that provides quick access to them, while advanced settings are still accessible via a link in the panel.

I took advantage of Vue.js here. Each setting gets mapped to a data property, and when one of them changes, the UI updates (if required) and I call saveSettings(). It works something like this.

function saveSettings() { const settings = {}; // settingsToStore is an array of property names that will be persisted // and "this" is referencing the current Vue model settingsToStore.map(key => settings[key] = this[key]); localStorage.setItem('settings', JSON.stringify(settings); }

Every setting is a data property that gets synced to localStorage. This is a rather primitive way to store state, so I might update the app to use a state management library such as Vuex later on.

To restore settings, I have a restoreSettings() function that runs when the app starts up.

function restoreSettings() { const json = localStorage.getItem('settings'); if (json) { try { const settings = JSON.parse(json); Object.keys(settings).forEach(key => { if (settingsToStore.includes(key)) { this[key] = settings[key]; } }); } catch (err) { window.alert('There was an error loading your previous settings'); } } }

The function fetches settings from localStorage, then applies them one by one ensuring only valid settings in settingsToStore get imported.

The Advanced Settings link opens a dialog with tabs for each mode. Despite having over 30 settings total, everything is organized and easy to access so users won't feel overwhelmed.

Clicking the "Advanced Settings" link opens up language-specific preferences and shortcuts.

Applying themes

Dark mode is all the rage these days, so it's enabled by default. There's also a light theme for those who prefer it. The entire UI changes, except for popovers and dialogs.

I considered using prefers-color-scheme, which coincidentally landed in Firefox 67 recently, but I decided a toggle would probably be better. Browser support for the color theme preference query isn't that great yet, plus developers are weird. (For example, I use macOS with the light theme, but my text editor is dark.)

The app with Light Mode UI enabled.

Defining features

Coming up with feature ideas is fairly easy. It’s limiting features for an initial release that’s hard. Here are the most relevant features I shipped right away:

Beautifies HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code

Syntax highlighting with tag/bracket matching

Paste or drop files to load code

Auto-detects indentation preference based on pasted code or dropped file

Light and dark themes

Clean and copy in one click

Keyboard shortcuts

Most JS Beautify options are configurable

Settings get stored indefinitely in localStorage

Minimal UI without ads (just an unobtrusive plug to my own service) 🙈

I also threw in a few easter eggs for fun. Try refreshing the page, exploring shortcuts, and sharing it on Facebook or Twitter to find them. 😉

The tools and libraries I used

I'm a big fan of Vue.js. It's probably overkill for this project, but the Vue CLI let me start building with all the latest tooling via one simple command.

vue create beautify-code

I didn't have to waste any time scaffolding, which helped me build this out quickly. Plus, Vue came in handy for things like live stats, changing themes, toggling settings, etc. I used various Element UI components for things like buttons, form elements, popovers, and dialogs.

The editor is powered by CodeMirror using custom styles. It’s a well-supported and fantastic project that I can’t recommend enough for in-browser code editing.

The library that does all the beautifying is called JS Beautify, which handles JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. JS Beautify runs on the client-side, so there’s really no backend to this app — your browser does all the work!

JS Beautify is incredibly easy to use. Install it with npm install js-beautify and run your code through the appropriate function.

import beautify from 'js-beautify'; const code = 'Your code here'; const settings = { // Your settings here }; // HTML const html = beautify.html(code, settings) // CSS const css = beautify.css(code, settings) // JavaScript const js = beautify.js(code, settings)

Each function returns a string containing the beautified code. You can change how each language is output by passing in your own settings.

I’ve been asked a few times about Prettier, which is a comparable tool, so it’s worth mentioning that I chose JS Beautify because it’s less opinionated and more configurable. If there’s enough demand, I’ll consider adding an option to toggle between JS Beautify and Prettier.

I've used all of these libraries before, so integration was actually pretty easy. 😅

This project was made possible by my app, Surreal CMS. If you’re looking for a great CMS for static websites, check it out — it’s free for personal, educational, and non-profit websites!

Oh, and if you’re wondering what editor I used... it’s Visual Studio Code. 👨🏻‍💻

The post How I Created a Code Beautifier in Two Days appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

How I Created a Code Beautifier in Two Days published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[theresawelchy]

The Event-Driven Data Layer

Recently, I wrote an appeal to Adobe suggesting they implement first-party support for an event-driven data layer in Adobe Launch. I specifically mentioned an “event-driven, asynchronous data layer”. Let’s just call it the Event-Driven Data Layer (EDDL) to keep it simple. Since the article’s release, I’ve had a number of good conversations on this topic. The consensus seems to be that this is the right direction. For the purposes of keeping the article a manageable length, I didn’t go into too much detail of what an EDDL might look like. The goal of this article is to define what it is and why it’s a good thing.

Before we begin, let’s be clear about one thing. There’s an EDDL and a CEDDL.

CEDDL = Customer Experience Digital Data Layer. Legacy W3C.

EDDL = Event-Driven Data Layer. What this article is about.

I tried to find a less confusing abbreviation. Unfortunately, this one made the most sense. They’re both types of data layers. A good way to remember the difference is the CEDDL is 25% more cumbersome to spell and to implement. That’s being generous. The Event-Driven Data Layer describes what you’re implementing: a data layer that is constructed and transmitted to your TMS by events.

Let’s first walk through a concept that seems obvious but very few people care to think about. That is this: in a TMS, every tag is triggered by a some event. That means your pageview is triggered on an event. That event might be TMS Library Loaded (Page Top), DOM Ready, Window Loaded, or any other indication that the page has loaded. These are all events that happen on a page or screen. They are as much of an event as a click, mouseover, form submission, or anything else.

A pageview is a tag (think Adobe Analytics beacon). Viewing a page is an event. A custom link is a tag. Clicking a button is an event. Logging in is an event. Submitting a form is an event. That event might also be associated with some tags. Make sense? This is important because we need to abstract the tool from the data. Yes, you might choose to load Adobe Analytics pageview code when the window loads… but you COULD also choose to load a pageview on a click. The EDDL thinks independent of tool-specific definitions. Let’s dive into why this is the preferred method.

It’s harder to screw up

That doesn’t mean you can’t screw it up. It’s just harder to. You still need some code that sits in your header. The difference with the EDDL is:

It’s less code

You drop it in once and never have to touch it again

Maybe that means you’re simply declaring a variable (var foo = [];). Maybe it means you’re dropping in a little more code (copy/paste exercise). There’s no way around it – the variable or the function has to exist before you do anything with it. After that it’s all gravy. Timing is a non-issue with an EDDL. That’s because it proactively sends a message when a thing happens. Other data layer methodologies poll objects (like the Data Element Changed event). What does that mean?

Imagine you’re waiting on popular concert tickets to go on sale. You know what day they go on sale, but not what time. You know they’ll sell out fast, so you refresh Ticketmaster every half hour to see if their status changed. If you’re checking (or polling) to see if they’re for sale at 12:00 and they go on sale at 12:01, you might be out of luck. This is what’s called a race condition. After the status of the tickets change, you’re racing to see if you can get one before they’re gone.

The same thing happens when you monitor data layers. If you go from Page A to Page B and you’re monitoring the object, there’s a very real chance you’ll be on the next page before your TMS realizes anything happened. That seriously sucks. You know what would fix this and save a lot of time? Subscribing to push notifications. Proactively tell me when the tickets are on sale. Don’t worry about loading the entire page object up-front. If we need to wait on servers, let me know when user information has propagated and then we’ll trigger a pageview. The EDDL uses these push notifications so you don’t have to worry about missing out on data.

It’s easier to communicate

Prioritization of data layers is difficult when it feels like a lot of work and its value isn’t immediately clear. Multiple code patterns paired with multiple sets of instructions feel like more work than one. We’re already taking focus away from the value of the data layer at this point.

The CEDDL requires teams to learn multiple concepts/patterns. There’s a page object… and then there are events. While it might be subconscious, multiple concepts/patterns (even simple ones) requires switching mental gears. They’re also both explained as though they’re different things. Here’s an example from Adobe where both the W3C and another methodology are recommended. If I’m not very technical or I’m new to analytics, this would make my head spin.

The EDDL is much simpler. You explain it once, use the same code pattern, and can be easily dropped into a template. Here’s how the documentation might look:

Data Layer Documentation

1.0: Page and User Information

Trigger: As soon as the information is available on each page loads or screen transition.

Code: dataLayer.push({“event”:“Page Loaded”,“page”:{…}…});

  1.1: Email Submit

Trigger: When a user successfully submits an email address.

Code: dataLayer.push({“event”:“Email Submit”,“attributes”:{…}…});

The documentation is consistent. We aren’t suggesting page stuff is different from event stuff. Remember that pageviews are triggered via events, too. You won’t send a pageview until you have the data you need, either. You’re not trying to figure out whether you can cram it into the header, before Page Bottom, ahead of DOM Ready, or before Window Loaded. We can just say: “When the data is there, send the pageview.” A lot of companies opted out of the W3C CEDDL for this reason alone.

It’s just as comprehensive

You can literally create the W3C schema with it. An effective EDDL has some kind of computed state I can access that functions like any other JSON object. What does a computed state mean, exactly? In the context of data layers, it means the content that was passed into it is processed into some kind of comprehensive object. Let’s pretend we’re using dataLayer.push() and I’m pushing information into the data layer about the page and the user. This is a Single Page App, so we will want to dynamically replace the name of the page as the user navigates. Similar to Google Tag Manager, this pushes the page and user data into the dataLayer object (because dataLayer makes more sense than digitalData):

As a business user, it’s a bit of a stretch to learn how arrays work. I just want to see what the data looks like when the page loads so I know what I can work with. That’s where a computed state is useful. As a technical stakeholder, I can advise the business user to paste dataLayer.computedState into their console to see what data is available:

  Looks like your average JSON object, right? Let’s see what happens when we want to change a field.

Side note: In hindsight, I probably should have named the pageCategory and pageName fields simply “category” and “name“. I’ll save naming convention recommendations for another post…

Here we’re just wanting to change the pageName and pageCategory fields. You can see the shoes data is still in that array above the hats page data. However, since that was the last information passed into the data layer, the computed state should update to reflect those changes:

There you have it. I should have the ability to add data and clear out fields, as well. For those who aren’t as technical, please note that this computed state stuff is NOT functionality baked into dataLayer.push() by default. I did some extra work to manually create the computedState object. This is for modeling purposes only. Also note that a key differentiation between this and GTM’s data layer is a publicly exposed computed state. GTM does retain a computed state, but isn’t (easily) accessible via your console.

With this functionality, the EDDL is more capable and accessible than any other client-side data layer technique.

Final Thoughts

One reason people don’t implement data layers is because it’s intimidating. You’re part of a large organization with many stakeholders. Maintaining data layer standards takes work. You’re right. Let’s also acknowledge that maintaining anything is hard and requires a certain level of discipline. There’s turnover on your team. Developers cycle in and out. Oh, by the way – you have to get this stuff prioritized, too!

The Event-Driven Data Layer is easier to document. It’s easier to implement and not as vulnerable to timing issues. It’s what a minority of sophisticated companies have already built for themselves (100 different ways) and what the majority needs to adopt. This data layer supports any schema you want. If you like how the W3C is structured, build it. If not, don’t.

One critical piece you’ll notice I didn’t link you to some EDDL library. All of this information reflects how an EDDL should behave. There are many EDDLs out there and there won’t likely be one single standard. However, Event-Driven Data Layers will eventually replace the CEDDL model. It makes more sense. I will commit to settling on a single recommendation in the coming months. There are a few examples out there:

Google Tag Manager

Data Layer Manager

If you have a public-facing event-driven data layer framework, add a comment or message me on Twitter and I would be happy to add it to this list. In the meantime, if you’re working on a data layer – don’t let the lack of a “standard” stop you from building one. If you want to use the CEDDL, go for it! Having a data layer is better than not having one.

DataTau published first on DataTau

[lindyhunt]

14 Copywriting Examples From Businesses With Incredible Copywriters

You all know the Old Spice guy, right?

The years-old "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" campaign was memorable for many reasons, but one of them was that it gave Old Spice a voice -- voice that came through in every video, commercial, tagline, Facebook update, tweet ... you name it.

And do you know who is behind all of that marketing collateral?

Copywriters. The ability to find the exact right words to tell your company's story isn't an easy feat, and it's even harder to do so consistently.

So when we come across companies that are doing it successfully, we think their copywriters deserve a pat on the back (and a raise?). Take a look at some of the companies we think have stellar copywriting, and if you're looking, maybe get some inspiration for your own brand, too.

Copywriting Examples

UrbanDaddy

Articulate

Moosejaw

First Round Capital

Trello

Velocity Partners

Intrepid Travel

Cultivated Wit

Cards Against Humanity

R/GA

innocent

GymIt

ModCloth

Ann Handley

1. UrbanDaddy

UrbanDaddy has mastered the art of getting me to open emails. And when I click into them, they don't disappoint.

Below is the copy from an email they sent me with the subject line, "Fun."

There are a couple things in this email that caught my eye.

First of all, there's no long preamble. The writers get straight to the point -- a wise choice for something as simple as a rubber band gun lest the reader feel cheated reading sentence after sentence for something so common.

Secondly, take a look at the purposeful sentence structure. This copywriter eschews conventional grammar rules by combining run-on sentences and traditional product promotion copy in sentences like:

Lock and load with Elastic Precision, a Kansas City-based workshop that manufactures high-powered weaponry except not at all because they actually just shoot rubber bands, now available online."

Keep reading, and you see a conversational tone that mildly mocks the silliness of the product, but also loops the reader in on something kinda fun.

And then, of course, they close with badgers. And how can you go wrong with badgers?

Best of all, UrbanDaddy's unique tone is found in every single piece of copy they publish -- from emails, to homepage copy, even to their editorial policy:

This company clearly knows its audience, which jokes to crack, and has kept it consistent across all their assets.

2. Articulate

Articulate, a HubSpot Agency Partner based in the U.K., is an inbound marketing agency, and their website copy is full of witty, confident copy on pages where you wouldn't think you'd find it. Here's exhibit 'A':

The copy above introduces Articulate's "Meet the Team" page -- not a page you'd think can pull off witty copy, right? Well, Articulate's page goes beyond employee photos and their job titles.

In addition to the playful header, "not the usual blah blah," the copy above takes on a farm theme, assuring visitors that employees aren't simply "caged hens." Rather, they're a "free-range, artisanal, cruelty-free team." Funny on the surface, but helpful to job seekers who, much like food, want to know where their work comes from and how it's made.

3. Moosejaw

Not many brands are brave enough to touch the products they're selling with unconventional copy ... but Moosejaw isn't afraid to have a little fun.

The outdoor apparel outlet store uses humor as a way to sell their products without being overly forward about it. By appealing to people's emotions, they're more engaging and memorable.

Here are a few examples:

Same goes for the call-to-action buttons that show up when you hover your mouse over a product photo -- like this one, which reads, "Look This Cool."

Does their brand voice carry over to the product descriptions, you ask? See for yourself:

If you think the brilliant copy stops at their homepage, think again. They extend it to their return policy, too. Here, they do a great job of not sacrificing clarity for humor. Their copywriters successfully made people laugh while still being helpful.

4. First Round Capital

While a sign of great copywriting is making people smile, another is making people feel understood. The copywriters at First Round do a phenomenal job at letting the value of their offerings for their customers sell themselves.

For example, they hold over 80 events every year connecting their community together. Instead of just explaining that they have events and then listing them out, they begin that section of their website with a simple statement that hits close to home with many entrepreneurs: "Starting a company is lonely."

Using words like "imperfect," "safety net," and "vulnerable" encourages readers to let their guards down and feel understood by the brand and their community.

Plus, you've gotta love that last line about stick-on name tags. Those things get stuck in my hair.

5. Trello

Do you know what Trello is? If the answer is no, then behold the copywriting on their website. Their product description -- like most of the copy on their site -- is crystal clear:

And then check out how clear this explainer content is:

Some of the use case clarity can be attributed to how smart the product is, but I think copywriters deserve some credit for communicating it clearly, too. They call it like it is, which ultimately makes it really easy to grasp.

And I couldn't write about the copywriting talent at Trello without including the clever references in the microcopy of their login page:

Each time you refresh the login page, you see a different, equally clever example email belonging to a fictional character, like Ender from Ender's Game and Dana Scully from The X-Files -- a great example of nostalgia marketing. This is a small detail, but nonetheless a reminder that there are real humans behind the website and product's design. Delightful microcopy like this kinda feels like I just shared a private joke with someone at the company.

6. Velocity Partners

No post from me about excellent copywriting would be complete without mentioning the folks at Velocity Partners. A B2B marketing agency out of the U.K., we've featured co-founder Doug Kessler's SlideShares (like this one on why marketers need to rise above the deluge of "crappy" content) time and again on this blog because he's the master of word economy.

What is "word economy"? It's taking care that every word you use is the right word. It means getting your point across concisely and not dwelling on the details when you don't have to. In a world of shortening attention spans, this is the ultimate goal when communicating your message.

And since we're talking about word economy, I'll shut up and let you check out one of Kessler's SlideShares for yourself:

Source: Velocity Partners

Whereas SlideShares are typically visual, Kessler's is heavily focused on copy: The design stays constant, and only the text changes. But the copy is engaging and compelling enough for him to pull that off. Why? Because he uses simple words so his readers understand what he's trying to say without any effort. He writes like he speaks, and it reads like a story, making it easy to flip through in SlideShare form.

The copy on Velocity Partners' homepage stood out to me, too. Check out, for example, how humble they are when introducing their case studies:

I also like how casual and honest they kept their email subscription call-to-action. The header is especially eye-catching -- and it plays off of the popular SlideShare about crappy content we mentioned earlier.

In fact, Velocity Partners' Harendra Kapur recently wrote a blog post on what goes in to great B2B writing -- starting with this disclaimer, of course.

7. Intrepid Travel

The copywriters at Intrepid Travel, a Melbourne-based adventure travel company, are on this list because they're at the intersection of interesting and informational.

I love seeing copy that is totally and utterly functional -- that delivers critical information, but is so pleasant to read that you actually keep reading. Quite a feat on the internet these days.

Take a look at their company description, package names, and package descriptions below for some examples of this fantastically functional copywriting in action:

Of course, they do benefit from quite a lovely subject matter, but still -- hats off you to, Intrepid Travel.

8. Cultivated Wit

The copywriters over at the "comedy company" Cultivated Wit do a great job of embracing their own brand of quirk throughout their site. They already have one of the best "About" pages in the game, but their delightful copy is spread throughout their site -- sometimes in the most unexpected of places.

For example, take a look at the copy around contact information at the very bottom of their homepage:

This section of the homepage is an afterthought at best for most companies. But for these folks, it was an opportunity to have a little fun.

They also have two, unique email subscription calls-to-action on different pages of their website. They're very different, but both equally funny and delightful. Here's one from the homepage:

And one from the "About" page:

9. Cards Against Humanity

You may or may not be familiar with Cards Against Humanity, the self-declared "party game for horrible people." It's a card game -- one that's simultaneously entertaining and inappropriate. The copywriting on the cards themselves are guaranteed to make you laugh.

The brand voice is very distinctive, and can seem a little abrasive, and even a little offensive. But that's their whole shtick: They're not trying to appeal to everyone, and that's perfectly okay. What they do do a great job of doing is appealing to their target audience.

One look at their FAQ page and you'll see what I mean:

Here's a sneak peek into some of the answers to these questions. You'll see they make fun of both themselves and the reader -- which is exactly what the card game is about.

10. R/GA

With the exception or UrbanDaddy, I've been focusing a lot on site copy so far, so I wanted to check out some examples of excellent social media copywriting.

I know you all like to see some more B2B examples in here, too, so I surfaced one of the best examples of the holy grail: Twitter copy, from a B2B company, that's funny. Behold, some recent highlights from the R/GA Twitter account:

HOW CAN I RELAX WITH ALL THESE WEEDS pic.twitter.com/T1x78HnPhr

— R/GA (@RGA) May 24, 2016

Your extended family going all caps with the Facebook posts like, hey we're all just people here and I've got some OPINIONS

— R/GA (@RGA) May 24, 2016

Imagine living in a time when horrible music wasn't pumped into every square inch of public/commercial space.

— R/GA (@RGA) May 19, 2016

Just saw a list of top tech talent referred to as "poachables," which sounds delicious. Like sophisticated Lunchables.

— R/GA (@RGA) May 16, 2016

If only audience segments knew how they were referred to in strategy decks.

— R/GA (@RGA) May 11, 2016

11. innocent

Check out U.K.-based drink makers innocent, and you'll see a language, style, and tone that matches their philosophy, product, and even their branding and design. It's all just clean, straightforward, and simple. And believe it or not, simple is a really, really hard thing to nail in copywriting.

This stands out best on their "Things We Make" page. (Isn't that page name even beautifully simple?)

This same straightforward-but-charming copywriting philosophy extends to their site navigation:

Their meta description is pretty awesome, too:

And my personal favorite:

12. GymIt

I've always loved the copy at GymIt. In fact, I check their site and social profiles all the time to see if they've freshened anything up. Luckily, they're no one-trick pony. They continue to keep their site fresh with captivating copy.

Here are some of my favorites, all of which hit on the pain points of gym-goers that they try to solve -- and actually do solve with their customer-friendly policies.

I can vouch for that one. I know how much of a hassle it is to move far away from your gym -- and how refreshing it must be to be able to walk in and just ... quit.

All of this rolls up to their philosophy, espoused eloquently on their "About" page, that gyms should just be about working out:

Talk about having an understanding of their core audience. The copy both in its value proposition and across its marketing materials reflects a deep understanding of their customers.

And how did their copywriters choose to make sure everyone knew what this new gym franchise was about if they didn't read that "About" page? This tagline:

Doesn't get much clearer than that.

13. ModCloth

ModCloth is a brand that has always had an excellent grasp of their buyer persona, and it comes through in their pun-filled copywriting. All of their products are silly plays on words -- check out this screen grab of some of their new arrivals, for example:

Dive into their product description copy, and it's equally joyous, evocative, and clever -- just like their customers. Often, it'll also tell the story of what you'll do while wearing their items:

After reading their descriptions, one can imagine what their life would be like if they owned this product. That's Copywriting 101, but so few brands can actually pull it off like the folks at ModCloth do.

14. Ann Handley

When it comes to building up your own personal brand, it can be easy to get a little too self-promotional. That's where the copywriting on your site can make a big difference.

On Ann Handley's personal website, she added bits of microcopy that shows, despite her many accomplishments (like being a best-selling author and award-winning speaker), that she still doesn't take herself too seriously.

Check out her email subscription call-to-action, for example:

Anyone can be a successful copywriter with the right brand voice -- and a little editorial guidance along the way. Want to learn how to write awesome copy for your business? Grab the free ebook below. 

[statusreview]

Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different)

We showed you our beach house style inspiration while the pink house was barely starting to come back together. And now that the duplex is at that same stage, we wanted to share our “vision” for its design – from materials and color ideas to specific room functions or features we’re thinking about incorporating.

It’s never too early to start making the 10,000 decisions that a major house reno like this requires because your brain will practically start to smoke if you attempt to pick everything all at once. So from the moment we offered on the duplex, I’ve been keeping a huge Pinterest board to catalog all of the ideas that have popped up and grabbed me over the months.

John and I have been sifting through them all lately in an effort to pinpoint our favorite ideas (so we can avoid that last-minute brain-burn when it’s time to finalize colors, counters, tile, lights, rugs, and BASICALLY ALL THE THINGS). Is everything perfectly crystal clear now? Nope! But we’re feeling a whole lot more focused than we did when we started collecting ideas months ago. So we wanted to share what we’re loving most for the duplex’s primary inspiration.

The Overall Plan

Like the pink house, we want the general vibe of the duplex to be relaxed, uncomplicated, comfortable, and old-meets-new. We definitely want to resist the urge to overfill or overdecorate the house, since it’s meant to feel easy and light (and less stuff = fewer things for renters to damage). Plus, it’s an old home, and we LOVE keeping original details like doors, floors, and my beloved diamond grille windows. We even uncovered an old brick chimney that passes through both sides of the duplex that we will be exposing and using to create a little niche with shelves within each side’s master bedroom.

We also want it to feel beachy, fresh, and coastal. This house has fewer historic details inside that we can emphasize and use for interest. A lot was stripped out over years of being a rental (whereas the pink house sort of froze in time and has things like the curved wall, the back staircase, the stained glass windows, old trim, an antique milk-glass pendant, and the grand front railing). So we’re going to use that as an excuse to go “beachier” with the duplex than we did at the pink house. We’re definitely still going to use old doors and refinish the original floors, but we’re also planning to play a lot with relaxed colors (mint, pistachio, soft pink, blue-gray, aquamarine, etc) and pair them with crisp white and coastal warm wood tones. The photos below do a great job of capturing the overall vibe we’re hoping to create:

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

Since the duplex is two separate residences, it means we have double the rooms to plan – two living rooms, two kitchens, two dining areas, two laundry/mudrooms, and a whopping six bedrooms and six bathrooms (four full, two half). We’re not planning to decorate each side identically – more like cousins than twins – so picture both of the powder rooms on each side having the same type of tile, but maybe in a different colorway. I think it’ll fun to have two “alter-ego” houses with mirrored floor plans, yet different colors, materials, and decor.

As a refresher, below is an updated floor plan of what one side will look like (the other is the same, just mirrored). You can read more about our floor plan in this post. There’s a video tour in there too if that helps:

So that’s the overall plan, but let’s get a little more specific and show how that will come to life in specific areas around the duplex.

The Exterior

Since the home is in a historic district, the outside will generally look like a fixed-up version of the before: it will still have shutters, corbels, and – of course – no dormer on the roof (womp-womp). We’re keeping the siding color white, but replacing the rotting wood with more durable HardiePlank siding in their stock Arctic White color – but don’t worry that it’ll look too much like this before shot. We have a few ways we’re planning to amp things up and add a lot more curb appeal.

To inject more beachiness into the exterior, we’re going to add mint green shutters (operable ones that will look so great compared to the thin plastic ones above!) along with painting the two original front doors the same mint color. We think it’ll be such a charming and colorful addition to our street. There’s lots of blue – and now pink, thanks to us – but not much green at all. And since there is so much “shutter coverage” on the front of the house, it will still make the house feel very colorful overall (it won’t really read like a white house – more like a green one). We also like the idea of doing a soft pink porch ceiling to subtly reference our pink house – just one house away – since the pink house’s porch ceiling is a minty green-blue color (winking right back atcha, duplex!).

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We actually started testing some mint paint colors this past weekend using some removable paint decals. We think we have a favorite, but we’re going to paint one of the doors first to make sure we like it before committing to putting it on all of the shutters.

The Transom Window

One exciting more recent development is that we decided to add an interior transom window above the opening between the kitchen and the main living area. We already had the opening framed wider, and Sean our contractor thinks he can easily rework the header to raise it and make room for the transom. People will see it from the second they step in the front door, and it’ll be another one of those cool “old details” that will add some original-feeling charm back to this house, since so much of that has been stripped out over the years.

We’ve had trouble finding images to represent what we’re thinking (I’m debating if we can do something with diamonds to tie into our diamond windows in the front and the old diamond door we tracked down for the mudroom). But these show you how much a nice high transom window can add to a doorway – especially one as wide as ours is going to be. Prediction: this addition will be one of our favorite things about the duplex when we’re done.

image sources: 1 / 2

The Kitchen

We’d love to do something with color in the kitchen, so our first option is to add it to the cabinets. Maybe one side gets soft blue fronts while the other goes mint? It will only have one window so we’ll still probably keep the majority of the room white so it feels bright, but the colorful cabinets will help it feel fun while the brick chimney we’ve exposed in one corner (like the one in the bottom right image) will add texture and history to the room.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We’re also trying to be realistic that buying two kitchens-worth of custom painted cabinets could get pricey, and DIYing it could be time intensive. So another option we’re floating around is injecting the color in the backsplash tile instead, then keeping the cabinets a stock white or wood color. Again, we could pick slightly different patterns or colors for each side so they each feel distinct.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 is ours! :)

The Stair Railing

Since we opened up the formerly closed in stairs on each side of the duplex, we now will have an exposed railing on each side.

While a wood newel post and railing are historic and pretty, we also don’t feel like every single detail needs to feel old. In fact, it might be cool to balance out the old touches in the home with some new additions that feel fresh and coastal – like a metal railing. We have the original wood railing at the pink house and LOVE it, so it feels like we have done that – and since we opened up the stairway wall at the duplex, there’s no original railing to save. So it inspires us to try something a little different…

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

We’re leaning towards that horizontal railing in the bottom left, but we haven’t priced anything out quite yet (and that could change our tune on metal entirely!). We know a local metal worker in Cape Charles (he forged a small support bracket for the stairs in the pink house) so it feels like something that’s worth exploring.

The Main Living Area

As you saw in the floor plan, the largest room downstairs (which looked like this when we bought it) will be home to both the living area and a dining space at the far end.

We like the idea of doing some sort of molding treatment on the walls (or ceiling!) just to keep the room from feeling too long and bare. Do we dare to finally jump on the shiplap bandwagon? Only time will tell. We especially love the beams in the picture on the left, and also like the vertical board and batten in the photo on the bottom right. These photos are all waaaaaaay too white when it comes to the furnishings (um, hello, that would never work in a rental) but the wall treatments all feel very beachy and, heck, it’d kinda be a nod to the beadboard that was there before!

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Powder Room

Since there’s just a downstairs powder room in each side of the duplex (along with an outdoor shower for getting the sand off – not to worry!), we think we can play a little bit more with some colorful wallpaper or some sort of wall treatment that makes that little nook of a bathroom under the stairs feel more like a lovely little hideaway. It’s going to be small, and will most likely have the same hardwood floors that run through the rest of the first floor (except for the mudroom, which will be tiled), so we can go a little nuts on the walls. Plus, we can also do some wall molding to save money on wallpaper and tie in whatever treatment we do in the adjacent living area.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Full Bathrooms

The upstairs bathrooms in this house aren’t huge, so we think we can do something fun with tile to make the most of the small spaces. We LOVE the idea of playing with shapes (subtle stripes or colorful zig-zags) by using the same tiles in two different colorways (or four or five!). Our tile budget is always tight, so it’ll be a challenge to see what we can find without ordering anything too fancy (or high maintenance – this tile needs to be super durable). But again, the fact that they’re small and won’t require much tile may allow us to splurge a bit.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

I realize that’s not every single space or idea (bedrooms! backyard! laundry!) but I figured this was enough to give you a sense of the overall vision for the duplex. One thing’s for sure… there will be beachy colors! And cool old pocket doors! And interior transoms! And original wood floors! And tiling projects that take us days and days to complete! Ha!

Psst- It’s really fun to look back on the style post we shared for the pink house and then compare how those mood boards looked to the final version of the house. So funny how many things stuck!

Also, are you on our free email list? We send out quick & fun weekly emails full of bonus details, design tips, random style thoughts, and other house-related musings. Click here to join the fun. And thanks to everyone who has jumped on board – we love putting these together for ya!

The post Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different) appeared first on Young House Love.

Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different) published first on https://ssmattress.tumblr.com/

[endlessarchite]

Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different)

We showed you our beach house style inspiration while the pink house was barely starting to come back together. And now that the duplex is at that same stage, we wanted to share our “vision” for its design – from materials and color ideas to specific room functions or features we’re thinking about incorporating.

It’s never too early to start making the 10,000 decisions that a major house reno like this requires because your brain will practically start to smoke if you attempt to pick everything all at once. So from the moment we offered on the duplex, I’ve been keeping a huge Pinterest board to catalog all of the ideas that have popped up and grabbed me over the months.

John and I have been sifting through them all lately in an effort to pinpoint our favorite ideas (so we can avoid that last-minute brain-burn when it’s time to finalize colors, counters, tile, lights, rugs, and BASICALLY ALL THE THINGS). Is everything perfectly crystal clear now? Nope! But we’re feeling a whole lot more focused than we did when we started collecting ideas months ago. So we wanted to share what we’re loving most for the duplex’s primary inspiration.

The Overall Plan

Like the pink house, we want the general vibe of the duplex to be relaxed, uncomplicated, comfortable, and old-meets-new. We definitely want to resist the urge to overfill or overdecorate the house, since it’s meant to feel easy and light (and less stuff = fewer things for renters to damage). Plus, it’s an old home, and we LOVE keeping original details like doors, floors, and my beloved diamond grille windows. We even uncovered an old brick chimney that passes through both sides of the duplex that we will be exposing and using to create a little niche with shelves within each side’s master bedroom.

We also want it to feel beachy, fresh, and coastal. This house has fewer historic details inside that we can emphasize and use for interest. A lot was stripped out over years of being a rental (whereas the pink house sort of froze in time and has things like the curved wall, the back staircase, the stained glass windows, old trim, an antique milk-glass pendant, and the grand front railing). So we’re going to use that as an excuse to go “beachier” with the duplex than we did at the pink house. We’re definitely still going to use old doors and refinish the original floors, but we’re also planning to play a lot with relaxed colors (mint, pistachio, soft pink, blue-gray, aquamarine, etc) and pair them with crisp white and coastal warm wood tones. The photos below do a great job of capturing the overall vibe we’re hoping to create:

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

Since the duplex is two separate residences, it means we have double the rooms to plan – two living rooms, two kitchens, two dining areas, two laundry/mudrooms, and a whopping six bedrooms and six bathrooms (four full, two half). We’re not planning to decorate each side identically – more like cousins than twins – so picture both of the powder rooms on each side having the same type of tile, but maybe in a different colorway. I think it’ll fun to have two “alter-ego” houses with mirrored floor plans, yet different colors, materials, and decor.

As a refresher, below is an updated floor plan of what one side will look like (the other is the same, just mirrored). You can read more about our floor plan in this post. There’s a video tour in there too if that helps:

So that’s the overall plan, but let’s get a little more specific and show how that will come to life in specific areas around the duplex.

The Exterior

Since the home is in a historic district, the outside will generally look like a fixed-up version of the before: it will still have shutters, corbels, and – of course – no dormer on the roof (womp-womp). We’re keeping the siding color white, but replacing the rotting wood with more durable HardiePlank siding in their stock Arctic White color – but don’t worry that it’ll look too much like this before shot. We have a few ways we’re planning to amp things up and add a lot more curb appeal.

To inject more beachiness into the exterior, we’re going to add mint green shutters (operable ones that will look so great compared to the thin plastic ones above!) along with painting the two original front doors the same mint color. We think it’ll be such a charming and colorful addition to our street. There’s lots of blue – and now pink, thanks to us – but not much green at all. And since there is so much “shutter coverage” on the front of the house, it will still make the house feel very colorful overall (it won’t really read like a white house – more like a green one). We also like the idea of doing a soft pink porch ceiling to subtly reference our pink house – just one house away – since the pink house’s porch ceiling is a minty green-blue color (winking right back atcha, duplex!).

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We actually started testing some mint paint colors this past weekend using some removable paint decals. We think we have a favorite, but we’re going to paint one of the doors first to make sure we like it before committing to putting it on all of the shutters.

The Transom Window

One exciting more recent development is that we decided to add an interior transom window above the opening between the kitchen and the main living area. We already had the opening framed wider, and Sean our contractor thinks he can easily rework the header to raise it and make room for the transom. People will see it from the second they step in the front door, and it’ll be another one of those cool “old details” that will add some original-feeling charm back to this house, since so much of that has been stripped out over the years.

We’ve had trouble finding images to represent what we’re thinking (I’m debating if we can do something with diamonds to tie into our diamond windows in the front and the old diamond door we tracked down for the mudroom). But these show you how much a nice high transom window can add to a doorway – especially one as wide as ours is going to be. Prediction: this addition will be one of our favorite things about the duplex when we’re done.

image sources: 1 / 2

The Kitchen

We’d love to do something with color in the kitchen, so our first option is to add it to the cabinets. Maybe one side gets soft blue fronts while the other goes mint? It will only have one window so we’ll still probably keep the majority of the room white so it feels bright, but the colorful cabinets will help it feel fun while the brick chimney we’ve exposed in one corner (like the one in the bottom right image) will add texture and history to the room.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We’re also trying to be realistic that buying two kitchens-worth of custom painted cabinets could get pricey, and DIYing it could be time intensive. So another option we’re floating around is injecting the color in the backsplash tile instead, then keeping the cabinets a stock white or wood color. Again, we could pick slightly different patterns or colors for each side so they each feel distinct.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 is ours! :)

The Stair Railing

Since we opened up the formerly closed in stairs on each side of the duplex, we now will have an exposed railing on each side.

While a wood newel post and railing are historic and pretty, we also don’t feel like every single detail needs to feel old. In fact, it might be cool to balance out the old touches in the home with some new additions that feel fresh and coastal – like a metal railing. We have the original wood railing at the pink house and LOVE it, so it feels like we have done that – and since we opened up the stairway wall at the duplex, there’s no original railing to save. So it inspires us to try something a little different…

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

We’re leaning towards that horizontal railing in the bottom left, but we haven’t priced anything out quite yet (and that could change our tune on metal entirely!). We know a local metal worker in Cape Charles (he forged a small support bracket for the stairs in the pink house) so it feels like something that’s worth exploring.

The Main Living Area

As you saw in the floor plan, the largest room downstairs (which looked like this when we bought it) will be home to both the living area and a dining space at the far end.

We like the idea of doing some sort of molding treatment on the walls (or ceiling!) just to keep the room from feeling too long and bare. Do we dare to finally jump on the shiplap bandwagon? Only time will tell. We especially love the beams in the picture on the left, and also like the vertical board and batten in the photo on the bottom right. These photos are all waaaaaaay too white when it comes to the furnishings (um, hello, that would never work in a rental) but the wall treatments all feel very beachy and, heck, it’d kinda be a nod to the beadboard that was there before!

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Powder Room

Since there’s just a downstairs powder room in each side of the duplex (along with an outdoor shower for getting the sand off – not to worry!), we think we can play a little bit more with some colorful wallpaper or some sort of wall treatment that makes that little nook of a bathroom under the stairs feel more like a lovely little hideaway. It’s going to be small, and will most likely have the same hardwood floors that run through the rest of the first floor (except for the mudroom, which will be tiled), so we can go a little nuts on the walls. Plus, we can also do some wall molding to save money on wallpaper and tie in whatever treatment we do in the adjacent living area.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Full Bathrooms

The upstairs bathrooms in this house aren’t huge, so we think we can do something fun with tile to make the most of the small spaces. We LOVE the idea of playing with shapes (subtle stripes or colorful zig-zags) by using the same tiles in two different colorways (or four or five!). Our tile budget is always tight, so it’ll be a challenge to see what we can find without ordering anything too fancy (or high maintenance – this tile needs to be super durable). But again, the fact that they’re small and won’t require much tile may allow us to splurge a bit.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

I realize that’s not every single space or idea (bedrooms! backyard! laundry!) but I figured this was enough to give you a sense of the overall vision for the duplex. One thing’s for sure… there will be beachy colors! And cool old pocket doors! And interior transoms! And original wood floors! And tiling projects that take us days and days to complete! Ha!

Psst- It’s really fun to look back on the style post we shared for the pink house and then compare how those mood boards looked to the final version of the house. So funny how many things stuck!

Also, are you on our free email list? We send out quick & fun weekly emails full of bonus details, design tips, random style thoughts, and other house-related musings. Click here to join the fun. And thanks to everyone who has jumped on board – we love putting these together for ya!

The post Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different) appeared first on Young House Love.

Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different) published first on https://bakerskitchenslimited.tumblr.com/

[additionallysad]

Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different) https://ift.tt/2Mmo0Lj

We showed you our beach house style inspiration while the pink house was barely starting to come back together. And now that the duplex is at that same stage, we wanted to share our “vision” for its design – from materials and color ideas to specific room functions or features we’re thinking about incorporating.

It’s never too early to start making the 10,000 decisions that a major house reno like this requires because your brain will practically start to smoke if you attempt to pick everything all at once. So from the moment we offered on the duplex, I’ve been keeping a huge Pinterest board to catalog all of the ideas that have popped up and grabbed me over the months.

John and I have been sifting through them all lately in an effort to pinpoint our favorite ideas (so we can avoid that last-minute brain-burn when it’s time to finalize colors, counters, tile, lights, rugs, and BASICALLY ALL THE THINGS). Is everything perfectly crystal clear now? Nope! But we’re feeling a whole lot more focused than we did when we started collecting ideas months ago. So we wanted to share what we’re loving most for the duplex’s primary inspiration.

The Overall Plan

Like the pink house, we want the general vibe of the duplex to be relaxed, uncomplicated, comfortable, and old-meets-new. We definitely want to resist the urge to overfill or overdecorate the house, since it’s meant to feel easy and light (and less stuff = fewer things for renters to damage). Plus, it’s an old home, and we LOVE keeping original details like doors, floors, and my beloved diamond grille windows. We even uncovered an old brick chimney that passes through both sides of the duplex that we will be exposing and using to create a little niche with shelves within each side’s master bedroom.

We also want it to feel beachy, fresh, and coastal. This house has fewer historic details inside that we can emphasize and use for interest. A lot was stripped out over years of being a rental (whereas the pink house sort of froze in time and has things like the curved wall, the back staircase, the stained glass windows, old trim, an antique milk-glass pendant, and the grand front railing). So we’re going to use that as an excuse to go “beachier” with the duplex than we did at the pink house. We’re definitely still going to use old doors and refinish the original floors, but we’re also planning to play a lot with relaxed colors (mint, pistachio, soft pink, blue-gray, aquamarine, etc) and pair them with crisp white and coastal warm wood tones. The photos below do a great job of capturing the overall vibe we’re hoping to create:

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

Since the duplex is two separate residences, it means we have double the rooms to plan – two living rooms, two kitchens, two dining areas, two laundry/mudrooms, and a whopping six bedrooms and six bathrooms (four full, two half). We’re not planning to decorate each side identically – more like cousins than twins – so picture both of the powder rooms on each side having the same type of tile, but maybe in a different colorway. I think it’ll fun to have two “alter-ego” houses with mirrored floor plans, yet different colors, materials, and decor.

As a refresher, below is an updated floor plan of what one side will look like (the other is the same, just mirrored). You can read more about our floor plan in this post. There’s a video tour in there too if that helps:

So that’s the overall plan, but let’s get a little more specific and show how that will come to life in specific areas around the duplex.

The Exterior

Since the home is in a historic district, the outside will generally look like a fixed-up version of the before: it will still have shutters, corbels, and – of course – no dormer on the roof (womp-womp). We’re keeping the siding color white, but replacing the rotting wood with more durable HardiePlank siding in their stock Arctic White color – but don’t worry that it’ll look too much like this before shot. We have a few ways we’re planning to amp things up and add a lot more curb appeal.

To inject more beachiness into the exterior, we’re going to add mint green shutters (operable ones that will look so great compared to the thin plastic ones above!) along with painting the two original front doors the same mint color. We think it’ll be such a charming and colorful addition to our street. There’s lots of blue – and now pink, thanks to us – but not much green at all. And since there is so much “shutter coverage” on the front of the house, it will still make the house feel very colorful overall (it won’t really read like a white house – more like a green one). We also like the idea of doing a soft pink porch ceiling to subtly reference our pink house – just one house away – since the pink house’s porch ceiling is a minty green-blue color (winking right back atcha, duplex!).

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We actually started testing some mint paint colors this past weekend using some removable paint decals. We think we have a favorite, but we’re going to paint one of the doors first to make sure we like it before committing to putting it on all of the shutters.

The Transom Window

One exciting more recent development is that we decided to add an interior transom window above the opening between the kitchen and the main living area. We already had the opening framed wider, and Sean our contractor thinks he can easily rework the header to raise it and make room for the transom. People will see it from the second they step in the front door, and it’ll be another one of those cool “old details” that will add some original-feeling charm back to this house, since so much of that has been stripped out over the years.

We’ve had trouble finding images to represent what we’re thinking (I’m debating if we can do something with diamonds to tie into our diamond windows in the front and the old diamond door we tracked down for the mudroom). But these show you how much a nice high transom window can add to a doorway – especially one as wide as ours is going to be. Prediction: this addition will be one of our favorite things about the duplex when we’re done.

image sources: 1 / 2

The Kitchen

We’d love to do something with color in the kitchen, so our first option is to add it to the cabinets. Maybe one side gets soft blue fronts while the other goes mint? It will only have one window so we’ll still probably keep the majority of the room white so it feels bright, but the colorful cabinets will help it feel fun while the brick chimney we’ve exposed in one corner (like the one in the bottom right image) will add texture and history to the room.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We’re also trying to be realistic that buying two kitchens-worth of custom painted cabinets could get pricey, and DIYing it could be time intensive. So another option we’re floating around is injecting the color in the backsplash tile instead, then keeping the cabinets a stock white or wood color. Again, we could pick slightly different patterns or colors for each side so they each feel distinct.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 is ours! :)

The Stair Railing

Since we opened up the formerly closed in stairs on each side of the duplex, we now will have an exposed railing on each side.

While a wood newel post and railing are historic and pretty, we also don’t feel like every single detail needs to feel old. In fact, it might be cool to balance out the old touches in the home with some new additions that feel fresh and coastal – like a metal railing. We have the original wood railing at the pink house and LOVE it, so it feels like we have done that – and since we opened up the stairway wall at the duplex, there’s no original railing to save. So it inspires us to try something a little different…

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

We’re leaning towards that horizontal railing in the bottom left, but we haven’t priced anything out quite yet (and that could change our tune on metal entirely!). We know a local metal worker in Cape Charles (he forged a small support bracket for the stairs in the pink house) so it feels like something that’s worth exploring.

The Main Living Area

As you saw in the floor plan, the largest room downstairs (which looked like this when we bought it) will be home to both the living area and a dining space at the far end.

We like the idea of doing some sort of molding treatment on the walls (or ceiling!) just to keep the room from feeling too long and bare. Do we dare to finally jump on the shiplap bandwagon? Only time will tell. We especially love the beams in the picture on the left, and also like the vertical board and batten in the photo on the bottom right. These photos are all waaaaaaay too white when it comes to the furnishings (um, hello, that would never work in a rental) but the wall treatments all feel very beachy and, heck, it’d kinda be a nod to the beadboard that was there before!

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Powder Room

Since there’s just a downstairs powder room in each side of the duplex (along with an outdoor shower for getting the sand off – not to worry!), we think we can play a little bit more with some colorful wallpaper or some sort of wall treatment that makes that little nook of a bathroom under the stairs feel more like a lovely little hideaway. It’s going to be small, and will most likely have the same hardwood floors that run through the rest of the first floor (except for the mudroom, which will be tiled), so we can go a little nuts on the walls. Plus, we can also do some wall molding to save money on wallpaper and tie in whatever treatment we do in the adjacent living area.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Full Bathrooms

The upstairs bathrooms in this house aren’t huge, so we think we can do something fun with tile to make the most of the small spaces. We LOVE the idea of playing with shapes (subtle stripes or colorful zig-zags) by using the same tiles in two different colorways (or four or five!). Our tile budget is always tight, so it’ll be a challenge to see what we can find without ordering anything too fancy (or high maintenance – this tile needs to be super durable). But again, the fact that they’re small and won’t require much tile may allow us to splurge a bit.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

I realize that’s not every single space or idea (bedrooms! backyard! laundry!) but I figured this was enough to give you a sense of the overall vision for the duplex. One thing’s for sure… there will be beachy colors! And cool old pocket doors! And interior transoms! And original wood floors! And tiling projects that take us days and days to complete! Ha!

Psst- It’s really fun to look back on the style post we shared for the pink house and then compare how those mood boards looked to the final version of the house. So funny how many things stuck!

Also, are you on our free email list? We send out quick & fun weekly emails full of bonus details, design tips, random style thoughts, and other house-related musings. Click here to join the fun. And thanks to everyone who has jumped on board – we love putting these together for ya!

The post Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different) appeared first on Young House Love.

[interiorstarweb]

Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different)

We showed you our beach house style inspiration while the pink house was barely starting to come back together. And now that the duplex is at that same stage, we wanted to share our “vision” for its design – from materials and color ideas to specific room functions or features we’re thinking about incorporating.

It’s never too early to start making the 10,000 decisions that a major house reno like this requires because your brain will practically start to smoke if you attempt to pick everything all at once. So from the moment we offered on the duplex, I’ve been keeping a huge Pinterest board to catalog all of the ideas that have popped up and grabbed me over the months.

John and I have been sifting through them all lately in an effort to pinpoint our favorite ideas (so we can avoid that last-minute brain-burn when it’s time to finalize colors, counters, tile, lights, rugs, and BASICALLY ALL THE THINGS). Is everything perfectly crystal clear now? Nope! But we’re feeling a whole lot more focused than we did when we started collecting ideas months ago. So we wanted to share what we’re loving most for the duplex’s primary inspiration.

The Overall Plan

Like the pink house, we want the general vibe of the duplex to be relaxed, uncomplicated, comfortable, and old-meets-new. We definitely want to resist the urge to overfill or overdecorate the house, since it’s meant to feel easy and light (and less stuff = fewer things for renters to damage). Plus, it’s an old home, and we LOVE keeping original details like doors, floors, and my beloved diamond grille windows. We even uncovered an old brick chimney that passes through both sides of the duplex that we will be exposing and using to create a little niche with shelves within each side’s master bedroom.

We also want it to feel beachy, fresh, and coastal. This house has fewer historic details inside that we can emphasize and use for interest. A lot was stripped out over years of being a rental (whereas the pink house sort of froze in time and has things like the curved wall, the back staircase, the stained glass windows, old trim, an antique milk-glass pendant, and the grand front railing). So we’re going to use that as an excuse to go “beachier” with the duplex than we did at the pink house. We’re definitely still going to use old doors and refinish the original floors, but we’re also planning to play a lot with relaxed colors (mint, pistachio, soft pink, blue-gray, aquamarine, etc) and pair them with crisp white and coastal warm wood tones. The photos below do a great job of capturing the overall vibe we’re hoping to create:

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

Since the duplex is two separate residences, it means we have double the rooms to plan – two living rooms, two kitchens, two dining areas, two laundry/mudrooms, and a whopping six bedrooms and six bathrooms (four full, two half). We’re not planning to decorate each side identically – more like cousins than twins – so picture both of the powder rooms on each side having the same type of tile, but maybe in a different colorway. I think it’ll fun to have two “alter-ego” houses with mirrored floor plans, yet different colors, materials, and decor.

As a refresher, below is an updated floor plan of what one side will look like (the other is the same, just mirrored). You can read more about our floor plan in this post. There’s a video tour in there too if that helps:

So that’s the overall plan, but let’s get a little more specific and show how that will come to life in specific areas around the duplex.

The Exterior

Since the home is in a historic district, the outside will generally look like a fixed-up version of the before: it will still have shutters, corbels, and – of course – no dormer on the roof (womp-womp). We’re keeping the siding color white, but replacing the rotting wood with more durable HardiePlank siding in their stock Arctic White color – but don’t worry that it’ll look too much like this before shot. We have a few ways we’re planning to amp things up and add a lot more curb appeal.

To inject more beachiness into the exterior, we’re going to add mint green shutters (operable ones that will look so great compared to the thin plastic ones above!) along with painting the two original front doors the same mint color. We think it’ll be such a charming and colorful addition to our street. There’s lots of blue – and now pink, thanks to us – but not much green at all. And since there is so much “shutter coverage” on the front of the house, it will still make the house feel very colorful overall (it won’t really read like a white house – more like a green one). We also like the idea of doing a soft pink porch ceiling to subtly reference our pink house – just one house away – since the pink house’s porch ceiling is a minty green-blue color (winking right back atcha, duplex!).

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We actually started testing some mint paint colors this past weekend using some removable paint decals. We think we have a favorite, but we’re going to paint one of the doors first to make sure we like it before committing to putting it on all of the shutters.

The Transom Window

One exciting more recent development is that we decided to add an interior transom window above the opening between the kitchen and the main living area. We already had the opening framed wider, and Sean our contractor thinks he can easily rework the header to raise it and make room for the transom. People will see it from the second they step in the front door, and it’ll be another one of those cool “old details” that will add some original-feeling charm back to this house, since so much of that has been stripped out over the years.

We’ve had trouble finding images to represent what we’re thinking (I’m debating if we can do something with diamonds to tie into our diamond windows in the front and the old diamond door we tracked down for the mudroom). But these show you how much a nice high transom window can add to a doorway – especially one as wide as ours is going to be. Prediction: this addition will be one of our favorite things about the duplex when we’re done.

image sources: 1 / 2

The Kitchen

We’d love to do something with color in the kitchen, so our first option is to add it to the cabinets. Maybe one side gets soft blue fronts while the other goes mint? It will only have one window so we’ll still probably keep the majority of the room white so it feels bright, but the colorful cabinets will help it feel fun while the brick chimney we’ve exposed in one corner (like the one in the bottom right image) will add texture and history to the room.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We’re also trying to be realistic that buying two kitchens-worth of custom painted cabinets could get pricey, and DIYing it could be time intensive. So another option we’re floating around is injecting the color in the backsplash tile instead, then keeping the cabinets a stock white or wood color. Again, we could pick slightly different patterns or colors for each side so they each feel distinct.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 is ours! :)

The Stair Railing

Since we opened up the formerly closed in stairs on each side of the duplex, we now will have an exposed railing on each side.

While a wood newel post and railing are historic and pretty, we also don’t feel like every single detail needs to feel old. In fact, it might be cool to balance out the old touches in the home with some new additions that feel fresh and coastal – like a metal railing. We have the original wood railing at the pink house and LOVE it, so it feels like we have done that – and since we opened up the stairway wall at the duplex, there’s no original railing to save. So it inspires us to try something a little different…

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

We’re leaning towards that horizontal railing in the bottom left, but we haven’t priced anything out quite yet (and that could change our tune on metal entirely!). We know a local metal worker in Cape Charles (he forged a small support bracket for the stairs in the pink house) so it feels like something that’s worth exploring.

The Main Living Area

As you saw in the floor plan, the largest room downstairs (which looked like this when we bought it) will be home to both the living area and a dining space at the far end.

We like the idea of doing some sort of molding treatment on the walls (or ceiling!) just to keep the room from feeling too long and bare. Do we dare to finally jump on the shiplap bandwagon? Only time will tell. We especially love the beams in the picture on the left, and also like the vertical board and batten in the photo on the bottom right. These photos are all waaaaaaay too white when it comes to the furnishings (um, hello, that would never work in a rental) but the wall treatments all feel very beachy and, heck, it’d kinda be a nod to the beadboard that was there before!

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Powder Room

Since there’s just a downstairs powder room in each side of the duplex (along with an outdoor shower for getting the sand off – not to worry!), we think we can play a little bit more with some colorful wallpaper or some sort of wall treatment that makes that little nook of a bathroom under the stairs feel more like a lovely little hideaway. It’s going to be small, and will most likely have the same hardwood floors that run through the rest of the first floor (except for the mudroom, which will be tiled), so we can go a little nuts on the walls. Plus, we can also do some wall molding to save money on wallpaper and tie in whatever treatment we do in the adjacent living area.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Full Bathrooms

The upstairs bathrooms in this house aren’t huge, so we think we can do something fun with tile to make the most of the small spaces. We LOVE the idea of playing with shapes (subtle stripes or colorful zig-zags) by using the same tiles in two different colorways (or four or five!). Our tile budget is always tight, so it’ll be a challenge to see what we can find without ordering anything too fancy (or high maintenance – this tile needs to be super durable). But again, the fact that they’re small and won’t require much tile may allow us to splurge a bit.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

I realize that’s not every single space or idea (bedrooms! backyard! laundry!) but I figured this was enough to give you a sense of the overall vision for the duplex. One thing’s for sure… there will be beachy colors! And cool old pocket doors! And interior transoms! And original wood floors! And tiling projects that take us days and days to complete! Ha!

Psst- It’s really fun to look back on the style post we shared for the pink house and then compare how those mood boards looked to the final version of the house. So funny how many things stuck!

Also, are you on our free email list? We send out quick & fun weekly emails full of bonus details, design tips, random style thoughts, and other house-related musings. Click here to join the fun. And thanks to everyone who has jumped on board – we love putting these together for ya!

The post Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different) appeared first on Young House Love.

Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different) published first on https://novaformmattressreview.tumblr.com/

[billydmacklin]

Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different)

We showed you our beach house style inspiration while the pink house was barely starting to come back together. And now that the duplex is at that same stage, we wanted to share our “vision” for its design – from materials and color ideas to specific room functions or features we’re thinking about incorporating.

It’s never too early to start making the 10,000 decisions that a major house reno like this requires because your brain will practically start to smoke if you attempt to pick everything all at once. So from the moment we offered on the duplex, I’ve been keeping a huge Pinterest board to catalog all of the ideas that have popped up and grabbed me over the months.

John and I have been sifting through them all lately in an effort to pinpoint our favorite ideas (so we can avoid that last-minute brain-burn when it’s time to finalize colors, counters, tile, lights, rugs, and BASICALLY ALL THE THINGS). Is everything perfectly crystal clear now? Nope! But we’re feeling a whole lot more focused than we did when we started collecting ideas months ago. So we wanted to share what we’re loving most for the duplex’s primary inspiration.

The Overall Plan

Like the pink house, we want the general vibe of the duplex to be relaxed, uncomplicated, comfortable, and old-meets-new. We definitely want to resist the urge to overfill or overdecorate the house, since it’s meant to feel easy and light (and less stuff = fewer things for renters to damage). Plus, it’s an old home, and we LOVE keeping original details like doors, floors, and my beloved diamond grille windows. We even uncovered an old brick chimney that passes through both sides of the duplex that we will be exposing and using to create a little niche with shelves within each side’s master bedroom.

We also want it to feel beachy, fresh, and coastal. This house has fewer historic details inside that we can emphasize and use for interest. A lot was stripped out over years of being a rental (whereas the pink house sort of froze in time and has things like the curved wall, the back staircase, the stained glass windows, old trim, an antique milk-glass pendant, and the grand front railing). So we’re going to use that as an excuse to go “beachier” with the duplex than we did at the pink house. We’re definitely still going to use old doors and refinish the original floors, but we’re also planning to play a lot with relaxed colors (mint, pistachio, soft pink, blue-gray, aquamarine, etc) and pair them with crisp white and coastal warm wood tones. The photos below do a great job of capturing the overall vibe we’re hoping to create:

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

Since the duplex is two separate residences, it means we have double the rooms to plan – two living rooms, two kitchens, two dining areas, two laundry/mudrooms, and a whopping six bedrooms and six bathrooms (four full, two half). We’re not planning to decorate each side identically – more like cousins than twins – so picture both of the powder rooms on each side having the same type of tile, but maybe in a different colorway. I think it’ll fun to have two “alter-ego” houses with mirrored floor plans, yet different colors, materials, and decor.

As a refresher, below is an updated floor plan of what one side will look like (the other is the same, just mirrored). You can read more about our floor plan in this post. There’s a video tour in there too if that helps:

So that’s the overall plan, but let’s get a little more specific and show how that will come to life in specific areas around the duplex.

The Exterior

Since the home is in a historic district, the outside will generally look like a fixed-up version of the before: it will still have shutters, corbels, and – of course – no dormer on the roof (womp-womp). We’re keeping the siding color white, but replacing the rotting wood with more durable HardiePlank siding in their stock Arctic White color – but don’t worry that it’ll look too much like this before shot. We have a few ways we’re planning to amp things up and add a lot more curb appeal.

To inject more beachiness into the exterior, we’re going to add mint green shutters (operable ones that will look so great compared to the thin plastic ones above!) along with painting the two original front doors the same mint color. We think it’ll be such a charming and colorful addition to our street. There’s lots of blue – and now pink, thanks to us – but not much green at all. And since there is so much “shutter coverage” on the front of the house, it will still make the house feel very colorful overall (it won’t really read like a white house – more like a green one). We also like the idea of doing a soft pink porch ceiling to subtly reference our pink house – just one house away – since the pink house’s porch ceiling is a minty green-blue color (winking right back atcha, duplex!).

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We actually started testing some mint paint colors this past weekend using some removable paint decals. We think we have a favorite, but we’re going to paint one of the doors first to make sure we like it before committing to putting it on all of the shutters.

The Transom Window

One exciting more recent development is that we decided to add an interior transom window above the opening between the kitchen and the main living area. We already had the opening framed wider, and Sean our contractor thinks he can easily rework the header to raise it and make room for the transom. People will see it from the second they step in the front door, and it’ll be another one of those cool “old details” that will add some original-feeling charm back to this house, since so much of that has been stripped out over the years.

We’ve had trouble finding images to represent what we’re thinking (I’m debating if we can do something with diamonds to tie into our diamond windows in the front and the old diamond door we tracked down for the mudroom). But these show you how much a nice high transom window can add to a doorway – especially one as wide as ours is going to be. Prediction: this addition will be one of our favorite things about the duplex when we’re done.

image sources: 1 / 2

The Kitchen

We’d love to do something with color in the kitchen, so our first option is to add it to the cabinets. Maybe one side gets soft blue fronts while the other goes mint? It will only have one window so we’ll still probably keep the majority of the room white so it feels bright, but the colorful cabinets will help it feel fun while the brick chimney we’ve exposed in one corner (like the one in the bottom right image) will add texture and history to the room.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We’re also trying to be realistic that buying two kitchens-worth of custom painted cabinets could get pricey, and DIYing it could be time intensive. So another option we’re floating around is injecting the color in the backsplash tile instead, then keeping the cabinets a stock white or wood color. Again, we could pick slightly different patterns or colors for each side so they each feel distinct.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 is ours! :)

The Stair Railing

Since we opened up the formerly closed in stairs on each side of the duplex, we now will have an exposed railing on each side.

While a wood newel post and railing are historic and pretty, we also don’t feel like every single detail needs to feel old. In fact, it might be cool to balance out the old touches in the home with some new additions that feel fresh and coastal – like a metal railing. We have the original wood railing at the pink house and LOVE it, so it feels like we have done that – and since we opened up the stairway wall at the duplex, there’s no original railing to save. So it inspires us to try something a little different…

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

We’re leaning towards that horizontal railing in the bottom left, but we haven’t priced anything out quite yet (and that could change our tune on metal entirely!). We know a local metal worker in Cape Charles (he forged a small support bracket for the stairs in the pink house) so it feels like something that’s worth exploring.

The Main Living Area

As you saw in the floor plan, the largest room downstairs (which looked like this when we bought it) will be home to both the living area and a dining space at the far end.

We like the idea of doing some sort of molding treatment on the walls (or ceiling!) just to keep the room from feeling too long and bare. Do we dare to finally jump on the shiplap bandwagon? Only time will tell. We especially love the beams in the picture on the left, and also like the vertical board and batten in the photo on the bottom right. These photos are all waaaaaaay too white when it comes to the furnishings (um, hello, that would never work in a rental) but the wall treatments all feel very beachy and, heck, it’d kinda be a nod to the beadboard that was there before!

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Powder Room

Since there’s just a downstairs powder room in each side of the duplex (along with an outdoor shower for getting the sand off – not to worry!), we think we can play a little bit more with some colorful wallpaper or some sort of wall treatment that makes that little nook of a bathroom under the stairs feel more like a lovely little hideaway. It’s going to be small, and will most likely have the same hardwood floors that run through the rest of the first floor (except for the mudroom, which will be tiled), so we can go a little nuts on the walls. Plus, we can also do some wall molding to save money on wallpaper and tie in whatever treatment we do in the adjacent living area.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Full Bathrooms

The upstairs bathrooms in this house aren’t huge, so we think we can do something fun with tile to make the most of the small spaces. We LOVE the idea of playing with shapes (subtle stripes or colorful zig-zags) by using the same tiles in two different colorways (or four or five!). Our tile budget is always tight, so it’ll be a challenge to see what we can find without ordering anything too fancy (or high maintenance – this tile needs to be super durable). But again, the fact that they’re small and won’t require much tile may allow us to splurge a bit.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

I realize that’s not every single space or idea (bedrooms! backyard! laundry!) but I figured this was enough to give you a sense of the overall vision for the duplex. One thing’s for sure… there will be beachy colors! And cool old pocket doors! And interior transoms! And original wood floors! And tiling projects that take us days and days to complete! Ha!

Psst- It’s really fun to look back on the style post we shared for the pink house and then compare how those mood boards looked to the final version of the house. So funny how many things stuck!

Also, are you on our free email list? We send out quick & fun weekly emails full of bonus details, design tips, random style thoughts, and other house-related musings. Click here to join the fun. And thanks to everyone who has jumped on board – we love putting these together for ya!

The post Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different) appeared first on Young House Love.

Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different) published first on https://carpetgurus.tumblr.com/

[vincentbnaughton]

Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different)

We showed you our beach house style inspiration while the pink house was barely starting to come back together. And now that the duplex is at that same stage, we wanted to share our “vision” for its design – from materials and color ideas to specific room functions or features we’re thinking about incorporating.

It’s never too early to start making the 10,000 decisions that a major house reno like this requires because your brain will practically start to smoke if you attempt to pick everything all at once. So from the moment we offered on the duplex, I’ve been keeping a huge Pinterest board to catalog all of the ideas that have popped up and grabbed me over the months.

John and I have been sifting through them all lately in an effort to pinpoint our favorite ideas (so we can avoid that last-minute brain-burn when it’s time to finalize colors, counters, tile, lights, rugs, and BASICALLY ALL THE THINGS). Is everything perfectly crystal clear now? Nope! But we’re feeling a whole lot more focused than we did when we started collecting ideas months ago. So we wanted to share what we’re loving most for the duplex’s primary inspiration.

The Overall Plan

Like the pink house, we want the general vibe of the duplex to be relaxed, uncomplicated, comfortable, and old-meets-new. We definitely want to resist the urge to overfill or overdecorate the house, since it’s meant to feel easy and light (and less stuff = fewer things for renters to damage). Plus, it’s an old home, and we LOVE keeping original details like doors, floors, and my beloved diamond grille windows. We even uncovered an old brick chimney that passes through both sides of the duplex that we will be exposing and using to create a little niche with shelves within each side’s master bedroom.

We also want it to feel beachy, fresh, and coastal. This house has fewer historic details inside that we can emphasize and use for interest. A lot was stripped out over years of being a rental (whereas the pink house sort of froze in time and has things like the curved wall, the back staircase, the stained glass windows, old trim, an antique milk-glass pendant, and the grand front railing). So we’re going to use that as an excuse to go “beachier” with the duplex than we did at the pink house. We’re definitely still going to use old doors and refinish the original floors, but we’re also planning to play a lot with relaxed colors (mint, pistachio, soft pink, blue-gray, aquamarine, etc) and pair them with crisp white and coastal warm wood tones. The photos below do a great job of capturing the overall vibe we’re hoping to create:

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

Since the duplex is two separate residences, it means we have double the rooms to plan – two living rooms, two kitchens, two dining areas, two laundry/mudrooms, and a whopping six bedrooms and six bathrooms (four full, two half). We’re not planning to decorate each side identically – more like cousins than twins – so picture both of the powder rooms on each side having the same type of tile, but maybe in a different colorway. I think it’ll fun to have two “alter-ego” houses with mirrored floor plans, yet different colors, materials, and decor.

As a refresher, below is an updated floor plan of what one side will look like (the other is the same, just mirrored). You can read more about our floor plan in this post. There’s a video tour in there too if that helps:

So that’s the overall plan, but let’s get a little more specific and show how that will come to life in specific areas around the duplex.

The Exterior

Since the home is in a historic district, the outside will generally look like a fixed-up version of the before: it will still have shutters, corbels, and – of course – no dormer on the roof (womp-womp). We’re keeping the siding color white, but replacing the rotting wood with more durable HardiePlank siding in their stock Arctic White color – but don’t worry that it’ll look too much like this before shot. We have a few ways we’re planning to amp things up and add a lot more curb appeal.

To inject more beachiness into the exterior, we’re going to add mint green shutters (operable ones that will look so great compared to the thin plastic ones above!) along with painting the two original front doors the same mint color. We think it’ll be such a charming and colorful addition to our street. There’s lots of blue – and now pink, thanks to us – but not much green at all. And since there is so much “shutter coverage” on the front of the house, it will still make the house feel very colorful overall (it won’t really read like a white house – more like a green one). We also like the idea of doing a soft pink porch ceiling to subtly reference our pink house – just one house away – since the pink house’s porch ceiling is a minty green-blue color (winking right back atcha, duplex!).

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We actually started testing some mint paint colors this past weekend using some removable paint decals. We think we have a favorite, but we’re going to paint one of the doors first to make sure we like it before committing to putting it on all of the shutters.

The Transom Window

One exciting more recent development is that we decided to add an interior transom window above the opening between the kitchen and the main living area. We already had the opening framed wider, and Sean our contractor thinks he can easily rework the header to raise it and make room for the transom. People will see it from the second they step in the front door, and it’ll be another one of those cool “old details” that will add some original-feeling charm back to this house, since so much of that has been stripped out over the years.

We’ve had trouble finding images to represent what we’re thinking (I’m debating if we can do something with diamonds to tie into our diamond windows in the front and the old diamond door we tracked down for the mudroom). But these show you how much a nice high transom window can add to a doorway – especially one as wide as ours is going to be. Prediction: this addition will be one of our favorite things about the duplex when we’re done.

image sources: 1 / 2

The Kitchen

We’d love to do something with color in the kitchen, so our first option is to add it to the cabinets. Maybe one side gets soft blue fronts while the other goes mint? It will only have one window so we’ll still probably keep the majority of the room white so it feels bright, but the colorful cabinets will help it feel fun while the brick chimney we’ve exposed in one corner (like the one in the bottom right image) will add texture and history to the room.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We’re also trying to be realistic that buying two kitchens-worth of custom painted cabinets could get pricey, and DIYing it could be time intensive. So another option we’re floating around is injecting the color in the backsplash tile instead, then keeping the cabinets a stock white or wood color. Again, we could pick slightly different patterns or colors for each side so they each feel distinct.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 is ours! :)

The Stair Railing

Since we opened up the formerly closed in stairs on each side of the duplex, we now will have an exposed railing on each side.

While a wood newel post and railing are historic and pretty, we also don’t feel like every single detail needs to feel old. In fact, it might be cool to balance out the old touches in the home with some new additions that feel fresh and coastal – like a metal railing. We have the original wood railing at the pink house and LOVE it, so it feels like we have done that – and since we opened up the stairway wall at the duplex, there’s no original railing to save. So it inspires us to try something a little different…

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

We’re leaning towards that horizontal railing in the bottom left, but we haven’t priced anything out quite yet (and that could change our tune on metal entirely!). We know a local metal worker in Cape Charles (he forged a small support bracket for the stairs in the pink house) so it feels like something that’s worth exploring.

The Main Living Area

As you saw in the floor plan, the largest room downstairs (which looked like this when we bought it) will be home to both the living area and a dining space at the far end.

We like the idea of doing some sort of molding treatment on the walls (or ceiling!) just to keep the room from feeling too long and bare. Do we dare to finally jump on the shiplap bandwagon? Only time will tell. We especially love the beams in the picture on the left, and also like the vertical board and batten in the photo on the bottom right. These photos are all waaaaaaay too white when it comes to the furnishings (um, hello, that would never work in a rental) but the wall treatments all feel very beachy and, heck, it’d kinda be a nod to the beadboard that was there before!

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Powder Room

Since there’s just a downstairs powder room in each side of the duplex (along with an outdoor shower for getting the sand off – not to worry!), we think we can play a little bit more with some colorful wallpaper or some sort of wall treatment that makes that little nook of a bathroom under the stairs feel more like a lovely little hideaway. It’s going to be small, and will most likely have the same hardwood floors that run through the rest of the first floor (except for the mudroom, which will be tiled), so we can go a little nuts on the walls. Plus, we can also do some wall molding to save money on wallpaper and tie in whatever treatment we do in the adjacent living area.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Full Bathrooms

The upstairs bathrooms in this house aren’t huge, so we think we can do something fun with tile to make the most of the small spaces. We LOVE the idea of playing with shapes (subtle stripes or colorful zig-zags) by using the same tiles in two different colorways (or four or five!). Our tile budget is always tight, so it’ll be a challenge to see what we can find without ordering anything too fancy (or high maintenance – this tile needs to be super durable). But again, the fact that they’re small and won’t require much tile may allow us to splurge a bit.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

I realize that’s not every single space or idea (bedrooms! backyard! laundry!) but I figured this was enough to give you a sense of the overall vision for the duplex. One thing’s for sure… there will be beachy colors! And cool old pocket doors! And interior transoms! And original wood floors! And tiling projects that take us days and days to complete! Ha!

Psst- It’s really fun to look back on the style post we shared for the pink house and then compare how those mood boards looked to the final version of the house. So funny how many things stuck!

Also, are you on our free email list? We send out quick & fun weekly emails full of bonus details, design tips, random style thoughts, and other house-related musings. Click here to join the fun. And thanks to everyone who has jumped on board – we love putting these together for ya!

The post Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different) appeared first on Young House Love.

[yesterdaysdreams]

Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different)

We showed you our beach house style inspiration while the pink house was barely starting to come back together. And now that the duplex is at that same stage, we wanted to share our “vision” for its design – from materials and color ideas to specific room functions or features we’re thinking about incorporating.

It’s never too early to start making the 10,000 decisions that a major house reno like this requires because your brain will practically start to smoke if you attempt to pick everything all at once. So from the moment we offered on the duplex, I’ve been keeping a huge Pinterest board to catalog all of the ideas that have popped up and grabbed me over the months.

John and I have been sifting through them all lately in an effort to pinpoint our favorite ideas (so we can avoid that last-minute brain-burn when it’s time to finalize colors, counters, tile, lights, rugs, and BASICALLY ALL THE THINGS). Is everything perfectly crystal clear now? Nope! But we’re feeling a whole lot more focused than we did when we started collecting ideas months ago. So we wanted to share what we’re loving most for the duplex’s primary inspiration.

The Overall Plan

Like the pink house, we want the general vibe of the duplex to be relaxed, uncomplicated, comfortable, and old-meets-new. We definitely want to resist the urge to overfill or overdecorate the house, since it’s meant to feel easy and light (and less stuff = fewer things for renters to damage). Plus, it’s an old home, and we LOVE keeping original details like doors, floors, and my beloved diamond grille windows. We even uncovered an old brick chimney that passes through both sides of the duplex that we will be exposing and using to create a little niche with shelves within each side’s master bedroom.

We also want it to feel beachy, fresh, and coastal. This house has fewer historic details inside that we can emphasize and use for interest. A lot was stripped out over years of being a rental (whereas the pink house sort of froze in time and has things like the curved wall, the back staircase, the stained glass windows, old trim, an antique milk-glass pendant, and the grand front railing). So we’re going to use that as an excuse to go “beachier” with the duplex than we did at the pink house. We’re definitely still going to use old doors and refinish the original floors, but we’re also planning to play a lot with relaxed colors (mint, pistachio, soft pink, blue-gray, aquamarine, etc) and pair them with crisp white and coastal warm wood tones. The photos below do a great job of capturing the overall vibe we’re hoping to create:

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

Since the duplex is two separate residences, it means we have double the rooms to plan – two living rooms, two kitchens, two dining areas, two laundry/mudrooms, and a whopping six bedrooms and six bathrooms (four full, two half). We’re not planning to decorate each side identically – more like cousins than twins – so picture both of the powder rooms on each side having the same type of tile, but maybe in a different colorway. I think it’ll fun to have two “alter-ego” houses with mirrored floor plans, yet different colors, materials, and decor.

As a refresher, below is an updated floor plan of what one side will look like (the other is the same, just mirrored). You can read more about our floor plan in this post. There’s a video tour in there too if that helps:

So that’s the overall plan, but let’s get a little more specific and show how that will come to life in specific areas around the duplex.

The Exterior

Since the home is in a historic district, the outside will generally look like a fixed-up version of the before: it will still have shutters, corbels, and – of course – no dormer on the roof (womp-womp). We’re keeping the siding color white, but replacing the rotting wood with more durable HardiePlank siding in their stock Arctic White color – but don’t worry that it’ll look too much like this before shot. We have a few ways we’re planning to amp things up and add a lot more curb appeal.

To inject more beachiness into the exterior, we’re going to add mint green shutters (operable ones that will look so great compared to the thin plastic ones above!) along with painting the two original front doors the same mint color. We think it’ll be such a charming and colorful addition to our street. There’s lots of blue – and now pink, thanks to us – but not much green at all. And since there is so much “shutter coverage” on the front of the house, it will still make the house feel very colorful overall (it won’t really read like a white house – more like a green one). We also like the idea of doing a soft pink porch ceiling to subtly reference our pink house – just one house away – since the pink house’s porch ceiling is a minty green-blue color (winking right back atcha, duplex!).

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We actually started testing some mint paint colors this past weekend using some removable paint decals. We think we have a favorite, but we’re going to paint one of the doors first to make sure we like it before committing to putting it on all of the shutters.

The Transom Window

One exciting more recent development is that we decided to add an interior transom window above the opening between the kitchen and the main living area. We already had the opening framed wider, and Sean our contractor thinks he can easily rework the header to raise it and make room for the transom. People will see it from the second they step in the front door, and it’ll be another one of those cool “old details” that will add some original-feeling charm back to this house, since so much of that has been stripped out over the years.

We’ve had trouble finding images to represent what we’re thinking (I’m debating if we can do something with diamonds to tie into our diamond windows in the front and the old diamond door we tracked down for the mudroom). But these show you how much a nice high transom window can add to a doorway – especially one as wide as ours is going to be. Prediction: this addition will be one of our favorite things about the duplex when we’re done.

image sources: 1 / 2

The Kitchen

We’d love to do something with color in the kitchen, so our first option is to add it to the cabinets. Maybe one side gets soft blue fronts while the other goes mint? It will only have one window so we’ll still probably keep the majority of the room white so it feels bright, but the colorful cabinets will help it feel fun while the brick chimney we’ve exposed in one corner (like the one in the bottom right image) will add texture and history to the room.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We’re also trying to be realistic that buying two kitchens-worth of custom painted cabinets could get pricey, and DIYing it could be time intensive. So another option we’re floating around is injecting the color in the backsplash tile instead, then keeping the cabinets a stock white or wood color. Again, we could pick slightly different patterns or colors for each side so they each feel distinct.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 is ours! :)

The Stair Railing

Since we opened up the formerly closed in stairs on each side of the duplex, we now will have an exposed railing on each side.

While a wood newel post and railing are historic and pretty, we also don’t feel like every single detail needs to feel old. In fact, it might be cool to balance out the old touches in the home with some new additions that feel fresh and coastal – like a metal railing. We have the original wood railing at the pink house and LOVE it, so it feels like we have done that – and since we opened up the stairway wall at the duplex, there’s no original railing to save. So it inspires us to try something a little different…

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

We’re leaning towards that horizontal railing in the bottom left, but we haven’t priced anything out quite yet (and that could change our tune on metal entirely!). We know a local metal worker in Cape Charles (he forged a small support bracket for the stairs in the pink house) so it feels like something that’s worth exploring.

The Main Living Area

As you saw in the floor plan, the largest room downstairs (which looked like this when we bought it) will be home to both the living area and a dining space at the far end.

We like the idea of doing some sort of molding treatment on the walls (or ceiling!) just to keep the room from feeling too long and bare. Do we dare to finally jump on the shiplap bandwagon? Only time will tell. We especially love the beams in the picture on the left, and also like the vertical board and batten in the photo on the bottom right. These photos are all waaaaaaay too white when it comes to the furnishings (um, hello, that would never work in a rental) but the wall treatments all feel very beachy and, heck, it’d kinda be a nod to the beadboard that was there before!

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Powder Room

Since there’s just a downstairs powder room in each side of the duplex (along with an outdoor shower for getting the sand off – not to worry!), we think we can play a little bit more with some colorful wallpaper or some sort of wall treatment that makes that little nook of a bathroom under the stairs feel more like a lovely little hideaway. It’s going to be small, and will most likely have the same hardwood floors that run through the rest of the first floor (except for the mudroom, which will be tiled), so we can go a little nuts on the walls. Plus, we can also do some wall molding to save money on wallpaper and tie in whatever treatment we do in the adjacent living area.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Full Bathrooms

The upstairs bathrooms in this house aren’t huge, so we think we can do something fun with tile to make the most of the small spaces. We LOVE the idea of playing with shapes (subtle stripes or colorful zig-zags) by using the same tiles in two different colorways (or four or five!). Our tile budget is always tight, so it’ll be a challenge to see what we can find without ordering anything too fancy (or high maintenance – this tile needs to be super durable). But again, the fact that they’re small and won’t require much tile may allow us to splurge a bit.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

I realize that’s not every single space or idea (bedrooms! backyard! laundry!) but I figured this was enough to give you a sense of the overall vision for the duplex. One thing’s for sure… there will be beachy colors! And cool old pocket doors! And interior transoms! And original wood floors! And tiling projects that take us days and days to complete! Ha!

Psst- It’s really fun to look back on the style post we shared for the pink house and then compare how those mood boards looked to the final version of the house. So funny how many things stuck!

Also, are you on our free email list? We send out quick & fun weekly emails full of bonus details, design tips, random style thoughts, and other house-related musings. Click here to join the fun. And thanks to everyone who has jumped on board – we love putting these together for ya!

The post Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different) appeared first on Young House Love.

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[lowmaticnews]

Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different)

We showed you our beach house style inspiration while the pink house was barely starting to come back together. And now that the duplex is at that same stage, we wanted to share our “vision” for its design – from materials and color ideas to specific room functions or features we’re thinking about incorporating.

It’s never too early to start making the 10,000 decisions that a major house reno like this requires because your brain will practically start to smoke if you attempt to pick everything all at once. So from the moment we offered on the duplex, I’ve been keeping a huge Pinterest board to catalog all of the ideas that have popped up and grabbed me over the months.

John and I have been sifting through them all lately in an effort to pinpoint our favorite ideas (so we can avoid that last-minute brain-burn when it’s time to finalize colors, counters, tile, lights, rugs, and BASICALLY ALL THE THINGS). Is everything perfectly crystal clear now? Nope! But we’re feeling a whole lot more focused than we did when we started collecting ideas months ago. So we wanted to share what we’re loving most for the duplex’s primary inspiration.

The Overall Plan

Like the pink house, we want the general vibe of the duplex to be relaxed, uncomplicated, comfortable, and old-meets-new. We definitely want to resist the urge to overfill or overdecorate the house, since it’s meant to feel easy and light (and less stuff = fewer things for renters to damage). Plus, it’s an old home, and we LOVE keeping original details like doors, floors, and my beloved diamond grille windows. We even uncovered an old brick chimney that passes through both sides of the duplex that we will be exposing and using to create a little niche with shelves within each side’s master bedroom.

We also want it to feel beachy, fresh, and coastal. This house has fewer historic details inside that we can emphasize and use for interest. A lot was stripped out over years of being a rental (whereas the pink house sort of froze in time and has things like the curved wall, the back staircase, the stained glass windows, old trim, an antique milk-glass pendant, and the grand front railing). So we’re going to use that as an excuse to go “beachier” with the duplex than we did at the pink house. We’re definitely still going to use old doors and refinish the original floors, but we’re also planning to play a lot with relaxed colors (mint, pistachio, soft pink, blue-gray, aquamarine, etc) and pair them with crisp white and coastal warm wood tones. The photos below do a great job of capturing the overall vibe we’re hoping to create:

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

Since the duplex is two separate residences, it means we have double the rooms to plan – two living rooms, two kitchens, two dining areas, two laundry/mudrooms, and a whopping six bedrooms and six bathrooms (four full, two half). We’re not planning to decorate each side identically – more like cousins than twins – so picture both of the powder rooms on each side having the same type of tile, but maybe in a different colorway. I think it’ll fun to have two “alter-ego” houses with mirrored floor plans, yet different colors, materials, and decor.

As a refresher, below is an updated floor plan of what one side will look like (the other is the same, just mirrored). You can read more about our floor plan in this post. There’s a video tour in there too if that helps:

So that’s the overall plan, but let’s get a little more specific and show how that will come to life in specific areas around the duplex.

The Exterior

Since the home is in a historic district, the outside will generally look like a fixed-up version of the before: it will still have shutters, corbels, and – of course – no dormer on the roof (womp-womp). We’re keeping the siding color white, but replacing the rotting wood with more durable HardiePlank siding in their stock Arctic White color – but don’t worry that it’ll look too much like this before shot. We have a few ways we’re planning to amp things up and add a lot more curb appeal.

To inject more beachiness into the exterior, we’re going to add mint green shutters (operable ones that will look so great compared to the thin plastic ones above!) along with painting the two original front doors the same mint color. We think it’ll be such a charming and colorful addition to our street. There’s lots of blue – and now pink, thanks to us – but not much green at all. And since there is so much “shutter coverage” on the front of the house, it will still make the house feel very colorful overall (it won’t really read like a white house – more like a green one). We also like the idea of doing a soft pink porch ceiling to subtly reference our pink house – just one house away – since the pink house’s porch ceiling is a minty green-blue color (winking right back atcha, duplex!).

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We actually started testing some mint paint colors this past weekend using some removable paint decals. We think we have a favorite, but we’re going to paint one of the doors first to make sure we like it before committing to putting it on all of the shutters.

The Transom Window

One exciting more recent development is that we decided to add an interior transom window above the opening between the kitchen and the main living area. We already had the opening framed wider, and Sean our contractor thinks he can easily rework the header to raise it and make room for the transom. People will see it from the second they step in the front door, and it’ll be another one of those cool “old details” that will add some original-feeling charm back to this house, since so much of that has been stripped out over the years.

We’ve had trouble finding images to represent what we’re thinking (I’m debating if we can do something with diamonds to tie into our diamond windows in the front and the old diamond door we tracked down for the mudroom). But these show you how much a nice high transom window can add to a doorway – especially one as wide as ours is going to be. Prediction: this addition will be one of our favorite things about the duplex when we’re done.

image sources: 1 / 2

The Kitchen

We’d love to do something with color in the kitchen, so our first option is to add it to the cabinets. Maybe one side gets soft blue fronts while the other goes mint? It will only have one window so we’ll still probably keep the majority of the room white so it feels bright, but the colorful cabinets will help it feel fun while the brick chimney we’ve exposed in one corner (like the one in the bottom right image) will add texture and history to the room.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

We’re also trying to be realistic that buying two kitchens-worth of custom painted cabinets could get pricey, and DIYing it could be time intensive. So another option we’re floating around is injecting the color in the backsplash tile instead, then keeping the cabinets a stock white or wood color. Again, we could pick slightly different patterns or colors for each side so they each feel distinct.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 is ours! :)

The Stair Railing

Since we opened up the formerly closed in stairs on each side of the duplex, we now will have an exposed railing on each side.

While a wood newel post and railing are historic and pretty, we also don’t feel like every single detail needs to feel old. In fact, it might be cool to balance out the old touches in the home with some new additions that feel fresh and coastal – like a metal railing. We have the original wood railing at the pink house and LOVE it, so it feels like we have done that – and since we opened up the stairway wall at the duplex, there’s no original railing to save. So it inspires us to try something a little different…

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

We’re leaning towards that horizontal railing in the bottom left, but we haven’t priced anything out quite yet (and that could change our tune on metal entirely!). We know a local metal worker in Cape Charles (he forged a small support bracket for the stairs in the pink house) so it feels like something that’s worth exploring.

The Main Living Area

As you saw in the floor plan, the largest room downstairs (which looked like this when we bought it) will be home to both the living area and a dining space at the far end.

We like the idea of doing some sort of molding treatment on the walls (or ceiling!) just to keep the room from feeling too long and bare. Do we dare to finally jump on the shiplap bandwagon? Only time will tell. We especially love the beams in the picture on the left, and also like the vertical board and batten in the photo on the bottom right. These photos are all waaaaaaay too white when it comes to the furnishings (um, hello, that would never work in a rental) but the wall treatments all feel very beachy and, heck, it’d kinda be a nod to the beadboard that was there before!

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Powder Room

Since there’s just a downstairs powder room in each side of the duplex (along with an outdoor shower for getting the sand off – not to worry!), we think we can play a little bit more with some colorful wallpaper or some sort of wall treatment that makes that little nook of a bathroom under the stairs feel more like a lovely little hideaway. It’s going to be small, and will most likely have the same hardwood floors that run through the rest of the first floor (except for the mudroom, which will be tiled), so we can go a little nuts on the walls. Plus, we can also do some wall molding to save money on wallpaper and tie in whatever treatment we do in the adjacent living area.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

The Full Bathrooms

The upstairs bathrooms in this house aren’t huge, so we think we can do something fun with tile to make the most of the small spaces. We LOVE the idea of playing with shapes (subtle stripes or colorful zig-zags) by using the same tiles in two different colorways (or four or five!). Our tile budget is always tight, so it’ll be a challenge to see what we can find without ordering anything too fancy (or high maintenance – this tile needs to be super durable). But again, the fact that they’re small and won’t require much tile may allow us to splurge a bit.

image sources: 1 / 2 / 3

I realize that’s not every single space or idea (bedrooms! backyard! laundry!) but I figured this was enough to give you a sense of the overall vision for the duplex. One thing’s for sure… there will be beachy colors! And cool old pocket doors! And interior transoms! And original wood floors! And tiling projects that take us days and days to complete! Ha!

Psst- It’s really fun to look back on the style post we shared for the pink house and then compare how those mood boards looked to the final version of the house. So funny how many things stuck!

Also, are you on our free email list? We send out quick & fun weekly emails full of bonus details, design tips, random style thoughts, and other house-related musings. Click here to join the fun. And thanks to everyone who has jumped on board – we love putting these together for ya!

The post Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different) appeared first on Young House Love.

Duplex Style Inspiration (& How Each Side Will Be Different) published first on https://landscapingmates.blogspot.com

[martechadvisor-blog]

Gaming Apps & Mobile Marketing: Pepe Agell, VP of Corp. Strategy, Chartboost

How is mobile advertising evolving and what role is in-game and in-app advertising playing for markets investing in it? 

Mobile advertising is rapidly evolving towards programmatic buying. While it’s been traditionally dominated by ad networks that had direct access to both publishing and advertising apps, everyday there’s more inventory that can be accessed by bidders using real-time bidding (RTB), meaning programmatic auctions. Advertisers are clearly happy because they can price each user based on the predicted life-time value (LTV) of that user. Publishers are also happy since they are making their inventory more competitive.**Gaming is still the number one category in the appstore and captures an engaged and valuable audience**. Last year, mobile games represented over 25 percent of all active apps - the largest category followed by Business apps at 9.88 percent (Statista). The recent industry stats say that there are 2.6B monthly unique users playing games,

Would it be correct to stereotype the demographics that play mobile games? What kind of advertisers should be considering in-game advertising? Is it a missed opportunity for others?

Unlike common assumptions, mobile gamers can’t be stereotyped anymore (young, male, student).

Mobile gaming has truly become mainstream entertainment. In the U.S. alone, over half the population is now gaming on-the-go with no signs of slowing.

What’s a little less known is this audience is broad and highly engaged with significant disposable income. According to a study by my company Chartboost, 62% of the mobile gamers in the US are women, and 35 to 44 is the biggest age bracket (representing 27.33% of the audience). Clearly an attractive target for brands.

Despite the demographic data, we still see mostly mobile game developers advertising within other mobile games. Some categories, like ecommerce, travel and transportation have started to realize how important gaming is to grow their audiences. We should be seeing more consumer, automobile and entertainment brands advertising in mobile games soon. I think the movie industry should absolutely leverage this distribution channel!

How can a marketer link in-game and in-app advertising to actual revenues? How could they approach that to build an internal business case? 

First of all, gaming is all about fun and excitement. There are studies out there that proof the importance of emotions in the success of a marketing campaign. And that’s one of the key values of gaming as an ad support: there’s a natural positive brand association when your ad is shown in a game.

Ads on gaming apps are usually full-screen (static, videos or interactive ads) which makes the ads very immersive and viewable (viewability is over 98%).  Also, one of the key ad placements within gaming is rewarded video, which is a high quality experience because the user opts in to watch a video ad in return for something valuable within the game (an extra life, more unique content).  Rewarded video has over 95% completion rates and increases the return on ad spend.

What are your tips to marketers wanting to deliver an engaging and immersive mobile ad experience without impacting the UX? What are the most important considerations?

The ultimate goal of any marketer is to connect with the right audience at the right time. The hard part is that people respond differently to different stimulus and content. So the first thing for any marketer is to research and segment their target group. Marketing is all about connecting to people, so understanding the audience they go after should always be the first step, so that they can design the messaging and assets taking into account the behaviors and preferences from that audience.

If you are doing video or interactive ads, the second step should be defining the core game/product benefits and creating a storyboard to convey the value proposition within the ad context. Mobile has a limited real estate but the animated formats, when well done, do allow marketers to connect with users very quickly.

Naturally, things won’t work perfectly in the first run, so don’t forget to constantly A-B test. 

Marketers should always build different hypothesis around creative formats, messaging, and features. Keep iterating to find the best performer.

We’ve seen cases, where the winners can drive 4x the performance (impressions to installs) of the pilot group.

What mistakes or missteps do you typically see marketers make with their approach to mobile marketing? What could they be doing better or differently, in your experience?

The first big mistake that marketers tend to make is having too many prejudices about the different app or game categories. We’ve heard, for instance, women brand advertisers say that they wanted to exclude solitaire apps from their media buying, when in fact 62% of their audience is female and the majority is over 40 years old, which is a valuable target for some of these brands. So **the first learning is that advertisers need to think broadly and be open to experiment in new contexts**.

The second mistake I’ve seen in some performance advertisers is giving too much importance to the price of the installs (CPI) when they should be looking at money they make back from the paid installs (life-time value of the user). There’s no CPI too high or too low when you meet the levels of return that you want.

Another mistake is not spend time on the creatives. Good creatives can make a big impact on the success of a campaign. In order to achieve performance, it’s crucial to always iterate (for big campaigns we suggest refreshing creatives at least once a month).

What are the metrics to keep in mind when it comes to advertising on mobile games and on mobile in general?

Advertisers come to mobile advertising with very different goals, but they should always have a definition of success. At Chartboost we mostly work with performance advertisers (app developers) that are looking for return on ad spend (ROAS). That means that their goal is to make more money from users (usually on in-app purchases) than what they spent to get those users. A good metric to define ROAS is the return that you’ve got out of the CPI within the first 7 days (called D7 ROI).

There are other metrics that allow marketers to optimize their campaigns, like the IPM (Install per 1000 impressions) which is a combination of the click-through rate and the install-rate.

With the increasing levels of fraud on mobile, it is also important to calculate the percentage of non-human traffic that you are getting from your media partners and individual app sources so that you can make sure that low quality sources are being excluded. 

In the quest for seamless CX, how can marketers approach integration between their mobile marketing efforts and what’s happening on their other digital platforms? Do you see marketing teams work in silos when it comes to mobile versus other digital marketing?

In most companies, different channels/teams within marketing (mobile, social, search) are still working independently in silos. The biggest challenge is building an identity indicator that allow advertisers to define and track users across all the different devices, channels, and platforms where they interact with advertising. On the other side, there are still many ad-hoc strategies to each marketing channel. Even within mobile, what works on a specific ad platform may not work on others. Different bidding and optimization strategies drive different results, even when they are targeting the same inventory. And this is why, most marketing teams, still have verticalized functions that don’t tend to collaborate much.

How would the new focus on data regulation impact a marketer’s efforts to collect and activate data on mobile? Do you help advertisers gather insights on players who may be viewing their ads?

I believe that the new regulations are a step forward towards a cleaner and safer industry. **Marketers can still collect and process data but they are forced to transparently communicate to the end users what and how they are using it and get consent**. Unfortunately, there’s been many examples of bad practices in the industry and I hope the new regulations create more pressure on these companies to implement robust and transparent data processing flows.

Like most advertising platforms, our insights, targeting and optimizations rely on the information we can gather around device ids. With the new regulations we can still use it but since device identifiers are considered personal data, we are partnering with our clients to make sure that we have explicit consent.

What are the exciting new trends in mobile marketing that marketers should be aware of/ tracking?

Programmatic advertising is bringing a lot of transformations into the in-app ecosystem. On one hand, the open RTB standard is still too web-based (in fact, advertisers are still categorized as web domains) and it needs to continue evolving to address the needs of mobile advertising.

Related to programmatic, the way the in-app inventory is currently monetized through waterfalls powered by mediation layers doesn’t make sense. There is too much fragmentation, inefficiencies, and abuses of power from certain platforms. The values of transparency, control to the publisher, and fairness that Header Bidding brought to the web will definitely transform the mobile advertising ecosystem. Chartboost is excited to drive that change and power a better industry.

About Chartboost:

Chartboost is a mobile game discovery and monetization platform. The company, acts as a business engine for mobile games, allows video game developers to create customized interstitial and video ads, promote new games, and swap traffic with one another.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor