I know this doesn’t really have anything to do with Design or Marketing but it soooooo worth sharing. These were a huge hit at our Pi Day event. Amazingly yummy. My client/friend Vicky made them with fresh lavender from her own fields and they disappeared so fast. She was nice enough to share her recipe. She says, “If you don’t have lavender florets, you can always use 1 drop of lavender essential oil.”

The dough needs to be refrigerated for at least an hour before rolling.
INGREDIENTS:
• 12 Tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 Tablespoon dried lavender buds
• 1 Tablespoon grated lemon zest
• 1 egg
• 1/2 Tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• 2-1/4 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour          (more…)

12 Reasons Why You Don’t Need to Redesign Your Website…Yet

1. The flashing, pulsating, blinking bright yellow boxes with the red text on your home page look pretty.
2. No one ever contacts you from your site anyway…or at least they don’t stay long enough or dig deep enough to find the contact information which was supposed to appear on the home page but for some reason shows up on the third page of services and you have to scroll to the right to see it.
3. Your site loads rather quickly. By the time you make a cup of coffee and get back to your desk the home page is almost completely up.
4. It doesn’t matter that your site is all messed up when viewed in IE6 or Firefox because it looks just fine in Netscape. (more…)

1. You really, really like Comic Sans and think it is perfect typeface for all your business documents.
2. I don’t need graphics. I just want a company logo, brochure, website and trade show booth.
3. Joe, the IT guy, knows how to stretch and squish photos and place them into PowerPoint to make cool trifolds we can just print out on our desktop printer.
4. Because you KNOW that people will look at your ad longer if you fill every inch of it with all the information they ever needed to know about your product.
5. You have all the special effects you could ever need in Microsoft PowerPoint. You know, like rainbow gradients and bevel emboss. (more…)

Many of our clients lately are asking about whether they should be incorporating social media into their marketing plan. My answer is YES! Marketing is really changing these days. People can block out the message you’re trying to get across with the old traditional methods of advertising and marketing by using Caller ID, TiVo and Junk Mail settings. Magazine and newspaper subscriptions are way down indicating that you have to be more careful with your advertising dollars. We must constantly look for new methods for promoting our companies in places where people are open to the message and don’t feel interrupted.

Today people expect a strong online presence. If you don’t have one you are losing potential customers daily. Everyone between the ages of 20-40 is online for at least part of the day, everyday. They are more likely to search for something on Google than in a phone book. Come on, when was the last time you actually picked up that huge yellow book and thumbed through pages? I used to heft it out to find the phone number for the pizza place. Now I even order my pizza online! Below are some things you should be doing to promote your company (and yourself) if you’re not already: (more…)