Stacie DaPonte / inspiration

inspiremyweb: productOps • http://productops.com/

Sun, 19 May 2013 21:32:58 -0400

inspiremyweb:

productOps • http://productops.com/

definitelydope: By Frank Kappa More photos from planes

Sun, 19 May 2013 21:15:18 -0400

definitelydope:

By Frank Kappa

More photos from planes

likeafieldmouse: Etsuko Ichikawa - Deai (2005) Artist’s...

Thu, 09 May 2013 22:18:15 -0400

likeafieldmouse:

Etsuko Ichikawa - Deai (2005)

Artist’s statement:

“These works are glass pyrographs that are made by drawing with hot molten glass, leaving the immediate charred tracery of my movement with the heat.

It is a way of capturing a fleeting moment and eternalizing it, and it gives the viewer the opportunity to see a gesture.”

Items on circle with CSS

Thu, 02 May 2013 09:59:28 -0400

Items on circle with CSS:

I write stuff about front-end development especially HTML5 and CSS3.

fuckyeahlost: Dharma stations (by thelostie)

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 08:01:02 -0400

fuckyeahlost:

Dharma stations (by thelostie)

nicethingswelike: Union Square Partnership - Thorbjørn...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:52:25 -0400

nicethingswelike:

Union Square Partnership - Thorbjørn Gudnason

photojojo: Cool portrait idea for far-away relatives! Project...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 22:14:56 -0400

photojojo:

Cool portrait idea for far-away relatives!

Project your Skype video onto a wall to take whole family portraits with relatives who live in other cities or countries. Singaporean photographer John Clang came up with the idea to photograph his own family.

Project Skype Video onto a Wall for Family Portraits

via Reddit

This is so amazing

"Bacteria are the ultimate BitTorrents of biology."

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:41:53 -0400

“Bacteria are the ultimate BitTorrents of biology.”

- Computational biologist Sergei Maslov, on his new work comparing Linux operating systems with bacterial DNA. Because these two networks are both open source, they evolved in similar ways.

By way of brookhavenlab, they add,

The term “survival of the fittest” is usually thrown around in biological settings, but Maslov found that it applies to manmade technology as well. He compared 500 bacterial species and 2 million individual computers and found a surprising similarity: the frequency of a certain gene being crucial to bacterial processes was almost exactly the same as the frequency of installation of crucial Linux packages.

The reason they’re so similar is that bacterial systems can easily add or remove genes from their genomes through what’s called horizontal gene transfer, a kind of file sharing. And Linux installations mimic a “natural” process of evolution because they, too, are based on open source code.

bambiibangbang: This is a rebranding project on a film creative...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:43:02 -0400

bambiibangbang:

This is a rebranding project on a film creative agency based in NYC.

Click here to see more

Email Newsletter Campaigns Part I

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 16:01:25 -0400

The world of E-newsletters can be daunting. Besides the actual structure of the HTML email itself and the challenges that can face, there is actually a lot of work that goes into the prep and strategy behind an email campaign, not to mention all of the spam laws that are in effect on a per-country basis. It definitely lead me to thinking ‘where the heck do I begin?’

Our studio uses a service called MailChimp to get all of our email campaigns done. It’s modular, walks you through the process every step of the way, has an incredible support team, and a ton of other features that I’ll highlight throughout this post. This Part I will cover best practices of preparing a newsletter campaign, and what you will need to gather from the client.

Let’s begin with a bit of terminology:

Campaign: This refers to the entire newsletter project. Everything from creating a list, designing system emails, marking up the actual newsletter itself, and finally deploying it off to your customers.

Template: This is the actual HTML email. MailChimp offers the option of pasting in your own code, choosing a pre-designed template, or doing a bit of both. I will discuss this more in Part II.

System Emails: These are any emails that will be sent to subscribers that do not include the Newsletter itself. This can include opt-in confirmation, unsubscribe forms, welcome emails, account preference changes, etc.

Step One - create a MailChimp account.
You can test it out for free - I think after a certain number of campaigns you have to move to a paid account, but their pricing is very reasonable. You will have to verify this account with an email address, so you might want to use your own, which you can switch out to your client’s at a later time.

You may be thinking, ‘Why not create my own account and create separate campaigns and lists to manage all my clients’? Not the best idea. And here’s why:

“Unfortunately, it’s the most common issue we see designers having with email marketing, and we’ve had to shut down a lot of agencies for their clients’ bad email-marketing practices… This stuff gets the client—and the agency—reported for spamming, and often blacklisted. Again, you should have a separate account for every client. If one of your clients is spamming on your account that they share with some of your other clients, then everyone gets shut down. And you[‘ll] probably lose a lot of clients as a result.”

This is an excerpt from one of the many beautifully designed and handy resources MailChimp offers for free. I’ll compile a list of ones I’ve found particularly useful at the end of this post.

Step two - Start preparing your list.
Your list of subscribers should be as organized as possible and contain all the information you’ll need for future segmentation of
your list. Chances are, a standard name and e-mail address won’t cut it, and it will be a pain to start sorting your list once it gets too large to practically manage.

MailChimp allows you to create groups within a list, but we’ve found that getting the correct information from your subscriber can work better than breaking the list up into groups. This is because some subscribers could belong to more than one group, and you don’t want to have duplicate entries lying around. Visualize the form that the soon-to-be subscriber will be filling out when they apply to your list. MailChimp allows you to custom build this form with as many fields as you’d like, with options like standard text fields, dropdown menus, Address field (US only), ZIP code (again, US only) etc. Some information you might be looking for could include language preference, country, or area of interest. When populating your list, you can import lists from excel spreadsheets to make your life easier, but make sure that all the fields in your form will have their respective columns in your spreadsheet. I recommend creating a spreadsheet template* for your client with the columns you’ll need.

You may run into the issue where your client has purchased their list of subscribers from a third-party service. You should be able to smell trouble when a client’s first newsletter campaign has some outrageous number of subscribers, or if many of the addresses are ‘info@test.com’ or ‘admin@example.com’. It is very important to explain to them the legal consequences of this. Best case scenario, your account will be suspended and all future emails will be blocked. “When you get junk mail, you can click a button that says ‘Junk’ or ‘Report as Spam.’ Every time you do that, a report and copy of the offending email goes to your ISP. Your ISP sends a warning to the sender that says, ‘too many complaints, and we’ll block future emails from you.’” There are many scenarios where the subscriber will hit the ‘spam’ button when they shouldn’t necessarily have, for example, they forgot that they subscribed, or just think there isn’t much of a difference between reporting spam and unsubscribing from a list. You don’t have to fret about this too much if you’re typically following good practices, but be weary.

As promised, here are a list of handy resources should you be interested in reading some more:

Getting Started with MailChimp
Your First Email Marketing Project
How to Create an Email Marketing Plan
How to Manage your Lists
Common Rookie Mistakes

Or, check out the full list of resourceshere.

Part II will focus on creating a campaign and best HTML Email practices!

*If you have a dropdown field in your subscription form - take for example ‘field of work’ - make sure to reflect that same dropdown structure in your spreadsheet template. You can do this in Excel using ‘data validation’ (google this + your version of Excel for more details). Allowing your list manager to input their own data when you need it in a specific format is always a bad idea, so this will help you avoid future problems in organizing your list (for example, ‘tech’ vs. ‘technology’.)

nevver: Up all night

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 21:45:52 -0400

julien mauve

julien mauve

julien mauve

julien mauve

nevver:

Up all night

bayleydesign: Front cover of my Design Report. Just need to...

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 18:25:44 -0400

bayleydesign:

Front cover of my Design Report. Just need to design the rest of the publication now :/

I would love to read this!

I can feel it. My mind is going.

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 08:00:53 -0400

I can feel it. My mind is going.

Went to the Game of Thrones exhibit at the Toronto Design...

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 21:56:23 -0400

Went to the Game of Thrones exhibit at the Toronto Design Exchange with my boyfriend this morning!

hellanne: Milky Way in Infrared Light (1996) (by Euclid...

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 16:01:05 -0400

hellanne:

Milky Way in Infrared Light (1996) (by Euclid vanderKroew)

Star gazing

rredcrown: RedCrown Approves. New line collaboration! Check...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 22:14:03 -0400

rredcrown:

RedCrown Approves.

New line collaboration! Check out the updated website!

Chrome CSS3 bug

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 15:19:27 -0500

My main content container (I’m sure the same would apply on the body, or maybe another div that takes up the majority of the screen) had an inset box-shadow applied to it, to give the feel of a subtle radial gradient. This resulted in some major performance issues; jQuery transitions and scrolling on the page was choppy and slow. Even form input was delayed about half a second. Right when I took the inset shadow off, everything worked fine (only took me 2 hours of javascript debugging, minifying and validation to figure out that this was the problem, nbd…).

Again, this is a Chrome specific issue - Firefox, Safari, even IE worked perfectly fine. Hopefully the Google folks are looking into this and the issue will be resolved soon!

commovente: Images from Julieanne Kost’s photo series and...

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 21:56:24 -0500

commovente:

Images from Julieanne Kost’s photo series and book Window Seat

I actually love long plane rides. Not sitting around in airports though.

This is where I work! Well, upstairs from here.

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 08:00:59 -0500

This is where I work!
Well, upstairs from here.

definitelydope: By Gokhun Guneyhan

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 08:01:01 -0500

definitelydope:

By Gokhun Guneyhan