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You may find this hard to believe, but I have an ego.
True.
Yes, there was a seminal and highly influential 70s Aussie rock band, Skyhooks, that said ‘Ego is not a dirty word’ and they were right (”bloody well right” as Supertramp said around the same time).
But on the blogosphere ‘ego’ is a pre-requisite.
Not only do we blog and pod precisely because we are ego-manical enough to believe that we have something worth saying that others would actually want to read/hear, but if we are smart we configure the search engines to find who is talking about us.
This I do. I confess.
Constantin Basturea is no stranger to the long-time audience of this blog — he is a phenomenal chap who has and continues to give so much to the PR blogosphere community that he deserves some sort of award. He snaffled a bloody good job a few months ago and it was exceedingly well deserved.
So Constantin jotted down a recent post of mine about Second Life (no, I’m not going to rave about SL again!) and I found it in my ‘ego search’. Which led me back to his listing on del.icio.us and to a FANTASTIC post on the blog of Cameron Moll, a CSS web designer.
I strongly believe that all business communicators need to be aware of what CSS is and why it is so important to any internet/intranet undertaking. Failure to at least grasp the basics, the essentials of it — what it is — is laziness.
Cameron’s post gives a wealth of links and information to bring the business communicator who hasn’t yet found out what css is and why css is so important completely up-to-speed.
This post is a phenomenal resource, and Cameron links off to many other blogs and sites that I regularly read (even if just to keep abreast of developments in the CSS world).
One point in Cameron’s post in particular struck a chord with me:
4. Communicate, don’t decorate. The sooner you learn to communicate with your designs using only what’s necessary and relevant, rather than decorate for the mere purpose of decorating, the sooner you’ll find your designs touch the consumer’s heart, rather than just satisfy the designer’s eye.
I have long maintained that the role of graphics is to support the adjacent copy, not overwhelm it. It would appear that an extremely successful and wise online graphic artist agrees with me. Yeah!!
Check out Cameron’s post and the rest of his blog. He’s now in my rss reader.
Thanks, Constantin!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Graphic design is very important when wanting to sell an idea and such. Visual appeal is needed first before anything else can be determined. Before describing and idea or object, the sight of the subject must draw the audience into whatever it is that you want them to read. For example, Time Magazine for yearts has placed great pictures of people, places and things on the front cover of their magazines. These pictures draw the customer in. Hook. Line. And sinker.
Hmmmm… good point, Patrick! I was thinking more of the use of imagery to support sales text, but you are absolutely right about visual appeal — any magazine that used to put Princess Diana on the cover was a sellout. Mind you, if you *didn’t* have any article about Di inside the magazine you copped abuse…