Web Design Company - Lounge Lizard | Internet Marketing | Web Site Development

Moving On: The Top Signs That You Should Revisit and Rebrand

Lounge Lizard — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 20:43:48 +0000

Change fills many with trepidation. Danger or opportunity, upheaval or progress: the turn of fortune that offers one business long term success often leaves another broken and bleeding. As the economy continues to improve and markets begin to settle, we at Lounge Lizard Worldwide have found that many of our clients now are asking the same question: when it the best time to invest in new marketing?

Social Media 2010: Online Community Building With Christina Kerley

Lounge Lizard — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:19:39 +0000

Recently the Libation team caught up with social media specialist Christina Kerley (aka “CK”) and asked her to share some thoughts about social media in 2010 – and about how businesses everywhere need to have their marketing strategies prepared to capitalize on this next major wave of online opportunity.

High Feedback: Mobile Interactive’s Power To Transform Markets

Lounge Lizard — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:30:22 +0000

Most of the history of sales and marketing, dating back to the most ancient street bazaars, can be told as the long story of human beings making the most of feedback. From the very beginning, human commerce in our world has rested on the pivot of negotiation – of an offer being made, taken or rejected or countered, and ultimately being crafted into an acceptable trade. At the very heart of it all has been feedback, the simple discovery that every action has a balancing reaction.

Targeting Myth Markets In The New Interactive Landscape

Lounge Lizard — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:27:39 +0000

In the old days of classic advertising, everyone’s goal was to “capture mindshare”: to convince select groups of discriminating and deliberative demographics that a certain product or service was logically a better purchase than its competitors. The features of mindshare marketing included abstract and dry business school buzzwords, such as “unique selling propositions”, “conversion targeting” and “long term buying premises” – all very useful concepts, particularly if you happen to be selling shaving cream. Or car tires. Or lumber.

Interview with Lounge Lizard’s Founder and CEO, Ken Braun

Lounge Lizard — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:59:22 +0000

A brief look into the company’s history, as conducted by Brad Szollose. View the entire interview.

Lounge Lizard client, My Little Swans, wins Magellan Award

Lounge Lizard — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:43:12 +0000

From travelweeklyawards.com:

“Travel Weekly is proud to present the premier award for the travel industry, the Travel Weekly Magellan Awards. From design to marketing to services, the Travel Weekly Magellan Awards honors the best in travel and salutes the outstanding travel professionals behind it all. All winners are featured in a special issue of Travel Weekly in September that will feature a special section dedicated to this year’s winners. Winners will also receive a custom produced statuette made by the same company that produces the Oscar® and Emmy® awards.”

Decentralize and Succeed: Building Markets By Trusting Your Customers

Lounge Lizard — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:21:06 +0000

Before the advent of online digital media, the traditional and dominant marketing model was a very controlled and specifically directed one: that of brick and mortar storefronts, promoted using centralized print and broadcast outlets. By applying large marketing budgets towards dominating airwaves and headlines with strong, consistent messages, pre-Internet era businesses succeeded through heavily centralized control of their brands.

Aiming Again: How Retargeting Can Radically Boost Your Website Conversions

Lounge Lizard — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:56:12 +0000

Some popular sales techniques preach that conversion – transforming an interested prospect into a readily paying customer – is purely a numbers game. If you simply pitch your wares to enough people, the thinking goes, sooner or later someone is bound to buy. Behind this idea is another one: that if this prospect doesn’t want to buy, you should cut your losses quickly and go on to someone new.

Segmentation: Building Better Interactive Marketing

Lounge Lizard — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:54:13 +0000

At the heart of successful marketing is the need to generalize: to make predictable the behaviors of large groups, and to extrapolate predictable trends from the jumbled mass of seemingly random individual actions. You must generalize your intelligence, tackling common sales trends rather than spending all your time chasing a multitude of independent prospect interests.

Font Freedom

Jared Verdi — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:58:59 +0000

I carry the internet around in my pocket on a device that rivals a calculator in size. I can pull up a map of the nearest restaurants and gas stations with a few swipes of my finger. My television now tells me who is on the other end of a ringing phone. If my flight status changes, I get a text message from my Airline letting me know I have time to stop for that large double-shot. I could go on about all the technical challenges we have overcome in the last decade, but I’d prefer to discuss one that still lingers:

If I am going to build a website to render reliably, I’m limited to Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Georgia and a handful of other fonts.

Let’s face it. We struggle to explain the idea of web fonts to clients. The idea that they can’t choose any typeface they wish to convey their marketing message does not compute. We are speaking to executives that are used to seeing stylized Powerpoint slideshows, business managers that choose from hundreds of fonts in their word processors for daily reports, marketing departments that manipulate stylized type in Photoshop every day. It seems ludicrous even for those of us in the industry that we still have to jump through hoops for typography. There is a reason web designers and developers have been so frustrated. At its core, this simply isn’t a technical challenge. It’s a business issue that relates to rights management. Font rendering has been solved since the early days of the web. The problem is, type foundries, the companies that design the fonts we know and love, are for-profit businesses. In current implementations, browsers leave fonts unprotected when used in the wild. Without some method for licensing fonts and preventing them from being downloaded and shared freely, the foundries could potentially see themselves in the same boat as the music industry.

Developers have not been standing by idly. Several stand-in measures have been taken to circumvent this hardship:

Shaun Inman created sIFR as a method for replacing text with a combination of Flash and JavaScript. Through the work of Mike Davidson and others, it saw three incarnations and had a long run in the design world. It has two major drawbacks; it is intended to be used sparingly (not for full body text) and it is cumbersome to use.

Cufón is an attempt to take the efforts of sIFR in a new direction. It relies solely on Javascript and does not have a Flash plugin requirement. It is fast enough to work for large amounts of text, and takes significantly less setup time on the part of the designer/developer to get running. There are a few shortcomings. The most notable is that text-selection is not supported. Both sIFR and Cufón toArialalso suffer from copyright issues as they conflict with foundry license agreements in most cases.

There is one exception to the rule. Before Internet Explorer 4, Microsoft proposed a rights-managed format called Embedded Opentype. It prevents visitors to websites from copying and distributing fonts that they have not payed for, and has been supported in every MS browser since. In 2008, they even brought it to the W3C, a standards body for web technologies, and granted them the rights and licenses necessary to bring it to every browser. According to the Fonts Working Group, EOT or another comparable spec should make its way into a W3C Recommendation some time around the first quarter of 2010. Many of the foundries support Microsoft’s efforts. The problem? DRM (Digital Rights Management) is a dirty word in the computer world. Forming a new standard brings with it legal issues, implementation issues, and competitive issues between browser vendors. It is yet to be seen if any of the other browsers will implement EOT. The latest versions of Safari, Firefox, and Opera seem to be heading in a different direction with adoption of the @font-face declaration and direct downloads.

The implementation of @font-face also puts an increased level of pressure on type foundries. A new generation of web developers are going to have a lower barrier of entry to copyright violation. Through a culmination of this back and forth between foundries, browsers, and the developer community, it seems that we are about to see a big change in 2009/2010. In just the last few weeks we have seen a number of proposals trying to reach compromises in this space:

Richard Fink has published a format called EOT Lite which removes some of the concerns raised by browser parties involved in forming a standard.

A method for adding permissions tables to OpenType was made by David Berlow of the Font Bureau.

Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland have proposed a format called .webfont that is seeing some positive feedback from foundries.

How it will all play out is unknown at this point, but it does seem as though the industry is taking steps in a positive direction.

There is also the possibility that another independent team will bridge the gap. Jeffrey Veen has been spearheading an initiative with his company Small Batch Inc to bring a product called TypeKit to market. TypeKit is a platform for delivering real fonts to web pages in a way that targets the nuances of the specific browser a website visitor is using. It avoids DRM, and includes free and commercial fonts that foundries have licensed specifically for this purpose. If it delivers on what it promises, it is sure to be a popular destination among the design crowd.

It has been a long road to true web typography, but for the first time the end may be in sight. And that is something we won’t have to celebrate in Arial.