When browsing the web today I found an interesting article about VSEO, video search engine optimization. That means that it’s possible to generate some extra traffic through YouTube! You can find the article here. It explains in short what to do, to get that extra traffic. In short:

Video search engine optimization begins with writing effective title, description and tags (Keywords). One should remember that the Title of the video has to be attractive and include the keywords. Again description should be attractive and should include proper keywords relevant to your industry. It is a good idea to add URL of your website/blog on your video in watermark. Finally add effective tags (keywords) of your video.

Yet another thing you can take in consideration when doing your SEO business.

As a designer I made my share of mindmaps throughout the years. In both studies they let me mindmap for almost every project, so yes I was getting tired of it. Because of that I almost never used it in my daily job. This changed the last year however.

Last year I started a new study and came in contact with mindmapping again. Of course my first reaction was: “Screw this, I’m not going through all this again” and: “I’m don’t use this technique at all when working”. But this changed when making the first few mindmaps again.

I found out, that a mindmap gets me to an idea faster then a normal brainstorming process. In a normal brainstorm session I always have the problem that I run out of idea’s very quicykl. With a mindmap that doesn’t happen. This is because you are writing it down in a tree like manor. When you run out of keywords you just start over with another section of your mindmap. Even words that aren’t related with the eventual project are allowed to be written down, everything is allowed.

When done you’ll see the bigger picture and all relation within your projects subject. This gives ton’s of inspiration for new idea’s. No stressing involved!

A social psychologist, Garner, researched the behavior of post-it notes attached to a advert. So how do you get more response by using a post-it? I’ll explain…

Of course you want to measure the responses of you marketing campaign. You don’t only want to get results from your loyal customers. No, also from your customers that aren’t that dedicated to your company. Especially this last group will respond far lesser then your loyal customers.

Social Psychologist Garner did some tests on how to get the largest percentage of your customers to respond to an marketing advert. He conducted three different mailings. One of them had a personal message written on a letter that was added to the mailing. The other one didn’t have a personal message at all and one of them had a post-it on it with a personal message.

This last one had a great impact. More then 75% of the customers responded it to that mailing. The mailing which had a personal message in the letter scored 48% and the mailing without a personal message at all got only 36% response.

Garner wasn’t convinced and did a second test. Again he did three mailings. One with a post-it and a hand written message on it, one with a blank post-it and one with no post-it at all. Again the hand written, personalized post-it mailing got the most response! 69% responded to that mailing. Only 43% responded on the mailing with the blank post-it. The mailing with no post-it at all just got 34% response.

And there were more positive effects. People responded faster then normal and did a lot of more work to even get to respond. This will work not only for mailings, but also for brochures, flyer’s and questionnaires. Try it yourself and find out the result yourself!

The university of Amsterdam conducted a research on how Magazine advertisements are read and how they can attract the reader. The results are nice to keep in kind when creating your own magazine advertisement.

The results were collected with the help of eye tracking. This way every eye movement readers had were recorded. It was possible to get an exact idea on what was looked at.

The results aren’t really that shocking. But they’re useful to use when designing that top advertisement of yours.

• The surroundings from the advertisement are important to get attention from the reader. For example, the color red on the page next to your advert will get more attention. This is also the case when there’s a lot of text on the other side. So it’s important to always ask what’s on the page next to your advert.
• It’s better to put your advertisement on the right page. It gets 8% more attention on a right page then on a left page.
• Big adverts get more attention then small ones (Yes! Really =)). If you can afford it choose the biggest size you can get. Advertisement that cover half of the page are getting 20% of the readers attention. A whole page gets 42% and a double page advertisements gets 70% of your readers attention!
• Use a lot of different colors in your design. Blue does get less attention (only 42%) then green, red or white (49%).
• A heading rule in your design get attention, use it!

So if your designing a advertisement for a magazine, it’s smart to pay attention to the things above. In short, get the biggest possible size available in the magazine next to a page with a low amount of text and no red colors on it.

Photo retouching is something I barely do in Photoshop. I just don’t get to starting of with. It’s one of the things however I really like to see and would like to do. So in my spare time I try as much tutorials about the topic. Of course I can’t keep those tutorials for my own good, so below you’ll find my top 10.

Professional Photo Retouch – Photoshop® CS4

Not a real tutorial, but it shows the possibilities to me and the end result is very nice.

Glamorous Glowing Model Effect on Your Image

This tutorial is short and easy. Even a beginner can do some real nice stuff after he follows this tutorial. That’s at least my opinion. With some really simple options and modifications your picture will get more glamorous.

Professional Photoshop retouching tutorial

This tutorial goes significantly deeper into the retouching. It explains to you what happens and you get to see how this guy does it.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly

Not the retouching you might think of. The techniques used however can come in handy when retouching your own photo’s. On the other side, creating these kind of compositions is a specialty on it’s own.

Create a High Clarity Photo (Dave Hill style)

Everybody knows Dave Hill, at least you should! He always creates some nice HDR photo’s. You can accomplish something similar on your own photo’s with this tutorial.

A fellow buzzer recently mentioned Justin Maller on one of his Buzzes. Justin Maller is a designer with a style of his own. He creates beautiful compositions and did work for some great companies already, so it might be possible you saw his artwork already. I just couldn’t let you guys miss this. I think illustrators like him are one of a kind. Enough said. Just enjoy his work @ justinmaller.com.