Daily Brad, the blog

Another first happened for me at the Omniture holiday party last month. While the party itself was another great event filled with awards, music, dancing, food and general merryment, I think one of my favorite parts was seeing my handy-work on ice.

At the entry doors to the party stood an ice sculpture of Omniture’s logo, flanked in the rear by green lights. Since this was a Brad McCall first (Having a logo I designed carved in ice), I thought I’d mention it in my blog and put up a couple photos.

Watch Omniture this year… it’s going to continue to great things! (Meanwhile, I’ve been feverishly working on the next iteration of my online portfolio. If you think that having the same portfolio online for over 6 years is a shame, well, I’d have to agree with you.)

The other day I had a co-worker looking at my LinkedIn profile, and said “Wow, you have so many Recommendations”, and after explaining how they came to be there, I thought of blogging about it.

Early last year I had a friend who had just laid off send me a request to write him a Recommendation on LinkedIn. Knowing full-well his talent and the work that he did when we worked together, I was happy to. That was when I learned about LinkedIn’s built-in ability to request Recommendations.

At first I thought it silly to ask someone to say something nice about me in writing. But as I began to request Recommendations from a few of my former colleges and contract clients, I found it was an excellent way find out from others just how good a job I do/have done as well as let potential clients or employers know what it’s like to work with me. It was testimonial, or validation of my work.

The LinkedIn feature of Recommendations - and how you used these Recommendations in gaining new business or obtaining a job - can be just as valuable an asset to your portfolio as the designs you put in there. Sure, your design work is excellent, but how is it to work with you?

Here are a couple excerpts from the recommendations others have given me:

“Having hired and managed several large, national agencies when I worked on the Pizza Hut, Pepsi and Blockbuster brands, I was surprised (and impressed) that I was getting top agency results from a team of only one person, Brad McCall…”

“…He is extremely versatile, delivering best-in-class results for every project he took up…”

“…It’s hard to believe so much talent can fit in one person…”

“…I give Brad my highest recommendation and look forward to any project that I can collaborate together with him on again.”

“…The first version [of the product user-interface] started winning awards before it was even out of beta, and the feedback on the second major version has been every bit as positive, even though the degree of complexity was much higher. Excellent to work with, good business sense, and creative work that is second to none.”

“…He is easy to work with, insightful and very good at what he does. His knowledge of color, layout, and visual impact are incredible. Though his work speaks for itself, I gladly endorse Brad as well.”

“…Brad is a valuable asset to any project he is a part of.”

“…Brad has a built-in desire to add value to every project and company he is involved in…”

“Brad is the most effective person I have worked with at communicating through design…”

“…Brad has an amazing capacity to do it all, in copious amounts with consistency, quality and with a great attitude…”

“Brad’s work was some of the best I’ve seen. It was creative, artistic, and professional.”

I’ve had several people over the years ask me if I did illustration. Most often I’ll say “I’m not an illustrator, but what do you need?” And several times I’ve been able to pitch in and contribute few illustrations to the cause on some projects. Since most of these never end up in my official portfolio, I thought I’d throw a few in my blog post.

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As this is the first day of the new year, I wanted to use it as a chance to send out a big thank-you to those who read my blog on a regular basis and take the time to comment. I also wanted to list the top 5 most read blog posts that I wrote in 2006 and a little snippet from the post:

Top 5 Posts of 2006 by Traffic

1. Website Pirates Strike Again - Park City Group
   I was looking at a list of public companies in Utah a couple days ago. One intrigued me, so I accessed their website. The Park City Group was founded by Randy Fields, the co-founder and former chairman of Mrs. Fields Cookies. Their customers include such well-known names as The Home Depot, Foot Locker, Inc., The Limited, Albertson’s, Schnuck Markets, Pacific Sunwear of California, Wawa, Busch Entertainment and Tesco Lotus. And guess what? Their website design is pirated.
2. Design Your Own Snowboard with Revolution
   The last time Jon and I were on the slopes (last month, can you believe it? With all the new snow, we’re planning on going this month as well) I looked around to get a sense for some of the snowboard designs that were out there. And you know what I realized? Most snowboard designs suck.
3. Utah Creatives - Designers, Agencies, Firms and More
   So there use to be this great site called ampUTate.org that would contain links to all the local Utah advertising agencies, graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, etc.
4. Pixel Patterns Wallpaper - New Graphic Design Trend?
   Here’s something I’ve been noticing a lot lately, haven’t you? I call it Pixel Wallpaper, while I think most of the web calls it “Pixel Patterns” (or even “Atari Style Wallpaper”). Forget that wallpaper of the past, you know those nasty repeated gifs cut out from a photo or grabbed from a 3D texture makers. These babies are cool. Use a pixel pattern for your blog background or website - here’s where to find some.
5. Is Social Bookmarking the Search Engine of the Future?
   So it wasn’t until a couple months ago, that I began to hear about the whole concept of “Social Bookmarking”. I’ve even mentioned it to a couple of my friends, and they always pose the question “what ARE you talking about?”

Good things are going to happen in 2007, so stay tuned to The Daily Brad for more changes.

My friends think it a little funny that every time we pass the IKEA being built in Draper that I get a little excited. Why’s that you ask? Well duh, it’s the big Okland Construction logo hanging from the side - another Brad McCall design.

There is a fair amount of excitement in Utah that we’re finally getting our own IKEA. They officially broke ground just south of Salt Lake City, in the City of Draper back in early April of this year. (Near 1-15 and the Bangerter Highway) The 310,000 square-foot Draper location will open in Spring 2007 and will be the first of its kind in Utah. (There are 230 IKEA stores in 33 countries, including 27 in the U.S., where IKEA plans to open three to five stores a year.) For those unfamiliar with IKEA, there’s always IKEA.com where I personally have ordered plenty of things and had them shipped. But for those of us in-the-know, we knew that the 63 year-old Swedish store would eventually make a grand appearance in Utah. We’ll swoop in and grab from their range of home furnishings and accessories all with “good design” and function, at low prices. (Utahans LOVE a good deal.)

But as for now, the sweet spot for me is this:

See that? It’s my logo hanging on the side of the concrete structure going up. Call it a “sighting” if you will. It’s one of two logos of mine that can be spotted from the freeway.

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Here’s a logo I recently finished for Zensterz. (The URL won’t really go anywhere right now as the official site won’t launch for another couple months.)

Click image to view larger

Zensterz is a subscription-based online portal where family groups can share events, coordinate activities, brag about recent trips or promotions, etc. They can do all this within a password-protected site that’s packed with Web 2.0 features (ie Software-like functionality). There’s more to Zensterz which I can’t talk about (which gives it an extra punch to stand out in a fairly crowded space of “family websites”), since it’s still under wraps for the time-being, so you’ll have to be on hold until it goes live.

The selected concept that was taken to completion was based on and illustration of two individuals (one green, the other orange) who are conversing through the letter “Z”. The blue circle and relative roundness of the shape behind them represent the wrapping of the two individuals from around the globe where they arrive at the “Z” (representing zensterz) that is made from the negative space from their faces. I used an all-lowercase version of the font Gill Sans, to emphasize the ending of zensterz (with a “Z”). Gill Sans has always seemed like a “friendly” font with its mixed chunkiness, but still have a professional appeal. Seemed appropriate.

Here’s a logo I recently completed. I can’t talk much about the company or what they do as yet (since it’s a bit of a new product that’s got to be kept under wraps) but it has something to do with producing unique CD-R and DVD-R products. The name of the company is “Therty Brand”, and since there was an odd spelling for a common word, I wanted to somehow put emphasis on the “e”. Since they also dealt with CD-R and DVD-R products, I wanted to use that as part of the concept without making it too trite or silly. Here’s what I came up with:

I chose a bright blue to keep it fresh, but I’m working on adding a rusty orange to the pallet (and maybe a chocolate brown - though the blue and chocolate thing is kinda trendy right now…)

The concept I came up with was a very simple text treatment centered in a circle of color that represents the CD or DVD Media product. Without being to obvious, the “e” at the center makes the center of the media. Smallest possible use of this logo may separate the “blue dot” from the text treatment… but I still haven’t settled there.

Thoughts? Comments?

When I worked for Omniture as their Creative Director, I would often check the web analytics that we ran on our corporate website to see where people were coming from (referrers). Occasionally I would find several page views that were sent through from what I like to call “Website Pirates”: individuals who would pillage and plunder our site design and use it as their own. They’d be working with the html as templates while building their own site, and forget to take the tracking code off, and send through hits that I could follow. On one “design” we had to get Legal involved since they didn’t even bother to replace the imagery we owned with their own after it went live.

While reading Joshua Steimle’s blog about website piracy on MWi’s website, I got thinking to myself - I sure wish I had screen shots of all those websites that copied my design for the original Omniture website.

To make a long story short (my blog posts always run long), I was looking at a list of public companies in Utah a couple days ago. I really only knew of a couple and was curious just how many there were. One intrigued me, so I accessed their website. The Park City Group was founded by Randy Fields, the co-founder and former chairman of Mrs. Fields Cookies. Their customers include such well-known names as The Home Depot, Foot Locker, Inc., The Limited, Albertson’s, Schnuck Markets, Pacific Sunwear of California, Wawa, Busch Entertainment and Tesco Lotus. And guess what? Their website design is pirated.

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So I did a couple searches yesterday looking for the technique for putting Google Analytics on my blog. Since I’ve already put their code on the main pages of my portfolio site, I wanted to add it to the blog as well.

I found a quick little bullet-point that revealed how it’s done on Matt Cutt’s Blog (he was one of the first search results I found when searching). He says:

If you’re using WordPress with a theme like almost-spring, you would edit your header.php file, e.g. wp-content/themes/almost-spring/header.php and put the JS just above the tag. That’s it. Do a view-source on this page and search for “urchin” to see where to drop the code.

I tried this, and it’s already sending through hits. Wow, cool. Thanks Matt. I’ll have to monitor this over time, as it looks like it’s not sending as specific information through as I’d like. I’ve heard of other blog tracking tools, but this should be sufficient for now.

So guess what? I now know you’ve visited. Yeah! Upward and onward.

Renaming my blog for better search engine recognition

Tweet Sweet made it to the top!
So I make it an effort to check at least every few days where my search rankings fall in Google and Yahoo. I’ve even started checking MSN, though I don’t get as much traffic generated through them. I’ve been checking Tweet Sweet (my other blog) and its location, and making every effort possible to get to the top of the term “Tweet Sweet”, which finally happened on their last crawl.

Brad McCall maintains its top ranking
I’ve maintained top ranking for a while with any search for “Brad McCall” (my portfolio site). I make it a joke with my friends who say they lost contact with me by telling them to type my name in any search engine… yeah, that was hard wasn’t it? Back in the day when I started bradmccall.com, I got listed on DMOZ which I hear is actually quite difficult to do now. DMOZ (the open directory project) still feeds into a lot of smaller home-baked search engines as well as some of the big daddies. Since it’s managed by people it’s suppose to be more accurate. At the time, there were tons of “search engine submission” services around the web, one of which I used to get my URL out there. (MyComputer.com) I look at the SEO process now, and it’s quite apparent how things have changed in how things are done. This “submission” service back then was like $50.00, and recently I got an email from i need hits that offered it for $1.97. Thus, the “submission only” service’s effectiveness in today’s SEO market.

Where’s Brad’s Blog?
But I’m off subject (what’s new with that?) My point is, Tweet Sweet and Brad McCall have both made it to the top of the search engines. So what’s my next step? (For them, it’s probably keyword optimization for specific terms) But for me, I wanted to see where this blog ranks. I didn’t spend much time thinking about about a name for this blog, I just typed “Brad’s Blog” and launched it. In this morning’s search for “Brad’s Blog” Google came up with 105,000 results, some of which I could probably never throw off the top of the heap. So I tried another phrase I’ve used many times before “Daily Brad” (a play on the prayer “give us this day our daily bread”). Looks like there was just under 32,000 searches with this term - 2 of which seemed to offer the most competion. Thus, more success in getting listed in the top 5.

So today “Brad’s Blog” became “Daily Brad”. My only concern? Now I’ve set the expectation for daily posts… goodness. I guess I better start pouring out those ideas, observations, and general stuff that keeps rambling through my brain.