Modern food packaging design can be sexeh. Photo by schoschie.

Behind everything you buy at the super market are food packaging designers who’ve made some serious choices. Taking a food product to market must be nerve wracking and pretty exciting but oh man, what a process! I was wondering about how much I take for granted the other day when I stopped for a moment in the supermarket and realized I was surrounded by thousands of products AND what must be millions of hours of design time to make all these food products shelf ready.

Continue reading…

Over at FastCharacters.com we’re definitely biased when we say “cartoon mascots rock!”.  Why? Because great mascots add character and charm in ways that makes us humans take notice, and these days, anything that can capture attention is a valuable thing.  You know the deal; we get so swamped with media every single day that we tune most things out that aren’t life threatening and I guess we have to or we’d fry our noodles from information overload.

But cartoon mascots are different.  They stand out from the crowd in ways that are difficult for other forms of visual communication.  Great typography, photography, web design .. you name it, they all have their place but when was the last time you think a Regular Joe saw a billboard and thought to themselves … “Wow, that’s very cool typesetting!”  Yeah, exactly. A good mascot design just stands out and sticks in your brain like nothing else can.

Continue reading…

Passive income for web designers and developers. Photo by borman818.

If you’re a freelance or self-employed web designer or developer you know all too well about the ups and downs of cash flow.  You’ll also know that the concept of passive income in our field is not one that many of us web workers entertain or know much about.  So here’s what I can share with you on the subject of creating and profiting from a passive income as a web geek … and hopefully give you an insight into how you can smooth out the peaks and valleys of your cash flow in a way that can truly change your life.

Continue reading…

Some of the best free WordPress themes will take the design of your blog or website to a whole new level  … if you can find them. How to locate a great  WordPress theme is like panning for gold. Every now and then, your patience is rewarded and you find a free theme that just shines head and shoulders above the rest; a rare nugget that feels like it could almost be a premium theme if the author wanted it to be.

This crop of WordPress themes moves the “free line” closer to Premium than ever before. Regular readers will know that late last year I featured “413 Best Free WordPress Themes” which although cool, felt like overload. I mean, sifting through 413 WordPress themes is no small task. So with this round up, I’ve saved you some time and handpicked what I feel are some of the best free WordPress themes currently available.

So lets get this show on the road! Let me start with a free theme that I liked immediately.

Continue reading…

There are more WordPress SEO plugins out there than you can poke a stick at; or ever use. I’ve seen at least twenty SEO plugins for WordPress and I wonder who the heck has time to use even a fraction of them? You can learn the bulk of the SEO game by understanding the simple words of StomperNet’s Brad Fallon … “Use your keywords early, and often”.

Photo by hamed.

The right SEO plugins for WordPress get you Google love.

Continue reading…

If you’ve tried to put video on a WordPress powered site, you’ll know it’s a little tricky to make it all work. Afterall, you’ll need to encode the video, upload it somewhere, then embed a player into your WordPress post. Let’s take a look at a few ways you can go about putting video onto your WordPress site.

Continue reading…

WordPress baby themes aren’t something I get asked for everyday. But I got an interesting email asking me if I knew of any good ones. I didn’t offhand so I did some digging around and what I found for WordPress baby themes was weak sauce. The themes were either lame or overpriced or both. I found this surprising considering how much demand there is for parenting and baby information and products; a highly emotional market with motivated readers and buyers (parents!). You WordPress theme designers out there might want to take note and fill a void while there is one.

Photo by gustty.

Wordpress baby themes

Personally, if you are looking for a WordPress baby theme here’s what I would do. Continue reading…