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Recently Written

• Blogs: Mad About Design offers graphic designers hundreds of inspiring ideas for your blog, or your client’s blog
• Discover the branding power of Stone Serif, Stone Sans, and Stone Humanist
• New white paper design template opens new profit opportunities for graphic designers
• What features would you like to see in a white paper template?
• Free Font of the Month helps graphic designers build their font library and design attractive ads, brochures, logos, newsletters, & websites

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Blogroll

• Blog Business Summit
• Chuck Frey’s Innovation Weblog
• Chuck Frey’s MindMapping
• Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind
• David Meerman Scott’s Web Ink Now
• Design & Thrive - Maria G. Nozza’s Design & Thrive blog and site offers graphic designers resources for both sides of the brain.
• Designer’s Who Blog
• John McWade’s Design Talk blog - Design philosophy and tips from Before & After’s publisher of
• John Thackara’s Doors of Perception
• Laura Ries’s Origin of Brands
• Membership Site Planner - Ideas and tips dealing with selling information on a subscription basis
• Mindjet Blog
• My Graphics Notebook - Graphic Designer
• Published & Profitable - Blog tips for authors planning, writing, planning, and profiting from books
• Seth Godin’s Blog

Designers looking for hundreds of creative and inspiring blog design ideas in one place should visit Blogs: Mad About Design, just published by Spain’s Maomao Publications. You’ll find page after page of creative and inspiring blog design ideas, from conservative to the cutting edge, each professionally executed created by designers around the world. 

Blogs: Mad About Design is a beautifully-produced hard cover book containing illustrations and design statements from over 250 blogs around the world. It’s a quality investment if you’re as serious about your blog’s design as you are about its content.

Best of all, my Design to Sell blog, the one you’re reading, is included!

Spend some time leafing through the more than 250 blogs illustrated in Blogs: Mad About Design. Visit some of the blogs that appeal to you. Analyze what you like about them, and share them with your clients or designers. Look for design techniques that you might be able to adapt  to your blog.

You’ll be rewarded with a new respect for the design possibilities that blogs offer graphic designers who are constantly on the looking for new online branding ideas.

Note: the above photograph is reproduced thanks to the courtesy of David Airey, an Irish designer and branding consultant. If you like design, you’ll want to visit him online at www.davidairey.com and follow him on Twitter.

PS: You can also follow me on Twitter!

If you are looking for a typeface family that will never fail to satisfy, explore the Stone family, designed by world-famous type designer Sumner Stone. The Stone family includes Stone Serif, Stone Sans, and Stone Humanist. Within this family, which also includes Stone Informal, there is enough variety to brand your communications, yet permit you to “voice” different documents for different purposes.

Creating a brand using a combination of Stone Serif and Stone Sans (or Stone Humanist) is an excellent design strategy. The serif and sans serifs versions are distinct enough to function as a design tool. The contrast between them is strong enough to draw attention to sans serif headlines and subheads used to guide visitors through text passages set in Stone Serif. Yet, the serif and sans versions are similar enough to set your publications apart from the common Times Roman and Arial.

The various fonts in the Stone family were designed to complement each other. The main body of the typeface family–the x-height–of Stone Serif is the same as Stone Sans. This means you do not have to adjust the type size of Stone Sans or Stone Humanist when using it in text run-ins to paragraphs set in Stone Serif.

Likewise, you won’t have to adjust the type size of Stone Sans subheads next to paragraphs set in Stone Serif.

You can get a better understanding of the branding power of the Stone typeface family by downloading a free 21-page PDF specimen book displaying the fonts in various combinations with each other.

Graphic designers looking for new ways to serve clients and new profitable niche markets and are encouraged to visit my new White Paper Design site that Maria G. Nozza and I have created. White papers are one of today’s most powerful marketing tools. Businesses large and small use white papers to generate leads and build their mailing lists for permission-based marketing.

The White Paper Design Template that Maria and I have created provides a customizable platform that graphic designers can use over and over again to create attractive, readable white papers for themselves and their clients. The template saves designers time and makes it easy for designers to create page-to-page consistency and a branded series of white papers for their clients.

Included with the template are detailed instructions for customizing the white paper to match each client’s unique color and typography. The template package includes several informative newsletters and a 47-point white paper proofing checklist. Visit www.whitepaperdesign.com for details.

Maria G. Nozza and I are preparing a 2009 White Paper Design Template. Our goal is to help you save time creating white papers for use as lead generators and list building incentives. Our template will help graphic designers work faster and non-designers do more on their own. But, in order to offer you what you’re looking for, we need your help.

What would you like to see in a white paper template?

• What do you want the white paper template to do for you?
• What are the problems you want the template to solve?
• What are the benefits you are looking for?
• Are there any specific features you’re looking for?
• What sort of “image” do you want the template to project?
• What software program do you want to use with the template?
• What kind of resources would you like to accompany the white paper template?

Submit your wish list as a Comment, below. Tell us what you’re looking for and what you hope to find in our white paper template. Or, e-mail us your ideas.

If you’re a graphic designer, here’s an easy way to build your typeface library of attractive fonts for free by visiting the Font Marketplace website each month and downloading their Free Font of the Month. Each free font you download improves your ability to design attractive ads, brochures, logos, newsletters, and websites.

Visit My Fonts for an illustrated look at the Top 10 Fonts of the Year, based on 2008 sales. See which fonts are the favorite choices of graphic designers, and learn the stories behind the fonts.

At My Fonts, you can also set your name in thousands of different typeface designs, and learn how to locate your favorite fonts.

Hours of pleasure await type-loving graphic designers at My Fonts.

Graphic designers and business owners interested in publication makeovers are invited to check out an online interview and slide show showing Planning Magazine’s transition from a newsletter to a magazine. Planning, published by the American Institute of Certified Planners, began as a newsletter, and during its life, has undergone many makeovers.

You can view the various stages of the makeover, as well as access a video interview with Sylvia Lewis, Planning’s Senior Editor and Publisher. Design makeovers are always fun, especially when those involved discuss their goals and methodologies. Many readers credit the before and after examples in my original Looking Good in Print: A Guide to Basic Design for Desktop Publishing, with a great deal of its success.

If your firm depends on white paper marketing to generate new business, or if you provide copywriting and design services for firms who use white papers to market new products and services, you’ll want to attend Michael Stelzner’s White Paper Success Summit 2009.

Michael Stelzner, the author of Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged, the definitive guide to preparing white papers, has gathered an all-star team of experienced white paper copywriters and graphic designers who will share their white paper copywriting and design secrets. Presenters include:

• Bob Bly, author of 50 books, including The White Paper Handbook and the career-building Copywriter’s Handbook.
• Roger C. Parker, author of the White Paper Design that Sells: 16 Easily-Implemented Best Practices.
• Steve Slaunwhite, recognized copywriting expert and author of Cracking the White Paper Market.
• Peter Bowerman, author of the Well Fed Writer series of writing and publishing books.
• Gordon Graham, known as That White Paper Guy, who has written over 1,000 white papers over the past 25 years for clients like Autodesk, IBM, Intuit, and Oracle.
• Jonathan Kantor, founder of the Appum Group, known as That White Paper Company. Jonathan has personally produced 100’s of white papers for firms like Adobe, Lexmark, Sun Microsystems, Proctor & Gamble, and Intel.

Attend from your home or office
Michael Stelzner’s White Paper Success Summit 2009 takes place during February. On your computer, you can listen, watch, and participate in a month of presentations. You’ll also be able to interact with presenters and other attendees, asking questions, sharing insights, and making valuable connections.

Sessions take place, live, each week during February.

Register today and save $200
To learn more, and save, visit White Paper Success Summit 2009 today.

Get on the path to higher profits by tapping into proven techniques for white paper success. Whether you create your own white papers, or prepare them for others, White Paper Success Summit 2009 can be your passport to increased profits creating white papers for yourself, or writing and designing white papers for others.

If you’re a business owner using white paper marketing to attract new business, or a graphic designer creating white papers for clients, you’ll want to download these 3 examples of effective white paper marketing. Each example shows how to use layout, text, and graphics to attract readers and keep them engaged.

The following white papers are available for free download. Together, they provide examples that you can learn from to improve your own white paper design abilities:

• White Paper Design that Sells: 16 Easy-to-Implement Best Practices. How to generate more leads and make your message easier to read and retain.
• Write Your Way to Success. Mster a 4-step process for planning, writing, promoting, and profiting from a profitably published book.
• Membership Site Content and Design Planner. A step-by-step guide to planning, launching, and maintaining a profitable membership or subscription site, with resources and suggestions.

If you’re interested in creating similar white papers for yourself, or for your clients, you can learn the latest white paper copywriting, graphic design, and marketing success at Michael Stelzner’s White Paper Success Summit 2009 in February. Michael, the author of Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged, the definitive guide to preparing white papers, has gathered together an all-star team of experienced white paper creators to share their white paper secrets.

Sitting at your computer, you’ll join America’s 7 most experienced white paper copywriters and designers as they share their copywriting and design secrets with you.

Visit White Paper Success Summit 2009 today and take advantage of early-bird savings!

Cathy McNeil, from Grass Fed & Healthy, where you can learn more about the health benefits of eating grass fed beef, shows how you can use everyday photographs, such as those you take looking out your office window, or while walking around your property, as the basis of a strong visual branding program.

Each week, on the home page of Cathy’s website, she posts a photograph taken during the previous week at her ranch. More than one of my friends has mentioned that they return to her site once a week, just to view the latest picture, or view the changing seasons from her ranch’s online photo gallery.

You, too, may want to use photographs to provide a visual context for the ideas and messages that you share with clients and prospects. Cathy’s photograph communicate the healthy environment of grass fed beef; your photographs can help personalize your message and help you stand out from the competition.