Concert poster designed for the “Music in the Park”

“Music in the Park” is a free summer concert series held in downtown San Jose, CA featuring Neon Trees, The English Beat, and Cracker.

For this poster design, we wanted to evoke that warm, sunny feeling of  an outdoor summer concert… where you swap out your work shoes for sandals as you head over to the show right after work…

Opaque Design is pleased to announce the launch of their site design for SaveAlternative.com.

Save Alternative is a radio network and online music community focused on alternative music. The goal of the site design was to present a lot of content – news, featured artists, videos, and concert listings of new and upcoming artists - in a concise format with a modern, minimalist design.

This project was especially enjoyable for us to develop, as we are huge, huge, huge alt music enthusiasts. We grew up during the rise of alternative music in the ’80s, listening to Depeche Mode, The Cure, New Order, The Mission, etc. (which we listen to as much today as 25+ years ago). While some of our current favorites to crank in the office are She Wants Revenge, IAMX, Moving Units, Dial M For Murder, Veil Veil Vanish… and well, we could go on and on…

SaveAlternative.com

New web site design launched for Millstone United Travel Soccer.

This soccer club is based in central New Jersey and has boys and girls soccer teams in a variety of age ranges. Millstone United needed a site that organized a lot of club information in a concise format, and that they could add and update club news, minutes, and other information themselves.

We designed the site to accomplish this by making news items prominent on the homepage, a featured pages image slider at the top, and putting the most referenced information like field status and weather in the sidebar. The overall design goal was to be modern, clean, and energetic.

The site utilizes the WordPress platform for content management, which allows the site development costs to be kept manageable while allowing the client to easily make content changes.

MillstoneSoccer.com

Possible Uses for Video

Visually explain a service or demo a product – Demonstrate a product in action, show installers on the job, or have the owner or other staff on screen explaining what the company does.

How-to videos – Offer helpful video content to customers to keep them coming back to the web site, or into a store. Give them tips on how to use their new purchases.

Before and After video – Quickly show the benefits of a product or service by showing the results of using it.

Promotional Video Tips

Keep production costs in check – Opaque Design often creates a promotional video by combining photos, logos and voice-overs with animated video effects and transitions.

This technique provides an effective promotional tool, while keeping production costs low. The resulting video can be used online or for broadcast.

Simplicity is Key – Potential customers and prospects have limited time to spend, so outline the specific benefits of your service or product. Give enough information to get them interested, but resist the temptation to go overboard with details and lose their interest.

Video Length – Shorter is better. Prospects have many things competing for their attention – get to the point. Under three minutes is usually best.

Appropriate Graphics – Professional visual transitions, effects and keys will make your video stand out.

Promote the Video – In addition to posting the video on your web site:

• Include a link to the video if you send an e-newsletter to customers and prospects.
• Create a YouTube account to upload and embed videos. For multiple videos, create a YouTube channel for your company.
• Post the video on your Facebook Fan page and Twitter

Check out some more promotional videos, and contact us to find out how we can help promote your business with video.

We upgraded from our trusty and beloved Canon Digital Rebel this year, so it’s been sitting forlorn in the closet. Next to that is our ancient Canon Elph.

They are well used but too nice to toss, and so outdated they are probably not worth much on Ebay (not that we wanted to fuss with that anyway).

So we gave www.gazelle.com a shot. The site makes you an offer for the item, depending on condition and if it has cables etc.

It took a few clicks to get a price offer and set up an account. Then we packed the cameras, cables, instruction manuals and disks (we are ridiculously organized and still had everything) and printed out the free shipping label they provided.

Gazelle evaluates the received item to make sure it matches the stated condition, then sends you money via Paypal or a check.

The whole process was super easy, and we received $65. Certainly not crazy money, but not bad for two items taking up space in our closet.

Squareup

Free app and card reader, for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Android devices. Charges a percentage of the transaction as a fee.

Install the app, create an account, apply to accept payment cards and then Squareup sends a reader devices to swipe cards. Needs an internet connection to process credit card transactions.

Site: www.squareup.com

Review of Squareup on Wired.com

Mophie Marketplace

Mophie takes a different approach by charging $179.95 for a swiping device that attaches to the bottom of an 3G/3GS iPhone (not available for 4G yet).

The GoPayment service by Intuit handles the transactions. Monthly service is $12.95, with processing fees of 1.7%3 or 2.7%, plus a transaction fee of .30.

There are no contracts, so the service can be stopped and started as needed… a big plus if your credit card needs are seasonal or occasional.

Site: http://www.mophie.com/

Review of Mophie Marketplace on Wired.com

We’ve found these to be the most useful for business:

Tweetdeck

Update Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and Foursquare. Free, for desktop, browser, and mobile devices.

We prefer Tweetdeck to juggle our Twitter accounts for both business and personal. Set up as many columns as you need to sort feeds, groups, mentions, and search terms to keep everything organized.

Site: www.tweetdeck.com

Hootsuite

A web based application for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Ning accounts. Free for one account, paid pro version.

We use Hootsuite to schedule posts, which is something a business would need that a personal user would not.

(Tip: don’t over-schedule, but if you have useful info it should be repeated several times over a span of days/weeks, and at different times of day. Items can easily get missed in people’s feeds.)

The free account is very robust, but for a monthly fee you can add stats and unlimited accounts.

Site: www.hootsuite.com

Socialite

An application (Mac only) that simplifies the management of your social networking services. The program provides one central area to handle popular services such as Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr, (as well as multiple accounts of each – good if you are managing business as well as personal accounts). It also handles Digg, Google Reader and RSS feeds.
Site: www.realmacsoftware.com

An in-depth review of Socialite 1.2 from Macworld Magazine.

Created for NJ Solar Power to showcase a customer installation, and highlight their services and financing programs.

The promo video is used on their site, njsolarpower.com, as well as featured on jerseygogreen.com.

Glenn Tilbrook sporting our “Romantic Gestures Strange” Squeeze t-shirt design! in Japan!

Glenn was in Japan for Love Hope Strength’s latest musical journey, to Japan’s Mount Fuji.

Photo by Oli Powell. Check out the rest of Oli’s terrific photos from “Mt. Fuji Rocks” on Squeeze’s website: www.SqueezeOfficial.com

]]> http://www.opaquedesign.com/blog/glenn-tilbrook-wearing-our-squeeze-t-shirt-design/feed/ 1 http://www.opaquedesign.com/blog/easily-create-web-site-surveys-and-forms/ http://www.opaquedesign.com/blog/easily-create-web-site-surveys-and-forms/#comments Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:59:36 +0000 Opaque Design http://www.opaquedesign.com/blog/?p=426 Web site surveys and contact forms are a great way to interact with your customers and site visitors, allowing you to collect useful information, feedback, and market research.

Two of the easiest methods are Formstack and Wufoo. They are online services that allow you to quickly create a form, while handling all the database and backend tasks for you.

Just some of the forms you can create:

• Contact Forms
• Surveys
• Invitations
• Online Registrations

A Snap to Setup.

Use the online form editor to drag and drop segments to your form, and change the settings if you like. No HTML code to mess with. Or use one of the provided form templates for even faster setup.

Easy to Integrate into your Site.

Use a simple link to your form, or copy and paste the provided chunk of code to embed right into your site. Optionally, If you know HTML, you can further adjust the look of the form as well.

Stats and Results.

Login to your account to see the results of your form, or have it email the results every time a form is submitted. The form data can be downloaded as a .CSV for use in Excel.

Pricing Plans.

There are a variety of pricing plans, but both offer a free account that you can test out the service with. The free account limits the number of responses and forms, but is enough for many small businesses. If your needs grow, just upgrade to a paid account.

Examples.

The Formstack site has a video demo, and examples. Wufoo has form examples as well.

If you’d prefer assistance with setting up a survey or form, you can contact us. We also offer a variety of other new media consulting services, please visit our consulting page for more info.