An IDEO team combined human design talent and machine learning to create Font Map, a tool for designers to compare and find similar fonts. This started with Google’s ~750 typefaces, but can scale to many more. Explore for yourself. More and more of my searches start and end in the Google ecosystem, including those short snippets results in …
Friday 5 — 1.13.2017
Even if you’re cooling on your virtuous New Year’s resolutions, keep the one about sending better email. Commit to designing and delivering content that will drive opens, clicks, and conversions. Is on-site search the red-headed stepchild of SEO? Claiming that 30% of visits include on-site search, this article makes the case for improved optimization, and outlines steps …
Friday 5 — 12.16.2016
Google released its 2016 year in search, with a pretty nifty user experience. Pokémon Go was the top term globally, but you can explore by type of search as well as other facets like geography and volume. Handy eye candy as the search engine comes under fire for some terrible fake news results. This week …
Friday 5 — 10.28.2016
The microcopy in a user interface — the words that go on the buttons, appear in error messages, and guide you through wizards — is too often neglected or left for the developer to fill in. Nick Babich provides guidance on effective writing for your user interface. No more shopping for snake oil: the best search …
Friday 5 — 9.30.2016
Black, teal, and coral: those are your color options for Snap Inc.’s new product, Spectacles—sunglasses with a pair of cameras. Your questions about how to use them are answered here. Will this be the breakthrough wearable device? Ben Thompson concludes that our wearable future isn’t here, and it’s probably not even close. I’ve often wondered how content gets into …
Friday 5 — 7.1.2016
This is the year I began to rely on voice commands in the same compulsive manner that we all reach for our mobile devices. Try this helpful catalog of over 150 questions and 1,000 variations you can ask Google. My favorite Easter egg: “askew.” Just when you thought it was safe to count on your distributed content strategy, Facebook tweaks the …
Friday 5 — 4.29.2016
Product Hunt delivers nine tools and resources that tell you everything you wanted to know about Snapchat but were afraid to ask. These tips may prevent your head from exploding when you try to understand Snapchat’s user interface. New axiom: Anything can be GIFed, will be GIFed — thanks to this new tool from Giphy. Is it …
Friday 5 — 7.31.2015
Optimizing your business for local search starts with working through the fundamentals. Brush up on your tactics with the ultimate guide to local SEO ranking. Looks matter. An experiment revealed that news site homepages get more pageviews and user engagement when they have contemporary image-rich and modular layouts. Modular pages have discrete blocks of customizable and portable content, …
Friday 5 — 7.3.2015
What does the White House’s new photography policy tell us about the opportunity for brand building? Read my new piece over at Harvard Business Review on the visual web’s latest victory: the White House selfie. How does do Americans’ internet access and usage correlate with age? Pew has released a new report on Americans’ internet access …
Here’s why Google indexing tweets matters
This week I was looking for an article about the pressures of media coverage on scientific research to send to a few colleagues. All I could remember was that it was in the New York Times recently, and had the words “perils” and “publishing” in the title. So I searched within Google News for “perils publishing science nytimes” …