Several months ago, Dawghouse Design Studio held a custom-designed business card giveaway to its readers. Our lucky winner was Greg Pettit of Monkey House, his personal blog about parenthood and family. In this post, I will be giving you a walkthrough on the entire business card design process that I did for them.

Monkey House needed something to brand themselves. Of course, when I thought of initial concepts, I could only think of a monkey illustration. Greg provided me with a couple of monkey head illustrations that he liked and from there, it was fairly easy to understand what he was looking for.

Below you can find the original monkey head sketches that I did. It took me only a few sketches before I came up with something that I really liked.

I scanned the sketch, imported it in Illustrator, traced and did the coloring.

Now to create the actual business card, I created a new document in Illustrator with dimensions 3.625 x 2.125 inches. Since this artwork was set for printing, the color mode of the document was set to CMYK.

The next step was to add the bleed. A bleed is a term in printing that refers to what goes beyong the edge of the document after trimming. The entire artwork should exceed the bleed area so that when the document is trimmed, no thin white areas will be shown. AllBusinessCards, the printing company, required a bleed of 0.125 inch on all four sides leaving the finished business card size to 3.5 x 2 inches.

Now for the design of the business card, I played around with a few ideas before settling for something both Greg and I liked.

On the document, I drew a rectangle using the Rectangle Tool (M) without a border and with a fill of Pantone® color 4975 C. I thought that with a darker background, this would emphasize the monkey illustration more.

I imported the monkey illustration onto the new document and just played around with it. Somewhere along the way, I decided that three monkeys may be better than one, did a little more playing around until I ended up with below.

For the Monkey House typeface, I wanted something that looked playful to match the monkeys yet legible and bold. After a few searches and trials, I finally settled with using Berlin Sans FB Demi.

The last step before sending the final file off to the printer was to convert the text to outlines (Type > Create Outlines). This ensures that the exact same typefaces are used just in case the printing house doesn’t have them.

After a few weeks, the business cards arrived and the final output was exactly how we both wanted it to be. We’re happy of how it turned out!

One of the many resources that designers need are photos. Photos play an important role in contributing to the entire aesthetics of a design. They help convey a message without the need for words. Say, in a website or in a magazine, if an article is accompanied by a photo that is interesting enough, it traps the reader and encourages him to read on. And as designers, nothing is better than getting free photos and textures to add to our design resources!

So to anyone who is looking for free high-resolution photos and textures, we would like to introduce you to one of our Sponsors - Photovaco. Photovaco is a site that provides free stock photos and free textures. This site offers us thousands of photos in several categories such as landscapes, nature, animals, food, people and a whole lot more!

These resources from Photovaco are free to use for both your personal and commercial projects but must not be sold or redistributed in any way. Whether you would like to use their photos for your websites, videos, TV productions, forums, blogs, school projects and print media including newspapers, magazine, books and CD covers, feel free to do so. Plus, there is absolutely no need to register. This site spares us the hassle of having to sign up for an account so once you have selected the photos of your choice, you can just download them straight to your computer! Isn’t that great?

So what are you all waiting for? Let’s go check Photovaco out!

For this blog post, I would like to introduce you to one of Dawghouse Design Studio’s Sponsors, Pixel Crayons.

The Design process alone is so time consuming that you are not left with much time and energy, if you are a designer, to even code it. Giving the design work a perfect touch from every corner does not only need time and hard work but also a free mind so that you can concentrate and complete it rather than just wrap it up in hurry.

Converting your PSD to HTML or its extension is not only about error free coding but also about its W3C validation, cross browser compatibility and resemblance of HTML file with its PSD which not every PSD to XHTML service provider can produce.

Though many service providers promise to meet your expectation but not even half of them successfully meet your requirements. Writing a service review for Xhtml.Pixelcrayons.com was easy as I have used their services couple of times and they really helped me out with their turnaround time.

*As we mostly cater to US clients so we specifically needed WAI 2.0/Section 508 Compatibility which they provided me with 100% hand-coded neat XHTML code.

Order form
By filling some simple blanks and expressing your specifications, you can upload your file in formats like PSD, JPG, GIF, PNG, AI, ZIP or PDF. An order confirmation notification will be sent to you after you place the order and soon a project manager will assist you who upon confirmation of the order will start working on you project.

Work process
The order form on Pixelcrayons website is structured very precisely and collects all the relevant information about the project like your name, email address, phone number and other useful things.

The moment your order gets confirmed it is sent to review to one of their departments. From there it is sent for conversion process and then to their quality analysis team (if no software implementation is required). After their QA team gives the green signal the project is delivered to the clients.

Pricing:
The Basic Package – starting at $99

• Markups: HTML 4.01 Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• W3C Validation: CSS, XHTML & HTML
• I.E 6.x / 7.x, Mozilla Firefox, Safari

The Professional Package – starting at $199

• Markups: HTML 4.01 Transitional, HTML 4.01 Strict, XHTML 1.0 Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Strict
• W3C Validation: CSS2 (Advanced CSS Code Structure), XHTML & HTML Browsers Compatibility: I.E 6.x / 7.x, Mozilla Firefox, Safari 2.x/3.x, Opera, Konqueror
• Includes: SEO Semantic Code, Load Speed Optimization, Complete Presentation Separation, Maximum Cross-Browser Compatibility

*Money Back Policy
*50% Discount Scheme

Client support:
The agile client servicing at Pixelcrayons keeps you informed about the swift processing of your project. Minimal response time with efficient client support helps you to get easy clarifications on design implementation promptly. The instant chat option also helps to communicate directly with their sales representative 24×7.

Conclusion:
After experiencing the service it can be concluded that anyone who wishes to save time and get quality code can reach Xhtml.Pixelcrayons.com to hire their services.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is one of the most important things to consider when starting your new website. Yes, color, aesthetics and ease of navigation are all very important, but nothing is as important as traffic being able to find your site. SEO means plugging in to what search engine sites, such as Yahoo and Google, use to index and find your site when a person searches a certain topic.

With SEO being so important, here are thirteen (muhaha, a scary number) things we tend to forget from an SEO perspective when building a website.

1. Stuffing Important Content in Flash is Bad
Flash is an amazing piece of software that enhances fascinating interactive sites but unfortunately Google and Yahoo search engines do not really like Flash. Adding SEO to a Flash-based site can be done, but it is difficult, expensive and it is hard to find people who know how to do it. Putting important information and text inside of Flash will result in nothing, more than likely it will not be indexed properly.

2. Trim Down and Get Rid of Useless Code

You will want to go through your site and clean up and delete all unwanted code. Dreamweaver is finally falling by the wayside and reducing the number of badly coded sites. And today there is much simpler code that has been created and is available from a number of third party software developers and/or as freeware. Unnecessary code slows down search engines and can scare a bot away from your site.

3. Use Keywords Wisely
It is worth putting time into thinking about what SEO keywords best reflect your site. Search engines search each and every site from the top of the code down. Words that reflect you and your site better should be at the top. And do not go stuffing keywords. Have you seen a web designer’s site that had pages for "Web Designer Kentucky, Web Designer KY, Web Designer Louisville, Web Designer Derby," etc, etc? This is a type of stuffing, don’t do it as neither your visitors nor the search engines like it.

4. Get a Good Domain Name

Choosing a friendly web address is critical. If you can get a domain name that includes one of your chosen SEO keywords then you are in great shape. You are probably thinking that all the good domain names are taken but that is not necessarily true, get creative and create a domain that you know will attract people. It also does not hurt to have a domain name that is easy to spell and is catchy enough to remember.

5. Use "No Archive" and "No Index" Tags When Necessary
Not everything on your site needs to be indexed. Things like contact information pages or privacy policy pages can be left out of search results. Make sure you add the appropriate code so that pages that do not need to be indexed are marked as such. This will speed up the indexing process and also bump you higher up in the results. Remember the faster you can be found and indexed, the more likely it is that you will appear in the top results.

6. Study Other Sites

Take a look at other sites and see how they are constructed. Try doing a search yourself for a site that might be similar to yours. If there is no other site like yours on the web, you shouldn’t have any trouble ranking high with search engines for your keywords. Otherwise, search for whatever service or product you are selling on the web and see what comes up first. A good web designer will be able to deconstruct and reverse engineer the site and offer you some great advice and tips for your new site.

Get Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools to monitor your site. There are other providers out there, equally good and even better, but these two are the bare minimum.

7. Make Sure You Link Internally
If you have old content on your site, especially old blog posts, chances are they are not being crawled as often as newer pages. Create internal links from some of the new posts back to your old posts. It can be as simple as: The first five posts of My Blog, a walk down Memory Lane. Because you wrote a new post describing these five posts and link internally to them, the crawler will follow those links to the old posts. Otherwise, internally link with related posts or materials to help keep all pages on your site actively crawled.

8. Use the Alt Tags For Images
Yes, there is a reason that the alt tag exists for images so use it. This helps when browser do not load images but the person reading the page can read a description of the photo. Alt tags also help in image searching. Short, sweet tags are the best.

9. No Cheating or Copying from other Sites
Honestly, it is so dumb to say it, but I have to. Copying content, paragraphs in whole, images, from any other site is BAD BAD BAD. Why am I emphasizing this? Because there are a lot of new so called design resource sites that are just ripping off materials. You may get a good Page Rank but eventually you will crash. It’s not only bad for SEO, it’s also unethical.

10. Write Friendly, Targeted Titles

Every post or page needs to have a Title, Meta Description, and Meta Tags. Meta tags are the least important, but list four to five words that are themes of the article. Meta descriptions are important for search engine results, it’s what the user sees when your pages pop ups in the results page. Descriptions should be limited to 150 (some say 160) characters, otherwise your description will end with an ellipses. Lastly, the title tag is the most important one; it should be no more that 65 characters and succinctly describe your article.

A couple notes, the WordPress platform is not SEO friendly and you need a plugin, All in One Seo, to help. If you are coding on different platform the tag box below should appear on every page of your site.

11. Create Canonical URLs
Having problems with duplicate content on your site? A canonical tag can help you fix that and it’s a new, yummy goodie from Google.

Add this tag to the header area of the pages that are non-canonical.

12. Keep the Links to Under 100
On an article post, links can easily spiral out of control. Not including nofollow links, a page can have a long blogroll (lots of links), social media links (even more links), and just random external links. Keep your blogroll to a minimum, 15-20 sites. Besides, will your visitors really be visiting all those blogs? Social media links, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumble, etc., can also be no followed because really, you don’t need to pass on any page rank. And if you have 30-40 of these social media icons, just tone them to the five most useful ones for your site because your visitors will be confused seeing too many options.

13. WWW or Not: Choose One

Go with www or without www in your domain and all urls; do not have some pages that are using it and some not using it. Sticking to one way will keep a clear structure and ensure your SEO value and links direct to one page only instead of variations.

As web designers, you need to not only create pretty websites, but you need to create pretty code. The more you adhere to web standards, clean coding, and basic SEO techniques, the easier it is for a website to get more traffic via search engines and be read by bots.