Seth Godin, in many of his books repeatedly highlights the problem with interruption marketing - a traditional advertising technique were companies target the mass market and interrupt them with advertisements. This is no longer an effective strategy, people have become desensitised to this form of advertising and it only serves to frustrate people in many cases.
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NYC’s newest startup, Folio - allows designers to sell or purchase digital assets with a new drag and drop marketplace.
If you need a button, you can buy it on Folio or if you’ve made a button, you can drag and drop it into the peer-to-peer marketplace and start earning cash.
Folio’s platform operates like an app store for digital goods with the simplicity of Dropbox, giving every creative professional the ability to sell their digital assets in minutes. Using a simple menu bar application, the creative can just drag and drop the file, add a descriptive tag, set a price, upload and it’s instantly for sale on the Folio network and shareable with a unique URL to Facebook and Twitter.
It’s a great idea although it’s debatable if many professional designers would relinquish such control in favour of a third party asset such as a button. Icons – perhaps, but creating something as basic as a button should be within the capabilities of every designer.
Oftentimes designers will spend $150 of billable time creating a “Click me” button inspired by something they saw on Dribbble.
Isn’t spending hours on the finer details an important element of craftsmanship?
One of the most difficult questions facing every digital startup is how much do I charge? While application pricing can be somewhat of a black art, there are some considerations that can help.
Pricing a web app is very different from pricing a tangible product where the cost is calculated based on physical worth. The costs of maintaing a web app can be incredibly low, therefore the pricing is based on value rather than a fixed unit cost.
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I recently visited the Northern Regional College in Newtownabbey, where I delivered a short presentation to the current students studying for their Extended Diploma in Interactive Media. This was the course where it all began for me so it was great to return and share my experiences of university and what I had learnt since leaving the college.
Robert Wilsdon, one of the lecturers on the course was kind enough to provide a news article about the talk on the NRC website.
Perhaps you have a great idea for a product – you’re excited about transforming your idea into something real, something people will love. There are a lot of steps required in achieving this goal and each will offer its own unique challenges but the hardest of all can be taking that first step.
The most fundamental step for any start up business is to actually START.
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The most important element of any product is its users, especially if your product relies on user driven content. This creates the problem of the chicken and the egg - which comes first, the product or the users?
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If you appreciate exceptionally high quality illustration work, then you should definitely follow Tale & Teller’s blog - run by fellow Masters student and good friend, Jordan Henderson.
He posts new artwork regularly so it’s worth visiting every few days. Make sure you check out The Joker and Mr Miyagi.
The books I have read over the course of the last year have contributed to a huge shift in my thinking and broadened both my skills and design thinking capabilities. I’ve put together a list with a short description of each book which will hopefully prove useful for anyone interested in design, especially students of Interactive Multimedia Design or those already on, or joining the MA Multidisciplinary Design course.
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Public speaking was once one of my greatest fears, I’d do anything to avoid it at all costs. This fear was borne from school; I’d given plenty of presentations on topics I had little interest in and of course standing in front of a class rambling a load of nonsense about a topic I knew nothing about only succeeded in making me look foolish – denting my confidence and leading to embarrassment in similar situations later in life.
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Last month I received an email informing me that I’d been selected from over 500 of the worlds best student entrepreneurs to attend eBootcamp 2012, held at Stanford University in California.
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