Chris K Designs

It’s official. With Photoshop CS5, Adobe has single-handedly made my degree (and many more out there) worth absolutely nothing. Ok, so maybe not NOTHING but at least worth the cost of Photoshop CS5. You no longer need to have any skill to remove objects from an image, know what the tools actually do and how to alter them, or even the actual reason you are doing anything in the program. You only need to select an area, use a single check-box…”Content Aware”, and hit delete. It’s like magic.

Apart from the image manipulator, you no longer need a good photographer either who has the ability to see the issues that may arrise in the shot before they even take it. Oh well, I guess the new wave of Art Majors studying fields that use Photoshop will have an easier time with their projects. Maybe that’s just it, I’m bitter I didn’t have this option available to me. Enjoy your easier image manipulations kids, now maybe you’ll have to think more conceptually.

All through design school it’s drilled into your brain to have a target audience for each project you create. It’s a simple rule that should be step one in every design project, however it falls to the wayside as deadlines loom closer and executives push harder. As a designer you cannot falter from the path of your target audience.

There are three things you should keep in mind for every bit of work you do:

1. Never use Papyrus as a font (hehe)
2. “Doing X made it look better/pop/just work.” is not an acceptable reasoning for a decision
3. Define and don’t change our target audience.

In this example we’ll just assume that the work you are doing is for an advertising campaign, to keep things simple. You can break down your target audience into any combination of things like age, sex, education, income, or political views (just to name a few). These are examples demographics and your bosses are always worried about the demographics. Can I tell you a secret though? These don’t always fulfill the target audience quota.

The problem you run into with demographics is that they are based on statistics. You may have to search deeper than the numbers to hit your target audience. A great example of this is Charles Schwab’s “Talk to Chuck” advertising campaign. I’m pretty sure you all know this campaign but you can find an example of one of the commercials here. (sorry for the link. the embed was disabled)

Did you go watch the video? Good. Notice anything besides a tight animation sequence and a guy with a somewhat odd voice? It’s simple and you probably won’t even realize the effect of it. They changed one thing, Charles -> Chuck. Yeah, big deal, cute, I know. This simple word change is the entire basis of the campaign. The idea is to bring investments down to people who don’t invest because it’s thought of as a product for people named Charles or have 2 previous relatives with the same name, causing them to be ‘The 3rd”.

Choosing your target audience and tailoring to them isn’t about numbers, it’s about people. Next time you go to start a project don’t narrow down your target to ‘Males ages 23-30 with a college degree’. Think beyond the standard demographics and into who the product, company, or event you are working with can affect people who typically wouldn’t be considered the target audience. After all, the more people who find the product accessible, the better the return on investment will be. There’s a number to give to the execs.

Visit the Charles Schwab website
View the Charles Schwab YouTube Channel

I’ve updated the code below so that it works properly. Sorry for any confusion this code was causing, but this should all be fixed now

I’ve been using the Mystique theme by Digitalnature for my personal blog for a few months now and after many updates, it’s really becoming quite the all inclusive design. The one thing it’s missing is a great login that’s themed along with it. So I’ve taken it upon myself to create it. You will need to make  a small customization to the functions.php file for the theme but I’ll walk you through it.

First you need to download the custom-login.zip file, unpack it, then upload the custom-login folder to your mystique folder. The directory is ‘/wp-content/themes/mystique/’.

Download custom-login.zip

Step two is modify the /wp-content/themes/mystique/functions.php’. You only need to add about 4 lines of code to the file so it’s nothing to major. Open the file you in your favorite text editor and look at the end of the file for:

add_theme_support('automatic-feed-links');

endif;
?>

Paste the following code between the add_theme_support and endif; line.

function custom_login() {
echo ' ';
}
add_action('login_head', 'custom_login');

And there you have it, a custom login screen for people using the ‘Mystique’ theme. Thanks to Pro Blog Design for the great post about ‘Custom WordPress Login Screens‘

Updated: I have modified the Code Plugin I’m using so this code should work without error now. Let me know in the comments if you have any other issues. Thanks everyone for the help!

Update 3/26 – If you are using the WordPress nightly builds for testers, this isn’t working anymore due to a CSS change in the WordPress code. I’m looking into it.