What Makes a Good Logo (5 Quick Tips)

What makes a strong, effective Logo? Lets asks a professional. This week we sat down with PT Senior Designer, Christina Lewis and she gives her "Elite 5" tips to making a strong Logo.

An Intro to Adobe Photoshop Touch SDK and Mobile App Suite

Adobe has come out with some pretty amazing new tools over the last year or so. While there have been several notable upgrades to many Creative Suite applications, the stuff we’re most excited about has to do with Photoshop and its new mobile capabilities. In fact, if you’re still using Photoshop CS4 or earlier, you’re missing out on some incredible stuff.

The Photoshop Touch Software Development Kit (SDK) was announced last April and will allow developers to create “companion apps” for mobile and tablet devices. The free-to-download SDK is part of a larger campaign to create an integration—or perhaps, more accurately, a communication—directly from tablet devices apps into Photoshop on your desktop computer. The SDK is compatible with iOS, Android, RIM, and webOS-based devices, as well as with both Mac OS and Windows.

As opposed to many websites and software companies who often just create a “mobile-version” of their program or network, Adobe is thinking more about tablets and mobile devices as a tool to be used in conjunction with your desktop computer. This means thinking about the inherent advantages that a tablet device offers. The apps are catered more to those times when creativity comes unexpectedly; in the coffee shop or in the park, scribbling on a napkin or taking a quick photo with your iPhone. Also, the apps are more designed to help “drive Photoshop” rather than act as a mobile substitute.

Adobe created this video to help elaborate on their vision for the Touch SDK’s potential for creativity and productivity.

To complement the release of the Touch SDK, Adobe has released three new mobile apps:

Adobe Color Lava:
If you’ve ever used Adobe Kuler, Lava is like that, but on steroids and made specifically for touch-based devices. You can actually swirl around colors and mix them up the way a painter would on his or her palette. Once you’re done, you can then transmit the colors you created back into Photoshop as swatches.

Adobe Eazel:
Digital finger painting done right; create rich realistic paintings on your tablet and then send them to Photoshop to finish them up. There are some other apps that do this, such as Sketchbook Pro, ArtStudio, and Brushes, but the ability to seamlessly integrate your work back into Photoshop is very attractive.

Adobe Nav:
In what is sort-of a mobile version of Adobe Bridge, this app can be used to browse through all the projects you have open on Photoshop, as well as to customize the default tools found in your Photoshop desktop toolbar. It can also be used as a way to transfer images from your tablet into Photoshop.

Adobe Revel (formerly called Carousel):
The newest of the bunch, this one requires a paid subscription, but for a good reason: it syncs your entire photo library between your computer, tablet, and mobile devices. No need to worry about storage issues or syncing things manually. Subscriptions go for $5.99 per month or $59.99 per year.

These all come together to form an amazing, cross-platform, Photoshop ecosystem of creativity. It’ll be exciting to see what other apps Adobe comes out with to expand Photoshop’s capabilities. Have you tried any of these apps yet for your iPad, Android device, or other tablet? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

PT Bios: Kevin and Michael

In our latest segment of PT Bios, we ask Kevin and Michael what is the one tool that they simply couldn’t live without.

Kevin, a Web Developer at Plum Tree, mentions the Firebug add-on for Mozilla Firefox as one of his essential tools. Recently, Firefox announced that version 10 (to be released in early 2012) would feature it’s own developer tools, which could become a replacement to the popular Firebug plugin.

A closer look....

With Firebug, users can right-click on any web page element and hit “Inspect Element.” This brings up a console that allows them to view and edit the HTML, CSS and functionality of any element on the page. This functionality has already been replicated in Google Chrome as a standard function, so it’s only logical that Firefox would want to offer their own, native version. You can watch a preview of the new Firefox tools, or download the future of Firefox now (caution: this release is not stable yet).

Are you a Firefox user, or have you migrated to Chrome or another browser? Do you have a question for a future PT Bios video interview? Leave a comment on our Facebook Page or contact us on Twitter.

When Was The Last Time You Optimized Your Submit Forms?

In online marketing, all websites should be optimized to invoke a “conversion” or a desired action that you would want your users to take. This could be a purchase, a newsletter sign up, phone call, or to submit a form for service. The latter is often called an online sales lead and could be a major source of revenue for your business.

How do you get more of your visitors to submit online request forms? The answer is very simple; make them as easy as possible for the user. The shorter the better, make sure that you have only the information that you would absolutely need to qualify the lead or to make follow up contact.

If you require that the user fill in over 10 fields, make sure that the page is set in a multiple step process instead of a long vertical form. This will decrease your overall abandonment rate.

Although this advice seems like common sense, on a recent poll of websites, 77% of websites with submission forms either required too much information or laid out their pages inefficiently.

A great tool for testing which forms convert highest is Google Optimizer. G-O is free and allows you to conduct A/B testing on variables to determine a higher conversion.

Case Study:

• PTG recently consulted with The BusBank, an industry leading group and event transportation provider for charter bus services to stimulate more quote requests out of their current website visitors.
• PTG analyzed The BusBank’s current online form, and determined that the form was longer than necessary thus causing abandonment by otherwise potential customers.
• Through A/B testing it was found that decreasing the length of the form by 20% increased online quote requests 25%.
• The Plum Tree Group offers conversion optimization as an offering to any website looking to increase revenue, traffic, and conversions. To submit your sites please send an email to info@plumtreegroup.net for more information.