At monkeylogic design, we believe that advertising and promotion should serve the purpose of informing without deceiving. Highlighting the best aspects of a product or service is fine, but purposely misleading and making half-true claims is a practice we don’t participate in or support. The current Direct TV commercials fall under the category of intentional deception as what they show in their ads don’t always reflect the truth of their product.
The ability to expand the functionality of a piece of software can greatly influence your productivity and the life of the software. What has made Adobe applications extend beyond their general usefulness is the ability to add plugins that give you more power and functionality. Much in the same way you can do things with the Firefox web browser that the browser isn’t designed to do on its own, plugins for Photoshop can either shorten the time it would take to create an effect or give you the ability to create visuals that would be difficult or take longer to create. While Adobe allows for plugins on their programs, I’ve found that most plugins for Illustrator are usually less than helpful. However, there are a few plugins that aren’t designed to apply intricate visual effects to illustrations but can dramatically decrease the amount of time an illustrator has to spend in their workflow. (I’m not going to cover every tool available in the following plugins but will just cover a few that make the plugins worth their cost even if each aspect were offered individually)
One service that monkeylogic design provides that isn’t listed on our site yet is creating asynchronous online learning trainings for the web. The tool we use is Adobe Captivate, version 6 as of this post, and while Captivate does many great things it’s the quizzing feature that has some limitations.
When you run a business you have to stay aware of ways to move it forward but that also includes making sure you know who you’re doing business with. Many businesses start off or are run daily by making connections with other people and businesses via cold calls to people they don’t know. I’m not a fan of making or receiving cold calls but I understand that it’s part of business and for some businesses it’s a great model. One downside of cold calls is that the recipient has no initial information about who is calling them, which puts the caller at the advantage even though it’s the recipient that’s going to make or break a successful call. To make the call easier, some businesses gather just enough information about the recipient to make it seem like they’re not calling completely unsolicited.
Apple is renowned for their product design. The iPhone, iPod and iPad have set the bar for the area that each device represents. But what about the design of their packaging? I would imagine that most people would say the packaging design is just as thoughtful as the product design is without having to think very long. But pure perception doesn’t always equal the truth.