To me anyway, Helvetica is a kind of paradox - it is both old and modern. When you stop to consider that this font has roots that go all the way back to the Bauhaus movement of mid 1920s (Germany), in terms of years anyway, it is very old. When you consider the Bauhaus style or international style with it’s stripped down (un)ornamentation, it is also very modern. The Bauhaus movement was by the way, the most important design movement of the twentieth century.

It is amazing to me that the Bauhaus style and as a result, Helvetica developed at all. Bauhaus ideas began to emerge during Germany’s most turbulent prewar period. Enormous political and economic upheavals and then a few years later, the disdain of the Nazis, created conditions that only left one option for it’s best people - leave to the New World, while the going was good. This was an important development because while Europe was still stuck with their old medieval guild and old job protection systems, the New World (U.S mainly) was more fluid, responsive and quick to exploit business advantages. In other words, more modern. The New World also wasn’t clinging to the style of the 19th century days of colonies and empires. It didn’t have that kind of baggage.

What really made Bauhaus and the fonts, furniture, graphic design and the architecture styles they created truly modern was the philosophy directly behind it. As it relates to fonts they insisted that typography should be used as an instrument of communication only. No extra eligible swirls or decoration for them. Just clean organization of ideas. That is the spirit of Bauhaus and that is what makes it modern. They applied that simple functionality to their furniture, architecture and graphic design as well, becoming a blueprint for the modern world. A completely new world born out of the new emerging, thrusting energy of the 1920s. A world of growing mass communication in radio and print. A world that was really speeding up, kind of like now.

Like to get a better visual of the Bauhaus style, take a trip to your local Ikea.

Shawn Richards
Senior Graphic Designer
Mystique Creative

Created to take a stand against the greatest threat our planet has ever faced, Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one hour to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming.

It started with a question: How can we inspire people to take action on climate change?

The answer: Ask the people of Sydney to turn off their lights for one hour.

On 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour - Earth Hour. This massive collective effort reduced Sydney's energy consumption by 10.2% for one hour, which is the equivalent effect of taking 48,000 cars off the road for a year.

This simple act has captured the hearts and minds of people all over the world. As a result, at 8pm March 29, 2008 millions of people in some of the world’s major capital cities, including Copenhagen, Toronto, Chicago, Melbourne, Brisbane and Tel Aviv will unite and switch off for Earth Hour.

Earth Day is the perfect time to think about conserving, saving, recycling, and discovering new, more efficient products to help us do the things we do every day. Consider some of the consequences of your choices, what should you avoid purchasing or doing, and what products are better for the earth. Even something as simple as turning out lights when you’re not in a room and switching to cleaner sources of electricity like “green power”, make a big difference. Every little bit helps when we're talking about saving the environment. Help make Earth Hour 2008 even bigger. See the difference you can make – visit http://www.earthhour.org/.

Paul Bies
President,
Mystique Creative

Unless you're going to invest a lot of money in advertising and promotions, the only way is to somehow manipulate how your customers find you.

We've all heard of SEO consultants who promise number one Google rankings. Lesson number one: Guaranteed rankings are a myth! Search engine crawl rates and algorithms are so different and unpredictable, making guarantees is irresponsible and misleading. However, there are ways to help get higher rankings than you already have, and this multi-part article will give you some insight into these. So don't forget to come back and learn a little bit more.

A little insight
Anybody can build a nice looking website. But a lot of designers aren't concerned about, or know how to build a site that drives business. Unless these pages are optimized correctly, you might as well take them offline, because nobody will be able to find them unless YOU tell them the url, and who can afford to do that without big ad budgets? Try optimizing for search engines. It's cheaper than using media advertising, and it works!

Some stats to think about
During a recent survey on user attitudes, 56 percent use search engines on a daily basis. 35 percent of those do at least one search per day, 21 percent search four or more times a day. Only one percent say they never use search engines. Note: everyone surveyed was an Internet user. 57 percent use the same search engine. 30.5 percent used several search engines, and 13 percent used different search engines for different types of searches. By far, Google led the way with 66 percent, followed by Yahoo at 55 percent, MSN at 54 percent and AOL at 49 percent.

91 percent of those surveyed, said they'd search differently if the initial search failed to find a suitable match within the first three pages. A survey two years ago prior found the figure to be 71 percent. 26 percent said they'd give up a search if they didn't find a match on the first two pages. Searchers are becoming increasingly discriminate due to the seemingly endless pages of matches. Women more so than men. 44 percent of women don't go past the first page. Only 37 percent of men agreed.

Food for thought — and this is only the beginning. Come again for more SEO tips.

Frank Beecham
Webguy
Mystique Creative

There is justifiable concern out there for the environment, therefore a colour shift toward more natural looking colours is occurring in consumer products. So predicts the Color Marketing Group (CMG), an international association of colour design professionals. This group has predicted colour trends accurately for the last 43 years.

So what does this all mean? Well according to CMG appearing “green” will be extremely desirable to a broad spectrum of people, be it corporate leaders, designers of all stripes, marketers and individual consumers. Not to worry, this doesn’t mean we will suddenly be colour blinded by various shades and tonal varieties of the colour green, it simply means, consumer products we buy, will look more natural. There will be an inclination for products to look hand made, undyed and unbleached. Textures and natural imperfections will suddenly and proudly show through the packaging. Natural colours are becoming very fashionable in the retail world but has been an important trend in graphic design for a few years now and is bound to increase. These include off whites, rock and soil colours and brownish greens while blues continue to remind us of sky and water, which is inspired by environmentalism. Meanwhile metallics are becoming less cold and alienating and are becoming warmer - coppery, bronzey etc.

Hand in hand with environmentism is globalism, which is inspiring a host of ethnic accent colours. These are coming from India, China and Latin America. Some of these include Moroccan reds and glowing oranges, rosy pinks, sunny yellows and turquoise. These colours exist already in home design and fashion but look for these to also show up in restaurants and hotels.

If nothing else, colours and textures set a mood but in this latest trend “to be green” seems to be part of a larger transcending movement toward a global view. Is this a temporary blip, with a lot of band wagon jumpers vying for consumer dollars? What of it, if growing global/environmental awareness is a result.

Shawn Richards
Senior Graphic Designer
Mystique Creative

We’ve been thinking about starting a blog on our site for some time now. We struggled to answer the questions that I’m sure many other business managers ask: Do we need a blog? How will this blog help us to achieve our commercial objectives? Who’s going to write it and maintain it? And above all this – do we have anything to say worth reading?

The answer to the first question seems self-evident after answering the rest. The answer to the second question seems relatively easy – If our content offers expert information, insight, and practical tips or tools, then not only does it build our equity as a generous brand but also it invokes something more valuable – dialogue with our customers and prospects alike. Having a blog makes this a whole lot easier, not to mention, a whole lot faster. And let’s not forget, from a marketing point of view – search engines are currently in love with blogs – so we get extra brownie points towards our optimization efforts.

As far as who writes it and maintains it – shoptalk will feature a number of contributors, all offering their own perspective, based on their experience, on a variety of relevant topics promoting success for your small to medium sized business. We welcome your questions, comments and criticisms and look forward to the opportunity to hear your views.

But hang on a minute, I’ve just sped past the difficult bit – do we have anything to say worth reading? Time will tell. You be the judge. Check back frequently – better yet sign up for our RSS feed, so you’ll be notified when we’ve posted new material. And please, let us know your thoughts – your wisdom will be a welcome addition to this endeavor.

Paul Bies
President,
Mystique Creative