I delved into the SXSW session with Adobe and Soul Pancake called Content Creation With Soul. Adobe sessions were tagged with #AdobeSXSW, and many were tweeted by Adobe’s various handles, like @AdobePremiere and @AdobeAE.
There are a lot of takeaways from the session, but I’ll be brief in this post.
The panel talked about Kid President’s Pep Talk video. I remember when my mother shared the video with me and how inspired she felt after watching it. I, too, felt inspired to share the video because it just makes you feel so great. In the panel discussion, SoulPancake CEO and Executive Producer Shabnam Mogharabi talked specifically about their mission to create digital content that makes people feel great. They’ve generated donations to various causes and have truly made a difference. How exciting and inspiring — a media production company that can exist solely to create content that makes people feel good and inspires them to contribute to a cause.
This video generated more than $60,000 toward charities that support those living with osteosarcoma.
Seeing how widely these feel-good videos are shared gives me something to think about in advertising.
I will do a hobby site. I would very much like it to be about my crocheting, although I know you said it should be different. On a limb, I am outting myself as a total loser: besides work and school, I don’t really have any other hobbies besides playing with string and turning it into useful objects and wearable garments. Insert frown face.
Craftsy is a really fun site that makes me feel as excited as I was when I was a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons. There are tutorials on every kind of artisan craft you could imagine, and more are being added every day. I was happy to learn they have a great, responsive web design that adapts to your browser size. No device detection appears to be at play, since browsing the site from my iPhone showed me the same format.
Jo-Ann’s website is also responsive, but the large banner at the top of the homepage doesn’t scale down with the rest of the site and navigation. It remains huge at the top of the screen when you decrease the browser size on a desktop. However, when browsing from a mobile device, it appears device detection serves up a differently formatted banner.
Knitpicks.com is one of my favorite sites to buy yarn. It is easily navigable, and I can always find what I’m looking for quickly. The alternating web banners on the homepage entice and inspire knitters and crocheters with brilliant colors, high quality photographs, and relevant copy that invites the shopper to click deeper into the site. The copy and overall structure of the pages provide enough contrast so the shopper can easily click and browse without struggling to read. I consistently browse this site because of how easy it is to use and find what I might want to buy.
Eat24 is my favorite way to order food delivery to my apartment when I’m completely occupied with work and school. The search bars to locate restaurants that deliver to your house are the most prominent thing on the page. There isn’t a lot of clutter on the site either, keeping the viewer focused on the matter at hand: locating food for the tummy. Throughout the ordering process, the menu is extremely easy to use, and the copy is short and to-the-point, providing a fast and easy experience. Although the website design isn’t “responsive,” their mobile app provides mobile users a fast and easy way to order food as well.
Magda Sayeg, from Austin, TX, is one of my favorite artists. She designs and executes large-scale knit and crochet art installations, usually in very public places like downtown Austin, the Google building in NYC, or even Etsy’s headquarters. I’ve always loved the layout of her site. The simplicity of the layout provides a stark contrast to the vibrancy of the images of her installations, inviting the viewer to click through her gallery. Because of the lack of clutter, the navigation floating at the top right is easy to find, although not distracting to the images below it. Although her “Store” link doesn’t work, overall it’s a great website for an artist.
Texas State Culture Pics
I chose these three photos because I took them during my first few days at Texas State. Every morning, I parked in the commuter lot at Strahan Coliseum and walked through Sewell Park, J.C. Kellam, and up the hill to Old Main. I would get so excited about spotting wildlife, and I took pictures whenever I could. This is one of the key memories I’ll have when remembering my time at Texas State University.
Photo by Taylor RichardsonPhoto by Taylor RichardsonPhoto by Taylor Richardson
I’m not an avid tweeter, but I’m opening up to it for this class. I saw an article online about the latest Twitter handle to take Austin by “winter storm” — @AISDclosures is really the only thing parents are finding funny about the recent “snow days” and delayed opening fails.
For the exercise, I used the app on my iPhone, and I both re-tweeted using the easy route as well as copying the tweet and pasting with my own comments. It made me appreciate the short and sweet tweets that actually leave you room to comment. Most of the tweets in my feed were too long for me to add anything to the end of.
So that was a cool discovery — the shorter the tweet, the better engagement you’ll get from others that add on to it.
Also, I received some spam tweets shortly after I RT’d @TorchyTaco and @LearnVest. I did receive a follow from two people — I’m not sure if one of them is a robot.
Ethan Zuckerman’s 6-minute History of the Internet not only sets the record straight as to who the “Father of the Internet is” (not Al Gore), it puts blogging, social media, and wikis into historical context and explains how these were all natural progressions of the advent of the Internet.
In the Nerds 2.0.1 Timeline, I learned more about the development of the internet prior to it becoming commercially available. My family signed up for AOL in 1995, and I remember a time when websites were limited. You had to know the exact address in order to find them or else rely on the “shortcuts” AOL provided you in its interface. The sound of the dial-up will always bring back memories. 🙂
The Internet: A Decade Later helped me realize the impact the internet has had on pop culture. For example, in 2002, the most-searched items were topics that originated offline, such as Spiderman, Shakira, and the Olympics. By 2012, we see online-originated topics becoming more prevalent, such as Rebecca Black, Google+, and Pinterest. Content created online is now popping up offline in the news, entertainment shows like Tosh.0, and in other aspects of pop culture.
The First Website: I never before thought of the web as a cooperative. The “How can I help?” link made that sink in. It says,
There are lots of ways you can help if you are interested in seeing the web grow and be even more useful… The web needs raw data…
In The Evolution of the Web, I was very interested to learn the evolution of the cookie, as well as all the different types of cookies that are now available. I am somewhat familiar with them, having worked at a financial institution and in the marketing department, but I had no idea that there were so many different types.
How Search Engines Work: I had no idea that some search engines only index the page title. That explains why some of our SEO advice at work tells us to drop a bunch of keywords in the page title. I’ve always found that tacky and annoying, but now I see the importance.
From: How Search Engines Work via outofotheblue.net
Get More Out of Google: Holy cow! There are SO MANY different ways to search Google. I had no idea it had its own language, similar to code, that can help you produce the results you want much faster than typing in keywords and combing through articles.
On Twitter, I started following WOCCU, the World Council of Credit Unions, because they sponsored and coordinated the internship I recently participated in. They serve as a connector between all the different credit unions around the world — many of which are “doing it better” than the CUs in the United States.
I also started following the CU Water Cooler because they post content, articles, and event information relevant to CU employees and fans of cooperatives.
Lastly, I chose Filene Research because they post content relevant to consumer finance in general. While I personally align with the cooperative/ credit union movement in the US, Filene posts information and consumer research that will impact both banks and cooperatives.
I’m Taylor, and I’m a senior advertising major here at Texas State University. I just got back from a two-week internship all over southern Brazil that focused on understanding the role that the Brazilian credit union system SICREDI plays in the cooperatives all over southern Brazil. It was life-changing, to say the very least, and I apologize in advance if I talk about it too much.
I am currently working full-time as a Marketing Specialist at Amplify Credit Union in north Austin, which keeps me very busy. In my free time, I crochet and design clothing and accessories. This year, my goal is to brand myself as a designer and have a website that showcases my work.
I have some experience with web developing, but I know this class is going to help fill in some of the gaps in my understanding of how everything fits together. I could really use some help in creating secure forms, and if we can learn how to have them feed into databases, that would be even more super! I am also very interested in data visualization.
My Twitter handle is @taytillaria but I admittedly don’t use it very often. I will do my best to use it for class.
