With Mad Men still being hot, there’s no better time than the present to rediscover the golden age of advertising. Google partnered up with some Madison Avenue legends to revisit their most iconic ad campaigns. 

One of them, Coke’s Hilltop ad campaign featuring ”I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke,” was reimagined as an interactive, customized banner ad that would let you send a free Coke to someone anywhere in the world with a video message of your own. Here’s the original 1971 Coke Hilltop ad created by the McCann Erickson agency:

And here’s the campaigned reimagined for 2012:

The project page also explains the technology used and gives more background on the creatives who made the original campaign. 

You can also see reinvented versions of the Volvo “Drive it Like You Hate it” campaign, Alka-Selzer’s “I Can’t Believe I Ate the Whole Thing” and AVIS’s “We Try Harder.”

More on advertising design:

• 10 Ways to Screw Up an Ad Campaign — on sale for $5!
• Advertising Design and Typography book
• From Print to Web recorded webinar

The design of this site is beautiful, but what I really appreciate is the unique approach to the idea of selling art. Rather than focusing on the art, it focuses on the problem people have: empty walls. It’s a subtle shift, but it makes the site amazingly compelling. 

Need more design inspiration? Check out the Web Designer’s Idea App for iPad, with hundreds of stellar websites selected by Patrick McNeil.

Social media, if done correctly, works for anyone! The web is essentially a big free-for-all of advertising and marketing and you should certainly take advantage of it. But that caveat “if done correctly” is the key to successful and productive client generation. 

Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Pinterest are just a few of the leading avenues to get your name and work out there. The first step is to plan what you want to share with your audience and prospective clients. The next step is figuring out which social media tools will fit your needs and which ones you can dedicate time to on a regular basis. Building a strong social network isn’t difficult, but it does take time. 

Let’s look at all the social media tools available and you can decide what best fits your needs. 

Twitter 

Twitter is currently the hub of all social media. As I once explained to a client, it’s like “a billboard on the information highway you drive past at 70 miles per hour.”

Maybe that’s too simple of an analogy. Even without many followers, by using hashtags (like #webdesign, #technology, #smallbusiness), you can reach out to a wide audience of fellow twits, tweeters—whatever we’re called—and join conversations. Posting images and links to Twitter and sharing your expertise will draw traffic to your website. 

One thing to remember when it comes to Twitter followers: quality over quantity. It’s not a race or competition. Spammers and useless tweets will just clog up your feed and keep you from seeing the tweets that are really important to you. 

LinkedIn 

The premier business networking site, LinkedIn is very much like Facebook but with all your coworkers instead of your high school friends and weird relatives. By joining groups, you can connect to prospective clients and improve your clout by posting discussions on these groups. As you build your own network, you’re also accumulating second- and third-degree connections exponentially. I’m a great believer in connecting with everyone, because even former coworkers who never refilled the coffee pot are valuable as they move around the industry.

It’s a captive audience there to do business, so it’s highly recommended for businesses but there is one thing to remember—connect with those who can use your design skills. I’ve found it’s best to concentrate on small- to medium-sized businesses for freelance work. If you’re looking for a staff position, doing LinkedIn company search will show you people in that company. Connecting with people who work where you want to work can give you an in when a position opens.

Facebook 

Facebook is a misunderstood social media tool. Personally, I just use it to stay connected with friends. But it can easily be used for business, because your friends, family and former coworkers are your most important network. They care about you because you have a personal connection. If you need a job, have something to offer, need an introduction or want the 411 on an opening in a company for which they work, they will be there for you more than any other connection through the web. 

Does having a fan page or setting up Facebook ads do anything for creative businesses? According to Facebook stats, it should be lucrative, but everyone I know who’s tried the approaches hasn’t reported much luck. 

Pinterest 

One of the newest social media kids on the block, Pinterest really took off in 2012. By pinning your best work on curated boards, you can share your style with the world—and they can share it with all their friends easily! But Pinterest has a terms of service policy you might not like. Read the TOS carefully, and decide whether you’re willing to go for it. If you don’t mind the possibility of a third-party being able to license your work, then the ease of use and SEO of your albums make this a viable marketing tool. 

Google+ 

The jury is still out on this social network by search goliath Google. Many people predicted it would kill Facebook, but Facebook is still going strong, and there have been plenty of complaints about how the circles on G+ work, with lots of concerns about privacy since public G+ posts can pop up in search results now. But that could be a boon for a creative business. I don’t think Google+ is worthless, but is hasn’t yet proven itself as a truly important social network in any circles aside from hardcore techies. 

Put it all together

The old saying “you can’t be everywhere at once” also applies to social networking. It’s one thing if you have a design studio and can hire a full-time social media manager, but when it’s only you doing your assignments, bookkeeping, client contact, advertising and marketing, you need to plan your social media outreach carefully by considering which sites are frequented by your prospective clients and which channels you can keep up on a regular basis. It’s better to have one really effective outreach venue then to have six that do nothing.

This yummy site combines two of my favorite approaches. It has the illusion of depth—the subtle 3D feel gives the site a real boost. And I’m a sucker for hand-drawn text. This combination in a collage style makes the site feel fresh and powerful. Love it. 

Need more design inspiration? Check out the Web Designer’s Idea App for iPad, with hundreds of stellar websites selected by Patrick McNeil.

ThemeForest is a marketplace for all kinds of web design templates and commodities, including WordPress themes, ecommerce elements and more. Designers who sell an item exclusively on the site get 50-70% of the sale price; nonexclusive items get 33% of the sale price. This isn’t a business for everyone, but themes are a real cash cow for many designers. 

LEARN WEB DESIGN WITH HOW:

• Build a full WordPress website in 28 days
• What is information architecture, and why do I need to care?
• Learn web design in four hour-long videos

A current trend in web design I’ve noticed is an interface that redefines the flow of a site. It’s not a new approach by any means, but this site approaches it in a fresh way. This beauty of a site combines many of these elements: the atypical navigation, lack of a logo, unique page layouts and the way the site fills the entire browser window without scroll bars. 

Need more design inspiration? Check out the Web Designer’s Idea App for iPad, with hundreds of stellar websites selected by Patrick McNeil.

Not what we're really going for when we talk about great design and SEO.

Ideally, a website will be created with good design and SEO in mind. SEO requires perpetual conditioning through content generation. While content strategy must play a huge part in SEO, a site’s design and development is increasingly important. In the last 12 months, Google and other major search engines have started using HTML and style guides as signals to gauge a site’s relevance. These signals affect a site’s ability to rank and, in some instances, to remain in the search engines’ indexes all together. Google especially has been removing from the first page sites that focus solely on quantity rather than quality. 

To design a website with SEO in mind, there are three core components to consider: 

• Speed: Google (and your users!) want websites to be fast. If your website is slow, users will bounce—leave immediately. But did you know this is a signal that search engines use as well? Speed can help determine a page’s place in search engine results.
• Substance: The days of sloppy 100-word pages created solely to rank for competitive terms are behind us. Force your client or company to create pages that matter, and design a website with user experience in mind. High-ranking pages clearly communicate in depth on a specific subject.
• Scalability: If your design doesn’t have the potential to grow with a business, chances are you have limited its ability to rank for key phrases in the future.

Designing for speed

When designing for speed, heed these tips:

1. Limit the use of Flash. It slows down the load time, and mobile products by Apple won’t be able to see the site at all.
2. Compress your images. Images are a huge part of a website’s success, but be smart about the file sizes. Use web-optimized JPG or GIF files, not huge JPGs—and don’t even think about TIFs.
3. Reduce server requests. Consider the amount of content you are using from external sources, such as widgets that pull in videos, feeds or other API-powered tools. 
4. Keep the page size down. I love long pages with lots of content. But most servers and browsers don’t.

Here is a list of 15 tools to help you build a faster site. 

Designing for substance

I already mentioned that 100-word pages aren’t dominating the top of the search engine result pages anymore. If you’re working with an existing site with hundreds of chunks of flimsy content, consider condensing them into rich pages that answer questions and inform the visitors. If you’re working on a new project, be sure to work with content generators to come up with a site map that serves users’ needs and organizes content well. The visitors referred by search engines will be much more likely to stay and return.

The Warby Parker website has style AND substance.

Well-written and well-designed pages are what build links, and links are fuel for rankings. Website content should use both images and text, and header tags are an important design element as well as a way to convey the importance of your content to search engines. 

Designing for scalability

If you’re working with an existing website, you must design with the content management system (CMS) in mind. (WordPress is one of the most popular and flexible.) Content editors and brand mangers need to be able to easily update the site, and fresh content is crucial for ranking well in search engine results pages. Web designers need to be designing for growth and scalability when building a website for a client.

Especially if you’re working on an all-new project, you have to consider future content needs. Creating page templates for specific sections of the site will make it easy for those adding and updating content to follow the visual standards that enrich the content and the user experience. This also ensures that the website is crawlable and SEO-friendly.

Andy Roddick knows it's smart to make use of readymade WordPress templates.

Keeping these three simple web design for SEO concepts in mind when starting a web design project will help your client or company rank high in search engines and be more successful. 

I love a gorgeous design that throws the standard formula out the window. This site promoting a mobile app isn’t anything like the typical solution. Usually, you’ll find huge images of mobile devices with a prominent link to the app store. Instead, this site sells you on the product first and makes the “buy now” link a tiny detail. 

Need more design inspiration? Check out the Web Designer’s Idea App for iPad, with hundreds of stellar websites selected by Patrick McNeil.

McNeil’s new book is a guide to working with and designing for the web. He demystifies web design software and technologies to help designers embrace interactive design. In this free webinar, you’ll get a preview of what the book has to offer and learn the top five things every designer should know about web design. You’ll also have the chance to win a copy of the book!

Note: Seating for all live DesignCasts is limited to 1,000 people, and registration does not guarantee you’ll get in, so be sure to sign in early the day of the event. (If you cannot attend live, you will be sent a recording of the event within a few days.)

Save your seat for the Virtual Book Signing today!

When your website concept is simple, it can work really well to support it with bold visuals. The design of this site is certainly eye-catching and compels you to at least give it a go. (It took a while to figure out the purpose of this website. Is it supposed to make you feel good or feel bad about your weight? In the end, I figured out it’s a promotional tool for a company that makes scales.)

Need more design inspiration? Check out the Web Designer’s Idea App for iPad, with hundreds of stellar websites selected by Patrick McNeil.