Generations: 

Lunchroom: 

Our parties aren’t like your parties: 

Our perks aren’t like your perks: 

Our co-workers aren’t like your co-workers: 

Our team players aren’t like your team players:

Our jokes aren’t like your jokes: 

Our doodle aren’t like your doodles:

Our big ideas aren’t like your big ideas:

Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars:

Our dedication isn’t like your dedication:

Our meetings aren’t like your meetings:

Madagascar Penguins Ads:

My grandfather told me this story once: He was buying some cloth and when looking at one of the cloth designs… and he thought to himself “that is so ugly!” He barely finished the thought when another customer came running in with her fiancé and mother-in-law and went directly to that same design he was thinking about shouting, “Here it is, the design we were looking for!” and bought the whole lot!

Read my full article here: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/design-theory/the-web-designers-theory-of-relativity/

1. In total I gained 105 new followers (15% extra followers)
2. I lost only 15 followers (only 2% loss)
3. 12 (10%) of the new followers followed me after I had stopped tweeting (my conclusion is they are coming from RTs by other tweeps)

Klout score for the new followers

As a social media strategist, I decided to enter this competition as a field experiment and address 2 issues, the competition itself, and the madness of Twitter-scape.

1) Choice of the #moretolife hashtag
Any competition should have a goal, usually this goal mainly benefits the owner (the brand) in some way and adds some value to the community through awareness, culture, charity, cause …etc. in Etisalat’s case, this could have been true if the campaign was mentioning @EtisalatMisr instead of the slogan #moretolife so as to increase followers or brand awareness, or they could have launched a parallel campaign offline using traditional media, and used a hashtag to promote this campaign.
However, the choice of #moretolife added no value to anyone, it didn’t relate directly to the brand, it didn’t increase awareness, and there was no rule to use the hashtag in a creative way so as to promote the Etisalat slogan – simply it was a meaningless choice.

2) Competition Duration
Have this type of competition over an extended period of time, which is 2 weeks only promotes SPAM, the top 10 were determined from the first few hours, and extending the competition more than 2 days only converted it into a game of musical chairs were the top 10 are exchanging ranks over the course of the day.

3) The Rules
One of the rules was that Repeatedly using, and thus abusing, the #moretolife hashtag will be considered SPAM, well almost 940 tweeps joined in on the competition generating around 45000 tweets within the first 5 days, the top 10 alone (1%) generated 64% of the tweets (almost 26,000 tweets) – check the chart below:

Summarizr Archive for the #moretolife hashtag

The question is how can (on average) a tweet every 3min not be considered as “Repeatedly using…”? if we take the top 3 alone, they are tweeting every 1 or 2min – yet they are legitimate contestants who are considered by Etisalat as not abusing or spamming.

Another strange rule was that a contestant will be considered SPAMming if and when the #moretolife hashtag in used in blank, empty, meaningless tweets, regardless of the confusion of trying to understand the difference between blank and empty, what is the definition of meaningless? see the below random sample of tweets from the top 5 contestants (I removed the account names for anonymousness):

Random tweets from the top 5 contestants

If Etisalat had another idea for meaningless, they really had to give us examples! – and do they expect to monitor almost 10,000 tweets per day to filter out meaningless tweets anyway?

4) Legitimacy
Only one main issue remains, the legitimacy of the competition itself – according to Twitter – a person is considered to spam If you post multiple unrelated updates to a topic using #!

Now, enough said about the competition, all the above is mostly straight forward logic to anyone using Twitter, the part that really surprised me was the reaction from twitter-scape, I was expecting a mass unfollow trend, mostly throughout the duration of the competition – which did happen, but what I never expected at all, was the even greater addition of new followers – I started out with only 690 followers on Friday April 29th, 5 days later I was 773 followers strong, taking into consideration that I almost lost 100 followers during the same time-period, that’s a really remarkable phenomena!

Twitter Statistics by twittercounter.com

The above chart shows the sudden jump in number of followers towards the right end of the chart, which is when I started to Tweet every 2min or so, another jump was in my Klout score (klout.com), which is a measurement of my overall online influence, it too jumped suddenly once I started flooding my timeline with tweets, see below:

Klout score

So the question I would ask now: is the rate of gaining new followers directly proportional to the tweet rate? I kept the type of tweets mostly the same before and after engaging into the competition, yes I lost some followers, but I gained almost double the number I lost.
The conclusion I reached is that a steady and constant flow of tweets throughout the day is a guaranteed formula for gaining a good number of followers, of course 2min between tweets is extreme, but I would recommend around 10~20min between tweets (100~140 tweets daily) as a good rate.

I also highly recommend reading the post Social Media Use or Abuse? by Doha Shawky which is also related to the same topic. – by the way, I’m stopping my participation in the competition, not because I’m losing, I’m actually in the top 5 since the start, and stopped when I was in 3rd place  but because this is Twitter Madness

It is greatly established that the default eye movement throughout the page (in an LTR – Left to Right – layout) is from the top left towards the bottom right, however; this can’t be further from the truth, by arranging the composition elements in a certain way, a designer can control and force the movement of the viewer’s eyes in and around the layout of the design. For example, the eye will travel along an actual path such as solid or dotted line, or it will move along more subtle paths such as from large elements to little elements, from dark elements to lighter elements, from color to non-color, from unusual shapes to usual shapes, etc. Graduation of size, and repeated shapes and size of related elements subtly leads the eye as well.

Read the rest of this article on http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/design-theory/visual-direction-in-web-design/

In my last article, The Gestalt Principle: Design Theory for Web Designers, we established the need to start any design with the containing shell design first before going into the details, in this part we will discuss the methodology of coming up with a shell design.

Any containing shape should have a concept behind it – but sadly, lots of designers focus only on a nice-looking shape that really has no meaning behind it. Or worse, they design an entire website based on pre-existing frameworks without even a moment’s thought for how an original design might bring some real meaning to the project.

“Truly great design has meaning behind it – it’s not just pretty shapes, filters or typography – each element should actually say something about the underlying project.”

At this stage, if you followed the methodology of creative requirements gathering (How to Get the Right Creative Requirements From Your Client), you should have enough input to build upon and work out what container shape or style your design will fit in.

Start By Collecting a Library of Reference Images

One of the easiest and simplest ways to find ideas is to have asked your client to give you some keywords to describe how he wants people to feel about his site…. energetic, fresh, young, solid….etc, by simply entering these keywords in any image search such as Google or Bing.

Choosing from these images the ones you like, you will easily find yourself with a large library of brainstorming ideas to start from…

Read the full article here: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/design-theory/concept-and-inspiration-design-theory-for-web-designers/

There is a classic case in which the tenants of a large office building complained about the increasingly poor elevator service. A consulting firm specializing in elevator-related problems was employed to deal with the situation. It first established that average waiting time for elevators was too long. It then evaluated the possibilities of adding elevators, replacing existing elevators with faster ones, and introducing computer controls to improve utilization of elevators. For various reasons, none of these turned out to be satisfactory. The engineers declared the problem to be unsolvable.

When exposed to the problem, a young psychologist employed in the building’s personnel department made a simple suggestion that dissolved the problem. Unlike the engineers who saw the service as too slow, he saw the problem as one deriving from the boredom of those waiting for an elevator. So he decided they should be given something to do. He suggested putting mirrors in the elevator lobbies to occupy those waiting by enabling them to look at themselves and others without appearing to do so. The mirrors were put up and complaints stopped. In fact, some of the previously complaining tenants congratulated management on improvement of the elevator service.

Read full article here: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/workflow/how-to-get-the-right-creative-requirements-from-your-client/

 Trying to come up with a good and creative design may seem easy for someone who has attended a design school, but for the 90% of web designers out there who never attended any design course or school coming mostly from either development or generally non-design backgrounds. The question still remains… what really defines a good web design? Is it just talent? A person who possesses some kind of “special” eye that knows what works out and what doesn’t? Or is there logic and scientific methodology behind all of this that can guide designers, critics and even clients into coming up with a great design.

This is part of a series of design-theory articles that will guide you through the basic principles of the design process. We’ll be focusing on the most important fundamental ideas that can make great differences in the final design.

Read the full article on Web Design Tutsplus: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/design-theory/the-gestalt-principle-design-theory-for-web-designers/

Trick #1. Getting several columns to adjust their height together according to the one with most content:

here we want to make the red DIV extend to the bottom of the container when the blue DIV has extra content, the simple solution to this is to structure them as follows:

<div id="container" style="background:url(X) repeat-y;">
    <div id="redDIV" style="float:left;"> your content here </div>
    <div id="blueDIV" style="float:left;"> your other content here </div>
    <div style="clear:both;"></div>
</div>

the trick is to insert a background image in place of the big red “X“  in the code that displays the background for both the red and the blue DIV, that way any content that expand either will extend the container to fit because you have a clear:both DIV after the two floating red and blue DIVs and it works all the time on every modern browser.

Trick #2.  A YouTube content widget imports video who’s titles are either in English or in Arabic, the problem here is that the font does not display nicely in both cases, if you adjust for English the Arabic looks terrible, if you adjust for Arabic the Englsh looks huge, and there is no direct or simple way to know in what language the content is in… or is there?
well actually there is, English content will be coded in ASCII codes below 128 and Arabic will be coded in higher values so the trick is to get any non-numeric random sample character from the content stream and check the ASCII code for it, if higher than 128 the it’s Arabic and you can instruct your code to inject a suitable CSS class to match the case and vice-versa for English.
For a listing of the lower ascii codes check http://www.klcconsulting.net/images/ascii-full.gif

let me know if you have similar cases and if my solutions worked for you (or not).