Marina Rodil. Irreverently elegant.

Marina Rodil Aka Lila Garamond is an argentine graphic designer who works principally in London, Argentine and Mexico and Spain, she performs publishing, magazines guides, branding, editorial work, corporate image and producer of content for sites and publicity, she is a freelancer and actually you can find her for booking in Domestika or his own web site marinarodil.com, even the site is some neglected is really easy contact her by his telephone number that the site provides.

She has worked with Campari, Smart Box, Camper, Icon, Ray Ban and BMW, you can review his portfolio in her website.

Amnesia and Icon Magazine cover

Marina preformed this cool and success two magazine covers for Amnesia magazine with Elijah Wood in 2015 and with Icon magazine of Prisa, with Gael Garcia Bernal in 2014, she was in charge of art direction and production, photography by Xavi Sancho.

Following I will try to pull apart his excellent design…

Alignment.

In the first cover Marina choose a simple centered alignment for make more combination with the completely frontal photography of the model and distribute the in two groups aligned on the top and bottom, but in the second one is more interesting that she breaks the symmetry and nothing is balanced and is all around the space.

aligment of editorial design of Amnesia and Icon Magazine cover by Marian Rodil

Proximity.

In this case she group and get close the related information and lead the attention of the viewer and puts away that groups to make space for the central image and focal point of the cover

Proxmity of editorial design of Amnesia and Icon Magazine cover by Marian Rodil

Color.

In first cover she decided a color photography because the skin and eye color of Elijah Wood easily may allow contrasting with the background, actually makes contrast among them, his eyes with his skin, and this with his hair. In the other place she uses the black and withe photography for make the face of Gael Garcia wither, and then make more notable.

Contrast.

This could be the principle that she most enjoys, this would explain too many things, the composition seems like all decisions she took goes around the contrast between two or more elements.  In the cover of Icon it is all about contrast, the suit contrast with the background and the shirt, the face contrasts with the background, actually the illumination over the face make contrast with all around, the golden circle globe with all design, and his hair with the background and the letters of Icon.  In the Amnesia magazine she decided a color photography because the skin and eyes color of Elijah Wood is a natural contrast fount with the background and his own face, she just to make contrast with the color for the text in the shirt.

aligment of editorial design of Amnesia and Icon Magazine cover by Marian Rodil

Repetition.

This is maybe the less important principle, just repeat in the first cover the typography for keep the two text elements related and the alignment with the title, and in the second actually she did not repeat no typography, color, size or alignment.

Repetition of editorial design of Amnesia and Icon Magazine cover by Marian Rodil

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We understand better how the principles of design works naturally in a designer’s mind to flow, and she achieves a fusion and balance among them, that looks really simple but elegant, she puts too much emphasis in some principles and not too much in others.

Almost the final post.

This week we learned how to optimize our website through a good strategy. Trying to fix or change something on our website without a strategy like this is like trying to fix or building a house without consulting an architect, and we all know how that can end.
So what can not be measured cannot be compared and what cannot be compared cannot be improved, tools such as woorank.com or the same Google Analytics offer a great help to know that and how everything is working on your website,
Like in a store even if you have a lot of love and respect for some products if they do not sell enough you have to go, or at least give more importance, space and investment to those products that are taking more money to the store, the elements in your website that maybe you like more, or that you have worked on may not be the ones that work the most, so you have to keep the best and most functional, and that means more conversions.
In the end, a website must be tied to a financial goal and a business, because it should not be a museum of the best ideas or best moments of your business.

The best friends in your business are your customers.

 

Good afternoon or evening, wherever and wherever you are, thanks for reading. this week I learned about a good strategy in social networks for non-business, I think you should choose the one that best suits your company’s goals, but I also think that the best for almost all businesses is facebook.Also, Instagram seems to be ideal for business.

Although I do not have much experience, there are many recourses that you can use to learn and to plan your strategy, like most of the client sales relationships, be strengthened with work and clear communication and take care with a good customer service. The agile and personalized treatment with the consumers is the best possible strategy. It is important, to be honest, transparent and in case of a reputation crisis, apply a consistent and predefined strategy. Identify the most participative clients and reward them, encourage interaction and not use social networks to communicate matters that would not be expensive. It’s not about getting fans and forgetting about them. Base the foundations of your community on feedback and interaction with your followers.

The Seller of the Mount: Your Website.

This week was interesting, I think the most important thing for a business is closing sales, it is useless to have the best product in the world, the best campaign in the world, with the best keywords, if you do not have a good website that closes sales and converses your products for money. Everything will be useless, in fact, I talked about an experience with this last week, I launched a small campaign and began to have some visits on my website, some of them with intentions to buy my products, however, my page had problems and when they tried to complete the sale, they could not, so I had to fix it.

My website could not close those sales successfully, so this is the most important thing, provide users with a good experience while they browse, but more importantly, they can close sales, invite and facilitate buying and paying. in fact, I think it is the best thing to improve the effectiveness of ads, which improve the effectiveness of your website.

More visits are more money, more money is more visits.

Good morning, afternoon or evening, wherever or wherever you are, thanks for reading this post.

This week at BYU Idaho. B250 class I launched a campaign with two ads and some keywords, it’s amazing how in a couple of days you can start having visitors, I had the site ready for a couple of weeks but I had not received any visits, but the same day I launched the ads, although there were only two, and with a short budget, I had 6 visits, in a couple of hours.

Something we must not forget is that we have to do more and better, there is an excellent and intelligent way to measure our results with a Google Analytics tool, which can help us translate the number of visits and the interaction to an amount of money. which is a lot of help, this is placed in the website through a tag in the HTML code, I had some difficulties to put the code on my page, in fact, I had to change the template of my page, because my first choice used PHP remote modules, so I could not modify some of them and place the code of my conversion, in The new template is possible and easy to do.

this is something that we must take into account if you want to make a page in Wix or another editor in which it is difficult to edit the code.

I am now waiting for results of my conversions. I hope you succeed.

The information is power… and money.

Good morning,  afternoon or evening, another week at Web Business Creation class of BYU Idaho, this week we learned something very important, first of all, to improve a Google ad, which is very simple and common, there are many tips that Google provides its users and many more in videos or tutorials, the most important is the experience and experiment to find the formula that works best for your ad or business.
Secondly, about Google analytics, this is the most important thing, the information is power, and what this tool does is provide you with very accurate information about your ad, and your website, I believe that what cannot be compared cannot be measured, and what can measure us cannot be improved, so it is important to know data and reports about everything that happens on our website: visitors, unique users, conversions, duration of the visits, duration of the sessions, how they have reached our website, so we can make decisions about the content of our page, our ads, and even our products.

I have a good history of the power of information, based on a true history because this really happen, I have a friend that I met when I went to school, called Plaqueta, who used to have a blog, you can visit el blog de plaqueta here, she only writes, she does not know much about technology either, but one day she saw a video of how Google Analytics was used, so he decided to pay for a service here in the city about this complicated but interesting service of Google, that would help implement this is his blog and have data on the traffic of her site, until then the only reference she had was the comments that visitors left, this was some years ago when Blogspot did not offer much information about this. So the office that I was contracting sent her weekly a summary of the data they obtained from Google Analytics, data such as the origin and behavior of the visitors on her blog, she understood it perfectly, and began to make decisions about what she wrote with help with this information, very smart, and then boom, she began to be very successful, in fact, some years ago a newspaper of national importance bought the rights of her blog and now writes weekly in this newspaper.

There are some things we must do to improve the quality score of our ad, but I think the most important thing is to use keywords, if it is possible in the title, be brief and precise, so when someone clicks on your ad, it will make us win money and not spend it.

Simple and Short, but Powerful

 

Good morning,  afternoon or evening, another week at Web Business Creation class of BYU Idaho, this week we learned about text ads offered by the Google Adwords service, this is one of the simplest ways to advertise your business on the Internet with almost the same rules of SEO, which makes it very convenient for new businesses.

Although it seems to be very little the 5 lines that you can use, two of header, one for the link and two for a short paragraph, let’s accept it, we have all clicked on an ad like these that although it is too simple, we were caught by curiosity or because the title spoke exactly what we were looking for.
Something that we can deduce, is that these very simple ads, work because although it is possible to hire other ads with images or video, they continue to capture clicks and customers.

In fact, this is an excellent way for new businesses to exercise the ability to advertise and summarize their qualities and present them to the largest number of customers in a simple and quick way to read, if you know what makes unique and special you can put it in a short google text ad, you may reach millions of people and among those are your customers, it is like finding the magic words that open a door, and Google is responsible for testing, according to your budget, with all the possible doors, and of course there are magic words that will open a bigger number of doors, that’s the fun, that even a small business can have a great idea that becomes a master key.

 

Google is already part of your life, some day will be your president, so, must be part of your business

Good morning, evening or evening, wherever or whenever you are reading. This time for the Web Business Creation class we learned about something very exciting, difficult and important for a business campaign in Google AdWords,

Basically, this topic is about the power that words have to attract your customers to the search algorithm of Google. although it is something that seems easy behind a science that costs some effort to understand it, when you do, you have developed a skill important for your business or other business.

A good campaign in Google AdWords should have in my opinion enough keywords, and at the same time enough negative keywords to make counterbalance, I think the balance between these two is very important. Negative keywords and keywords must have been chosen for careful study and be planning with the Google AdWords keyword planner, including a market study or even consulting statistics, or trends, or market studies that are already published online could help.

Another of the most important things in this topic is the negative keywords, basically are the words with which you do not want to relate your business and bring clients undesirable for your business, these are just as important as the keywords,

I think the worst thing you can do is that you have very few keywords because you are very specific ones that you already have, another way to ruin it would not pay attention to negative keywords, they are important, and if someone did not do a query,

This is somewhat complicated, even discovered that some universities offer courses to learn more in-depth this topic, however the most important is the experience and start to do so in real time.

 

Taxes, the less funny Part of a Business.

Good morning, evening or night, wherever or whenever you are reading.  This time for the Web Business Creation class we searched and discuss the less fun part of starting a business, the piece of cake the government will keep: the taxes and licenses.

Yoy may thing is bored, but there is nothing more motivating than not being in problems with the state. through this week research,  I read about a fact, that in Mexico around the 30% of the new business which fails, close and despair through its first 2 years, is because they had problems with its taxes declarations and was in troubles with the federal government.

The best you can do for your business is take enough time for being good informed about the taxes, and licenses in the state, country wherever you are. Ignore it would be like leaving your sun driving your new Mercedes carrying a gun without a driver’s license and without other corresponding licenses, maybe nothing shall happen, but if something happens will be a huge problem.

Actually, I discovered that is not overwhelming and hard like the people say, now in this days you must fill all forms and requires online and the governments are interested in keeping the things easy for the entrepreneurs, because in many economies this taxpayer is a majority and huge fount of contributions and employs around the 60% to 70% of the legal business.  Actually, all banking sector design too many products specifically for this kind of business,

Charging, the First Uncomfortable Silence in a Wonderful Night

Hello, good morning, evening or night, wherever and whenever you are. Let us review another week in Web Business Creations class of BYU Idaho. In the pathway to a new online business, we find the moment when we must ask the user their credit card number. Yes, this is the first uncomfortable silence in the conversation because your possible buyer stops and reflects if you are a true and serious business or a cousin of a Nigerian king who is ready to cheat unwary and innocent internet users.

Nevertheless, you can help that used to feel more confident, a carefully planned business, persuading by showing numbers, authentic images, clear information, a good original design for your website whit a defined purpose, and a trustworthy payment system.

This last thing is maybe the most important detail of all. Even there is on the web too many options, you have just a couple of them because you cannot add all of it on your website, actually I think most of the people feel more comfortable with the less possible number of options so it would be better if you chose only one.

Have you asked yourself Whit which of the payment systems your target audience or possible buyers feel more confident through purchasing? And how each one of this systems effects (if has any affectation) the profits of your website?

I really don’t know, and I honestly haven’t previous experiences with PayPal, I am not acquainted with, I always have thought is the old school of the payments systems, actually, I think I have never used it even once. Nevertheless, I use a lot Amazon, and I think the most significant issue with Amazon pay, (yes, Amazon has a payment system you can include on your website) is the confidence most of the web users have for this brand and its reputation, Actually, most of them have already given their credit card number to Amazon and are ready for use this system.  Is it like when you login into any website, as Spotify and you use your Facebook account for doing it, you trust in Facebook, you already have a count with, and that makes it easier and you feel more confident, that is exactly why Amazon pay is the best option.

You will use the trust most of the people have for Amazon, to work in your benefit, Anyway, I see as a good idea to have both options in my website, PayPal and Amazon pay.

 

Hosting and Website Builder.

Other week studying the Web Business Creation, this time we made a pause, to choosing one Host, and a Website Builder.

There is a lot of things you should consider if you want chose any of this two important things for a business. I think everyone thinks the price is the most important, and, they are right in some way, whatsoever, here are a few things to consider at the same time that the price.

1. The usability. If you are a beginner developer or you only want a want to have a website and make it yourself even you are not a developer, you must think about how much hard is develop your site in one specific builder. For example, Wix, and Squarespace offer a really intuitive and easy to use builder.
2. The help and accessibility.  Through the develop you will find some issues to you must to discover or search for an answer, even almost all Hosting companies, has a very good customer attention, you will discover that the best place to learn an resolve that problems is with the online tutorials, that other users already did. In this case, you WordPress win because has the greatest users community and you can find anything about any detail you could have with WordPress.
3. Mobile devices compatibility. Actually, the most of the visits you will have will be from a smartphone or mobile devices, so you must to consider how your website will look on it.
4. Previous experience. You maybe want to make a research of what sites are made with the builder you want to use, for example, a lot of popular websites about news are made with WordPress,  like the BBC or NYT.  But you maybe want to design for a pinter or music compositor, so you should make a research about the sites already exist, and you can read cases about security or problems and experiences of other users.

I hope this helps you. Be bold and do not fear to err.