Sarah Designs the World!

(And blogs about it, too.)

Month: June 2012

Que Rico

The truth is I’m kinda in love with this poster I got to make recently.

For one thing, the client is the lovely Adaliz De Sedas, whose food is so inventive and fresh and delicious you experience eating in a whole new way.

A recently meal we shared: carrot salad with a vinaigrette made from papaya seeds, cashews and homemade pineapple vinegar  /  soba noodle pasta with shitaki mushrooms, pineapple, mustard leaves, and homemade coconut milk curry  /  and for desert: homemade avocado ice cream!

Have you ever heard a menu like this?!  Are you not salivating? And did you notice the theme: homemade! Adaliz and her husband, Klaus, are what I’d call the real deal — sincere, compassionate, hard-working people who live their values with a sustainable, home-grown, home-made lifestyle. Klaus is a bamboo genius and recently completed a BOAT made from bamboo. A BOAT THAT SLEEPS SIX. That he MADE. WITH HIS HANDS. Yeah, think about that next time you’re sitting around bored!

Anyhow, here’s the poster:

Comer Sano poster

(Click the image to see it in its detailed glory.)

Thanks to the PSD Dude for his tutorial on how to make text look chalky. The pretty font is called Alice. It’s available for free from Google Web Fonts.

Newsletter Design + Build + Tracking

This week we launched a monthly newsletter for the Art of Living Panama. It looks something like this:

El Arte de Vivir newsletter design

After designing in Photoshop, I hand-coded it (most templates give me the shivers), and then we used MailChimp to send it out. If you’ve never used a CMS like MailChimp or Constant Contact, etc. for emailing, it’s incredible (albeit in a slightly Big Brother way) the kind of insight it can provide into your readers’ interests and behavior.

For one thing, you can see how many people bother to open it. Here’s a shot showing where they are, but you can just as easily see who specifically they are.

Newsletter location trackingAnd of those people, how how many people click on the links within:

Newsletter tracking

This is all very nice, but what really rocks my socks is ability to see what specific links are getting clicked on, and by whom:

Newsletter clicks

Were you to click on any of those percentage bars shown above, you’d get a full report of who clicked on that link, how many times, and when they did it. Kinda amazing, right? You can see what’s getting people’s attention, follow-up more directly with the people who showed interest, and/or adapt future editions of the newsletter to provide more of that type of content.

It’s kinda scary, also, no? This is probably not news to anyone, but it seems as though there are spies not only crawling our facebook pages and google searches, but our inboxes, too.

Good thing I’ve got nothin’ to hide…. how about you? ;-)