The Power of Good Design

Since I posted links to some recent journalistic articles yesterday, today is a day for links to some web copywriting projects I've worked on recently. A couple have gone live only recently.

Because of the juxtaposition of their launches, just several days apart, these two projects forcefully reminded me of how important good design is: on the web, in print and everywhere else in life. It's easy to take pleasing design for granted, at least until you see its opposite. Then you come to appreciate it all the more.

Anyway, this site for Goodyear Tire's premiere tire brand, The Eagle, still has a couple of kinks to be worked out, mostly in the time it takes to load. But when it does load, it's pretty pleasing to the eye (at least to mine). On the other hand, I'm afraid that when it comes to this site, for a technology recovery company (which of course has a far smaller budget, and whose "designer" I inherited), a visitor may never get to focus much on the words, because the design is so, well...less than appealing. I'm hoping to persuade these folks to upgrade the look as soon as possible. This third site, which I worked on some months ago for a talented Cleveland-area artist and Vietnam vet who taught me something about western-themed art, came out looking pretty nice, I thought. I never did meet that designer.

In the meantime, that tech-recovery site will cause me mild problems of an entirely different sort. Because the outfit competes on a for-profit basis (at least in certain ways) with my buddy Dan Hanson's splendid nonprofit Computers Assisting People, I'll expect to take my abuse from him when next I see him (he's already peppered me by email). But then, Dan, a.k.a. "the Great Lakes Geek," has been giving me the business for a very long time (you can dip into more of his sprawling geek empire here, here and here). Who knows--there may well be a way for these two organizations to help each other. I'm hoping to explore that with them both sometime soon.