Confabulations

Most parents tend to take their bed linen and the bedding in their children’s room for granted. They are unaware that a little bit of careful consideration can transform their child’s bedroom, turning it into a haven for their loved one to dwell in.

How, you may ask, can the bed linen make a difference to your child’s room? Let us explore some of the bed linen options available to a parent when decorating their child’s room and kitting it out with linen.

Gender Specific Bed Linen

You may want to choose a bed linen scheme that is succinct with the gender of your child. Traditionally, blue is the colour to choose for boys and pink is the colour for girls. Choose this and your child will be delighted with their bed linen, especially if the rest of the room’s decor matches. Be careful not to enforce gender stereotypes too heavily on your child though, everyone has the right to be their own person.

The Right Hues

You may decide to choose bed linen that will complement and define the mood of your child’s room. The colour of the walls and the bed linen can have a real effect on the vibe and atmosphere of a room. Light colours are cooling, whereas darker colours can be cosy and intense. Think carefully about the atmosphere you want to create in your child’s mood; it may come to define their personality.

Blankets and Quilts

It is also important that the bed linen you select is correct for the time of year you are in. Your child won’t want to be sleeping under heavy quilts on hot summer nights; neither will they only want a thin sheet on cold winter evenings. If you are unsure about what the right selection is, consult an expert in your local store.

Reception furniture, whether it be for a hotel, doctor’s surgery, office or any form of commercial building, will need to be carefully chosen so as to reflect the style of the building and the sort of impression that your business is trying to put across. For the most affordable reception furniture, most consumers head online in their search.

In many ways, you should choose your reception furniture with your customers or visitors in mind because it is them that it needs to impress. Taking a look through interior design magazines or websites is probably the best means of establishing which colours, styles and designs of office furniture will be the most suitable for your particular requirements.

In order to get the sort of first impression that you are seeking, you will need to make a bold decision with your choice of furniture throughout your premises. As such, you should choose reception furniture that really impresses and provides a comfortable and eye-catching welcome to your offices or business establishment.

Comfort should really be your main priority when it comes to reception furniture but you should also strive to create a visual flair with your office space. You should ideally opt for colours that don’t stain easily because they will be subjected to considerable wear and tear in a reception area and you will want to ensure that they last for as long as possible without any need to replace them.

When you purchase larger pieces of reception furniture, you should devise a floor plan beforehand because you won’t want to continually move big bits of furniture around. There are various ways of ensuring that you get the perfect furniture for your requirements but speaking to experts in the field of office and reception furniture is the most efficient method.

Bedding is something that is often underestimated in terms of its importance from an interior design point of view. Duvet covers, bed sheets and bed linen are obviously the main types of bedding on the market and choosing these is something which consumers usually do after taking a look through interior design magazines.

If you’re on the lookout for new bedding sets, considering their main features beforehand is a must – and this will include things like fabric, style and price. It is quite surprising just how striking luxury bed linen can be and those homeowners who opt for this type of bedding will instantly enhance the visual appeal of their bedroom.

As the bed is usually the first thing that the eye is drawn to when entering the bedroom, ensuring that you have chosen your bedding carefully to match the other interior design components of the room is a must. Keeping up with interior design trends in the bedroom is fairly easy by consulting magazines every few months and finding the latest bedding sets on the market and which colours are the most favoured at any given time.

To find the perfect bedding for your particular requirements, it is prudent to head online because it is invariably the most likely place to find all the best bed linen deals on the market. Buying new, luxury bed linen is a quick-win so far as interior design is concerned because it really will radically alter the visual appeal of a room without the need for too many other alterations.

It is usually the case that homeowners will know what type of bedding they like so they will already have something in mind when they head to the high street or online in search of knew bed linen and duvet covers. Luxury bed sheets are the ideal choice for homeowners who want eye catching bedding sets but also want to ensure that it offers the level of comfort that they demand.

In the last post we discussed how videos can be used by internet marketing teams as another tool in the battle for search engine rankings. Following on from this story I have been investigating other ways on which movies and animation can be used in SEO, and have come across a great site called GoAnimate. This website allows you to create characters and cartoons which can then be embedded onto blogs, bookmarked and shared around the web, with the potential to go viral should they get enough views.

In a fun activity that shouldn’t really be called work, I have been playing around with the characters, themes and sounds available on the GoAnimate website, however you can also import your own music and images from around the web or your own computer. Just like my video in the last post, I do not claim to have totally mastered the art of animation just yet, but it does give you a good idea of what can be done.

As a little bit of blatant promotion, my cartoon focuses on the SEO services offered at my workplace, 9xb.

GoAnimate.com: SEO at 9xb by fruitbat

When you get it right, the perfect website should be creative, usable for consumers and structured so that it can be optimised. What is the point of creating a fabulous, show stopping website full of flash and JavaScript, when it is impossible for search engines to crawl, consumers to see, and optimisers to market?  Every client who hires your company to design and optimise them a new website will expect the two teams to work together to create a finished product which does everything they asked in their brief. If the design/development team and the marketing team are not communicating, your site may well end up as a flop, with no traffic, no sales and no success.

This is especially important when it comes to ecommerce sites. People who use the internet to do their shopping have experience with different ecommerce sites, checkouts and navigation. I cannot tell you the number of times I have gone onto a website, put something in my basket, gone to the checkout and got my credit card out, only to abandon the transaction because the payment process was too complex. This problem is simple to remedy. Any SEO will be quick to tell you that a checkout process should be quick, and if it cannot be quick, then the stages should at least be listed so that shoppers can see they are progressing through the purchase.

The checkout is just one area where designers and marketers need to communicate more.  Another area of debate is product images. Product images need to be easily discernible from decorative images so that consumers know they can click on them and it will take them through to a more detailed product page. It is all very well designing a page so that the images float or overlap and look super nice, but if customers cannot use the page because it is all about looks and not about utility; you have not served your purpose of building a profitable site.

If you work for a digital agency, as a web designer, web developer or in SEO, think about how design, crawlability and usability go hand-in-hand. By looking at a website from a user’s perspective, you will be able to design a site that suits their needs as well as incorporating new technologies and special features.

I’m not entirely sure when it became socially acceptable to wear fashionable glasses, but now it seems every designer, ‘artist’ or vaguely well-heeled person owns a pair. Gone are the days when you could choose between one style of NHS specs and you were a source of ridicule for your able-sighted friends. Now you can spend literally hundreds of pounds on designer frames in various shapes and colours. If you’re uber-fashionable you might even want to get a pair of rimless glasses (mainly worn by architects and bald men).

It’s quite astounding that some plastic glasses can set you back £XXX, but that designer label isn’t cheap. From D&G to an independent fashion retailer, each new style represent someones ‘personality’ and is snapped up straight away. Now, the able-sighted are unfashionable and find themselves sat on the doorstep of cool.

Basically, I need one of these. Some fellow called Gopinath Prasana has designed this as the future of the music player. It’s an aluminium bracelet with a trackpad that you touch to flip between songs. There’s some sort of cushioning on the inside so that it fits snugly against your wrist and presumably doesn’t fall off when you’re cleaning the toilet, flushing away some £X00 of hard-earned cash.

It looks like something out of Star Trek which can only be a good thing. In fact, I hope they make it into a phone too so we can all talk into our wrists like on sci-fi.

What the hell? The classic “I love NY” logo, seen on such legends as John Lennon has been ‘updated’ to include a squirrel, a clipart butterfly and the impression of some grass. The cost of this malarkey? A cool $17million. Even at today’s exchange rates that’s a lot of kerblingy to blow on some graphics.

Is is worth it? I’m siding firmly with the “hell no” camp on this one. The original was witty, cool and iconic. The new one looks faddish and redundant. Allegedly this has been done to show that’s more to New York than just the city (it is actually a state that includes mountains, greenery and blah). But seriously, who cares?

New York remains the very definition of ‘city’. It is famed for its urban landscape and – Central Park notwithstanding – is synonomous with exciting grime, low-life glamour and metropolitan buzz. Trust me: no-one visits New York on the off-chance of seeing a squirrel. I can see one of those in Roundhay Park any old day of the fucking week and it won’t cost me a month’s salary for the plane fare either.

Faffing with iconic brands is a dangerous game, but luckily New York remains as cool as hell, regardless of how silly its marketing board are.

We came across the hilarious Photoshop Disasters the other day. It’s astounding what people sign off and then print – missing arms, heads obviously cut and pasted onto bodies, Britney airbrushed to the sort of metallic finish a sportscar would be proud of. We wonder whether it’s not just designers getting their own back on clients!