“You explain, they understand.” That’s the motto of Tildee, a free tool that helps users to create and share online tutorials on any subject: how to get to your wedding reception, manage your Twitter account, fix a broken toilet, install Linux, bake up your grandmother’s famous applesauce. Tildee makes it easy to write your own step-by-step guide—although, of course, there’s a Tildee tutorial for that, too—which can be enhanced with maps, images, and even videos. Start sharing your compiled wisdom.

Your website’s design can speak volumes, so be sure that it’s speaking your language

As seen in INVESTMENT NEWS

By David Langton
May 6, 2012 6:01 am ET

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but are they really the right words to describe you and your firm? We live in a visual world, and you can differentiate yourself and connect with your audience when you use the right imagery. We performed an informal survey of adviser websites recently and found many to be using images successfully. We also came up with several suggestions about how improvements in design and visual intelligence could enhance the client experience.

Avoid the financial clichés.
At a recent meeting to discuss a website re-design, the first thing a new client said was, “No sailboat images and no compasses.” How refreshing. One of the first bits of advice I recommend is to stay away from financial clichés. From one adviser website to the next, cliché images abound — from the green of money as a color scheme, to the lighthouses, to the happy couples walking down the beach in retirement.

The chess-playing images that show strategy and thinking ahead are overused as a metaphor for investing. Such images don’t add anything to a theme unless you can use them in a distinctive way.

There’s one practitioner who really should use this imagery — Dennis Stearns, whose University of South Florida chess team won the Pan-American Intercollegiate Championship in 1976. The president of Stearns Financial Services Group Inc. has a real connection to chess, and he could come up with a distinctive way of using this theme. The rest of us should put this metaphor in a retirement plan.

Use images effectively.
If your only choice is to use sailboats, a compass or one of the reliable investment metaphors, find a way to do it that distinguishes you from the competition and adds some visual panache.

For instance, while Cassaday & Co. Inc. uses photos that are not unusual, it has coupled the imagery with themes in a professional design that articulates its mission and investment philosophy.

Another example from the firms we surveyed is Spruce Hill Capital LLC which uses common images, but in a unique way, with a beautiful color palette and thematic terms such as “balance” and “life planning.”

The firm created cohesive imagery that feels inviting. The use of a slide show of its well-selected images, cropped in a distinctive manner, further helps to advance the firm’s marketing message.

Hire a professional photographer.
If you are going to use original photography for anything, especially executive head shots, you should absolutely hire a professional photographer. The difference between what a professional can deliver and what your office assistant can do could make all the difference in how clients and prospects see you and your firm.

For instance, if you look at the executive photos used in the team section of the Willow Creek Financial Services Inc. website you’ll see that the firm does a nice job of presenting its team with good, professional head shots. You can tell they were taken by the same photographer. They have the same backgrounds and are well-lit.

On the other hand, homemade photos on your website that look like snapshots can have the opposite effect. Most financial advisers want to look professional, smart and engaged, yet we often see photos with poor lighting that come across as unprofessional and make the firm’s owners appear unprepared and unpolished.

Keep in mind that executive head shots don’t necessarily have to be you in business attire. Informal is fine; just be sure to stay consistent across all the team’s photos. And while you’re at it, be sure to negotiate the rights to use your photos in advertising, promotion and on your LinkedIn page. Unless you specify otherwise in your contracts, the photographer owns the rights to the photos.

Remember, an investment in your imagery is an investment in your firm and the visual representation you want to portray to your clients and prospects.

David Langton (david@langton cherubino.com) is a partner at Langton Cherubino Group Ltd., a design communications firm. Julie Couser, owner of Invest MarCom & Events, provided research for this article.

Actor, MIT graduate, and Mensa member, James Woods, was recently interviewed in the New York Post. He has a lot to say about the iPhone:

“I think the iPhone was as significant an invention as the Gutenburg press, in terms of the future of humanity,” he told The Post this week.

“Think about this, we spent a million years in an oral, visual tradition — cave paintings and tales by the fire. Then, when the Gutenberg press was invented, we started communicating in a very unorthodox way.

“Now, we’re back to a visual tradition. We’re back to YouTube, imagery, photo stream, some texting. But, by and large, we’re going back to an audio, visual tradition.

“The whole world has gone back to something we are genetically engineered to do — communicating through symbols.”

It also looks like Mr. Woods has been reading our recent blog post, Marketing in a Visual World.

Click here to read the entire interview.

This post originally appeared in the Retail Prophet and is reposted here with the permission of the author.

By Doug Stephens

As you read this post, you are digesting a form of content that represents a quickly diminishing proportion of the total web content you consume each day. The written web is steadily becoming a thing of the past.

By 2013 Cisco estimates that 90% of all consumer IP traffic will be video. If you think this sounds implausible, consider that even today video represents well over 50% of all consumer traffic. Social bookmarking site Pinterest recently hit 10 million unique monthly users faster than any other site in history. Infographics, a marriage of visual design and data, have become a common means of helping us digest and contextualize complex data sets. Even traditional newspapers are increasingly turning to the infographic as a means of getting the story across to readers, giving welcomed relief from the graphs, charts and tables traditionally used by media to convey data. Even resumes are moving from text to graphics, with sites like visualizeme.com and others turning the traditional, dull resume into a thing of the past.

This move to a visual web makes sense when you consider the avalanche of information that the typical consumer is coping with today. A 2009 University of California San Diego study estimated that the average consumer was already being exposed to about 34 gigabytes of information or 100,000 words per day. With dramatic increases to both processing power and the ubiquity of mobile technology in the 3 years since the study, one can only assume these figures would be even more mind-boggling now. Thus, it follows that our minds are seeking visual breaks — a respite from the enormous glut of data coming at us. Images and video give us that.

What it means for brands, manufacturers and retailers who haven’t already realized it, is that the days of telling customers about your product with words are coming to an end. Traditional catalogs, brochures and selling aids won’t cut it in a world where consumers are seeking visual and audible alternatives. Your word-based pitches will be shunned. The fundamental reality is that as our capacity to process information steadily increases, our predilection for words will steadily diminish. Our brains are subconsciously seeking messages that provide our eyes these visual resting points. In other words, the brand with the best pictures, graphics or video will likely win — regardless of what they sell.

This means reimagining your business, your brand and your product through all visual tools at your disposal. It means exploring your brand through the lenses of Youtube, Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr and other visually based social tools. It means revisiting websites with an eye to crystalizing thoughts and ideas into images and sounds, instead of words. It means showing consumers instead of telling them.

Welcome to the visual web.

This visual presentation, by Marty Neumeier, is one of the best presentations we’ve seen that addresses what brands and branding really are. It drives home Marty’s definition of a brand: a brand is not just a logo or an Identity Manual but rather a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.

Click here to view the presentation as a slideshow without the thumping Euro-disco background music.

Pinterest is the new social media sensation with over 10 million new users per month. Pinterest is an online scrapbook that allows you to collect images, videos and websites in one easy to view area with links or “pins” that you may share. How can you use this new free service to collect visuals?

So what is Pinterest?
Here’s how Jason Keith puts in on boston.com: Ultimately, it’s a big collage board for the Internet. It allows people to “pin” images (and video, but good luck competing with YouTube) of things they like and want to share with others. These can be anything from funny pictures, professional images, food, places, or the all important “gifts.” If you see an image online, you can “pin it,” categorize it and Pinterest automatically matches back to the site that it was pulled from. From there anyone can repin something, like it or comment on it. Keith warns that unless your website can immediately convert sales, then Pinterest will probably not be money-maker for you. But it certainly is a fun way to scrapbook and collect visuals and share them with others.

Check out Langton Cherubino’s Pinterest boards on visual marketing.

Who would have thought so many insights could be gained from eating donuts?

Here is your cheat sheet for the leading social networking sites listed above:

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service, allows you answer the question, “What are you doing?” by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called “tweets,” to your friends or “followers.”

Facebook is the master of all social networking services lets you connect with friends, co-workers and others and share photos, videos and stories of your life.

Foursquare is a location-based social networking service that lets your friends know where you are and helps you figure out where they are.

Instagram is the vintage photo sharing application that allows you to make your photos look retro by adding filters and then you may share them with other social networking sites.

YouTube lets you upload and share videos. You may view and discover the next viral sensation. What will your cat do next?

LinkedIn is the Facebook for grown-ups, well that is, grown-ups who want to connect and do business, post a job or get a job, or reconnect with an old colleague.

Pinterest is an online scrapbook where you can collect images, videos and websites and bookmark, organize and share visuals on the web.

Last.fm is a music service that lets you discover new music you like, based on the music you already listen to.

Google+ (pronounced Google Plus) is Google’s latest and most successful social networking service competitor to Facebook. Kind of what Bing is to Google in the search business. Or if they are lucky, how Pepsi is to Coke.

If you’re in the mood for a really good crème brulee donut check out our neighborhood Doughnut Plant on 23rd Street in the Chelsea Hotel.

Had enough of those calendars from your dentist? Just in time, here is a special calendar from Langton Cherubino Group. Beautifully designed and written by our Design Director, Jim Keller, the 2012 calendar is now available. It’s filled with fun facts specific to 2012, including tidbits about Girls Scouts, Spam, and a Magnetic Influx. Update: Free Calendars are SOLD OUT! Thanks for your interest!

99 ways to catch a customer’s eye.
by Anne Fisher
Take a stroll down the pain-reliever aisle in any drugstore, and you’re bombarded with advertising buzzwords (super, extra, ultra, maximum, faster ) and scary warnings about possible side effects. (Clearly, the product-liability lawyers have been busy.) If you didn’t already have a headache, reading enough of these packages might give you one.

Richard Fine, founder of Help Remedies on West 28th Street in Manhattan, decided to go a different way. The son of two doctors, Mr. Fine began in 2009 to market 325-milligram acetaminophen tablets in plain little white biodegradable packages that read simply: “Help. I have a headache.”

The minimalist design caught on with hype-weary consumers, and the brand quickly spread from small specialty shops to mainstream outlets like Duane Reade and Target. The resulting burst of revenues led to nine new products, for minor ailments like blisters, allergies and insomnia, in just two years.

Help Remedies is one of the short, vivid case studies in a new book, Visual Marketing: 99 Proven Ways for Small Businesses to Market with Images and Design.

“Technology puts it within the reach of small businesses to use the kinds of visuals in our marketing that were previously cost-effective only for large corporations,” said co-author David Langton. “Not only does the Internet make it convenient to find and hire design professionals, but online design tools make it easy to experiment with creating great visual elements on your own.”

Mr. Langton, co-founder of Manhattan design firm Langton Cherubino Group, works for huge clients like Ernst & Young, HBO, McGraw-Hill Cos. and MetLife, but about half of his customers are small businesses. For this book, he, his partner Norman Cherubino and co-author Anita Campbell combed through hundreds of striking small business visual campaigns including packaging, print and online from all over the U.S. and Britain, to find the ones that are not only eye-catching but have yielded real business results.

“We started with more than 500 candidates and spent about a year narrowing them down to the 99 best,” Mr. Langton said. “So being selected to appear in the book was almost like winning an award.”

The judging seems to have been remarkably impartial: The authors laud standout work by rival design houses like The Art Department on East 12th Street, as well as marketing campaigns like Mr. Fine’s that were entrepreneurs’ own inventions.

“We wanted to be as inclusive as possible,” Mr. Langton explained. “The point is to show small business owners some things that have worked for others, and might spark some of their own new ideas.”

That’s not to say that Langton Cherubino ducked the spotlight altogether. Inspired by Oscar Wilde’s famous remark that one should either wear a work of art or be one, the firm created an online game called MasterpieceYourself.com that allows users to do both: Insert a photo of your own face into a painting by a famous artist like van Gogh or Michelangelo (Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is a popular choice), then email it to friends, tweet it, or post it on Facebook or on your own blog or website.

MasterpieceYourself is so much fun that it went viral, drawing more than 100,000 users worldwide. Like the other 98 great campaigns in Visual Marketing, it also boosted the bottom line. A crowd of new clients told Mr. Langton they chose his firm to do their online marketing because the game made them say, “Wow.”

Read more: Crain’s NY.

Visual Marketing: 99 Proven Ways for Small Businesses to Market with Images and Design is the new book by David Langton and Small Business Trends founder Anita Campbell. Norman Cherubino and David have been researching, designing and writing the book for the past year. It is just what the title says. It contains 99 examples of how small businesses (and a smattering of small non-profits) are using visual images to speak to and connect with customers and the public.

The book is an idea generator and the words are sparing as the images and pictures are key to the teachings of this book.

Visual Marketing is meant to be thumbed through, when you have time. You can pick it up for a few minutes or a few hours. Put it down, and then pick it up later. You don’t really need to start at the beginning and read it.
Visual Marketing can be found in fine book stores everywhere. You can also order it online at:

Preview Visual Marketing: