Randy Krum's Blog, page 43

5 Ways to Market Yourself Visually

Visuals communicate complex ideas into something more digestible. Large amounts of text make it harder for our brains to find pertinent information in a timely manner. This problem can be remedied quite easily, by adding images and visuals into marketing yourself.

Visuals can help turn a complex idea into something more easily digestible, with less effort and time spent by the person viewing it. By putting extra work in on your end, you position yourself to leave a more lasting impression, and stand out from a pile of resumes. Especially when marketing yourself to a recruiter or HR department - making it easier for them to understand your most important work. In Cool Infographics, I cover how visuals are 6.5 times more likely to be remembered than text alone, and there’s no better time to be remembered than when you’re applying for a new job.

Below are five ways to start marketing yourself visually right away:

1. The Infographic Resume

[image error]Pinterest Board Gallery of over 900 Infographic Resumes

Infographics are an excellent visual tool to have in your arsenal. They are the pinnacle of displaying complex information in an easily digestible way. Either pay a talented infographic designer, or do one yourself. If you’re not comfortable using graphics design software, check out an excellent free option online like Visme.co - that will have you designing infographics in no time.

Take a look at this Infographic Resume Pinterest Board with over 900 examples for inspiration, and check out the great book The Infographic Resume by Hannah Morgan when you’re ready to get serious about developing your own.

 

2. Visualize Your LinkedIn Profile

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It should be no big surprise that a prospective employer will look at your LinkedIn profile prior to checking you out in person. LinkedIn allows you to add photos and visually rich imagery, so take advantage of these opportunities. If you add companies that Linkedin recognizes to your work history, your profile will automatically display their logos.

Examples could be photos of you working at a trade show, product prototypes you designed, or a photo of you giving a presentation (LinkedIn has Sl SlideShare integration, so embed the presentation in your profile as well). Other images or PDF files work as well, like an advertisement you designed.

 

3. Create A Visual Portfolio of Your Work

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Talking about your creative work only goes so far, you need to provide visuals. Visuals help the employer see what you’re capable of, and gives you the opportunity to control the work they see. Websites like Behance and Dribble are excellent options for creatives of all types. Not only do you get to upload all of your projects, but you get to interact with their creative communities as well - having the chance to inspire others, and be inspired yourself.

 

4. Create a Blog Post to Provide More Information and Visuals of Your Work

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A resume should be a brief overview of skills, previous employment, education, and best works. One page is best. If you would like to expound further upon your projects, then create a blog post - loaded with visuals - that delves deeper into your work.  Tumblr is a great free option for keeping a personal blog.

Include links to any additional content you publish in your Linkedin profile and even on your text resume. Make it as easy as possible for hiring managers and recruiters to find your work.

 

5. Content Curation

Similar to the idea of creating a blog post to highlight your best work, create a content curation site to highlight the best infographics, articles, quotes, YouTube videos, podcasts, brands, inspirational work, thought leaders, TED talks, and books you’re reading. Show your future employer that you have a passion for gaining knowledge, and are an expert in your field. Pinterest is a great option, and if you’re looking for a design-centric curation site, Designspiration has got you covered.

 

What other ideas would you recommend?

The World's Loudest Noises - An Audio Infographic

 

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Loud noises can be unpleasant. But how loud is too loud? The World’s Loudest Noises is an interactive infographic from Air Conditioning Company that explains the loudest noises in the world and how much damage they could do to your ears. So next time your air conditioning kicks on and you feel like complaining… Just remember, there is always something louder.

Turn your volume down before you start clicking!

Our initial attempt to explain how loud air conditioners are via an internet page was, in our opinion, a minor disaster.

An indisputable fact is that 99.999% of us haven’t got a clue what a decibel either sounds like or looks like! Let’s be honest, we didn’t even know ourselves precisely what a decibel was!

So we started to delve into the dark world of decibels to make the blinking things easier to understand. We initially wanted to create an amazingly informative infographic to best explain how loud our air conditioners are. However, we didn’t know where the ‘cut-off’ point should have been and we got somewhat carried away until we found the worlds loudest noise!

Despite all of our in-depth research, noise levels and decibels are still controversial and subjective. We found so many different accounts of how loud the same sound was. Indeed, most of our research showed that an aeroplane taking off is louder than a spaceship launch and surely this cannot be the case. Further investigation revealed that people forget to mention how far away they were when actually measuring the sounds. Also, based in London, we don’t live close enough to Cape Canaveral to run around waving our own decibel meter…..

Have some fun clicking around on our all-singing-and-dancing infographic below. Those of you who wish for a more academic approach can scroll to the bottom to check out our initial research.

An audio infographic! This is a new way to create an interactive infographic. Each of the sounds listed in the infographic above is clickable to play an audio sample of each noise. It’s more fun and entertaining than actually representing the decibels because there’s no way your computer speakers (or your mobile phone speakers) can reproduce some of the decibel levels shown here. Plus you have volume control.

I’m really disappointed that the vertical scale is out of proportion. The sounds should be accurately placed along the decibel scale, not just evenly spaced no matter what the values are. That’s just poor data visualization.

There’s a sharing issue that happens with an interactive infographic like this one. I was bale to get the embed code from the publisher, so all of the click-to-play sounds should work here on Cool Infographics as well. However, most people that share the infographic will only grab the JPG image file or click the sharing buttons, and that loses all of the interactivity included in the code. The sounds also don’t work on many iOS and mobile devices.

What other infographic topics could include sounds?

Thanks to David for sending in the link!

An Illustrated Guide To The Galaxy Of Women's Shoes

An Illustrated Guide to the Galaxy of Woman’s Shoes is the all knowing cheat sheet to any shoe that a woman could wear. Created by Pop Chart Lab, the color coding around the shoes d distinguishes the categories that each shoe falls under.

Can’t tell the difference between a slingback espadrille wedge and a peep-toe ankle strap platform wedge? The prolific infographic design studio Pop Chart Lab has you covered. The Charted Collection of Contemporary Footwear is a handy, color-coded cheat sheet of the many shoes the modern woman might go sauntering—or, in some cases, teetering—out of the house wearing.

It just boggles my mind.

Found on http://www.fastcodesign.com/

When to Use JPEG, GIF, & PNG Image File Types

Image file types are confusing to many people, but the Know Your File Types: When to Use JPEG, GIF, & PNG infographic from WhoIsHostingThis? Is here to save the day. Too many people just JPG image file because they don’t understand the differences.

Trying to save space on image files?

It can be tough to know exactly which filetype is the best to use. If you save your image as the wrong type, you could end up blurring a beautiful photo, losing all the detail of your logo, or turning a transparent background black.

If you’d like to know exactly which is the perfect image filetype to use for which images, and save a lot of space and bandwidth in the process while maintaining a quality image, check out the handy reference below for the facts.

Great topic for an infographic! A complex, confusing subject that needed the infographic design treatment to simplify the information.

The URL to the infographics landing page should be included in the footer so readers can find the original, full-size version from sites that don’t link back to the original source.

Found on LifeHacker

 

How to Take Better Holiday Photographs

There are many moments in life that we love to capture with a photograph. The How to Take Better Holiday Photographs infographic from Sykes Cottages is a cheat sheet to help you get the most out of each photo you take. 

Holidays mean different things to different people. For some, they’re about discovering new cultures, unearthing ancient history and indulging in fine local cuisine; whilst for others, they’re a chance to lounge on the beach, read a few chapters from a book, and do very little. But whatever you get up to on holiday, one thing’s for sure: you’re bound to take at least a few holiday photographs.

Whether you’re a snap-happy amateur or a kitted-out professional, capturing your holiday is important. To help you rookies take holiday pictures you’ll be proud of, we’ve created a handy guide on how to take better holiday photographs- check it out below.

Great “How-To” infographic that’s easy to read and understand. The hand-drawn, watercolor look also helps visually imply that the complex information will be easy to understand.

Thanks to Leanne for sending in the link!

Top Ten Christmas Life Hacks

The Top Ten Christmas Life Hacks article and infographic from Kid Rated shares some great tips & tricks for the holiday season! Use condiment bottles for icing! Brilliant!

Here at KidRated we have plenty of suggestions of where to go with kids during the holidays. But there will always be those days around Christmas when the weather is awful, you have so much to do, or even you have eaten too much that even the idea of leaving the house would never cross your mind.

So, because at KidRated we really do like to help our brilliant readers and viewers, we have come up with our top ten Christmas life hacks to help you through the holidays. Kids will love doing them so much that you might as well put your feet up and enjoy the few minutes of peace and quiet. It won’t last long.

Clear design that’s easy to follow! I would have cut back on some of the text, but they needed to include enough of the directions for people to be able to follow on their own.

The infographic isn’t currently part of the article page, and that seems like a major mistake. The infographic should be helping to drive traffic and links to the article page.

Thanks to David for sending in the link!

The Pianogram

The Pianogram is a histogram using the design style of a piano keyboard to show the frequency of notes in a given song. Designed by software programmer Joey Cloud, the site has a handful of preloaded songs, but you can upload the MIDI file for any song to create a custom pianogram.

The visual below shows how often each key gets pressed relative to the rest for a given piano piece. It is a piano-looking histogram, so I named it a Pianogram! You can take a look at the pre-loaded options, try uploading your own piano songs (MIDI files only), or download the pianogram as a PNG image. Enjoy!

This a fun visualization tool. Here’s Billy Joel’s Piano Man, just because it seemed the most appropriate:

 

Found on FlowingData and FastCo Design

40 Brand Logos with Hidden Messages

Some of the best known logos hide the best kept secrets. 40 Brand Logos with Hidden Messages infographic designed by Oomph! reveals some of those secrets. How many did you already know?

You probably already know the story behind the famous FedEx logo and its clever use of negative space. (If you don’t, read this.) But of course, it’s hardly the only logo with a “hidden message.”

British plastic card maker Oomph has collected 40 such logos—check them out below. Amazon, Unilever and the Tour de France are particularly cool. How many of these sneaky messages would you have spotted without the help?

You can’t cover this topic without the visuals, and that’s why this infographic is so effective. It shows you the logos with clear explanations of the stories behind them.

The footer should include the uRL to the infographic landing page, so readers can find the original, full-size version when they find this design on other sites across the Internet.

Found on: http://www.adweek.com and http://www.thedrum.com

The Internet Is a Zoo: The Ideal Length of Everything Online

Short, sweet, and to the point! The Internet Is a Zoo: The Ideal Length of Everything Online infographic from a partnership between SumAll and Buffer explains the fine line between when extra words are helpful, and when they become too much information. Whether you are posting a facebook post to your friends, or a blog post to your avid followers. This infographic will help make sure your posts reach the most readers!

Have you ever woken up in cold sweat in the middle of the night wondering exactly how many characters long a tweet should be to get the most engagement, or how many words long a blog post should be so that it actually gets read?

Ok, that may just be me, but knowing exactly how many characters a Facebook post should be or what the ideal subject line length is should be endlessly fascinating (and useful) information to most people who are active on social media.

So, to make all this data digestible and easy to understand, we partnered with our awesome friends over at Buffer to produce an infographic that shows the optimal length of pretty much everything on the internet.

Great design that tells one story really well, totally focused on the length of posts on different social media platforms. The footer should include the URL to the infographic landing page so readers can find the full-size original when the infographic is posted without links.

They went one fantastic step further, and created a more print friendly version near the bottom of the landing page that spans multiple printed pages. The pages are formatted to fit on standard Letter-size paper or in presentation slides. This is a great example of using the research and design from the original infographic to share the information in additional formats.

Infographic was found on SumAll

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Convert Your Street Bike into a Café Racer

 

Looking for a project? Have a street bike laying around? Then why not change it into a Café Racer?!? The Convert Your Street Bike into a Café Racer infographic from Fix gives some great before and after pictures of the conversion.

It was in the U.K. during the 1960s that a new style of motorcycle was born. Racing enthusiasts took their Triumphs and BSAs and added all sorts of racy-looking accessories and engine tuning components. Not content with a bike that just looked like a racer, the owners would often have impromptu races between the many cafés that dotted the English countryside.

Although café racers come in many custom forms, there are some commonalities that run throughout the design. With the lowering of the handlebars and changing of the gas tank and seat, the outline of the bike becomes more curved. It is important that the café racer is not clumsy in appearance. With parts brought toward the center of the bike, the bike becomes more visually aggressive. The gas tank and “humpback” seat (described below) mirror each other, accentuating the curved look.

Today, for the owner-rider wanting to replicate the ’60s look of a café racer, the good news is that there are many over-the-counter parts for the most popular bikes. Adapting some of these café racer parts to fit any bike is not out of the question but may require some basic engineering.

Great How-To design that makes everything visual! The sections are also broken up as separate images on the Fix.com site.

The infographic is missing any URLs back to the host site or the original infographic landing page.

Thanks to Jesse for sending in the link!