I stopped in a lower Manhattan Burger King the other day to satisfy a craving for a milkshake. As I walked up to the counter and stared up at the menu to try and find the shakes, I was greeted with an unfamiliar sight. This is what I saw:

Five Flat Screen TV’s served up a partially dynamic menu. Wouldn’t you know it, the item I was looking for–Milk Shakes–was part of the dynamic section. So while I was scouring the sections of the menu that weren’t moving…the milk shakes were coming in and out of the picture on the 2nd monitor.

Now, I since this Burger King is in Manhattan and right across from the World Trade Center, I’d say they bring in a pretty penny and can afford to have huge flat screen TV’s for their menus. And since New York city law requires that menus display calorie information next to price information, it makes the job of updating food items and calorie information quick and seemingly painless.

But what about the user? From my experience, and I’m sure others as well, a dynamic menu with words and images in motion every few seconds, was not the best way to get information across. Menus have been static for hundreds if not thousands of years. We know what to expect: Food items in logical groupings in list form. So when BK tried to mix it up and make it fancy, it ultimately goes against the customers instincts and was quite an annoying experience.

One commonly-cited (and totally false) weakness of Photoshop is that it has no effective text layout capacities.

If you need a dynamic way to wrap or curve a line or whole blocks of text, Photoshop is perfectly capable of catering to your every need. A seemingly uncommon demand for a raster-based image application, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used the following techniques.

They all center around paths, a vector-based function; text entered into Photoshop is also vector-based. Paths are essentially ways to establish a boundary that some action can be applied to. Most often, its used for masking or shape fills. Today, we’ll be using it to fill with text!

Since it’s October already, let’s try to get some text to wrap around a pumpkin–the end result will look something like this:

First, you’ll want to have your pen tool activated, with the “paths” option, “rectangle” function, and “add” option all selected:

Now, draw a rectangle in the area you want the text to appear in, overlapping the part you don’t want it to include. We’ll cut that area out in a sec:

Now, here’s the key: we want to get rid of the portion that’s overlapping. You can use the oval tool, or the pen tool to create an arc to your liking. BUT be sure you now have the “subtract” option selected:

Now comes the insertion of text. I find it most useful to type up my text in TextEdit/Notepad and paste it in. Have the text tool active, and click in the box path: you’ll notice it turns into the usual “I” shape, but with a dotted circle around it. Go ahead and paste or type your text. You’ll wind up with this:

On a Mac, “Command-Enter/return” will set your changes. The awesome thing is the path is also set, and you can resize the path like you would a regular text box, only it’ll retain the area you cut out!

Now, let’s do a single line of text, curving around the top and above the text we just added. This is easier to do. With the pen tool selected, draw a multi-point arc around the object:

Now, with the text tool, hover over the very beginning point of your arc, and click. You’ll notice, again, that it has that dotted circle around the I. Now type in or paste in your text. “Command-Enter/Return” will set the edit. If you wind up getting a selection active after, just deselect. You’ll wind up with this:

Now, you’ve got the text placed! You’ll notice that at the pivot point, things can get a little cramped, so if you so desire, you can do two paths, one for each word. Each path itself can be as wavy or angular as you like–customization is endless.

The final result, after some editing:

When we first created our logo, we were extremely excited. We spent hours upon days upon weeks working on a logo design. It was one of the hardest projects we’ve had to date, and when we arrived at something we loved, it was the biggest sigh of relief. I’ve always been a fan on looking back and seeing the path that we’ve taken to get to where we are now, and I’d like to share a few of the logos that we worked on that didn’t make the final cut.

We normally start off logo projects with some rough sketches to get some ideas down. There is a lot you can accomplish in a short amount of time when sketching out logos first. And it doesn’t require you to be in front of a computer. Usually when we go digital, it’s time to start working on the polish of the ideas that have come from sketches. So here are some of the digital mockups of logos we didn’t choose.

There are tons more that we went through, but way too many to put in one post. As you see there were a few common themes going through those logos. We were confident on the light blue, and we knew we wanted type to be apart of our logo.

So there you have it, a peak behind the curtain on the path of the Tridea logo. We know that we made the right decision on our final logo, and we can’t that it couldn’t represent us any better. It communicates, it’s creative, and it’s simple. Just how we like it!

So it’s been a rough couple of weeks for the US economy. Well, heck, a rough quarter, a rough year. I was amazed to hear about the panic caused by a 6 year old bankruptcy story for United Airlines that resurfaced on the internet a few weeks ago and caused a 76% slide in share value before it was discovered to be unfounded and old news. Shares rebounded once the news was cleared up and savvy investors willing to take a chance could have made out handsomely.

Back in May we had the Bear Sterns bankruptcy sell-off to JP Morgan. This past week it broke that Lehman Brothers was filing for bankruptcy which caused a miserable few days for financial markets. In a move that many feel should have come sooner, the government stepped up and offered a bailout plan for Wall Street with the hefty figure of 700 billion. Yes, billion with a “b”.

In a tough economic time, dollars companies spend on advertising are sure to go down. Where, in times like this, where is it best to put ones money? In your website!

We’re in the midst of a Web 2.0 shift, one in which online communities and connections with users are being formed as opposed to old static sites and pushing content one-way onto the users. Social networks are growing and social media opportunities offer low-cost (and often free) ways to interact with your user-base. Companies now utilize fan pages on Facebook as well as creating Facebook Apps that can integrate into the site itself.

And let’s not forget the mobile web. With the Apple upgrading the iPhone’s data speeds to 3G and opening up the Apps store, there’s a been a flood of mobile web application development. Before the end of the year Google’s Android cellphone operating system will debut and there will be yet another major reason to focus energies on mobile-based websites.

So instead of shelling money out for advertising, focus on your site. Create rich content. Explore social media opportunities. Work on making a iPhone/mobile optimized version of your site. While the economy may be going through some rough times, web based business presence continues to grow and you can flourish if you focus on it.

In keeping with my previous themed posts on Twitter Business Usage and the Update on that post, I’d like to touch on another business interaction with Twitter: AMC’s show Mad Men.

If you haven’t seen Mad Men, I’d suggest watching it. It’s quite good:

Set in 1960s New York, the sexy, stylized and provocative AMC drama Mad Men follows the lives of the ruthlessly competitive men and women of Madison Avenue advertising, an ego-driven world where key players make an art of the sell. via

Clearly, in a show that deals with advertising, you’d expect they’d be creative in their marketing efforts. That’s what it seemed like when the show’s main character, Don Draper, showed up on Twitter posting updates as if he was a real person. Subsequently, other characters began popping up on the service. And then in a knee-jerk act of foolishness, AMC’s lawyers sent a DMCA takedown notice to Twitter and it appeared the jig was up.

Luckily, turns out AMC’s web marketing company, Deep Focus, talked some sense into their client and got them to realize that FREE PROMOTION is not actually a bad thing. Thankfully, their twitter accounts were restored and allowed to continue and fans interact with them daily.

So the moral of the story: instead of being afraid of social media, businesses should embrace it and work on creative ways of interacting with their customer base. Oh hey, did I mention Tridea is on Twitter?