@Duarte (...well, and everyone ;-) Ok, a few quite interesting things have come up!
I wanted to take this to a teacher of mine to get his input - which I did today! He has decades of experience in marketing, copywriting, campaigns and advertising in all kinds of media and he teaches at the leading marketing school in Sweden (Berghs <http://www.berghs.se/en>) on these and related subjects. I'm taking his course on "Communication Design" (at my university, not the marketing school) which is about (verbally) presenting so to effectively get messages across. He is 60+ and has a non tech background. I had previously mentioned TW but only in general terms (it's a wiki etc) and he doesn't really know about it or tried it, which I think was good for testing the poster on him. I told him about the competition and the purpose - and then showed him Duartes poster. Well, first of all - again congratulations to Duarte. He was *very* impressed with the artwork and he thought it was brilliant in concept. He also said it was unlike almost all other advertisement he had seen for technical products, and that this was a very good aspect. He also had quite a few valuable and even critical pointers: Perhaps to the relief of some, he did not like my "Free*" and "*yes free, check it out" bits. (Hrmpf!) He pointed out that a web address in itself is a call to action and he means the interest creation in itself pushes this. Regarding the headline he said we should make *this* the prominent part, not the URL. He strongly suggests putting the headline above the fish and the URL *under* it, because the headline is what tells the story. And the headline and the URL should switch each others font size. BTW, Jeremy suggested (unless the technical disturbance in the communication made me misunderstand him) he suggests we skip the "www" and also the faint grey. He points out "www" is redundant and that the grey makes it look like we want to say something with the colors. Ok, possibly. Well, if we cut out the www, then the grey looses much of it's point anyway. I say we try it and see what it looks like, i.e simply "tiddlywiki.com" in one color. Wording for the headline: He (my teacher) said: Messy thoughts. Organized. Ok.... hard to argue with that. That really does say it all. He also pointed out that "scattered brains" and similar is not good if it is to be used outside of Enligsh speaking countries. I think he's right. I kind of liked the "Now." but I agree it is even more direct without it. (Again I'm reminded of the Evernote line: "Remember everything." That also really says it all.) Now for the absolute major crtitizism, and a *classic* beginners mistake: We have too much text. (I guess Herr "More is less" get's happy now ;-) And, somewhat to my embarassment, I only there noticed the font is actually also *much* too small! I had until then zoomed in every time I looked, but the poster is - well - it is as big as it is, A4. We MUST reduce the text and only take out the critical parts. It is the typical beginners mistake to list all the technical benefits but this is not the right stage for this. As he pointed out, just about every other IT system is supposedly "versatile" and "knowledge base" etc and trying to list every benefit we can think of is like a desperate car salesman and instead signals insecurity as if you're nervous the customer won't like it. He says we should basically have more or less only the "free and open source" and "own you data". Now he's not an IT guy so he may not know exactly what our target market considers important but I can't argue with his general premise here. Listing a lot there will not convince anyone any more than listing a few things there. And if the "too much" makes the text difficult to read, well then we loose it all. Regardless, I would at least want to have something like "personal wiki" included. So I suggest: a personal wiki ○ single html file in your browser free and open source ○ no costs, you own your data any platform, any time ○ desktop, mobile, tablet, offline or in the cloud (He would probably say this is too much also. Can we make it even fewer words?) Regarding the image (which he *really* liked!) he suggested that what comes out probably should only be one line, not many. I think that we here think of many tiddlers coming out but I think his point was to have "maximum order", i.e one thing. Ok, makes sense. (I fear it might look heavy if it's one thick black line though. Maybe paler? But should be same color as what comes in IMO.) He also pointed out that the supposed "messy" lines aren't very messy because they are symmetrical! I agree with the "not very messy" but hadn't considered that it was they symmetry causing it. I think he is right. He suggested having *one* of the downpointing lines diverge much more so the viewer gets annoyed at something. Ok, worth a try IMO. @Duarte... you up for it? :-) <:-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
