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Around town we see many examples of the And More Sign Disease — Computers Plus, Floors & More, and Monuments and More, and more! Home Decor & More has it bad — they have a big sign and more! The obvious question is, “More What?” If you have more, why not just say what it is? Or do they think passersby care enough to play a guessing game? No, it’s just Bad Sign Design.

We just don’t get it. One of the top three cities we get visits from is Tyler, TX. A little over half the visits come through Technorati.com, just under a fifth visit directly, about 15% through flickr.com, about 7% from Experts Exchange, and the rest from search engines and a MySpace profile. How can this be?

To clear up one mystery, that’s Johnny Horton, who was raised in Rusk, TX which is about 41 miles south of Tyler, singing in the video.

The Baxter Bulletin is a local newspaper here in Mountain Home. Sometimes I visit it online just to see what’s going on, but lately I visit it less and less. Today I went there and after I opened a few pages they wanted me to fill out a “Quick Survey”. I clicked the button that said: Why do I have to fill out this form? They gave a pop-up talking about better advertisements. Apparently they didn’t read this post that talks about us using Firefox with the extension Adblock. I didn’t fill this form out, and will not fill this form out. I think it is just plain wrong and so not Web 2.0. Yes, that means that either I have to delete my cookies every time I visit the site if I want to see the pages or I will just have to stop going there. I think I will choose the latter.

Bad Process Design Baxter Bulletin, telling your users to help you put more stuff on your site they don’t want to see. Shame on you.

Yes, tomorrow is the Day of the Ninja, that day when all nonjas can be ninjas too. Only the tigers survive, and even they have a tough time. Prepare well, your test is at hand!

Naming:


It took us a month to come up with Design Ninjas as a name, mostly because every time that we found a name that excited us, the matching domain name was taken. It was a painful and long process. Why Ninjas? We love to wrestle, and no not girly girl wrestling, real wrestling where there are bruises and sore muscles. We love to sneak up and scare each other. We go stealth sometimes and study and watch the human race to figure out why they act the way they do. These are our Ninja qualities and then there are our White and Nerdy qualities. We bring these qualities together to form the Design Part of the name where we do Web, Brand, and Process Design. Why do We Kick Ass? Because we can!


Logo:


Bill strongly recommended (in the form of saying “No Way In Hell”) me early on that I was to steer clear of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle imagery, I was a fan of them as a kid. I was also a fan of Michael Jackson’s, but we don’t want to go there. We went through a few sketches of Ninjas in masks, globes, and eyes. Then we had to dig deeper because none of these things were speaking to us. Bill then pointed me in the direction of Shurikens, or Throwing Stars. There are a bunch of kick ass throwing stars out there, so that made it easy. We sketched about 8 different styles and quickly found the one that was perfect. Then we were on to search for a font that complimented the logo and the name. We decided on the Forte font because it was readable, seemed Ninja like, and went nicely with the throwing star, in other words the font tied it all together. Now, we had our logo weapon that we could go forth and Kick Ass with. It’s always nice to have good tools, and we consider our Shuriken a great tool in the Branding Adventure.


Website, Blog, or Both:


This was a challenging problem. You see, Bill surfs in a reduced browser window, so he likes his sites liquid, plain, and functional (otherwise known as butt ugly sites). I surf full screen and I like my sites beautiful, yet still functional, maybe it’s just a girl thing. We came up with about five different designs, but could not settle on one. I found myself bored with anything we could add as text on a website. It seemed like it had all been said before. You got your welcome page, services, about, and contact..blah blah blah blah. We wanted something that was instantly engaging to people and would help start conversations, so we decided to have a blog as our landing page. We are still looking at adding more pages, but keeping this as the main landing page. We believe regular websites have their place, we even have one of those here, but for Design Ninjas, we wanted to give people a better sense of who we are and start conversations that way. Then if they are interested in who we are, we can talk about what we do.

On Hit Tail, we discovered that one person found our site by searching videos de ninjas here. We did a search of our own on YouTube and found that Tuesday is Ninja Day! On this day all nonjas can pretend to be ninjas. Who knew?

We’ve had a lot of people ask how Bill ended up here in Mountain Home, Arkansas from Sacramento. Last week Paste This suggested we tell this story, so we’ve decided to do just that.

We usually refer to it as our Bait and Switch story.

Bill and I met through a mutual friend Steve LeBlanc. Steve and Bill had lived in Santa Fe 15 or so years earlier. Steve introduced Bill and I through the Internet. Now normally I would not have spoken to anyone on the Internet I didn’t know, but I figured Bill had a good reference so he must be ok. After countless hours on the phone and online I flew out to Sacto for some Microsoft training. That was it, we knew we had to be together. So, every other weekend we flew back and forth. The plan was for me to move with my two kids to Sacto. I loved it there and so did Bill. Well, after Bill and I got married I chickened out (didn’t want to quit my job, sell my house, or move my kids). So, I delievered the news that there was no way I was moving to California now. At that time I was still living in Arkansas and he in California. So after a day of him thinking this over he decided he would journey to The Natural State to be with me.

Today marks our two year wedding anniversary, and it’s been a great adventurous two years!!

Tomorrow is our second wedding anniversary. It’s been an exciting two years full of Romance and Adventure. I’m just crazy in love with My Darling Misty!

From thefreedictionary.com:

Slogan
1. A phrase expressing the aims or nature of an enterprise, organization, or candidate; a motto.
2. A phrase used repeatedly, as in advertising or promotion….
3. A battle cry of a Scottish clan.
Tag line
1. An ending line, as in a play or joke, that makes a point.
2. An often repeated phrase associated with an individual, organization, or commercial product; a slogan.

Do you have a slogan or tagline? Does it express your aims or nature? Does it make a point?

It’s about 50/50. Some people love to see me come to save them from their computer woes. Others hate to see me come because it usually means that they have came to the end of their rope and had to give up and call in the expert, and guess what, experts cost money……OUCH.