TOON LINE is an online magazine about animation. It is built with a wordpress template and a joint project with my brother Antoine Leporc as a copyrighter. The project consisted as consulting in term of interactivity,principles of design and information design, coding, copyrighting, designing.

www.toon-line.com

Scavi Rocheteau website is built with WordPress framework and is made in 3 languages. It is fully SEO optimized and get in the first page of google for pertinent keywords just after 1 week it has been launched. I also work on all the content and the organization design of the website.
The portfolio section is designed to hold video that i also edit.

www.src-football-academy.com

Brochure Design in 3 languages for an Art Exhibition  in Ho Chi Minh City.

I wanted to redesign the website of my football team for a while. I designed and coded the first edition 4 years ago while i was learning to code. This project was a draft that i was glad of and since i got a lot of good feedbacks, i did not touch it that much.

The problem with most projects that i am working on by myself is that i hate its design as soon as i finished it. Basically, i have to leave it as it is and jump to something else as soon as i can to avoid loosing way too much time.

This is what happened with this ‘Gaulois de Saigon” old website. I could simply not stand it anymore. As it was coded without CMS function, i had to get into the code every week for every update. Secondly, besides conservative peoples say that the old one was better, it was for me remains of my immaturity when i start designing.

The new website is done on top of a minimalist and pretty well coded theme called Industry from contempographicdesign

I figured out rapidly that i could adapt my content within this theme easily and rapidly. I actually released the website after around 20hours of works. Feedback that i often got from the previous website was : warm. Personally, i judge it childish with a bad color scheme and bad information design. While visiting the website, i felt like this is an amateur football team and this is not the image i wanted for the Club although it was the idea at the beginning.

This is why the new website looks more professional. A friend of mine, Erwan Gallile, took nice shot of match and i adopt the classical: Menu/Slider/News/Footer. This classical scheme starts to be boring for designer after having been used so much during the last 2 years in the web design industry. However, it has the advantage of a recognizable and organized information design.

As i said before, i love wordpress and i start to manipulate it very well even if i don’t have time to design my own theme, which i’d love. Using wordpress as a CMS is a huge advantage comparing to the old website. I created a few accounts for my team mate to write some posts and match reports. Secondly,  comments feature will make the site more lively.

I got a few negative feedback about not enough visual and i will work toward a more attractive home page. However, i already got 2 mails from people is HCMC that visited the website and want to play football. I don’t know whether this is thanks to the new design but this is encouraging…

Re design of the 3 years old running website of this French Football team in Ho Chi Minh City. On this project, i built content and shot some photos of the team.

The website has been built within 1 week on top of a minimalist and pretty well coded wordpress theme called Industry from contempographicdesign.

Blog insight post: here

It did not take long for marketers to figure out that social networking was a gold mine. For the last years, Facebook grew as the most completed wanted customers database and became a tool as powerful as its financial value ($11.5 billion according to http://www.allfacebook.com/).

As a user, I have been receiving ‘Friend request’ from people I do not know for the last 2 years. The strategy of those business owners was to ask to be friend to every single person in the list of theirs city or country networks. That is definitely time consuming process but that can be rewarding if we consider that around 40% of people are accepting friend requests from lads they do not physically or even virtually know (SOPHOS). The friend list of those people can eventually reach more than 4000 people, who connsequently became potential clients.

A Group or a Page for my business

Having a large friend list gives access to private information about those potential customers, however it does not give tools to market your company or your product. We could think we can create an account with the name of the company but facebook have a system with a dictionary  to avoid people renaming themselves with name that could be considered as a company or product entity.
For example, it is impossible the create an account named: Bob restaurant.

Eventually, a good tool to market is “the group” option. To create a group have multiple features that are very useful to marketers but it was probably not its first purpose imagined by facebook’s creators.

Seeing that companies start using facebook as a marketing tools, facebook decided to create a specific tools for them: The company page

From that, the question raised: What is the difference between a group and a page for my business?

Indeed those two options have different features. We could think that “create a page for my business” is specifically designed for business. However, a group have a couple of more features that the Business page crucially miss.

Accessibility – Where to start?

To create a group is somehow easier than to create a “page for you business” in term of usability. To do so, a user have to click on the group page and then click on the button on the top left on the screen.

To create a page for my business was a little bit more challenging as I needed to access a page from another company and finally to find at the bottom left.Difficult to explain the lack of design consistency and such a flaw in accessibility.

Group Panel and Business Page panel

At the first glance we can already see differences between the two panel. The Group panel provides more options than the company’s one.

Besides, the insights panel of the business page deserves more understanding. If I still did not understand how the number displayed is calculated, clicking on this link provide a wide range of statistics about company’s fans including gender, ages, languages, countries and city. Those statistics are divided: actives fans and passive one.

This feature is definitely an advantage over the “group page” that does not include this tool.

On the other hand, the group page allow admins to send messages to their group members which can be a more direct way to communicate.

What is best?

Choosing between those two tools basically depends on one need. One would rather push marketing  by sending mails to his groups members while other will prefer having company’s feeds on the facebook feeds page. Additionally, the statistic page is a must have for all marketing department when they want to monitor their audience.

I would tend to think that sending  mails from group can rapidly be considered as junk mails and using the neat facebook feeds page for one’s company is the best.

Promoting with an Ad

Finally, i would like to conclude this post by emphasizing the amazing opportunity for marketers that is the “promote with an ad” feature of Facebook.

Not only it can help to spread the word to people who are not in your friend list but we can also target the ad to be displayed on user’s screen according to his age, gender, language or location. Indeed, facebook users entered such important data about themselves that they are finally used for those ads.

This is indeed a wonderful tool for company as they can specifically target their potential customers. The same way than google ads, we can set the maximum daily budget and user will be charge per click on the ads.

From there come the second step of the design. The HTML version of the newsletter. The HTML version do not have to exceed 500Ko. It is the limit i think a mail must stay below to avoid surcharging client mailboxes.
Besides, the HTML newsletter is rarely read completely. Therefore, text and visual together have to bring the most important information fast. According to statistics, only 2% – 5% of clients read newsletter they receive.

Our mail boxes are overloaded with those kind of E-Newsletter and eventually too much information kill information. I believe that is where ” information design” is important and where i engaged to provide in this work a suitable visual organization.

The technical difficulty that neophytes are not aware of is mail client compatibility. If IE6 pain to code for is well know, his little brother MS Outlook 2007 walked on the sames steps. Yes, it is even worse as MS outlook is using MS word rendering to render mail.

Nonsense? yes! as mails are basically HTML, it is using a spoon to eat a steak. MS outlook only support little CSS and does not support background image of any sort.

I stop here with technical considerations that could be a future blog subject and show you the 4 pages of the PDF pilot newsletter:

PDF Newsletter - page 1

PDF newsletter - page 2

PDF newsletter - page 3

PDF newsletter - page 4

This ads was design for a monthly edition of a French magazine in Ho Chi Minh City. This month goal is to push Myanmar sales by insisting on the VISA on arrival new policy in the Country.

I used this very beautiful picture of an old lady in a train in Maymyo – Myanmar. Photoshop works were on sharpening the face and pattern of clothes and color calibration.

I conduct this project from the pictures, the design and coding (XHTML + CSS + javascript).

Vuotsong Shipyard new website features a dynamic AJAX news reader on the homepage and an improved SEO . The site has been released in June 2009 and count 10 visits a day for a niche sector.

Once again, the main power of this site is the SEO as the site come on Google first page for users looking for a shipyard in south East Asia.