Man On A Street

If you often work on AdWords text ads, you'll like this little spreadsheet that will make the keyword matching tags automatically for you. As you know, the matching convention for keywords is: Exact Match Phrase Match Modified Broad Match [this is a keyword] "this is a keyword" +this +is +a +keyword Imagine how tiresome doing this would be, for every word, if you have hundreds of keywords (or search terms). Here's a Google spreadsheet that will do this for you: Keyword Match Tagger . You just paste your search terms (one search term per line) on the "Keyword" column, and the other columns will populate with the keyword matching tags which you can then copy to your own spreadsheet. If you pasted in keywords with duplicates, those will be highlighted in red. Since modified broad match does not consider the order of the words in a search term, the "MMB Duplicate Detector" column will rearrange the words alphabetically in a search term and highl...

A friend requested a logo for her home quilting business named QuiltDat! (The spelling, I was told, is a Louisiana thing.) No color specified, no style specified. I like this kind of design challenge – you're basically free to come up with your take on the business name and no pressure for perfection (no time limits, although I think they wanted this quick). The risk, though, is that those who requested it may not like your design. Collaboration is still the best way to design a logo since the ones who will end up using the logo know their business and usually know what they want (or, at least, will have no one else to blame if the design turns out bad since they were in on it). Here's the logo (no color decisions yet – they like the yellow one over gray, although I meant for this to be like Japanese family crests or kamon/mon , where it's usually white or light colored over a darker colored background): It represents a "sunrise" letter 'Q' using q...

I have been reading the medieval Japanese-inspired novel series by Lian Hearn, the Tales of the Otori on Calibre eBook viewer. But I don't care much for the existing covers I can find on Google. They're too ... elaborate for my tastes: I needed to make my own eBook cover for Across The Nightingale Floor . My idea was to have a single emblem—​the heron kamon (family crest) of the Otori as the main decoration on the book cover and graphic accents on the virtual "spine" (changeable to other crests and color motifs relevant to the story for the remaining books). But first, I had to find a heron kamon. The Japanese word for "heron" is "sagi" . I googled for "heron crest" or "heron kamon" or "sagi kamon", hoping to find a suitable and authentic emblem to include in the cover. I found one , a triple-heron done in the paulownia (kiri) leaf style: I wanted the round look of the crane crests like the one seen on Jap...