What Search Engine do you use?

• It only took one question from my 8 year old daughter to wake me up to the reality of how pervasive internet technologies have become in our society today. Sitting at the dinner table the other night, she asked me whether I preferred Google or Bing for search. Besides being taken aback by this question from an 8-year old, I was more curious to understand why she asked the question. "Oh well, Dad… you know Bing does a better job of presenting information with images and I learn better with images." Okay. I can appreciate the validity of her response, but was it really true? I didn't set out to prove the truth in her statement, but wanted to find out user-habits when it came to searching on the web. I thus gathered information on which search engine people use on the web and thought to share the information with you.
  
• From a business perspective, this should alert you to which search engines require your attention when it comes to reaching your target audience. That is, you may choose to optimize your website to reach audiences across all search engines, or target one or two based on their share of internet traffic.
  

The Beauty of Colors - Part II

In last month's article, we discussed the importance of color in defining mood, taste, and style. This month, we dig a bit deeper to explore how colors can be combined to produce an endless array of visually appealing colors.

I find it fascinating that you can get about all the colors in the world with just different combinations of the 3 primary colors (Red, Blue, Yellow). Remember Crayola's Law of Colors which states the number of colors doubles every 28 years? Well, this is only achieved with different combinations of colors on the color wheel below.

* Source from http://www.malanenewman.com/images/colorwheel_browsersafe.gif

The color combination possibilities are endless. In fact, I was intrigued by an article in the January/February 2010 Design New England magazine that had listed and shown vibrant colors with names such as Daredevil, Torch, Babouche, Carnival, and Tangerine.

There is a fairly robust body of work on the internet about colors with my favorite starting point being http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_wheel.

Just remember you sometimes don't even need color combinations to have a visually striking composition. You can choose just one color and use a monochromatic theme similar to the example picture below to achieve the desired outcome.