Our Blog
Developing a Winning Multi-Channel Content Marketing Strategy
Content strategy defines channel strategy — not the other way around. The following guide (source) is intended to help brands understand the steps in developing ...
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Innovation: How to Decide Which Ideas to Pursue? – The Screening Phase
Having many ideas is good but once you’ve generated lots of ideas through ideation it’s now time to screen them: to determine if an idea ...
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Innovation: Where Do Ideas Come From?
At TVI, we take innovation seriously. It’s what the “I” in TVI stands for. Our proprietary innovation processes encourages innovation thinking with our team through ...
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A 2-Step Editorial Calendar Template that Can Boost Your Content Marketing Productivity
Looking to increase your content marketing productivity? To get yourself started, try using this two-step approach to creating an editorial calendar: Step 1. Use the ...
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Developing an Integrated Marketing Plan
By conducting a thorough integrated marketing audit of your previous/current marketing efforts and research on external factors that might affect your marketing, you can come ...
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5 Reasons Your Content Marketing is Not Working
Content marketing is an ongoing process in which optimization is important. You may not get it right the first time around but avoiding some of ...
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Developing a Winning Multi-Channel Content Marketing Strategy
Content strategy defines channel strategy — not the other way around. The following guide (source) is intended to help brands understand the steps in developing ...
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The Building Blocks of Integrated Marketing Research
In the first part of the research phase, we looked at what an integrated marketing audit looks like in which we analyze your internal marketing ...
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What is an Integrated Marketing Audit?
An integrated marketing plan is a detailed plan, tied to your sales objectives, which takes into account the various activities and media buys that your ...
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5 Restaurant Trends for Summer 2015
Summer is right around the corner, and we’ve compiled a list of the 5 hottest trends this season for your business. Trend #1: Get Local, ...
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Why Emotional Branding Works
Emotional branding and messaging are terms you’ve probably been hearing for a while. However, you may be having trouble understanding why it works or why ...
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How to Speed up Your Website
There are many different ways to speed up your website after analyzing load time with utilities like Pingdom or Google’s PageSpeed Insights, but it all ...
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3 Web Design Trends to Look Out for in 2015
It’s now 2015, and users have more access to the internet than ever, with the increased availability of wifi hotspots, smartphones and faster megabit speeds. ...
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3 Things to Think About When Planning Your Annual Marketing Strategy
Managing a business requires skills in planning how to deal with friction and uncertainty. However, fast-changing technologies, globalization, increasing transparency, and even social responsibility, are ...
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SEO Done Right
We’ve had a lot of conversations recently with clients about our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services and thought this post would help you understand the ...
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The best summer internship ever?
This summer, we had the largest group of interns ever from New York University (NYU), Columbia University and Parsons School of Design. We’re lucky to have ...
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There Is No Fold: The truth about website conversions, Part Two
Hearing people talk to about how information on their website needs to be “above the fold” is almost as annoying as hearing how a design ...
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How Wi-Fi Can Grow Your Local Business
What do the iPhone 5S, Samsung Galaxy, Nexus 5 and HTC One all have in common? At some point soon, hopefully today, a person will ...
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There Is No Fold: The truth about website conversions, Part One
There is the longstanding idea that cramming material “above the fold” on your website will increase conversion rates . After all, who is going to scroll ...
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Social Media & Recruitment At TVI: 4 Tips To Get Yourself Noticed
With the start of the new year, recruitment season has also just begun. The recruitment scene is abuzz with career fairs, internships, on-campus recruitments, interviews, ...
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Top 5 Marketing Trends of 2013
Marketing is always a growing expenditure in a company as one expects business to grow every year however, it is sometimes difficult to allocate the ...
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Restaurant Choice & Consumer Behavior: What Motivates Your Customer
Consumer behavior can be a broad and complicated topic, but researchers have done some excellent work specific to the restaurant industry. Much of this work ...
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TVI’s Recruitment Cocktails: Recruiting the Best Marketing and Design Talent
For those of you in the know, TVI started a new initiative called the “G2KT (Get To Know TVI) Recruitment Cocktails”. As a relatively new ...
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5 Holiday Marketing Tips to Bring more Business into your Restaurant
The holidays can be a lot of fun, but they can also be a business challenge. This is the time of year when the arena ...
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Creative New Technologies in Foodservice: Two Examples
Last week, I saw an omniscient waterfall, a self-driving car, and a bar-tending arcade cabinet. These were some of the technological wonders shared at Four ...
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Restaurant Marketing Tips inspired by CreateTech 2013
The restaurant business being described as “highly competitive” is surely an understatement due to the diverse choices from which to make dining decisions. That’s why we ...
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New Ways to Grow a Successful Business from Advertising Week 2013
Last week in New York city, top experts in marketing and some of the most powerful names in modern industry gathered together to discuss current ...
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How to create a great cover letter
Keisha Stephen-Gittens is awesome. So is Nick. They belong here. We met Keisha at the 2013 NYU fall career fair and immediately took a liking ...
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How to get an internship you really want. Be awesome.
Nick Manluccia is awesome. So is Keisha. They belong here. Out of the hundreds of students we met two weeks ago at a career fair ...
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How to Follow Up After a Career Fair
You did it all correctly. You went to the career fair, you shook hands, you introduced yourself, made your hiring materials like resume and links ...
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3 Tips For Using Social Media
Correctly implementing social media for your company is critical in today’s marketplace – with more customers interacting online, social media is a valuable outlet for ...
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Good Customer Service: Telling a Customer When They’re Wrong
We’ve all heard the saying, “the customer is always right”. Any of you out there who have the joy of working with customers/clients also knows ...
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Why Do Agencies Exist? To Build Your Brand
In a previous blog post on the Basics of Branding, I talked about the importance of a company’s public identity and laid out a strategy ...
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The Basics of Branding
One question I’m asked over and over again in this business is “What’s all this about branding?” Often times, the true, underlying question I’m being ...
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Where to get Stock Images Online
If you are a designer of any kind, whether it be print or web, chances are you’ll need to use stock images at some point ...
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How to Say NO to a Client
In the world of marketing it’s almost a truism that you never say no to a client. After all, we’re in a service-based industry and we’re ...
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Biggest UI Design Trends of 2013 (So Far)
It’s always good to keep up with the latest design trends. It helps broaden your style and step out of what you’re used to. I’ve ...
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5 CSS Tricks to help you code faster
CSS is something that I (and millions of web design masterminds) use every day. Some days you love it. Some days? You hate it. But ...
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Why your digital agency needs to guide your messaging
Everyone working in the modern business world knows that there are a lot of ways to reach customers that didn’t exist five or ten years ...
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Brand Advertising: SEM vs SEO
There are a lot of options for getting your site noticed by customers on the web, and most of them are useful to some degree, ...
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How to Get That Design Job You’ve Been Eyeing
It’s that time of year… Seniors in art programs are completing their final design courses, prepping for exhibitions, and most importantly, trying to land a ...
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Content Before Design
When it comes to designing a website, tasks have to be done in a certain order. If these tasks are completed out of order it ...
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How to market a restaurant: 3 Sites you NEED to be on
There is no clear cut answer to the question of ‘how to market a restaurant?’ but there is a clear cut answer to ‘what 3 ...
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Tips for Video Shoots: Youtube Marketing
Youtube is a great place to advertise and creating a video can be fun – but it requires a lot of work and planning to ...
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Picking the Right Program for Your Creative Agency Job
As a designer there are a lot of programs you need to know. The suite of Adobe programs are the standard for most designers but ...
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Wonderful Jquery and You
What’s Jquery and why use it? Jquery is a coding framework that was introduced in 2006 and makes writing javascript much easier. Javascript has been ...
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Restaurant Branding: From Physical to Digital
If you’re just starting to increase your restaurant’s online presence, one big thing to remember is maintaining consistency in your restaurant branding. Your business should have a ...
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Why NYC.GOV and TDBANK.COM Suck
It surprises me how large, successful businesses and organizations can run websites that lack design standards and even an ounce of creativity. For example, take ...
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The Most Obnoxious Fonts in the World
There are some fonts that are so blatantly overused and misused that every time I see them, I just want to find the person who ...
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How to Market a Restaurant: Discovering New Restaurants
How do customers discover new restaurants? Most marketing firms will tell you that everyone is on Facebook or Twitter (in general, they are) but the ...
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Web Design Trends That are Seriously out of Date
Web design trends come and go very fast and that turnover is building up speed. With different technologies springing up every day, your site has ...
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SEO Tips: How Web Development Affects Your SEO
When a company’s management orders up a new website, they generally do so with only design elements in mind. Frequently, the assumption is that a ...
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Pick a Great Color Palette With These Free Design Tools
Every designer needs to consider color when designing for print or web (unless it’s black and white, of course). A clean and cohesive color palette ...
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How to Market a Restaurant: Setting up Google Places
Whether you’re a big, well established restaurant or a small mom & pop place just starting out, reaching out to your neighbors can always help ...
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Top Restaurant Websites Offer Online Ordering
Top restaurant websites always offer customers the option of ordering online. Why? Imagine this: You’ve really got a hankering for your favorite lunch from your ...
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Why Do I Need Landing Pages?
Landing pages are a key tool to online marketing, and the more you have, the better off you are. Why? Because it’s the easiest way ...
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PR Daily Winner: GetCurious.com!
TVI, in partnership with Phillips and Company, has been awarded “Best Website” in the PR DailyMedia Relations Awards. TVI created the lauded GetCurious Website as part of Phillips and Company’s ...
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Just Launched: Coloredge
TVI is proud to announce the launch of the redesigned Coloredge website. Coloredge is a leading graphics company that specializes in visual communications, working with ...
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How to Market a Restaurant: Coupon Marketing
When you think about how to market a restaurant, “coupons” are usually one of the first things that come to mind. Coupons can bring in ...
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Restaurant Web Site Menus: The Good, Bad, and Ugly
At a bare minimum, a restaurant web site needs to convey 3 things: the restaurant’s contact number, the restaurant’s address, and the restaurant’s menus. For the ...
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Great Restaurant Websites > Great Restaurant Apps
A lot of restaurant owners think that the best way to engage with their mobile customers is through a mobile app. In reality however, a mobile ...
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Webdesign Trends to be Aware of in 2013
Webdesign trends can be hard to keep track of simply because they change so fast. To help you keep abreast of changes, here are some ...
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How to Market a Restaurant: Facebook Don’ts
For most restaurants, Facebook is an integral part of their social marketing strategy. (We’ve discussed before why Facebook is an important tool when it comes ...
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No One Wants to Visit Your Outdated Restaurant Web Site
First impressions matter. For most restaurant customers, that impression starts with the restaurant web site. They check the map for what’s close to them and ...
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Five Graphic Design Items Your New Restaurant Needs
Opening a new restaurant is hard. Knowing how to market a new restaurant is even harder. In general, a good place to start once you’ve ...
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5 Productivity Tools for the Road
A few days from now, more than 20,000 people (myself included) will be converging on Austin for SXSW. One of the keys to a successful ...
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Why no One Visits Restaurant Websites That Play Music
Imagine this: Your favorite customer is sitting at work listening to music as a means of maintaining sanity through the day. A friend calls and ...
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Speed up Your Restaurant Website
Great restaurant websites load fast. A speedy website prevents visitors from getting frustrated and leaving your website. And when slowdowns happen frequently, users will less likely ...
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Rebranding Your Business. Here’s How:
Once you’ve come to terms with why your business needs to rebrand and decided who you want to rebrand as, you have to keep going ...
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Tools for Restaurant Marketing. Use Them Now!
Sometimes, the best way to market your restaurant (while saving dollars) is to make use of the tools you already have. Below, we highlight 3 ...
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Restaurant Websites That Play Nice With Your Mobile Device
It’s crucial for a restaurant to have a presence on the web, and more importantly, smartphone access. By the end of 2013, it is predicted ...
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Great Restaurant Websites NEVER use Flash. EVER
There are no hard and fast rules for building great restaurant websites. Like most coding endeavors, it’s as much art as science. That said, there ...
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Rebranding Your Business: Here’s Who
In the first part of our Rebranding series, we covered why we considered rebranding to be a necessary part of growing TVI (or any other business). ...
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Positioning a Brand: What JCP Did Wrong
By definition, positioning a brand is what you do to cement your brand identity in the mind of your customers/target market. Unfortunately, it tends not to ...
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3 Great Tools to Increase Productivity
When you’re running a small business, it’s hard to identify which tools increase productivity and which tools drain resources. The three tools reviewed below increase productivity ...
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Dear Five Guys, Your Boring Website Sucks
I love Five Guys. Their food is delicious, the price is right, and new stores are always popping up in various neighborhoods. Clearly, there is ...
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Rejected: A TVI Redesign That Didn’t Make the Cut
Internally, a major focus of the TVI site redesign was to maximize usability by minimizing useless and forgettable content. While our final design accomplished this ...
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Sometimes, You Just Have to Rebrand
Ever heard the one about how doctors’ wives die young and shoemakers’ kids go barefoot? Well, we suffered from a little bit of that here ...
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Rebranding Your Business. Here’s Why:
Whether you’re running a national restaurant chain, a design agency, or a Fortune 500 company, rebranding your business is a necessity. Why? Because your brand ...
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Redesigning the TVI Website
When your business is constantly growing and changing, your brand marketing needs to evolve with it. At TVI, we try to regularly update our brand and upgrade ...
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Rating the Superbowl Logos in Honor Of Superbowl XLVII
When it comes to positioning a brand, few have been as successful as the NFL. Each year, the Superbowl is watched by millions of people, ...
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Why Spend $4 MILLION on One Lousy Ad?
In 2012, nearly fifty percent of Americans in the country’s top fifty-six media markets sat down to watch Superbowl XLVI. Brands who placed advertisements that ...
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Just Launched: Arlington Club
TVI’s industrious design and development team is proud to announce the launch of Arlington Club’s new website. Built around the needs of award-winning chef Laurent Tourondel ...
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Just Launched: LeChurro
A Little Taste of Spain Right in NYC. LeChurro.com is a small website for a new shop serving up hot, fresh churros on the Upper East ...
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Turn Your Restaurant Week Customers into Regulars
NYC Restaurant Week starts this Tuesday and many New Yorkers will be taking advantage of prix–fixe menus to try new restaurants. But how many of ...
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Instagram for Restaurants and How It’s Heating Up!
Instagram for restaurants is definitely heating up in the social network world. How often are you out and about in today’s world and see people ...
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Why Flash is Bad for Your Website
How many times have you visited a website, and encountered the following words? “Please update your Flash player.” Let’s just say that sometimes it throws me ...
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5 Twitter for Restaurants Blog Posts You Need to Read
Twitter or Tweeter as we like to call it, is a social media platform that too many businesses fail to take advantage of. Especially those that ...
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Responsive Websites Explained
In the U.S. there are currently an estimated 327.6 million active wireless customer connections. This means there are more active broadband tablets, cell phones, and ...
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Leadership vs. Management. How we can all be leaders.
I recently finished a leadership course at NYU and wrote on the topic of management vs. leadership. Can anyone be a leader or are they ...
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Pinterest for Restaurants: The Ultimate Marketing Guide
The online social media frenzy has added a new member: Pinterest. You may have heard of it due its explosive growth in popularity, or maybe ...
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Why Email Marketing? 10 Reasons You Should Start Now
Why email marketing? You’ve probably heard of it before. And maybe even thought about doing it yourself. But if you want to make great strides ...
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10 Ways to Not Land an Interview or a Job at TVI
We know the job hunting process is a pain. We’ve all been there. Part of our culture at TVI is to always be learning from ...
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Is a short domain name a competitive advantage?
I’ve heard both sides of the debate that a short domain name isn’t as valuable as a brand or the product, and that it’s not ...
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Steve Ballmer’s Words of Wisdom
There is so much advice out there for entrepreneurs in technology that sometimes it is no different than the noise we hear on Twitter, Facebook ...
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Steve Blank on Startups and Customer Development
I’d heard about Steve Blank but never had the opportunity to hear any of his lectures. Thoroughly enjoyed this video from Brant Cooper whose book ...
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Johnny Rockets Website. A TVI Idea. – Part 2 of 2
What if Johnny Rockets were to let TVI rebuild their website? Well they haven’t, but we did it anyways–the homepage at least. We decided to ...
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How Twitter Got Started …
Found this old email here. Amazing to see Twitter’s early days of planning and execution. This is an email from co-founder Jack Dorsey to Noah ...
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QR Codes for Small Businesses
Initially used for tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing, QR (Quick Response) codes are similar to barcodes and are now being used more by retailers to ...
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Johnny Rockets Website Critique – Part 1 of 2
I love Johnny Rockets. I’ve always enjoyed the experience of going into a their restaurants and the design elements in them. I wish I could ...