I’m always trying to find out about the world’s most exciting design events, and there really is no one resource to collect this information, so I’m putting together 10 of my favorite design event resources and giving it to you. Hopefully, you will find the list of links useful. If you know of good design event lists, then please drop me a note and I’ll add it to the list. BTW, the list is really meant to cover design events related primarily to furniture, product, and architecture design with a marginal focus on graphic design, fashion design and art. Sorry it’s not so comprehensive.

• Metropolis Magazine- Design events are briken down by regional, national, and international events. It’s an all around great resource to find out what’s going on in design.
• DesignTaxi.com Event Forum- Although I personally think that weaving through designtaxi’s website is confusing, their design event forum is really handy.
• Core77 Design Calendar- The Industrial and product design supersite of course has a great design calendar.
• Upcoming.org- This site does not focus on design in particular, but is a surprisingly useful way to ferret out smaller design events in your area. For instance, the SF chapter of Pecha Kucha is listed on Upcoming.org, but is probably hard to find out about otherwise.
• The Cooper Hewitt Calendar- although this calendar is specifically for the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, there is no denying that the museum is one of the most important institutions in the U.S. for all designers.
• Design Museum, London- Of course, the UK equivalent of the Cooper Hewitt is the Design Museum in London which should not be ignored for good events.
• Design.nl- For all of you Dutch design freaks, the calendar at Design.nl is about as good as it gets. I believe all the design events are located in the middle column.
• Design Thread- This is a bit of an off topic design calendar, however the calendar is quite good if you are a graphic or web designer.
• Fashion Trendsetter- I find Fashion Trendsetter to be a bit hard to look at, but there is no denying if you want to keep up with the latest fashions, then this is a simple place to find everything you need to know. There are a couple of links of great use. The link above is to the fashion trade events, but this link will tell you more about when and where the big runway shows are occurring.
• Design Addict Calender- What is better than design crack? A design addict, I suppose. I don’t know much about who puts design addict together, but it is quite obvious that they are passionate about design. Their calender fills in any gaps I’ve missed, as well.

1. Web Rings still work:

It’s scary, but true. The ancient webring still boosts traffic to my site. About a year ago, I joined a design webring called Lounge72. I had never really considered a webring because they have always seemed so cheesy. This webring, though, looked cool and it had great quality links. If you can find a ring for whatever subject your blog is about, then I would consider joining. I now receive dozens of visitors every day from this webring and this has been consistent for months.

2. Join Stumbleupon to promote your own blog:

Stumbleupon.com is a bit of an everything place. It’s has so many pieces and parts that’s it’s hard to keep track of what it all does. The part that I’m mainly concerned with is StumbleUpon’s “stumble” button. This is the most powerful thing on the site. Why? It’s like a remote control for the web. You type in a topic and start hitting the stumble button, and it brings you to site after site after site on the topic you’ve chosen. In the past, sites like Delicious just give you lists of sites tagged with your topic, but a list isn’t as fun or as inspiring as seeing actual sites themselves. It’s just a much more fun way to channel surf the web.

Here’s the big tip: I submit every page I write on my blog to Stumbleupon with their handy submission button which can be added right in the browser. When I did this, I immediately started seeing 30 or more people coming to my site each day with occasional spikes of several hundred unique visitors.

I’ve also used Stumbleupon to test the effectiveness and usefulness of a page through Stumbleupon’s paid program. Let’s say you wrote something that you think people would find really important or useful. You can insert this to be a top stumble destination for a particular topic, age group, and even location. People will see your content first, and be able to comment on your page. This is a quick and inexpensive way to get your blog in front of people. If it’s great content, people will keep coming back, and you will get a “thumbs up” from any stumbler that liked the page. If the content sucks, then you will know quickly because you will get tons of “thumbs down”. It’s really a handy way to find out if you are on track with what you present to people.

3. Blog your posts from Flickr to your blog:

One thing that Flickr allows you to do is blog from Flickr, and Flickr automotically sends the post to appear on your site. This is using the XML-RPC interface which you really don’t need to know anything about. All you need to do is follow the directions from Flickr to set it up. I don’t use this technique myself, but I have seen friends get great traffic to their site using this technique.

Here’s the big tip: Write the article, but be sure to include a number of keywords that your blog is about in the article as well as tag the picture with a number of keywords. Then include a link back to your site at least once in the article if not twice. I would also make sure to give the link tag a descriptive title. If you’ve got interesting photos, or you start each article off with a photo like I do, then using Flickr to drive more traffic to your blog is going to be effective. Also, I suggest looking through the Flickr Groups and finding a number of groups that this photo would be appropriate to submit to. The photo will then show up in the groups and bring yet more eyes for your blog. If you are a heavy duty photograher who can describe photos well, then this is going to get you some serious traffic.

How do I do this? First, get an account with Flickr. It’s free for the basics, but it’s a bargain to get a pro account at $20 per year. Next, upload some photos. Upload instructions are HERE (this link works only if you’re logged in). Make sure you’ve set the photos up so that you give permission for the photo to be blogged. Then, set up a connection to your blog at this address: http://www.flickr.com/blogs.gne?from=extend (this link works only if you’re logged in). Just follow the instructions on how to set up your blog to talk to Flickr. If you can’t figure any of this out, just leave a comment and I’ll help you. Next, after all of this is set up, you can go back to your main Flickr page, click on one of your photos, and you should see a button above the photo that says “blog this”. Then just follow the instructions and the photo should pop up into your blog. Finally, I copy the blog entry and paste it into the photo description on Flickr which guarantees you have the blog entries on both locations. The photo description is the little text directly under your image. This is not related to the tags which are a different thing entirely. This sounds a bit complex, but it’s not so bad once everything is set up.

There are some flickr plugins for wordpress blogs that I’ll discuss in later articles that may help speed this process.

4. Get a big search engine traffic boost with the Image Googlebot:

Something every blogger who likes to include pictures on their blog should be acutely aware of is this: Is Google indexing my images and if not then why? I’ve noticed through some crafty research that certain sites get nearly half of their search traffic from images.google.com. That means if your images are not indexed then you could double your search traffic by making sure the images are indexed. First, let’s find out if Google is indexing my photo’s. Go to Images.Google.com and click on advanced search. Do a search where you restrict the site to just your blog URL, and if the results don’t turn up any images then Google is not indexing your images. If you are seeing all your images indexed, then stop right here and skip to the next step.

If you’re not seeing images then there are two things you need to check: First, is the robots.txt file. This file commonly resides in the main directory of your webserver and is there to ward off search engines from finding files that you don’t want to show to the search engines. Often times, the robots.txt will tell a search engine to skip over your images. To boost your traffic, make sure that this file is not excluding your images files or directories. A detailed discussion of what to look for in the ronbots.txt file can be found here. I also highly recommend signing up for google webmaster tools which will test to make sure that images are being searched. The second way to make sure your images are being searched are meta tags in the head of your page (here’s a quick overview). Let’s say, for instance, you just copied a template for your blog and didn’t create it from scratch. Often times, template designers will put a meta tag in the head of the theme that will ban search engines from reading images. They do that just as a safety precaution, but if you want your images indexed, you’ll want to get rid of this meta tag as well. Unfortunately, you will not see an immediate bump in traffic. Google takes a long time to index all of your images as to not put too much strain on your web server. Expect to see a significant traffic increase, but this will be a slow process that may take months.

In the next article, I will cover: How to gain knowledge by reading other blog’s publicly available site meters, essential Wordpress plugins for driving traffic to your site, meta tag writing, and a host of other topics.

As always, your feedback is appreciated.

One thing I’ve decided to start is a How-To area of the site. It won’t be a huge focus of the site, but I want to do this to share some of the resources I’ve learned about that is not concerning cool design objects.

On to the list. Why did I create this list? I’ve been looking for fairly inexpensive and unique ways to get some cool promotional items. I did a little research, and I thought, “Why not share this information?”. If anyone knows of any other cool promotional items I’ve left off this list, then please leave a comment and let me know about them.

Create beautiful, stylish business cards with Moo: Moo is about the coolest online business card design site I’ve seen. Moo connects to your Flickr account, so you can pull images from it onto your cards. What makes Moo unique is that you can create 100 distinctly different cards in each pack that you order. So, one thing I was thinking would make these cards kind of fun is creating a kind of game or contest with these cards. I was thinking of giving my logo away as an adobe illustrator file and asking participants to pimp my logo. The favorite logos would be judged by the community, and the winner would receive a nicely designed prize. Then, each entry would be saved on Flickr, and I would turn the designs into a pack of 100 cards on Moo where each artist is included in the pack. Moo allows for each image to be individually recognized on the cards, so you could acknowledge each artist as a way to reciprocate their enthusiasm for your site.

Go beyond the CafePress printed T-Shirt with real screen printing from Custom Ink: I have quickly set up a T-Shirt shop at Cafe Press. It’s super easy, and I don’t have to worry about minimum orders. But if you want much higher quality and flexibility with your T-shirt printing, you will have to step it up a notch. When the time comes, I suggest looking at Custom Ink. The User Interface isn’t as cute as Cafe Press, but it’s good. Everything worked for me perfectly. And, as you will find, screen printing will open the whole shirt as your canvas rather than a small piece of it. Volume buying is the only way this setup will work, though.

Make compelling hard cover books with Lulu: Recently, I saw Lulu demoed at a conference, and it was a hit (for good reason). This is the only company I know that makes beautiful one-off books for a reasonable price. These books can be used as portfolios or promotional objects. The hardcover version looks and feels really nice. And it’s the quality of the book as an object that gives your promotional material a higher level of legitimacy. This would be a great PR gift.

Design a rug with your brand actually woven into the rug from Treasure Knit: This looks a little scary from the pictures on their site, but give the right design, this could be be a pretty fun way to get the word out on your company. OK, maybe it’s a bit expensive doing a rug, but there is something psychologically permanent having your logo in a rug. On second thought, this may not be all that cool.

Etch your iPod with EtchaMac: Etch A Mac is cool, though. There is no doubt. I would say that this would be the best client gift available. What you could do is very gingerly take apart the iPod packaging, pull out the iPod, and have it sent to be laser etched with a thank you note and your company’s logo. Then, of course, put the iPod back just as you’d found it once the etching process is finished. For an added personal touch, load a 10 songs that relate to the relationship to the customer- maybe something cheesy and fun.

Make your business card a scratchoff from Koolprint: I have never seen this done, so I take full credit for this idea. First, what is a scratchoff? It’s one of those things you may have seen at the liquor store used for lottery games. It’s a card with a thin sheet of removable material that disappears when you scratch it off revealing that you’ve either won or lost a prize. I think that it would be pretty cool to make your business card into a scratchoff where everyone wins a prize. I would obviously make the prize something super simple, but cool. Then, I would throw in a few really cool prizes, and maybe save those for the real potential prospects. The really cool thing about this one is if they want the prize they have to claim it by giving up their info, so I think the potential is high to help a mailing list grow. Again, there is a high cheese factor, but I think it might be fun, too.

Have some fun with flip books from Flippies: Flippies are awesome! Do you have a product that is well suited to being demonstrated in action? This might be a perfect opportunity to get the word out. For instance, I profiled this awesome chair that folds out like an accordion. The chair does not look like much until you can see what it can do in a video. A flip book could easily show the benefit of the chair, and be a neat little tangible object to share with friends.

Brand your own Nike shoes at NikeiD: (click on iD exclusives menu, then Metro Collection) This really is an ultimate promotional wearable item that probably very few people even know about. A lot of salespeople where collared shirts. Boring! On the Nike site you can chose your brand colors for the shoes, and then add your brand name to the back of the shoe all for a reasonable hundred bucks. It’s an eye catching extension to the huge realm of branded clothing ubiquity that’s out there. So, let’s say my logo is pink and black like the one at the beginning of the article. I just create a pink and black shoe to fit my brand colors. The only unfortunate thing about the shoe is that each shoe is limited to five characters, so it might not work for every situation.

So that’s my list! I hope this list is handy for people. Please give me some feedback on promotional items you like to make for your brand.