We all know the convenience of RSS feeds can’t be beat. They allow you to get the news you want sent to you, rather than visiting different sites. Using RSS feeds as part of an online marketing strategy to keep your audience connected – and returning to your website – has become pretty common.

Email service provider MailChimp provides a great tool to send your feed from a blog or news page to create an automatic email newsletter, but you can also use this RSS-to-email service to set up your own daily email of RSS feeds.

A few months ago I decided that Twitter just wasn’t working well enough as a content aggregator. I follow a number of design publications through Twitter to keep up with their latest articles. I also follow funny feeds like Kenny Powers, Funny or Die and about 300 others. So my design content gets lost. (Argue the case of custom lists all you want, they’re just not practical.)

The next tool I tried was a web app called NetNewsWire. I spent an hour or so subscribing to all the blogs I wanted to read and it worked out just fine. After about a week, I had stopped checking the app. I even set it up to open whenever I turned on my machine. Still never looked at it. I just couldn’t work it into my routine.

So my need to read relevant design articles festered for a while, until I came across MailChimp’s RSS tool. I already knew about the RSS-to-email campaigns. That concept was novel and works for a lot of people. But I don’t really want to get five emails every morning just to see what a couple pubs wrote about. That was what I thought until a brand new Vital Design email marketing project introduced me to this badass new feature called feed merge.

Feed Merge

The possibilities here are endless. Before, you could only subscribe to an email consisting of posts from one feed. Now, you can pepper one email template with as many feeds as you want. I will detail how to accomplish this below, but for now just think about the possible applications of this. Exciting, right?

Create a Design Digest

The first idea that popped into my head was to aggregate all of the publication feeds that I wanted to read each morning. So I sat down, plugged in the RSS feed URLs into the code that I detailed below and set up the email to send to me every morning.

I can now wake up each morning and have a brand new email sitting in my inbox – which I DO actually check everyday – containing the two most recent articles from each of my favorite publications.

No more running News Feeds every morning. Now everything I want is sitting in the one place I do check everyday: my inbox.

How It Works

With a simple short code users can drop entire entries from any blog they want into an email. Plus, the number of sources is unlimited. Just drop in this code wherever you want the RSS feed to appear:

*|FEED:Feed URL [$count=Number of Posts Included]|*

Feed Merge Individual Items

If the default layout of the basic feed merge isn’t looking as clean as you would like, you’re in luck. The shortcode below will allow you to break the feed up into individual elements. That way you can actually have some aesthetic control over what you’re displaying.

*|FEEDBLOCK:URL|* *|FEEDITEMS:|*
INSERT INDIVIDUAL ITEMS HERE
 *|END:FEEDITEMS|* *|END:FEEDBLOCK|*

For a full list of individual items available in shortcode form – plus a much more in-depth tutorial on how to use this feature, head to the MailChimp support page.

Get Clever

Creating a simple and customized digest is just the tip of the iceberg with field merge. I took a real world problem and used this feature to fix it. To me, it’s a game changer. We now have the ability to:

1. Build a custom designed eblast with infinite dynamic content sources.
2. Aggregate relevant content the way YOU want it to be display and delivered.
3. Give your readers a wider range of related content during your outreach.
4. Build a daily relationship with your readers that adds value beyond your content.

If you’re curious about this feature or would like your clients to see a digest like this come from your company, contact us here. Questions or ideas? Please comment below.

Sign Up for the Vital Design Digest: Graphic Design Edition!

With the arrival of the new year, times are changing and so are the faces here at Vital Design. We are very happy to welcome our newest team members, graphic designers Jesse Rand and Shane Rutherford.

Jesse and Shane will dive into many exciting projects Vital Design has slated for 2011. Jesse will work both in graphic design and Web development while Shane will focus primarily on graphic design and branding.

Jesse’s previous experience includes time in the Boston mobile start-up industry as an in-house graphic designer where he produced branding, print and Web collateral, and mobile UI development. He even produced and directed his own segment for Bryant Gumble’s “The Economic Report.” He returned to NH to work for a small marketing company, where he was responsible for the design and development of numerous small medical practice websites from around the country. Jesse holds a BFA from Plymouth State University, with a concentration in graphic design.

“I’ve always admired Vital’s online marketing presence and overall aesthetic from afar,” Jesse said. “To say I’m excited to finally be a part of this team would be a gross understatement.”

A Portsmouth native, Shane has worked extensively as a designer, photographer and marketer in the action sports industry in San Diego, CA where he worked for national and international apparel brands. He has also worked as a graphic designer at Infinite Imaging, Ideal Health and previously at Vital Design in 2004. Shane was part of the team that designed some of the most popular brands in Vital’s portfolio.

We have received a great response from some past “How to” blog tutorials like How to Rotate Photoshop Brushes and How To Create a Fanpage on Facebook With Custom HTML so here is another quick Photoshop tutorial on a technique that saves me tons of time.

As a Web developer here at Vital, production work is a big part of my job, so any way I can speed up my part of the process is going to help the bottom line. Masking images is a huge time saver itself, but when I learned you could mask a group of layers rather than taking the time to mask each layer individually, again my mind was blown by how such a simple thing could save me so much time!

I have found that masking a group of layers is especially handy when you are prepping images for photo galleries. Generally for galleries you need lots of images that are the same size, with the same effects applied. Whether you are just looking to make all the images a consistent size or your adding rounded corners etc., a layer mask is a great way to give you a consistent, clean edge. In this example I had to crop photos for the Portfolio Luxury Kitchens photo galleries.

There were a total of 35 images for the main galleries that had the same dimensions, and a thumbnail for each. Cropping each image and thumbnail, or masking them individually would have taken hours. The solution was to put all the photos layers in a group and mask the group. This way the images can be moved around individually inside the mask for the prefect layout and the dimensions will stay exactly the same when copied out.

Here is how it’s done.

Open the PSD of your design, and start by snapping guides to the size you need.

Vital Tip - Zooming in and holding shift while dragging guides, will snap the guides to exact pixels.

Next, add your photos to individual layers and make a group of those layers. They can be moved around later for composition. Now, making sure you are on the layer of the group, use the marquee tool to select the area you want to have masked. Click the “Add vector mask” icon in the footer of the layers pallet.

Now you will see that you have masked the whole group of layers. If needed, you can select the individual layers to position them correctly.

Keyboard Shortcuts to Quickly Copy and Paste Your Images

Use the marquee tool to select the area you have masked.

You can easily copy each layer (shift, command, C).

Vital Tip - Using “copy merged” opens your new window at the correct size.

Open a new window (command, N).

Paste the image (command, V).

and save it for web (shift, option, command, S).

As you go back to your original PSD, leave the marquee in place, turn off the next layer and repeat these steps.

This is really handy for rounded corners and custom shapes too. You can simply drag the mask from any shape to the layer or group of layers you want masked. And the best part is that if you hate it you can just change or remove the mask and you original image is intact!

Have fun and feel free to post questions in the comments below.

This may be old news to some, but when I figured out this technique I was blown away by how much time I had been wasting. This quick tutorial will show you how to easily rotate your Photoshop brushes to any angle you need. It may sound silly, but it’s a huge time saver!

We’re all fans of Photoshop brushes. Easily adding textures, patterns, images etc. to my designs is great although I always felt like they had their limitations based on their “out-of-the-box” layout. I can’t tell you how many times I have used the brush I needed on a separate layer, then rotated or flipped it to where I wanted it to end up. A huge waste of time.

With a couple mouse clicks, you can make the brushes do whatever you want. Here’s how.

STEP 1

Open up a blank document and grab your brush tool. Pick a pattern (anything but round) from your brushes pallet. I’ll choose this cloud brush that’s alway annoyed me because I thought it could only be used in the lower right corner of the page, without transforming or erasing part of it.

STEP 2, here’s where it gets good…
Now, in the brushes pallet (Window > Brushes) select “Brush Tip Shape.” I never noticed this as an option because of the check boxes next to all the other choices. Check out your options, flip X, flip Y, angle, even a dragging option. Too easy! You can just click and drag to the exact angle you need.

Here is a sample with the clouds rotated to all 4 corners. How celestial.

Quick and easy, but a huge time saver. I hope you found this to be helpful!