There is a new interview focusing on my personal work on the Adobe Blog. I’ve been working on a series of illustrations using the iPad as a key part of my process, with additional compositing and cleanup done later on a desktop computer. Two of my pieces are on display via Twitter and Facebook pages. Adobe also made a repeating background of my work on their official Twitter page. It was amazing to have members of Adobe’s social media team take an interest in my new work and I can’t wait to share more pieces as they are completed.

Check out more of my artwork here.

Check out the post on the Adobe Blog.

Check out all the posts I’ve been involved in on the Adobe Blog.

Last week I was featured in Billboard Magazine’s Twitter 140: The Music Industry Characters You Need to Follow. Every year Billboard puts together a list of 140 influential Twitter users from every part of the music industry, and I’m honored to have made the list for the last two years in a row.

According to Billboard “We turned to a panel of industry experts, musicians, digital trailblazers and Billboard’s own staff to find out who they followed. We were looking for the voices who steer the conversation about the music industry and digital culture, and also for music (and Twitter) obsessives who constantly share their discoveries.”

Read the Billboard overview of why I was selected below.

Eric Snowden
Senior Product Lead, Behance
@EricSnowden
The nexus where music, technology and design all come together exists at Snowden’s Twitter page, where the tech exec dishes advice and opinions on all three. If you like to get technical with the mechanics behind a website, Snowden tweets all of your mobile, online and artistic tips — with a little political discourse thrown in for good measure. Snowden recently announced via his Twitter page that he’ll be leaving Atlantic Records for discoverability startup Behance, where he’ll be taking their properties mobile.

Check out the full list here

Today I awoke to a nice surprise, one of my illustrations was featured on the Adobe Touch Twitter and Facebook page along with a link to my new Tumblr. I’ve been experimenting with a new illustration workflow using Adobe Ideas, one of the new Adobe Touch apps for the iPad. I’m using Ideas to start all the elements in my new illustrations (black and white line art), then export to Illustrator to clean up the drawings, and finish in Photoshop for coloring and compositing. I have 3-4 new pieces using this flow, and have been drawing more in the last few weeks than in the last few years thanks to Ideas, my iPad and my Adonit stylus.

Check out my Tumblr featuring in progress versions of my new work.

At Mobile World Congress 2012 Mozilla announced its upcoming HTML5 app marketplace for desktop and devices. Using HMTL5 developers will be able to deploy the same app across tablets, phones, desktops and other HTML enabled devices. Atlantic Records worked with Mozilla to build two responsive applications that were showcased at their booth. They are currently being polished by our dev team and will be available at the consumer launch of the platform later this year. In the meantime we’ll be posting web based links to the apps in the coming weeks. We’re huge believers in HTML5 here at Atlantic and are really excited to be working with Mozilla to help push the open web as a platform forward.

Get started developing apps for the Mozilla Marketplace.

Sign up for the Mozilla Marketplace developer program.

Today was a good day for mail, I received my copy of the 365 Best Websites of 2011. This website is featured on page 113 and was site of the day for July 24th, 2011. All sites were selected by the jury at Awwwards.com based on design, creativity, usability and content. There are some big brands featured in the book (Nintendo, Garnier, Versace, Ted) as well as work by some amazing agencies (Teehan & Lax, Odopod, Firstborn, Digitas) and I’m proud to be among such great company.

This is only one man’s experience, but I hope there is value for other designers in this information. One clarification – I’m not going to badmouth anyone. Just like the designers reading this post, the value of a site is not measured by traffic alone. I’m not going to mention sites who accepted my work and didn’t generate significant traffic. I want to keep this all positive.

This is what worked for me.

First off, something obvious. Getting “site of the day” will get you exponentially more traffic than just getting accepted. I mention this because the difference for me was a 100x spike in pageviews in one day. I was shocked at how much more traffic it garnered. When submitting your site I would start of looking at sites that have sites of the day/week/month competitions and make sure that you submit to them first. Most sites show so much work with no real focus and the ones who do more obvious curation have the greatest upside. Awwwwards.com has been the highest contributor of traffic to my site since launch and to this day is still my top referrer. The number two referrer has been thebestdesigns.com, where I was also site of the day.

Secondly, look for sites that don’t feature too much work at once. The WordPress.org showcase is a great example of this and is the number three referrer to my site. They sometimes only post one site a day, and have been known not to post for days at a time. Again, it’s harder to get chosen, but if you do there is a lot more focus on your work.

Creattica.com, cssmania.com, webdesignledger.com and csswinner.com round out my top seven referrers. Then something interesting happens – Google. Although this post is about traffic from design websites, never forget how important content and SEO optimization is.

Cssdesignawards.com, cssbased.com and designfridge.co.uk round out my top eleven. Facebook comes in at number twelve, which is interesting because I have almost 4x the number of Twitter followers as Facebook friends (more on this in a later blog post). Designdelight.net and cssawards.net round out my top fourteen sites.

Why top fourteen you ask? After 14 the amount of traffic these sites generate for me drops off drastically and becomes insignificant. These are the sites that contributed material traffic to my website. On an average day my pageviews are up 500% from my previous design with fewer pages.

The remaining question you may have – do mass site submission services work? In my opinion, no. They may carpet bomb your site to dozens or hundreds of design websites but most of those sites only generate only a handful of hits. Again, traffic is only one measure of success, but for me submitting my work to websites that curate by giving awards or by featuring a limited numbers of designs ended up maximizing new traffic to my website.

There is a great recap of the presentation “Data-Driven Bottom Line Results: Making Social Media Actionable A Real World Case Study” that Carmen Sutter and I gave at the Web 2.0 Summit on the Informationweek website. The presentation was about our strategy around social media and how we use analytics and data to convert music fans to customers.

Read the full InformationWeek interview here.