Visual Marketing: 99 Proven Ways for Small Businesses to Market with Images and Design

Thanks To

Kathi Elster, for sharing her experience and insight as a marketer and author; Jim Keller, for his wit, eloquence, and supreme visual intelligence; Veronica Sozek, my first art teacher, for inspiring me to think visually; Richard Walsh, who was the first small-business owner to influence me; and Peg Patterson, Hannah Shatz, and Teri Scheinzeit, for serving as my gurus when Norman and I started Langton Cherubino Group.

I descended from a small-business owner and a typesetter who set type by hand. My maternal grandfather, Walter Walsh, founded his own flower shop in Woonsocket, Rhode Island; lost it in the Depression; and rebuilt it again. My paternal grandfather set type for the Providence Journal and edited the Fox Point Rambler during WWII. Both influenced my destiny.

Thanks to our editor Dan Ambrosio and editorial assistant, Ashley Allison at John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Kudos to Geoff Williams, who wrote about me in Entreprenuer.com, and thanks to Peter Shankman for creating HARO.

I would like to thank my parents, Austin and Carol, for their never-ending encouragement and support. I dedicate this book to the ones who have seen me at my best and worst and everything in between: Rachael, Jae Min, and my one and only, Shelley.

—David Langton, May 2011

How do you start giving thanks in a book with so many ideas like this? It's like trying to bottle up the atmosphere—an impossibly large task. Each day in my travels on the Web and to events across the United States, with countless ...