Monday, December 20th, 2010
Every year many companies, especially creative agencies have the dilemma of “what do we do for Christmas!?” We simply made some nice Christmas cards last year but this time we wanted to go one better and create something digital as well as something that’s fun, creative, and shows off our skills!
Thursday, October 7th, 2010
Choosing the right font is key to any piece of graphic design, whether it be for web or print. Unfortunately web designers have been stuck with the same old system fonts for years, unable to create intricate typographical layouts without the use of images. I think we’ve done a pretty good job to be honest because any old-school print designers would have a heart attack if they knew we’ve been working with a choice of about six fonts to fulfil the needs of every website that we create.
There have been a number of different processes and applications written to try and solve this problem by allowing custom fonts to be embedded into websites. In this post we will outline the latest and most popular techniques, and the legal issues that you may unknowingly face by using them.
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Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
Now, this post was supposed to go out about two weeks ago, and since then it seems that every designer under the sun has written on the same subject - That’ll teach us for being lazy. Nonetheless, we decided to publish it anyway, just in case anyone missed any of the other great posts out there…
By now you should all have heard of the iPad, and if not then you must have been living under a rock for the last few months! Touch screen devices are here to stay and you need to start thinking about how to design and develop to get the most out of them. Apple would like you to believe that the iPad is the only touch screen device that anyone should own (and to be honest it probably is the best), but there are already some strong competitors, and many more coming to the market this year. So, you need to get your thinking caps on and start designing your websites to work with them, as well as updating your other sites, too. There are a lot of things to consider… here are just a few.
Thursday, April 1st, 2010
One of my pet hates is when designers preview the websites they’re working on as an emailed .jpg, rather than as an HTML file within the browser (which usually results in it being printed by the client). A design looks completely different when it’s printed out to how it does on the screen - not only are you printing a 72dpi / RGB design, but a printer renders text and images completely differently to a monitor. A website is a piece of interactive digital artwork and so should be shown in this way, even in the first stages of it’s development. Seeing as though 1024 x 768 is still the most popular screen size, when presenting your designs you should obviously make sure they work at this resolution, but by putting your design in a HTML file you are able to present it in any number of resolutions - Go on, impress your client by going that little step further and help them see that their site will look different, but just as great, on their computer compared to your 27″ iMac! ;-)
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
Ok, so there are a lot of articles out there on HTML5, especially since Google Wave arrived (because it’s the first major app to run on the language), but all the information that you need to know in order to start using it now is either too complicated, or spread out over various websites / articles / tutorials. Hopefully in this article we’ll be able to amalgamate and condense a lot of this information so that anyone with basic HTML knowledge can start using it.
Before I start I’d just like to say a big thank you to the Speak the Web guys who put a series of talks on in the north of England over the last two weeks. The gigs each had a speaker from Opera (amongst others) who enlightened many of us to the true potential of HTML5, and why we should start using it sooner rather than later.
