Archive for the ‘Tips’ Category

The Importance of User-Centered Design

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

Let me introduce myself, I’m what you call “a user”

So, you might be thinking this is something of a contrived statement? One that is to lead on to an article full of humorous wit and intrigue, maybe with a twist! Well, I’m afraid such an assumption may lead to nothing more than bitter disappointment. But hold on and wait just a moment longer, there is a reason for doing so.

User centered design

Okay, let’s get down to the nitty-grit, the nuts and bolts, the crux, the real reason why we’re all here.
Your latest site build has gone live – it’s looking good, it’s on-brand, it’s ticking all right the boxes, it’s a master piece of modern art, a real winner. The analytics figures are beginning to come through and traffic is hitting the site in huge numbers… It’s looking like a massive success, the client is going to be ecstatic, joyous beyond all belief. You’ve got them now; a roaring success and new business will indeed be yours for the taking.
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Mobile Usability and Designing for Interrupt-ability

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

Last week we attended an evening dedicated to opening our minds and gathering some tips on mobile usability. The evening was free and hosted by Northern User Experience, and these are my thoughts…

The main talk was by Kimberley Bottomley, a User Experience Manager at Aviva who has “spent a considerable amount of time researching [mobile usability] and learning about [it] in the past 12 months”.

The talk got off to a bit of a slow start, detailing some points which any good designer or User Experience professional should take into consideration on every project, whether mobile or not. However there were several interesting facts and figures to spark discussion amongst the group.

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Top 10 WordPress Plugins 2011

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

1. Pods CMS

www.podscms.org

Just as the name suggests, Pods CMS is a content Management plugin for WordPress. Gone are the days of people using WordPress for your blog alone. It’s fast becoming one of the industry’s standard CMSs, and if you’re thinking about using it for this purpose, then this plugin is possibly the most powerful of all.
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MincePieCount CSS3 Animations

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!

www.mincepiecount.com

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Font Embedding & The Law

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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