Friday Video #2

An excellently hectic and also quite brilliant piece of animation. Note the overgrown skyscrapers – a developing meme rapidly heading towards sci-fi cliche…

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Responsive design, yes and no…

The whole ‘responsive design’ debate has been stirred up again by a recent article from usability expert Jakob Nielsen. The response from the industry on the whole was pretty negative. But after I read it, I found myself nodding in agreement at times. It felt unusual.

Before I go any further, I should probably point out that I’m a designer Jim, not a developer. I can code HTML and CSS and just about get away with it, but I don’t here. I’m more interested in design and content implications of responsive websites.

So what’s the big deal?

Multiple platforms

Multiple platforms

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Posted in Design & Content, Development, Mobile, Web | 3 Comments

Creating the Edinburgh Comedy Festival brochure with XML & Adobe Indesign

The requirement

Back in 2008 we were tasked with creating the brochure for the Edinburgh Comedy Festival. As part of that project, we decided that we needed a way to automatically generate the brochure in Adobe InDesign (to prevent designers from wearing their mouse clicking fingers down to little stumps).

Because each page in the brochure could potentially have a different layout (each page is comprised of a series of blocks, each of which contain a show listing of variable size), this meant that a master template could not be created that would cover every page.

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Posted in Design & Content, Development | 2 Comments

HTML 5 Video – What’s the Story?

What’s all this then?

HTML 5 video. It’s the latest buzz word filtering down from the lips of techie types. You should use it they say, it’s the future they say. Well, in all honesty, it probably is. But what the hell is it and why should it concern you? Well I’m no programmer; I like cameras rather than keyboards, so I’m going to explain this to you in the way that I understand it.

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The New Facebook Timeline

If you have a Facebook business page you have 24 hours and counting before Timeline becomes mandatory and your old page layout will disappear into the ether! Don’t panic, although it’s not quite as simple as throwing up a nice new cover image, the changes are a good step forward.

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Goes Bootleg Chic?

I think it’s fair to say that this represents a bad day for the designer in question. You’d expect that “make the DVD cover look like a bootlegged ripoff” wasn’t in the design brief. (Not that there’s heaps of room to move in movie marketing design.)

But maybe there’s something other than just a misinterpreted design brief here?

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Posted in Design & Content | 1 Comment

A great video

A fantastic video here to end the week. Just shows how easy it is to reach 3.5 million viewers with online video. All you need is a fun and simple idea, a beautifully crafted script, and an amazingly charismatic performance and you’re away. Easy.

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Website may contain nuts

We always put ourselves under pressure to deliver great websites quickly and within budget, but do clients know what they’re really getting? How can you compare one site to the next? What does a £100k budget achieve that a £5k one can’t?

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Posted in Design & Content, Digital Strategy | Leave a comment