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Posted 7/13/2009 by Geoff, Pres/CEO
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Here are some interesting articles that our interactive media team came across this past week:
“Google Finally Drops the Beta Tag” >> Read Article
“Using Wikis to Document UI Specifications” >> Read Article
“Hands On: Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview” >> Read Article
Enjoy!
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Posted 7/6/2009 by Geoff, Pres/CEO
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Here are some interesting articles that our interactive media team came across this past week:
“FireFox 3.5 is Out” >> Read Article
“Google AJAX Feed API Released” >> Read Article
Enjoy!
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Posted 6/29/2009 by Geoff, Pres/CEO
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Here are some interesting articles that our interactive media team came across this past week:
“Inspiring Examples of Minimalism in Web Design” >> Read Article
“FTC plans to monitor blogs for claims, payments” >> Read Article
“Google Announces Update to Flash Indexing” >> Read Article
Enjoy!
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Posted 6/22/2009 by Geoff, Pres/CEO
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Here are some interesting articles that our interactive media team came across this past week:
“The Battlefield of Design: Designers vs. Clients” >> Read Article
“Watching Your Web Language” >> Read Article
“Microsoft’s Removal of IE from Windows 7 Will Have no effect” >> Read Article
Enjoy!
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Posted 6/15/2009 by Geoff, Pres/CEO
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Here are some interesting articles that our interactive media team came across this past week:
“Dell makes $3 Million from Twitter-Related Sales” >> Read Article
“16 Design Tools for Prototyping and Wireframing” >> Read Article
‘Hunch’ Web site will make decisions for you” >> Read Article
Enjoy!
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Posted 10/6/2008 by Geoff, Pres/CEO
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This weekend I attended Webmaster Jam Session 2008, a conference in Atlanta put on by CoffeeCup Software and a few other groups. We sent about 10 people from our company. Representatives from our Project Management Team, Account Management Team, Technical Writing/IA Team and Design Team all attended.
Yours truly at Webmaster Jam Session 2008
The conference had a pretty good lineup of speakers, some better than others. The speakers tended to be design oriented or social media oriented. They could have used a few more sessions with a true business focus, but overall it was a worthwhile conference.
The best speaker, in my opinion, was Chris Perry from Weber Shandwick, one of the largest PR companies in the world. Chris spoke on social media and its impact on business. He made an excellent point -- too many businesses try to use social media tools (such as Facebook, blogging, LinkedIn, etc.) because they feel they have to in order to keep up with the times. In other words, they blog because everyone else is doing it. Their approach should instead start with a focus on what they are trying to achieve.
Social media tools should be utilized as a means to an end -- a way to connect and interact with a desired target audience. A business should first identify their target audience and then use social media tools as a way to engage that audience in conversation. Too many businesses are missing the boat on this right now.
So all in all, a good weekend and we are looking forward to Webmaster Jam Session 2009!
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Posted 1/17/2008 by Declan, Acct Mgr
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Remember Favicons (don't know what a Favicon is? look up to the left, see that little 352 badge beside "http://" well that's a Favicon, they're used for bookmarking your site in web browsers, so users can find your site by looking in their favourites for your logo.)
Now you can create the same thing for iPhones and iTouch users that wish to bookmark your site.
1) Create a 57x57 PNG.
2) Name it "apple-touch-icon.png"
3) Save it in the root folder of your website (web documents).
or alternately for more flexibility
<head>
<title> 352 Media Group's iPhone Bookmark </title>
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/whatever.jpg"/>
</head>
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Posted 11/23/2007 by Geoff, Pres/CEO
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One of our great design contractors, Paul Traylor, recently shared this tip with the rest of our designers. I thought it may be helpful to other designers as well, so I wanted to share it here:
Have you ever manually merged files with a file comparator through Dreamweaver? If not, it's easy and a good thing to have in your bag of tricks.
Here's a link to a how-to article:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/compare_utilities.html
Here's a summary:
1) Download a file comparison (diff) application. Adobe suggests Winmerge for Windows or XCode for Mac (see the above article for links). I am a Mac user and I use TextWrangler (http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/index.shtml).
2) Next you have to configure DW to use that application to compare the files. You need to point DW to it in DW's Preferences under "FileCompare".
3) Now, in DW if you select two files in the site's "Files" box and right click there should be a "Compare Local Files" option.
4) Select that. It will open the two files using the diff app you specified. Your diff app should show you the two files one next to the other and flag all the diff's between them. It should allow you to go through the files variation by variation and either merge the variation one file or the other (your choice). For example, say two developers made modifications to the same CSS file and now need to merge them together. Take one developer's css file, let's call it mainStyles.css, and rename it mainStylesPAUL.cssand throw it in the css folder with the other developer's copy of mainStyles.css. Now use DW to do a compare and see and/or merge the diffs between the two files.
Hope that helps someone. If nothing else it will give you a healthy respect for what CVS has to do to merge files.
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Posted 7/5/2007 by TimP, Designer
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As a web designer, you would think that I find most of my design inspiration from a “favorites” folder that contains all the web sites I thought were cool or some other collection of online eye candy. For me however, it comes from print.
Actually, to be more specific, it comes from a desk drawer that is packed with an eclectic mix of magazine ads, covers, photos and various other clippings that I’ve ripped out from the magazines in the restroom or the other publications that clog my mailbox at home. (I would like to take this moment to apologize to any of my co-workers who have read magazine articles just to have them abruptly end at a torn or missing page.)
I don’t know how I started this odd obsession, but whenever I’m reading a magazine I tend to spend more time looking at the layout or staring at the design of the ads than actually reading the articles. Usually something will catch my eye: an interesting color gradient in the background, creative use of typography, a photo treatment, or just the general layout of a page. Before I know it, I’m quietly ripping it from the magazine and stuffing it into my pocket so I can later add it to the rest of the horded print scraps in my drawer.
I think the reason that I like to pull design inspiration from what I see in print is that it’s a completely different medium from web design, and thus forces you think more creatively in its implementation.
In the past, I’ve created designs in which I was inspired from other websites that I thought were really cool. It could be the way the header was shaped, how they set up the top navigation, or the way the menus looked.
The problem though was that sometimes I inadvertently pulled “too much” inspiration from these web sites, and would have to scrap the entire design because I ended up simply re-creating some of the design elements I liked.
With print (or any other un-related medium), however, it’s virtually impossible. How do you take a largely graphical layout for a magazine page and port it to a web site that has to have navigation, text, scalability and other various features?
By using print as an inspirational medium, I think it forces you to pull feelings and concepts that made you like the design, (the vintage or overall modern style, the way the colors worked together, the use of the white space, the impression you got from the photography), but not the design itself.
In the end it helps you develop a design using the creative stimulation you got from something, as opposed to creating the design that stimulated you.
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