09/2007 Article Archive

  • September 28, 2007 in Business & Process

    Don't Send Me Your IT Department

    "Get to the Point" a daily email newsletter from marketingprofs.com recently had an article entitled "Information Technology is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus". The title immediately struck a chord with me. Many times I've gone to consult with a company about their web site and they sent their IT guys out while their marketing department was AWOL.

    • 0 Comments
    • 982 Views
  • September 27, 2007 in Design Inspiration

    LogoLounge.Com - 2007 Logo Trends

    This is an interesting article about design trends for logos in 2007. The section that really struck me was the one entitled "rubber band". I blame the Lance Armstrong awareness bands for this particular trend. They've been so pervasive for so long that they've finally made their way through the designer psyche and materialized on paper.

    • 1 Comments
    • 2234 Views
  • September 26, 2007 in Web Design Culture

    Writing Well is Never Bad

    In new media we frequently find ourselves in situations where we are forced to wear more than one hat. The fact that many clients use us as their complete ad agency solution is just the nature of the business. Because of this it is important that we are reasonably good writers. Common grammatical errors which are easy to avoid can be deal breakers when you are emailing a client, writing copy, or blogging...

    • 1 Comments
    • 898 Views
  • September 20, 2007 in Web Design Culture

    What Does Your Design Really Say?

    As designers, whether we realize it or not, the products of our labor have a huge effect on culture at large. Specifically, web designers decide how linguistic data should be presented to the population which affect how they will interact with that data. Wow! Design matters. A perfect example of this is the recent project of design gurus Pilipp Steinweber and Andreas Koller called Similar Diversity. Essentially, Similar Diversity is a graphical representation of the common word usage in the writings considered holy by the major world religions. It portrays all religion as a huge nebulous blob of similar thoughts and ideas. This design is saying something and affecting the way people think in a very tangible way. It reminds me that every decision I make in my design process should be evaluated carefully so I can better understand the message I am conveying with my design. Can theology really be reduced to a mechanistic chart of similar words ripped from their original context? After all the meaning of a word changes dramatically when you change the words around it. No. Religions are opposed to each other in concept not in common use of language to express those concepts.

    • 1 Comments
    • 962 Views
  • September 18, 2007 in Product Reviews

    Large File Tranfser Part 2: Paid Solutions

    After the previous post about transferring large files, a reader brought to my attention the fact that there are paid services like LeapFile out there that basically do exactly what I am describing. If you are a web designer that likes to leave the hosting up to the client, then these solutions will be great for you. On the other hand, if you resell hosting, which I assume a lot of you do, then you are already paying for storage and bandwith so it makes more sense to have your own solution.

    • 0 Comments
    • 1130 Views
  • September 17, 2007 in Product Reviews

    Getting Large Files From Clients is Still a Problem!

    Clients very rarely understand the concept of file size. When they try to send a 20MB file by email and it doesn't make it through, it baffles them. For about a year now I have pointed my clients to a service called yousendit.com. Without getting into too much detail, yousendit.com allows you to send large files by email. However, you run into a problem when there are a lot of large files that all need to be sent together. In these cases yousendit just doesn't cut it. Rather than set up and FTP account and try to explain how to use it, I would usually just tell my clients to snail-mail it or drop it off. That is, until recently. I discoverd a cool little FTP Java applet that has solved my problems. You embed it into a web page and it automatically connects to the FTP account you specify and it allows the user to drag and drop files onto the applet for easy upload. So all I did was create a web page in a directory with standard Cpanel directory protection on it. Then I added the applet to the page and sent my client to it. Problem solved and it really makes you look like the wizard of the web. Here's a link to the applet.

    • 1 Comments
    • 1067 Views
  • September 11, 2007 in Product Reviews

    Online Video Revisited

    A few months ago I wrote a post comparing and contrasting the most popular YouTube clones on the web. One of the sites I reviewed was Blip.tv. At the time I was extremely impressed with the podcasting options Blip.tv provided. But I found they were lacking in the ability to embed a Flash player into a web site. This is a feature that nearly all of the other sites had and was a big deciding factor in my review of Blip.tv. In doing some research recently for a client on video publishing options, I found that Blip.tv has added the embed feature to their service which, in my opinion, puts them at the top of the game. Check it out when you have a chance.

    • 0 Comments
    • 869 Views
  • September 5, 2007 in Web Design Culture

    Know What's Going On In New Media

    In any industry, but especially in new media, it is important to keep up with what's going on. It keeps you from getting behind the curve and it invigorates your work when you see the cool things that other people are doing. Two good places to "get your learn on" are Vitamin News and Digital Web. I think they both do a good job of keeping a finger on the pulse of new media.

    • 0 Comments
    • 900 Views