Yesterday night I attended the Young Business Professionals Mixer at Michael Alberini’s, sponsored by my new friends at Wardrobe Clothing. First, allow me say this was my first time going to Alberini’s in Boardman. If you’re in the vicinity of the Mahoning Valley you absolutely must try this place, great food, great atmosphere, great place to bring a date, family, grandma…you get the idea; it’s a nice place. You can find them on the web at www.michaelalberinis.com. For those of you who don’t know, Wardrobe Clothing is a valley clothing company started by Derrick McDowell. You can find them on the web at www.wardrobeclothing.com. They have some nice shirts there, and all around they are some really cool guys. It was a great evening, we had a really good time, met with other local business owners and entrepreneurs and had a lot of opportunities to inform people about the advantages of working with 1080 Media, specifically the benefits to having video, print, photo, and web capabilities all under one roof working for you.
You know, when you’re at these kind of events you’re talking to many people about a plethora of ideas and marketing solutions, and you don’t really get a chance to digest everything until the event is over. So, as I got into the office this morning and began going through each contact and card I was surprised to see that a decent amount of people were really interested in better, easier print solution for their business.
::Warning: This is the Print PSA part, just sayin’:: Even though the mainstay of 1080 Media is in creating intense, captivating user experiences on the web; one of the things we sometimes neglect to mention is that we also have the ability to bring that same attention and interest to the print world. We have the ability to follow any project from conception through printing, and will even arrange delivery. Already have a design in place? Not a problem, I can almost guarantee our printer is more cost effective, while still delivering a quality product. In fact, more and more we are seeing jobs come through our workflow that are predesigned, either by another agency or an in-house marketing team, that need pre-flighted and sent through our printing service. It’s an easier, cheaper, hassle-free way to handle your printing.
I’ve been thinking about the Apple v. Flash issue for a bit now and I have come to a conclusion that is not easy. I’ve been a Mac guy for over a decade (I was a Mac guy PRE OSX), I LOVE how Apple’s OS works and the great features they provide. I love the look of my Apple MacBook, how compact it is, the 8 HOUR BATTERY. I’ve never owned a computer that has made my job easier, made me more efficient, and overall has been my tool of choice for design since college.
But unless Apple lifts the ban on Flash developing I will be moving to a Windows 7 PC platform on the next computer upgrade, and I’ll be inviting other interactive designers to do the same. In fact I don’t think I’ll have to do much convincing…over 10,000 designers have joined the “I’m with Adobe” site on FB (it’s only been open for a week), and TONS of designers and developers are voicing the same opinion all across the blogosphere. In fact, many of the execs at Adobe are beginning to post images and lists of their new ‘Mac free’ design setups, that are cheaper and better (that was hard to say) than the Macs they used to run. I can completely understand Jobs not liking Flash or any other development tool, but to not support it and then COMPLETELY BAN it’s use on the new Apple SDK is ridiculous. Flash (love it or hate it) is THE MOST widely used tool to develop applications and interactive content for the web and for Apple to exclude it’s use is a huge set back for web development as a whole.
I hope Apple gets it straight (because I LOVE using Apple products) or else they’re going to successfully isolate the same demographic that allowed them to bounce back from the financial disaster of a company they were in the ’90′s.
Good Morning! I stumbled across this excellent article from my friends at www.zurb.com about designing good copy. I thought it was a worthwhile read and tied into my theme for the next couple of months. That is correct, through the entire winter season I’ll be blogging about things that I think make good designs truly excellent and engaging. I’ll be drawing from my decade or so in the biz, plus using great resources (like www.zurb.com). These are things I think about every time I get in front of my screen here at 1080 Media (shameless plug for the search engines LOL). I hope these will get you all thinking and hopefully you will find these useful. Thanks again to the ZurBlog!
Headings: Treat each line as a phrase
A good headline sparks interest and captures your attention. It also gives you a good idea of what’s to come as you start to read. When it comes to headings, I’m often faced with working with more than one line. In those situations, you have to treat each line as a separate phrase.
Consider this example:
It doesn’t read well, does it? The lines are choppy with no consideration to the overall flow or interaction of each line. Each line breaks in mid thought, forcing an unwanted break in the message. It feels rushed and amateur, making me focus on individual words instead of the overall message. (And look at that widow!)
Let’s take that same example and give it some structure, forcing line breaks at the proper points such that each line reads on its own:
Each line can now pull its own weight, giving readers a small sense of completion with each line that adds value to the entire headline. Forced line breaks in HTML are easy (<br />), so take the extra time when possible to make your headings stand out.
Paragraphs: Strategically emphasize
When it comes to emphasis, you can learn a lot from properly styled hyperlinks. If the goal of a hyperlink is to encourage action through special visual styles, then the same can be said of bold and italicized text.
With a similar goal in mind—improving scanability by highlighting important ideas—a little emphasis can add a lot of value to your words. We call it strategic bolding.
Look at it this way: as you’ve been reading or skimming through this post, you’re eyes have likely jumped to the bolder, bigger, or more colorful elements. That means our styles are doing their job. We want your eyes to skip along, fixating on key areas to grab your attention. We know where we want your eyes to fall, so we put a little extra emphasis on them.
The result? Faster reading, improved comprehension, and some more “colorful” paragraphs in an otherwise dull piece. But the real benefit is that you’ll improve the interaction of your words. As readers get through paragraphs of text faster, they’ll be able to latch onto and recall key concepts.
However, not even strategic bolding can help you out if the words you’re bolding aren’t readable. That’s where an iteration or two will help you out.
Everything: Read, re-write, repeat.
Nothing compares to copy that’s been put through the grinder a few times. Consider your process and approach to writing. Do you start with a good outline, but spin your wheels on turning it into a stream of thoughts? Maybe you have a tendency to talk too much with run-ons abound in everything you write. Then again, maybe you think your words are the best around.
Either way, writing what comes naturally is easy to do, but iterating—rewriting and proofing your work—will have a huge impact on the success of your words. Getting someone else’s eyes on your work will also help expedite the process. Seek out someone who has that attention to detail and passion to read and write.
We employ the same tactics here at ZURB. When blogging, we encourage the off-the-cuff posts, but also acknowledge that those in the moment posts come with diminishing returns. You need the proofreading, the editing, and that little extra polish to make your post sing.
You can get better results with very little overhead. Encourage your teams to print and edit drafts, use a blogging buddy, and establish a few guidelines to designing your words. You’ll like what you read a lot more.
Good Morning! While meandering through the many inspirational design oriented blog sites I read, I came across this one that I thought I’d pass along.
Being someone who was trained as a graphic designer before making the leap to interactive design grid systems have played a pretty important role in the way I approach our projects here, at 1080 Media. The way I’ve always seen the grid is kind of like a house. All of the support walls and foundations hold the house together, and you build all of the ‘personality’ in the house out from the foundations. That is exactly what good grid work in design does. It would be like building a website without implenting any CSS, sure you could do it that way, but why?
This one comes from my friends over at www.aisleone.net. I’d recommend you guys check their site every now again for great info in dealing with grid systems in design.
A few myths and misconceptions about grids exist in the design community that can be detrimental, especially to designers who are new to the subject. I recently read this article claiming that grids have disadvantages and then it goes on to list them. As you can guess, I very much disagree with this entire article and feel that it’s providing a lot of bad information on grid systems. All of the listed “disadvantages” are distortions derived from the lack of understanding on how a grid works and functions.
In response to that article, here’s my attempt at clearing up this mess.
Grids are a design trend.
Grids have been in use long before graphic design became a discipline. During the 13th– and 14th-centuries, scribes used the Villard Diagram to organize their handwritten manuscripts. In the 15th-century, Gutenberg and others divided their pages using the Van de Graaf canon.
The use of a grid is not a trend, it’s a fundamental skill that designers should possess. Grids have been around a very long time and are an important part of the design process.
Grids can impede creativity.
Definitely the most ridiculous of the bunch, this myth suggests that a grid will cause a designer to be less creative. A grid should never define a design, it should work with it. To suggest that a grid can hinder creativity is the same as suggesting that a music tempo can as well. A grid is a building block that can never, and should never, impede creativity.
The legendary designer, Josef Müller-Brockmann, explained it well:
“The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee. It permits a number of possible uses and each designer can look for a solution appropriate to his personal style. But one must learn how to use the grid; it is an art that requires practice.”
Another outrageous claim is that grids are confining. When used properly, a grid will never limit or confine a design, it will grow and adapt to your liking. If someone tells you a grid gives you no freedom, that person doesn’t fully understand the purpose of a grid or how it should be used. Grids are flexible and allow for an infinite number of possibilities.
Graphic designer and writer Ellen Lupton explains:
“To say a grid is limiting is to say that language is limiting, or typography is limiting.”
Where people get confused is with the notion that a design utilizing a grid should look “grid-like”, giving a clear indication of columns. Fortunately, that isn’t true, and this poster by Brockmann is a great example. The text clearly falls on a grid but the concentric shapes have more of an organic feel, making the grid invisible.
Grids only benefit certain designs.
A grid can be used for ALL designs. I’ll repeat that. A grid can be used for ALL designs.
To suggest that only certain designs can benefit from using a grid is to suggest that a structural foundation can only benefit a certain type of building or that grammar is only useful for a certain style of writing. A grid is a foundation, and like with any architectural structure, it’s a vital part of the process.
Grids also do not satisfy a specific aesthetic. They do not require the use of Helvetica or the omission of images. A grid can be applied to any style of design, no matter if it’s scrapbooky, or clean and minimal. You don’t have to design like Brockmann to use a grid.
Here are two sites that exhibit completely different styles of design, but both make use of a grid.
Example 1 is predominantly white, doesn’t feature many colors or textures and uses a sans-serif typeface.
Example 2 uses a larger variety of colors, textures and a serif typeface.
Grids require a lot of content.
The amount of content in no way dictates whether a grid is required or not. A design needs to visually communicate an idea or message, whether it’s a 250 page story, or a 5 word sentence and an image. A grid helps achieve that goal through structure, organization and hierarchy.
Grids slow down the design process.
The opposite is actually true. A well-designed grid, used by a competent designer, can help solve a design problem in less time. A fully designed grid system will also provide a consistent structure and organization across a multi-page design, like a web site, making the process more efficient.
Grids only work in a fixed layout.
This is specific to web design. Many people believe that a grid needs to be fixed and as a result can only generate a fixed layout.
Not true.
A grid can be designed to be fluid and change with the viewport size, scaling itself proportionately.
A few articles have been written on the subject and there are even a few CSS frameworks available:
Fluid Grids
The Fluid Grid system
Fluid 960 Grid System
Conclusion
Hopefully this article has helped clear up a few myths and misconceptions about grids, and has allowed you to better understand the purpose of them and how they should be used.
If you’re interested in learning more about grid systems, visit my site The Grid System for helpful links to articles, tools, books and templates.
Adobe MAX was GREAT! Now that I’m home I’m having a chance to pour over all the information and things that I was fortunate enough to study and witness this week, so I’m going to go through each day for my posts.
Our first ACTUAL day in L.A. was all about getting our bearings and seeing some of the sights. I arrived sometime around 8pm or so and settled into our hotel shortly after. The next day we went out and saw some of the sights with our friends Dave and Kelly from Long Island (we met them at MAX last year). We went out to Santa Monica and walked out to the pier and spent some time on the beach, wandered along the shops off of Santa Monica Blvd. I LOVED Santa Monica! There was a flourishing art community, families, some pretty cool community things (including outdoor performances, etc. at the shopping center off of Santa Monica Blvd.) It was a great experience and one that I will not soon forget.
The first day of Adobe MAX kicked off the following day for those of us at 1080 Media with Pre-Conference Labs. These are all-day (8hrs.) classes that really dig deep into a specific field of design, or software. These classes are really cool because more often than not they are taught by the people who developed the software at Adobe. The one I took would kind of set the tone for the rest of the week, it was on a developmental emerging software called Flash Catalyst. This program is essentially being used to develop rich internet applications (i.e. Adobe Air Apps, Mobile Apps, Apps within a webpage, etc.) for browsers and devices. Previously these applications have been developed in programs like Flash, and coded out as applications. Flash Catalyst is part of a suite of programs (now being dubbed as the “Flash Platform) that will develop these applications and then be tied to a database structure (I’ll get to that later) creating very cool interactive content that can run independently of your internet browser. The really cool thing about Flash Catalyst is that you can directly import an Illustrator or Photoshop file into the program, and as long as you’ve managed your layers properly, can begin building applications immediately. If you’ve ever used Flash before you know that you would have to select elements, write in action script and it can be a bit of a process (especially if you’re not that into learning a scripting language; basically you’re a DESIGNER). With Flash Catalyst you select the layer group, tell it to be a button and it writes in the necessary code to be a button! The Same goes for making data lists, scrolling bars, and pretty much any other interactive element you would need in an application. As if that isn’t cool enough it has a timeline similar to the Flash timeline that allows you to create transitions between pages, fading in and out elements, etc. Flash Catalyst allows exports to another program in the Flash Platform called Flash Builder, where you can tie your application to .xml databases, and edit the action script, and much more. All in all a good day, it started my fascination with Catalyst.
The Thunder Over the Valley Airshow was a huge success and a great time! Can’t wait for two years to go by so we can have more 1080 cornhole out there!
