Events for the week of August 2 to August 8.
Exciting events for this week include:
Tuesday, August 3
Extreme U 2010 Patio Party, 5:00p to 7:00p
Your chance to connect with the founders of Extreme Venture Partners and this year’s crop of ExtremeU startups. Details and RSVP.
Potential Photo Show Reception at Comraderie
Showcasing Alex Clark’s brightest, most vibrant and most commented on photos. Details and RSVP.
Thursday, August 5
The Communication Design of Gilbert Li
From groundbreaking books to trendsetting packaging, join the Communication Designers of Toronto for this informal presentation from Gilbert Li. Details and RSVP.
Friday, August 6th to Sunday August 8th
Orangutan Awareness Weekend
The Toronto Zoo presents Orangutan Awareness Weekend. Learn more.
So, what’s on your radar?
Let us know via Twitter or add your recommended events to the TO Events Calendar.
Our Value Pricing deck from last week’s NXNE Interactive panel.
Last week we had the pleasure of joining Sam Ladner, Jon Lax and our moderator Simon Conlin on a NXNE panel discussion about value pricing. Abolish The Hourly was a well attended session and, from on stage, appeared to be capture the audience. I suppose any time you challenge the status quo, people take notice. But this topic is really nothing new, though it may be somewhat foreign to the creative services industry.
Sugar for your phone.
Boy that new iOS 4 is pretty snazzy. But it has those super complex textured backgrounds that make reading your icons more difficult than reading anything should be. So without further ado, here’s a lock screen I Need Sugar wallpaper for your iPhone (4, 3G, 3Gs or whatever, it works on’em all) and a matching home screen desktop for your iOS 4 phone that’ll help your icons pop. Enjoy!
Towards better readability on the Web.
Proponents of Web font options have been given a boost with @font-face, Typekit and now Google’s support with the Google Font Directory (of course, in Google ubiquitous Beta). However, the greatest barrier to Web legibility is not typefaces but rather screen size.
It’s about time! A presentation on time tracking and work life balance.
Here’s our slide deck from IgniteTO on how finding daily patterns in where we spend our time can help us win back our lives. The Ignite format is 20 slides in 5 minutes, so you have 15 seconds with each slide before it automatically transitions. Here I’ve loaded the slide deck in a format that let’s you transition with a click so you can spent as much time with each slide so you don’t have to experience the Ignite stress. I’ve also included a more polished script than the largely ad libbed one that was done live. But I promise I did get these points in within my 5 minutes limit. And I only said, “I’ll just wait for the next slide…” once.
Vector version of Safari 4 for your web mockups.
Yesterday we published an article on designing websites in Illustrator. There was a link at the end of that article for a vector version of Safari 4 for use in mockups, portfolios, and any other safe and respectable use you can think of. Here’s that link so you don’t have to scroll through the on pixel discussion:
Yes, we use Illustrator when designing websites.
I personally don’t understand why anyone would use a photo editing program to design a website, but I also recognize we’re in the minority here. So here are some reasons why we use Illustrator when we’re designing websites, along with some tips and assets to help you do the same.
How to turn a linguistic convenience into a nationalist uproar at benlucier.ca.
Design is about communication. And effective design doesn’t bewilder or misdirect. Symbols and images have the ability to clarify, but in the worst case they may completely obscure what you’re trying to communicate.
Case in point, EA’s current home page for The Sims:
b5media ad sales slide deck.
We’ve previously talked about the b5media Ad Sales Brochure. What we want to share now is the companion slide deck. We have a lot of fun building slide decks because we’re focused solely on supporting the speaker. This means we want to create a healthy backdrop for them to shine against and help guide the conversation that they’ll be engaging in with their listeners.
We’ve all seen slide decks where you’ve got an abundance of illegible bullet points or tiny little charts. None of this helps the audience or the speaker relate their story effectively. It generally distracts from the conversation with the speaker pointing to things that no one can read and the audience focusing on the slide instead of the story. Engagement fail.
The More You Know, The Better Your Work at flyosity.com.
Mike Rundle has posted a great article on the value of knowing your medium. The article is focused on user experience design for the web, but it applies to all mediums.
In addition to the examples that Mike provides in his article, I’d like to add that a designer who creates printed material knows the constraints of their medium. Print designers need to take into account the size of their canvas - is it a billboard or business card? They need to know technical limitations of the printer - is the process digital or press? Are my images at a sufficient resolution? The list goes on. You can’t effectively design for any medium without an understanding of how it works.
Mike’s article is in response to an article by Lukas Mathis which argues that designers who code (or at least know how to code) can negatively impact the design process. It’s worth a read, though I personally disagree with his theory.
I’d argue that because Lukas is both designer and coder he’s able to identify the issues that arise from being multi disciplinary. He’s not, however, taking into account the issues that arise from knowing too little about your target medium, which presents a host of other issues.
