Life
Imitating
Design

The Dunvegan Group recently commissioned a motion graphics piece to help describe their system of helping organizations grow and retain business. Working alongside Fiona Friesen of Strategy Forward, I produced this video, featuring animation and a background theme written and recorded specifically for the video.

Motion graphics is a great medium for bringing a website to life. It can be used in tutorials, as part of training programs, or as seen there, to illustrate something that might be more difficult to show with live actors.

Visit YouTube to watch in glorious HD.

Sometimes, you just have to use stock images. I know it’s not ideal, but budgets and time restraints are what they are. But if you find an image you really like, how can you be sure that it isn’t being used by everyone else? You don’t want your website or brochure to look like it uses stock images, you just want it to look good.

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My wife and I like wine. We don’t have a cellar full, a winery with our name on it, or call ourselves connoisseurs, but we have found a few labels we like and have started a short list of favourite varietals.
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Don’t worry if you’ve missed parts one and two. I forget to set my PVR all the time. But thankfully, this is not television. You can read the entire series here.

Your Mileage is Going to Really REALLY Vary.

By now you should know what you want to say in your podcast, why you want to say it and what you might use to record it. Now you have to take the plunge and record this thing.

Since there is a huge range of software out there, I’m not going to give you a tutorial on one particular piece of software, but rather give you some guidelines to help you make sense of almost anything you might be using. I could go through how to use Audacity, for example, but it might be meaningless if you’re trying to use, say, Garageband. So this guide will apply to just about anything you are using.

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A regular column by author, Simon Rose.
All languages evolve over time and English is no exception. Many words frequently spoken in the medieval period, in the time of Shakespeare, from the Victorian era or even words in common use as recently as a century ago, most of which can still be found in the dictionary, are rarely heard today. The rapid development of computer technology in recent decades has given us words such as online, laptop, iPod, log-on, cell phone, download and many others, including of course, Internet. However, despite all these newcomers, the incorrect use of existing words and phrases and confusion or indifference to their actual meanings has become rampant. » Read the rest of this entry «

For sending out great looking newsletters and keeping track of all your stats, nothing beats MailChimp. It’s simple, flexible, works together with a LOT of other systems and is just plain fun too. Even their tech support is a joy to contact – they sign off with an eep-eep, in keeping with the monkey branding!

MailChimp have now redesigned their mobile apps, available for Android and iPhone. It’s cleaner, leaner and meaner, plus you get more reports, eCommerce360 stats, and you can manage multiple MailChimp accounts. If you’re already kind of addicted to checking your MailChimp campaign stats, and you found yourself sneaking way too many peeks at your email marketing reports during your holiday time with family, you do not want this app – it will only make your addiction worse! But who doesn’t need more stats?!

Get the Android app or the iPhone app directly from iTunes. More details are available on the MailChimp blog.

Eep eep!

As of December 1, 2011, Brandstack, the logo farm that sold clipart, is closing it’s virtual doors for good.

On their website, CEO Wes Wilson says it was because of credit card fraud – “it’s ripple effects have caused serious waves.”

KO in the Third Round.

Brandstack was only in business for three years, and to see an entrepreneur’s dream die is sad. But what is sadder is that there are designers caught in the middle of this who will not be paid for their work. I truly hope that this is the first time the creatives (the ones actually doing the work in this venture) got ripped off, as it’s the first time that always spurs one on to hone business skills and do better next time. Everyone gets ripped off at some point, but when it’s your business it’s like having wages taken out of your pocket. It devalues what you do.

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Web design is a young industry. But like most things young, it’s growing rapidly. With each new full version of HTML (the language used for building websites) come more and more features and interactivity. The latest version, HTML 5, now offers animation, video and a host of features that makes a web designers job easier and pages load faster. » Read the rest of this entry «

In part 1 I covered why you should have a podcast and tried to get you to think about what you would say in your podcast. It might be a regular ramble, interviews, tutorials or a diary entry from your daily life. Whatever you decide to do with your podcast, keep it relatively short, on topic and alive. Imagine you are on the radio – would you tune out and change the channel, or is the material interesting enough to hold your attention? » Read the rest of this entry «

A regular column by author, Simon Rose.

The English language can be very odd when you take a look at it. I mean, consider a word like ‘thought’, which doesn’t look like it should be pronounced the way it is. The spelling is similar to the word ‘through’ although even that word sounds the same as ‘threw’, which has a completely different meaning. No wonder people from other countries have trouble understanding or learning English or that we see images of those badly translated signs from around the world. Nevertheless, that’s no excuse for what sometimes seems like pure laziness in the use of the language by English speakers that we witness so often today in the business world and elsewhere. » Read the rest of this entry «