How many times have you looked at your website and wanted to do an complete redesign? And how many times you said, ok I do it next month when I’m less busier. The truth is, that we just keep postponing the redesign and don’t do anything. But maybe just a little evolution and some small tweaking would do the job and would improve the website. How to decide if you need a complete new design or just some improvement? Here some questions to ask yourself and if you answer the majority with yes you need a complete overhaul.
Is your webdesign “trendy”?
Design is like fashion, there are trends. And the bigger trends of the last couple of years have been grunge, comics, <insert other trend here>. The beauty of the internet is, that it’s evolving fast. But just like in fashion, your site can look old fashioned in a blast. So if you don’t plan to renew the site design every year or so don’t get too trendy on your next design. And if your design is trendy now, get on to the next trend – sustainable web design.
Are you changing (or need to change) your website technology?
You are on a self hosted wordpress installation and want to switch over to a tumblr blog or get over to squarespace to not have to deal with updates and servers any more? It’s a good time for a redesign. You spend as much time to recreate your website on the new services as redoing the whole design. It can be evolutionary at large but take this opportunity.
Is your website just in Flash?
While I’m not a Flash hater and I see many uses of Flash in the real world that make sense, I cannot see the point of having a complete site in Flash anymore. It’s not even ok for “business card” sites with no content and who don’t want to get found in the search engine except for your local pizzeria which name you know but not the telephone number. Many of this businesses want something “flashy” and don’t mind the technology. It’s easier for a designer to please them with a nice Flash animation – and often it’s also quicker to do a Flash site, but you will get in trouble when mobile gets more important and the sites won’t work correctly. So I hope that with the advent of HTML 5 we will get rid of these problems – but if you want to prepare yourself now, get rid of Flash.
Evolution is better
I just picked three questions for the revolution section because there are not many reasons to do complete redesigns. Many times small improvements can have a big impact and help your site. Big sites like Amazon and Wikipedia have gone a radical redesign if you compare them to 5 years ago, but the steps where small. One by one. Testing and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Is learning from nature – making a lot of small variations to experiment what works best costs less “energy” that redoing everything from scratch. The are some instances where your have to revolutionize – but more often than not, evolution beats revolution.
Next up in the series of font alternatives for popular fonts is Thesis – or better known as TheSans, TheSerif, TheMix, TheSans Mono. I’ve found 7 interesting alternatives – from huge and expensive to very big and resonable priced. …click here to continue…
Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks — including death itself — at the university’s 114th Commencement on June 12, 2005. Inspiring and worth 15 minutes
The font DIN typeface family is inspired by the classic industrial German engineering designs, DIN 1451 Engschrift and DIN 1451 Mittelschrift. This font comes since 1995 from two different foundries. While Linotype has the original designs, Fontshop made their interpretation with the aid of Albert-Jan Pool under the name FF DIN. FF DIN became quite popular because it had a few more widths and was optimized for graphic design.
Linotype on the other hand just launched their new DIN interpretation called DIN Next under the direction of Akira Kobayashi. In this new interpretation you find 25 fonts and 7 weights. An impressive re-work with many additional features. Find out more on the official website of Linotype.
While this are good news in the tradition of this series I’ve looked around the foundries to find some other alternatives and found some interesting ones. So enjoy. …click here to continue…
Why more and more companies choose to publish their own magazine is a wider topic I will cover in a future post. I will start my new series about corporate publishing by demystifying a myth – corporate publishing is boring. I will show you in this lesson how you can make a graphically stunning article about the introduction of a new window hardware product line by telling a story.
In the last couple of month I’ve attended to a few workshops related to the new tools we are going to use in our marketing departments. The two main tools I’m talking of is the DAM (digital asset management) and a translation management and approval system based on a indesign workflow (very handy if you manage publications in 32 languages). I know both systems already because I was one of the initiators of the group wide projects and because I tested them before choosing the solutions. This enables me to have quite some notion of “how to do things” with the software. But this does not mean that I already now the fastest way, or the most effective or future proof way to do it.
It’s much like when you learn Photoshop or Indesign. There are many ways to get results, but you might not figure out the best way by yourself. I’ve expected to get from the software vendors some advice, some “best practices” as they are called, what is the most effective way to get your taxonomy (keywords and structures) right and what are good workflows to follow. They should know as they see what theyre clients are doing and what works well and what not. But this was obviously not the case. You get the usual “Every firm has it’s own way to do things.” and “Our system is so flexible that it can be customized and setup to your needs.” This might be true, but if I just match my current workflow I could miss some great improvements or even worse, I discover later on, that if I structured the system or prepared the documents a little bit different in the first place I would get much more out of it. Nobody starts over such a project without a bad need. I hope, that with the spreading of this kind of systems there will be more user groups and tutorials to help firms setup their DAMs, in the meantime I will stick to this subject and bring my experiences.
Back again with some more alternative fonts for your graphic design pleasure. This time I want to show you some very fresh fonts, none of the presented fonts are designed prior to 1999. This is partly because Interstate itself is quite new (1993) and it would be strange if I found an alternative that is older than the original. A bit of history – Interstate is based on the font used by the Federal Highway Administration and was one of the most popular typefaces in the 90s. Used often for corporate design and quite flexible enough for a broad range of “topics”. Enough bla bla, lets get started. …click here to continue…
You ever wondered why some magazines appeal you more than others? One thing you rarely been teached is how to do appealing covers. Even when you are in corporate publishing and layout the corporate news magazine having a nice cover is good. Besides the text layout having an appealing foto is key. But not every photo does the same good job. Here a few examples and why they work. …click here to continue…
Pentagram, a historic graphic design firm is releasing a new book. It will cover 400 logotypes and symbols made by Pentagram from the 1960s until now on over 800 pages. Neddles to say that this is a must for every serious graphic designer and a top inspiration source.
And if you preorder it now you can save 37% off the retail price. So get yours now.
Let’s get fshionable. Gill Sans is for sure one of the most used fonts for corporate design in the fashion industry. Whe a brand claims elegance and self confidence this font is a sure shot. But with the wide use (since Mac OSX it’s even a standard system font) one brand looks like another, so let’s get some alternatives.
What is the job of an art director anyway. How is it like? And how to learn to do the things the right way in real life. I will present you here some insights and some tutorials about becomming an art director, not just a graphic designer. Tips & Tricks you won't learn in any school and normally you will have to figure them out yourself. So go ahead and start your lessons.
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