Typography is not only about what font to use, or how it “looks” – it’s about making a text easier to read.

The rules presented in this great article will help you to make every text more accessible and better looking. In fact, this basic rules work so good, because type designers taylor their fonts to work best when this rules are applied. So go ahead and refresh your memories for a more readable future

BTW: If you are writing or editing text in another language than english, the rules are quite different – so be warned.

#typography #tutorial #guide

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Mind Your En And Em Dashes: Typographic Etiquette – Smashing Magazine | Smashing Magazine
An understanding of typographic etiquette separates the master designers from the novices. A well-trained designer can tell within moments of viewing a design whether its creator knows how to work wit…

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Google Maps is one of the best Web-Apps ever created. There might be discussions about the costs for website owners, but as a consumer it’s a blessing.

Most functionality like creating your own maps etc. on the other hand is not so obvious and this tutorial gives an easy overview on how to make Google Maps even more useful.

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Google Maps — Start here.

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I would love to see the Send To button also in the mobile version of the website and the app …

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How To Share Google Reader Stories to Google Plus. You can share content with any circles. Cool tip. #google+

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How To Share Google Reader Stories to Google Plus
Those of us who are still playing with Google Plus are eagerly awaiting its further integration into other Google services (in ways other than the red box in the top right corner). The updates are com…

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Mobile websites don’t need a flash video player to show video (or a HTML5 capable browser). Modern mobile devices have video player linked to their browsers and you can just link to them from your mobile website.

But you need convert the video to a screen size and codec that will work. Here are the settings for Handbrake a great free tool to convert videos.

Please note that this settings cover an array of devices but not all – for example to make it work on all blackberry devices you have to provide versions of the video with different frame rates. If you need that you have to switch to a professional video hosting solutions. Check your Google Analytics Logs to know how many Blackberry Users you have.

Do you know about the cross posting problem? … you signed up to all the social networks and services and enabled posting to Twitter, Facebook, tumblr and the other services. Neat. Did you remember that you connected facebook to twitter as well? Probably not, and the result is double postings and posting loops.

How to avoid this cross posting getting out of hand? Simple draw a chart. You might wonder how many services you actually linked to other services and where the problem might be.

I do my chart in Illustrator – but you can obviously use any charting software you want – aviary or the drawing tool in google docs works well for that. Just keep it updated. In the image above you see my chart. You see it’s quite complicate because I have my personal and my professional accounts listed.

BTW: You can also see if your “communication” strategy fits your goals and if you can centralize your efforts.

Doing charts is a almost a daily business for any graphic designer. Most of them don’t need to be super-fancy, but some spice can always help. Creating a 3D Effect is quickly done with the standard tools we all use – rectangles, lines and gradients. But if you have to do many charts (for an annual report) then this options can really slow you down. Unless you use a tool to speed up the process.

Why not use the 3D Tools provided by Illustrator. The positive side effect is that you don’t have to worry about the shading and you can apply text on the surfaces (the trick here is to convert the Text into symbols). The best part is that you start from the 2D versions of the charts – easy to change and to manage. The examples I show here are neither fully styled or finished, but should give you a hint about what you can do.

Download the sample Illustrator file to get an idea behind the example given. This is a great starting point and you can dress the result up and quiet easily.

Having a single inbox can be a life safer for small design departments. Scheduling graphic design projects is hard enough, make your life easier with this best practice.

The case

Small design departments often have one project manager/account and a few graphic designers and copywriter. While the pm (project manager) is the main project lead, small jobs are often handled directly by the creative team. Things like sending out a logo or making a small text for the website for another department.

In theory this should work great. But the problem relies in the direct access to the creative team by clients (or even worse to coworkers if it is a in-house department).

The direct access will quickly be abused by the coworkers to override the project manager and get things done on their schedule. Graphic designers and copywriters are in this work setting not able to deny a request by the client and so they accept.

This screws up the scheduling made by the project manager, but he/she is not aware of it. Even worse, the project manager might accept additional workload.

Even notifying the project manager doesn’t improve the situation as the he has lost the lead and does not manage anymore.

Solution: Single Inbox

The solution to the problem is easy. The project manager has to be the only “inbox”. All requests must pass through this single point. It might seem a bottle neck, but in fact this is by far a smaller problem than the not controllable scheduling of multiple access channels.

Even when 2 Minutes lost by reading an email about a logo request and forwarding it to the graphic designer is well spent. This way the project manager knows how much times is occupied by this recurring jobs.

Note that I talk about the single inbox, not outbox. Graphic designers should still send out themselves the files etc. they just shouldn’t  respond to any request.

Photo courtesy of Matt McGee

Objective

Window types and window installation has not been globalized yet. In northern Europe feature rich windows with high insulation values are a standard. Energy saving homes are now a standard and the window installation must follow the trend. This makes the installation of windows a complicated task and Maico wanted to make educational DVDs to show the right procedure.

I wrote this video series, filmed and made the final cut. Enjoy the viewing

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.

Image courtesy of StePagna

I’ve looked around the web for the correct size of the wallpaper and a way to control what content is visible on a specific home screen. In fact the wallpaper is not scrolled 480 pixels when you change homescreen. After various experiments I’ve come up with a photoshop file where the guides are ready for you to design your own wallpaper for your nexus one. It’s for for you to download. Enjoy.

• Click here to download: Nexus_One_Wallpaper_Toolkit.psd