Digital Design Advice

We have been busy finishing projects before Christmas, and I am glad to say that we have managed to get them all done, which is great news.   So this afternoon we have had the chance to put our Christmas decorations up in the office and buy some treats in – yummy mince pies.  We have also exchanged our secret santa gifts, the budget was a fiver and I got an Air Zooka, we have had a lot of fun with it in the office this afternoon.  Just in case you aren’t sure what an Air Zooka looks like.

We have our Christmas party tomorrow night and we are all really looking forward to it, we looked back over party photos from last years, I cannot believe it has been a whole year since then.  Some of the photos are really funny and I nearly posted some on but didn’t think it was appropriate!!

I read a nice article on the BBC, which is a nice cheery Christmas article for the Friday before Christmas.

“A Sheffield man who lent a penniless Australian tourist £5 to pay for a ferry trip in 1969 has been repaid his debt nearly 40 years later.”

It is nice to see that Christmas spirit is still going strong and even after 40 years people still remember the kindness that was extended to them.

We have a bet on at work and I am betting on snow for Christmas so keep your fingers crossed for me.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas.

Hello Everyone,

Got another fantastic example of graphic design work for you today, these come from a MR Danny Ronald Hananto, an excellent designer from Singapore.

He has quite a distinct style which you’ll see in many of his pieces but its extremely detailed and he does some really impressive colour work alongside the stylisation.

Here are a few of my choice picks from his Gallery, you can see more at deviantart.

Sanctuaire by the Design Chamber

Mystica by the Design Chamber

Certainly something special, I even like his business card!

This is definitely one to watch to see how things should be done and gleam some inspiration for work you do in the future. Although amazing I do think the design has limitation (in an application sense) but this doesn’t stop it being beautiful.

—

As a further note I got myself a new graphics tablet this week, it’s an early Christmas pressie but I couldn’t resist start to sue it right away!

Specifically it’s a Wacom Intuos3 and is an excellent piece of tech, the marketing blurb says it has 1,024 levels of pen and eraser sensitivity and has advanced tilt sensitivity.

Contrast to my old tablet it has some really useful ExpressKey buttons, a great feature that I don’t know how I lived without!

The tablet itself is solid and stable and not too chunky or in the way, it’s attractive and an odd graphite/silver colour. The pen is also really nice, it has a soft texture and is a decent size and weight.

It also comes with a fairly nice optical mouse but its no where near as sharp as my Razer mouse.

Definitely a recommended product.

What pen tablets do you guys recommend and what do you think of our featured designer today? Let us know with a comment!

Only a short post this week. I’ve regressed back to my childhood a little with the discovery of a web site from a small frozen yoghurt shop in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia called Sour Sally.

The main reason that I fell in love with this flash based web site is the effort that was put in to make it an interactive design. You control Sour Sally and use either the nav keys to bounce around the environment or the mouse to float Sally, who is attached to a balloon, around the levels finding out about the product and shop as you go. Or for the less adventurous of you they have put a ‘normal’ navigation panel at the side.

The hidden features were also a big plus for me, on the ‘where is Sour Sally’ the avatar pops out from behind trees and when you click on her, polaroids of the shops interior pop up for you to view.

This site is a prime example of using interactive graphic design to draw the site visitor into the environment and encourage them to find out more.

I for one will be seeking out Sour Sally should I ever venture to Indonesia and I will certainly be paying them a visit – all from stumbling across their web site – in an increasingly online world the power of interactive marketing in today’s society cannot be ignored and this little frozen yoghurt company has truly embraced the phenomenon.

Visit the site and see for yourself.

With 2008 nearly over I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the exceptional designs we have seen this year.

The first is a showcase of photographs FlashLife.se, but the designer has created an interactive experience.  Allowing you to alter the way you interact with the photographs and images by easily altering the way in which they are displayed.  As the creator suggests it is like a “digital playground”.   I really like the way the site is designed to not only impress you with the exceptional photographs but also the creative way they are showcased.  With so many portfolio websites out there it is always good to see someone that has broke free of the norm.

One of my favorite sites for this year would have to be BrandBud, the site is fresh, bright and easy to use.  It demonstrates their high level of talent and creativity which is often lost in todays designs.  Not only is the homepage impressive but delving deeper into the site you realise how much work has gone into creating this design masterpiece.  The philosophy garden is probably my favorite page, as although being slightly different in design to the rest of the site it still completes the sites design.  They offer mainly print and corporate design work such as letterhead, business cards.

I think next year we will see more interactive flash design work like this, creating a more interactive feel and a great user experience.

One last thing, Sophie, Chloe and I would like to wish you a merry Christmas and if you haven’t started your Christmas shopping yet and want ideas on what to buy read Sophie’s post later in the week – she loves her new toy!

Hey Everyone,

Time for my latest update in the world of great graphic design.

This weeks entry looks at Alexandre Efimov, a Russian graphic designer who has a sample of work on Behance.

I really like his style, especially the unique use of colour in some of his pieces, a lot of graphic designers would not typically use this many vibrant colours together but we can see Alexandre pulls it off very nicely.

My favourite piece has to be his poster for Renova, its very sleek and attractive and instantly intrigues me about the project.

Here’s a few examples of his work;

isoCologne by Alexandre Efimov

Renova by Alexandre Efimov

What do you think? I looked for Alexandre’s own site but couldn’t find it, if you know where it is let me know, I would love to see it!

On November 17th Fantasy Interactive Inc announced the alpha launch of Kontain.com. It’s the first Flash-based blogging platform open to world wide free public access.

The guys from FI describe Kontain as;

“A free destination for users to media blog and share photos, videos and audio with friends, family, colleagues and even beautiful strangers. The core of each user’s experience is media-driven and Kontain takes the everyday concept of blogging to a wider audience by making it easy for users of all demographics to “kontain” and share their life online. Simple enough for Mom and Dad, yet flexible and sophisticated for a web veteran, Kontain aims to be the Internet’s premier destination for user-generated content.”

I was lucky enough to be one of the 10,000 accounts allowed in the alpha stage and have been playing around with it for about a week now. Kontain takes an old concept, blogging, and re-introduces it to a wider audience by focusing on ease of use and looks.

Now this isn’t a new idea. Six Apart is trying to accomplish it with Vox, Automattic with WordPress.com, and dozens of other startups have launched a wide range of other services. The focus of all of these platforms is to dumb things down to the point where users don’t need to think about anything from a technology point of view, but rather, can focus on putting content online in the quickest and easiest way possible.

To that end, Kontain does a brilliant job. From the signup process to its no-frills publishing tool, Kontain is incredibly easy to use. As the whole point of Kontain is to allow easy media sharing, the service also makes it simple to insert photos, videos, and audio. Rather than require the user to position multimedia elements within a post, they are added separately at the top of a post, through a simple built-in uploader.

I’m looking forward to the upcoming features that are due to be launched as well, with tools such as activity stats, HD video and High Def images, drag and drop media embedding (youtube) and inline editing – Kontain is raising the bar for the likes of Facebook and Myspace.

At the time of writing there are still some accounts waiting to be snapped up so sign up and take a look for yourself.