I love photography and it is something that I will do in my spare time.  Recently I have been looking at different types of photography and the different finishes you can achieve and I stumbled across high speed photography.  For those of you who are not sure what high speed photography is it is the ability to capture images with remarkably quick speed which most photographers use to catch images that otherwise wouldn’t be seen by the naked eye.  It is amazing what photographers capture and the different perspective you get from seeing a high speed photograph.

If you would like to try taking a high speed photograph, I really recommend giving it a go, you will need an SLR  camera, generally speaking an expensive camera can reach a much faster shutter speed and high speed photography is the game of shutter speed.

Here are some of my favorite high speed photographs:-

If you have taken some high speed photography and have some photos to share please drop a link in the post, I am going to try and take some this weekend.  I am hoping that I get some good quality images.

Firstly I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year, I think 2010 is going to be a good year for DDA and design in general and to mark the turn of the new year I thought we would look at some designs that we won’t forget.  Creating a design that will stick in people’s mind is more important than ever.  So what designs caught your eye this year?

Here are a few of my favorites which I came across on one of my favorite sites Web Design Ledger.

My first favorite is this one, it is the Anti Breakage Shampoo : Rapunzel.  I like how they have used a well known character to promote shampoo.

Not being a huge fan of heights, I am not sure that I would do very well with this and would have to take the stairs.

I also love the ones that can make you smile,

I have only chosen a few that I really liked, please visit the site to see more advertisements not to be forgotten.

Enjoy design in 2010.

]]> http://www.digitaldesignadvice.com/2010/graphic-design/happy-new-year/feed/ 0 http://www.digitaldesignadvice.com/2009/graphic-design/christmas-at-dda/ http://www.digitaldesignadvice.com/2009/graphic-design/christmas-at-dda/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:45:58 +0000 LucyP http://www.digitaldesignadvice.com/?p=938

Here at Digital Design Advice we are really excited about Christmas and have added snow to our design.  What do you think?  Fingers crossed for snow on Thursday if the weather people are right ;o).  So instead of the usual design post I thought we would take a look at Christmas gift ideas – we  have just picked our secret santas.

So here is a quick look at possible gift ideas:-

USB stick

How about a Lego USB stick, which you can make by following the instructions.

Or how about the teddy USB drive

I like this idea too, the human sleeping bag.  I am not sure it would go down very well with the receiver but the person does look snuggly warm.

These are only quick ideas and I am obviously keeping my secret santa gift top secret until we exchanged them.

Merry Christmas everyone

We covered the UK Google Doodle competition last year, it’s always a really interesting and fun idea for Google and it gives loads of kids out there chance to showcase their skills and have their logos featured on the Google Homepage!

This years theme is “My Hero”.  It centers on finding out who children really look up to and  asks them to create a Google Doodle representing one of the heroes from their family, friends, community or even world famous figures.

The final winner will be chosen by Dennis Hwang, the original Google Doodler and the winner even gets a trip for California!

Please take a look at each of the age groups and vote for a finalist, here are my choices!

5-7 Year Old Category: SuperGran by Ellen Blair (Aged 5)

This is my favorite from this category purely because the artist thinks her Gran is her number one hero. Everyone loves their Gran and the feature of flowers and sweets (which we all associate with Granny) is fantastic. Well done Ellen!

7-11 Year Old Category: Tomoriko Nishicado by Pip Watkins (Aged 11)

This may actually be my favorite design overall. Not only is the fact that Pip chose Nishicado amazing, an eleven year old with respect for classic video game innovation! but the design itself is fantastic.

The “damaged” Google logo is an original and entertaining idea and the little touch of having “Google” as the high score is also loads of fun. If your reading this Pip DDA loves you!

11-14 Year Old Category: The Dashing Prince by Sophie Devlin (Aged 13)

This is my favorite from the 11-14 year old category. Sophie (great name btw!) has done a really good job at invoking all of our fond memories of Princesses in towers and brave Knights on horseback with her tribute to The Dashing Prince, every girls favourite fictional hero!

Sophie’s drawing is fantastic and I love the drawbridge “e” and the dragon,well done for this entry!

14-16 Year Old Category: Isambard Kingdom Brunel by Matthew Collier (Aged 15)

Matthew has done a fantastic job of creating a Google Doodle tribute to one of the worlds most influential industrialists. Very strong artwork with a nice balance between utilising the logo and drawing pictures around it. I especially like the use of the “L” as a bridge support.

Great work Matthew and good luck!

Computer Artwork Category: David Attenborough by Sophie Redford (Aged 15)

I think there is no doubt in anyone’s mind here at DDA as to how amazing this entry is, for a 15 year old Sophie (another one whoo!) has done a truly fantastic job.

A really worthy choice for a “hero” and amazing artistic ability make this, without a doubt, the most “attractive” entry into the competition.

Lets hope Sophie wins her category for all the effort she has clearly put in here!

That’s all for now, some really great entries this year. Good luck to everyone, not just those featured here, I will update when I see the winner announced!

We love freebies here at DDA. So this week I’ve scoured the web to bring you the best Christmas icon sets. All of them are free to download from the sites they link to so get downloading and add a bit of Christmas cheer to your web site.

You can also download our new Christmas WordPress theme from Smashing Magazine here.

When you are looking for inspiration it can sometimes be hard to know where to start. Sometimes you have been given a direction and requirements from the client and other times you get a clean slate. I love starting a design from new the clean blank canvas but every so often I go completely blank and struggle to get anything down and out of out mind to give me a tangible place to start. So where do I find my inspiration for design, I use all kinds of ways to generate ideas:-

CSS Galleries

Are a great place to start and really generate some ideas, you can sort by colour, design styles including dark and different layouts. Usually I see something that catches my eye. I did a quick search today and found this design.

I really like this design its clean, fresh and although has the standard navigation has elements that allow the user to interact with the site in a fun way with the navigation around the tree and the featured projects.

Graffiti

I love sites that show graffiti art always suprise me as it proves that you can be creative in even the most unusual places.  Graffiti art is not always appreciated by everyone but I think that you should take a look and judge for yourself.

Design Blogs

Design blogs are a great way to get ideas and create something that you like, taking ideas and design tips are not only a great way to improve your designs but you also come across ideas that you can run with and create something more inline with your design and how you want it to work.  I recently came across a great light effect that I have used on one of my designs which looks great.

There is plenty of places to take inspiration from, where do you get yours?

Stock photography is often used in web design to fullfil the needs of a creative assignment instead of hiring a photographer. The number of sites offering stock photography is growing year on year, and whilst the recognisable stock image galleries are still some of the best, Getty Images, Dreamstime, Corbis etc there are also some completely free stock image galleries popping up that can provide designers with quality professional imagary, without adding to the cost of the project.

Here we take a look at the top 5 stock image sites that provide their images for free.

Stock.Xchng

Stock Xchng features over 400,000 high quality images. They are one of the leading free stock image sites on the web and also offer paid images as well as free stock images.

Morgue File

The Morgue file offers free high resolution digital stock images, it is a classic resource that has been the standard for free stock imagary over the last few years.

Free Stock Photography

Over 100 categories on this site. A little less choice than some of the others but you can still find high quality photographs completely free.

Free Pixels

This site has an easy to use search function along with a really useful tag cloud. Search over 3,000 images however some are paid images.

Stock Vault

Over 13,000 from over 3,600 photographers! They also have really helpful tutorials, videos and articles making this site a must for every designers bookmark bar.

Sorry we have not been around much lately so much, we relocated offices which turned out to be a bit of a nightmare – people should realise that the internet is a priority. We are all settled now in our new offices and have the internet – which does help. It is a lot nicer than the ones we had before and now that we have some of the major projects out of the way we thought we would return to DDA.

I thought since we came back this week we would take a look at Typekit which has just come out of beta which is great news as it provides designers with a library of fonts which you can easily integrate into your designs and best of all you can currently sign up for free.

For those of you who haven’t heard of Typekit it is the “easiest way to use real fonts on the web”. The issue in the past has been that it has not always been legal to use some fonts as they are protected by copyright even some that are available for free. When you are limited with your typeface in a design it can be really frustrating and sometimes make you feel that you have compromised your design which is why Typekit works so well.

Typekit offers the solution, with its web only font linking license, hosting both free and commercial fonts whilst eliminating the problem of how different browsers render the font. Typekit also state that in most cases, the css and fonts will be served up faster than your own web pages.  Which is a huge step forward from what we have had to rely on previously.

We think Typekit is easy and simple to use which makes this a great tool for any designer and with the range of typefaces now available we should see some great designs/fonts appearing on the web.  Watch this space!

Earth Hour was created by WWF and Leo Burnett advertising agency in 2007, and this year they have teamed up with Shepard Fairey (Famous for his “Obey Giant” a 1989 street-art project and the more recent “Obama Hope” campaign) to re brand for Earth Hour 2009 and you can immediately see Fairey’s influence in the design.

The re design is not the only place that Earth Hour has invested their marketing budget this year, they’ve invested in a “Fairey-esque” devoted website www.voteearth2009.org to carry the brand (opposed to main site) Not only that they have fully embraced the online world with downloadable promotional packs, banners, posters, stickers, widgets and buttons, but they have also embraced the social networking community by setting up global social media profiles including twitter, myspace and facebook.

Maybe the big push this year can partly be chalked up to Google’s contribution to “Lights Out San Francisco” last October when they symbolically turned their homepage black.

Athough using a black screen on a flat panel monitor uses MORE energy than the usual white, getting a company such as Google to commit to a cause is more of a symbolic gesture on their part, it’s about raising awareness and gaining support for a cause that they believe in rather than actually reducing the energy output of the world for an hour.

Having been around since the early 1980s it has proven it self to capture and engage peoples attention and be an inventive way to promote your brand. Guerrilla marketing can be used by large organisations or small start up companies.

One of the earliest campaigns was from Adidas having struggled with promoting the brand after changes in management they needed to pull something big out of the bag and their answer was to give pairs of Adidas trainers away to rappers in New York and if you are a child of the 80s you will remember Run DMC bringing out a single called “My Adidas”.  If you don’t remember the song then see the bottom of the post.

Todays guerrilla marketing has changed from the early days and is now more inventive and sometimes challenging.

Here are some of my favorites:-

The important thing to remember about guerrilla marketing as a technique is it becomes ineffective once it has been used, marketers need to keep ahead and find new ways to grab the attention  otherwise what was a surprise marketing campaign that everyone was talking once will soon something that people have forgotten and are bored with.

Whether you like this marketing technique or not you have to agree that it does make you stop and stair – it works!

Just in case you don’t remember – you’ve got to love the 80s.