Digital Design Advice

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. (more…)

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.

Hello again everyone,

Here is some excellent artwork that caught my eye, not strictly graphic design but it could give you some excellent inspiration.

Loads of clients request fantasy themed advertisements and such these days so taking a leaf out of this guys book could really get you noticed.

by Jacek Yerka

by Jacek Yerka

It’s by an artist called Jacek Yerka and you can buy prints if you like them enough

You can find his website gallery here if you want to see some more examples. His site could do with a little work though, maybe we could do it for him.

We are still organising our logo competiiton but if you have any ideas drop us an email or comment and we’ll take them on board!.

SciFi channel mini series TinMan kicks off their promotional campaign with an amazing flash based graphic journey though Infinite OZ. You can control the speed with which you fly through this beatifully designed landscape, pause on a scene to find out more information about that place, and if you wanted to find out more about the program just got to the main TinMan website. Airing on the SciFi chanel on December 2nd at 9pm – I will be interested to see if they can translate the backdrops to the small screen.

Portfolio sites – how do you get noticed and stand out from the competition? How can you give yourself the edge in the world of new media agencies? Well single-page design could work for you if you don’t have much content, but want to showcase just your work. If you’re a designer then using a single page design can save you time and cost as it doesn’t require much coding. Below are some of the best examples of single page web design I’ve found. Hopefully, they can give you some inspiration.

I would just like to introduce myself and let you know what this blog is all about. My name is LucyP and I am a web designer working for a digital design agency who create websites, logo designs, digital marketing, interactive media solutions for its range of clients. I have worked as a graphic designer for a few years now and this year I am thinking about submitting my work to design competitions and building a portfolio of my designs.

In this blog we are going to talk about design reviews, helpful sites and good sites.  Any new sites that we find that have good designs – talk about how they achieve their site and the effects.  Any helpful sites including tutorials or advice on graphics and design.  Also, we will be looking at any sites that are just good sites, they can be good because of a certain thing or just good because we like them.

With so many sites out there to choose between for the reviews it will be tough so if you have seen any designs or anything you think is just great post a comment and I will have a look even if it is your own site – post a link to your portfolio and we will have a look.