At one of our previous Heavy Chef events in Cape Town, Justin Gomes (FoxP2 Ad Agency) in his talk on “Creativity And Its Power To Transform Business”, told the story of George Lucas and Star Wars, and the importance of creating new worlds…
So, when I stumbled across Comcast Town, I was reminded of Justin’s words of wisdom.
lochness-logo
This is just too cool. I saw this on Logo Faves (one of my favourite RSS feeds) and was gobsmacked by how spot on this design is. It’s always the simple stuff that kills. Love your work Mr Designer. Read Further
apple
The sales team at World Wide Creative have probably used the Apple website in a few of our client pitches as an inspiration piece for a combination of great design and usability. Nice, squeeky clean and conversion-focused. So, check out this classic piece of reinvention from a guy called Dave Lawrence that’s doing the interweb rounds right about now… Read Further
As banking websites go, they aren’t really built to excite.
In fact I often wonder if they’re built to transact. It doesn’t seem as much, considering their failure (in my opinion) to find even a swift of balance between creative design and the user-experience.
That being said, FNB has changed my perception. Read Further
At World Wide Creative we promise 2 things when creating digital strategies for our clients – Profitability and Creativity.
I’m wondering if we should add ‘Elegance’ to that pledge?
Guy Kawasaki recently interviewed Matt May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing
birdlove
This little guy is a peach, although, if it was me, I would have chosen a better font. Love the icon though. Read Further
We like this: Plinky, a new service that helps you create inspired content on the web (via ReadWriteWeb)
Like it or not. You’re a writer. You’re creating content on a daily basis, updating your Facebook status, commenting on blogs, sending tweets. Social networking requires that level of communication. But as a writer, you’re also a potential victim for writer’s block, a condition that plagues even the most prolific authors. Read Further
Vitaly and the team from Smashing have put together another top notch gallery of photos: check these out, focusing on Reflective Photography.
At World Wide Creative, a sticky point is often how much it costs to get decent images, but when you see a gallery like this one, entitled ‘50 Stunning Examples Of Reflective Photography’, it just nails the argument in favour of hiring a pro. Read Further
icons
I love designing icons. It’s something that I still do whenever I get a chance. I find it relaxing, as weird as that may seem.
We often use icons for the sites we design at World Wide Creative. In our quest to develop sites that are profitable for our clients, we have seen (and research about the fact) that well-designed icons make difference to usability. Read Further
design muti
I’m pretty stoked to have found this: Design Float. It’s a Muti.co.za / Digg style design scrapheap. It’s now top on my Google Reader. Sweeet. Read Further
typography
It’s amazing how much detail goes into a website. Think of the functional components, programming technology, tags, site navigation and the personas. Phew! And that’s before we even touch the content.
Design is the glue that holds everything together. Read Further
vector art
A showcase of amazing talent. Once again a link to the brilliant Smashing Mag.
In the web design arena, we can sometimes get too restricted by the parameters of our media. I’ve always been a fan of book cover design. It’s something we did back in college, and it was always a fun, and challenging, project. Check out this collection put together by Vitaly and crew at Smashing Magazine. Great inspiration for web designers, to think a little differently. Read Further
What makes a great designer? I compiled this list after a decade of trying to be one. (This list applies to graphic designers as well as web designers.) Read Further
As a web marketing company, World Wide Creative focuses a lot on the actual design and usability of the websites we’re marketing. One of our biggest headaches is cross-browser compatibility – arrgh. This means making the dammmm thing work in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, as well as Firefox (our browser of choice – download it here) and all the rest. Read Further
This piechart explains the pain we go through better than any words could. Read Further
A very talented graphic designer friend of mine sent this to me. I think web designers face similar challenges sometimes…
8 Ways to Drive a Graphic Designer Mad:
As everyone knows, graphic designers are the reason there are so many wars in this world. They get inside our heads with their subliminal advertising, force us against our will to spend money on the worst pieces of shit, and eventually, drive us to depression and random acts of violence. And of course, most of them are communists.
So to do my part to save the world from them, i made a list of things you can do when working with a graphic designer, to assure that they have a burn-out and leave this business FOREVER.
1. Microsoft Office
When you have to send a graphic designer a document, make sure it’s made with a program from Microsoft Office. PC version if possible. If you have to send pictures, you’ll have more success in driving them mad if, instead of just sending a jpeg or a raw camera file, you embed the pictures inside a Microsoft Office document like Word or Powerpoint.
Don’t forget to lower the resolution to 72 dpi so that they’ll have to contact you again for a higher quality version. When you send them the "higher" version, make sure the size is at least 50% smaller. And if you’re using email to send the pictures, forget the attatchment once in a while.
2. Fonts
If the graphic designer chooses Helvetica for a font, ask for Arial. If he chooses Arial, ask for Comic Sans. If he chooses Comic Sans, he’s already half-insane, so your job’s half done.
3. More is Better
Let’s say you want a newsletter designed. Graphic designers will always try to leave white space everywhere. Large margins, the leading and kerning of text, etc. They will tell you that they do this because it’s easier to read, and leads to a more clean, professional look. But do not believe those lies. The reason they do this is to make the document bigger, with more pages, so that it costs you more at the print shop. Why do they do it? Because graphic designers hate you. They also eat babies. Uncooked, raw baby meat.
So make sure you ask them to put smaller margins and really, really small text. Many different fonts are also suggested (bonus if you ask for Comic Sans, Arial or Sand). Ask for clipart. Ask for many pictures (if you don’t know how to send them, refer to #1). They will try to argument, and defend their choices but don’t worry, in the end the client is always right and they will bow to your many requests.
4. Logos
If you have to send a graphic designer a logo for a particular project, let’s say of a sponsor or partner, be sure to have it really really small and in a low-res gif or jpeg format. Again, bonus points if you insert it in a Word document before sending it. Now you might think that would be enough but if you really want to be successful in lowering the mental stability of a graphic designer, do your best to send a version of the logo over a hard to cut-out background. Black or white backgrounds should be avoided, as they are easy to cut-out with the darken or lighten layer style in photoshop. Once the graphic designer is done working on that bitmap logo, tell him you need it to be bigger.
If you need a custom made logo, make your own sketches on a napkin. Or better yet, make your 9 year old kid draw it. Your sketch shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to make. You don’t want to make something that’s detailed and easy to understand, because the less the designer understands what you want, the more you can make him change things
afterwards. Never accept the first logo. Never accept the 9th, make him do many changes, colors, fonts & clip art. Ask him to add a picture in the logo. Bevels. Gradients. Comic Sans. And when he’s at his 10th attempt, tell him that you like the 2nd one the most. I know, it’s mean but remember: graphic designers are the cause of breast cancer among
middle aged women.
5. Choosing your words
When describing what you want in a design, make sure to use terms that don’t really mean anything. Terms like "jazz it up a bit" or "can you make it more webbish?". "I would like the design to be beautiful" or "I prefer nice graphics, graphics that, you know, when you look at them you go: Those are nice graphics." are other options. Don’t feel bad about it, you’ve got the right. In fact, it’s your duty because we all know that on fullmoons, graphic designers shapeshift into werewolves.
6. Colours
The best way for you to pick colors (because you don’t want to let the graphic designer choose) is to write random colors on pieces of paper, put them in a hat and choose. The graphic designer will suggest to stay with 2-3 main colors at the most, but no. Choose as many as you like, and make sure to do the hat thing in front of him. While doing it, sing a very annoying song.
7. Deadlines
When it’s your turn to approve the design, take your time. There is no rush. Take two days. Take six. Just as long as when the deadline of the project approaches, you get back to the designer with more corrections and changes that he has time to make. After all, graphic designers are responsible for the 911 attacks.
8. Finish Him
After you’ve applied this list on your victim, it is part of human nature (although some would argue weather they’re human or not) to get a bit insecure. As he realises that he just can’t satisfy your needs, the graphic designer will most likely abandon all hopes of winning an argument and will just do whatever you tell him to do, without question.
You want that in purple? Purple it is. Six different fonts? Sure!
You would think that at this point you have won, but don’t forget the goal of this: he has to quit this business. So be ready for the final blow: When making final decisions on colors, shapes, fonts, etc, tell him that you are disappointed by his lack of initiative. Tell him that after all, he is the designer and that he should be the one to put his expertise and talent at work, not you. That you were expecting more output and advices about design from him.
Tell him you’ve had enough with his lack of creativity and that you would rather do your own layouts on Publisher instead of paying for his services. And there you go. You should have graphic designer all tucked into a straight jacket in no time!
[Thanks Tahier]
- Fred
Thanks to Paul, our awesome designer at World Wide Creative, for this list.
(In no particular order)
1. You’ve almost rear-ended the car in front of you because you were analyzing a font on a billboard.
2. You get pissed when a free Photoshop brush you download is less than 1000px in size.
3. You’d rather study the paisley pattern on your boyfriend/girlfriend’s shirt than listen to what he/she has to say.
4. You can use keyboard shortcuts at light speed, blindfolded, but you can’t type a paragraph of text without staring at the keyboard.
5. You’ve had "Software Nightmares," when you’ve been working way too much.
6. You consider meals interruptions.
7. You’ve learned your lesson and stopped using the word "final" in any file name when saving.
8. You clean your keyboard more often than you wash your car.
9. You’ve intentionally given up trying to explain your projects to non-designers.
10. You see CMYK and RGB like Neo sees the Matrix.
11. You’d rather organize your desktop than your sock drawer.
12. When you heard that Adobe was acquiring Macromedia, you had a Design Orgasm.
13. When you look at Album art all you see are grunge Photoshop Brushes. (Then you see the album art a couple minutes later)
14. You’ve Photoshopped out a watermark for a comp or mock-up.
15. You’ve actually $paid for a font.
16. You’ve totally slaughtered a great design concept because the client thinks he/she knows best. (everyone thinks they are a designer)
17. The amount of words you’ve written with a sharpie labeling burned discs total more than the amount of words you’ve read in novels.
18. You’ve had to explain to a client that a layered file wasn’t part of the deal.
19. You’ve kept a ragged concert ticket just so you could scan it.
20. You’ve nicknamed the OSX spinning wheel. (and not affectionately)
21. You bookmark a resource more often than you have a fun night out on the town.
22. You’ve intentionally overbid a project because you can sniff out a bad client from a mile away.
23. You can’t go to a restaurant without secretly critiquing the menu design.
24. You have an amazingly huge font collection, and an amazingly short temper.
25. If you had a penny for every mouse click, you would have been a trillionaire 3 years ago.
Ok – thanks everyone for the feedback on ‘creating a profitable website’ design. This is the final permutation of the layout before we ‘chop it up’ into HTML. Now I will launch into setting up the pay-per-click campaign. Yeeha!
Home page (below)
Gallery page (below)
First things first: We have to pick a company and build a website before we can start the Pay-per-click campaign. We chose my wife’s new profession, painting, as our company. The reasons for the choice are as follows:
The ‘company’ is called Art Revision; has one ‘employee’ – my wife; will be run under the World WIde Creative accounts; and will sell replicas of famous paintings for around 200 or R2500 in South African terms. She is really good at making copies, and is now getting pretty confident with the brush.
So here is the first design. I have stuck to a tried and tested formula as we don’t want to get too complicated.
Any thoughts or feedback are welcome. One question I’m not sure of is should we have a newsletter sign-up form?
- Fred
