Topic: Favorites
8 Faces: Viget
Why?
Typography is very central to the work we do as designers. There are many tools and techniques. There is much history. And as we all know, the world of web-type these days is developing rapidly on a day by day basis.
Recently at Viget, we decided to conduct our own internal version of 8 Faces to figure out the collective typeface preferences of our design team. There were a few reasons for this:
- Curiosity: we were interested to know which typefaces would rise to the top
- Simplicity: with a font library in the hundreds and thousands, it begs the question, how many are truly irreplaceable?
- Efficiency: this is probably a secondary reason but it has come up before that it may be useful to have a list of solid, tried-and-true typefaces that we could use as a starter set for new hires and interns
An Unedited Passion for Creativity
When reflecting on my creative intake and output over the past year, they simply stand out: the three guys that cursed a lot but admittedly got me fired up creatively. Simple as that, but with warnings:
- You may have already happened across these.
- I don't agree with all that is being said.
- Explicatives fly. You may be offended. The cursing may make them more memorable than they actually are.
- I most assuredly did shed a tear over #2 (the part about the dad).
- #3 was posted at the end of 2008, but I didn't come across it until earlier this year.
#1: Now is the Time
#2: The Clackity Noise
#3: America Is F*****
Let us know if something has you passionate going into the new year.
You Should Know: Amy Martin
I'm so excited about Amy Martin's design style I can hardly contain myself. I happened to be image-Googling "retro-futurism" as research for an upcoming project and one of her posters showed up in the search. A few clicks later, I've developed a designer crush the size of Pangaea.
You Should Know: Charley Harper
To get my lazy blogger butt moving, I decided to start posting a monthly series introducing artists and designers everyone should know. I couldn't think of a better place to start than with my current obsession, Charley Harper. This prolific artist used abstracted geometric forms and bold colors to render wildlife in a way no one else had ever done. His work is simple and elegant, and although much of it was created in the 50s and 60s it looks modern even now. Todd Oldham and Old Navy brought him to the masses, and his work is showing up in all sorts of new places. He's someone with a minimalist style worth studying, especially for vector artists and illustrators. If you're not already a fan, trust me, you will be.
How to Create Design Concepts in Rapid Fashion
Sometimes you need to get a bunch of ideas in a short amount of time. Its not always easy for one person alone (though easier for some than others). Collaboration is key whether it be collectively or individually within a working group of people. Team design is one of the benefits of working in an agency or inhouse studio.
In borrowing from an idea that originally began in partnership with some of my former colleagues, the design team at Viget recently embarked on our first Design Flash Mob (DFM). You may have heard the term 'flash mob' to describe wacky collaborative events such as massive pillow fights where a large group of people gather in a single place, fight each other with pillows and leave with a pile of feathers on the ground as a residual reference to the event. The basic steps of these events are as follows:
- Plan and promote in advance of the event. What do you hope to accomplish? When and where should this take place?
- Gather at the designated time and place.
- Act upon on what you set out to do.
- Disperse and reflect on the madness.
In the spirit of design synergy we can take these steps and use them to collaborate quickly on things like logo designs, t-shirt ideas or rethinking user experience problems. Plan to do something about a week out. Think ahead about what you might want to create. When the time comes you'll be ready to jump in and start designing in a rapid but refined way. Take a morning or afternoon to hold the event. At the end, take time to talk about it and share different perspectives on working under pressure.
Another important aspect of a design flash mob is that it should not be treated as a competition. Even if one design is to be chosen it should be a democratic effort including those who played a part in the event. Benefiting the greater good should be the goal. In effect, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
One great place to start with a DFM is to have several people participate in designing desktop wallpapers. They're simple to design in a short period of time and have no production costs associated with them. This is where we started on our first Viget DFM. The assignment was simple. Take an afternoon (roughly 4 hours) to assemble one or more desktop wallpapers within the given time and include the Viget brand no matter how big or how small. Everything else was left up to the designer's discretion. Planning ahead was ok but no one was allowed to begin until the start of the event. Additionally, you didn't have to be a designer to participate. Our design team consists of UX designers, visual designers and production specialists with a wide range of talents and skills. How you work within the guidelines is all that matters.
Continue reading "How to Create Design Concepts in Rapid Fashion"
Pulling Your Flickr Feed with jQuery
Feeds are the easiest way to view updated content, whether it's through a feed reader or outputted onto a web site. There are many different types of feeds, such as RSS or Atom, and many different ways display them on your site, such as using MagpieRSS to parse an RSS feed in PHP. However, you can also display feeds on your site using JavaScript, so in this post I'm going to be talking about a feed format called JSON and how you can use JavaScript to parse it out and display it.
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a data format that is easy to read and language-independent, meaning you can parse it using any programming language. Both Yahoo! and Google have been offering data from their sites in JSON format for the past couple years. A good example of this is Flickr. Anyone with a Flickr account can access a JSON feed of their photos.
Finding Your Feed
If we go to the Viget Inspire collection on Flickr, we can click on the feed (orange button, bottom of the page) and bring up a RSS 2.0 feed of all the images in our pool. Flickr's API has many other feed formats, so I suggest going to their site to read up on it because there are a lot of things you can do. If you want the JSON version of the feed, change "format=rss_200" at the end of the query string to "format=json" so that your URL looks like this:
Hotmail Image Problems in HTML Emails
Working with HTML emails can be tough with all the various email clients out there. Just ask Jim Basio, who wrote a great post on our blog with some really useful resources. Recently I was working on an HTML email that had a lot of images, and for some reason Hotmail displayed the images with weird spacing. Let's pretend the picture below is actually three separate images in an email viewed in Hotmail:
As you can see, there is a gap between the images. We can fix this with one simple addition to the image style with CSS:
<img src="image.jpg" alt="Viget Logo" style="display: block;" />
And that's it. Just put "display: block" on any image in your HTML. I put it inline because there are still issues with email clients reading the <style> element (for example, Hotmail). Your images should now be in the right place:
The good news is that it doesn't affect the way images are displayed in other email clients. If you have other useful tips for HTML emails let us know!
UPDATE: This problem only seems to happens in Hotmail when using Firefox (although I feel like I saw it in IE before...). Another good tip, from a reader named Jurre-Jan Smit, was that you can just put the code in the <style> element in the <head> (for Live Hotmail) and <body> (for old school Hotmail) so that you don't need to put it inside every image. I just tend to use inline styles in emails because they're more specific. I've found Campaign Monitor's guide on CSS support in emails very useful for answering compatibility questions. Keep the useful tips coming!
2011