Viget Inspire

ABOUT BRIGHTCOVE

Brightcove offers a wide range of players that will plug right into your site. Its players range from a video window with basic controls to players with tabbed navigation, playlists, related videos, and keyword search. These players are easy to build into your site and connect with videos you've uploaded to Brightcove.

Unlike most drop-in players, Brightcove offers a great deal of customization. You can style existing players using a video player editor where you primarily have control over colors. This goes a long way when you're trying to match the look of your player with the look of your site, but you can take this a step further with a proprietary markup language called BEML (Brightcove Experience Markup Language). Think of BEML as HTML for a media player. You add custom images to replace the Brightcove custom elements (like your play or mute button for example). You also have complete control over which Brightcove components you want for your players and even which buttons you want for your player controls (play button, mute button, etc.).

However, even with base color styling and more advanced BEML modifications, you may still run into styling and component limitations. If you want to really customize your player, Brightcove allows you to take things even further with their API. So, with said API, Adobe Flex, and custom UI and visual design up front, that's what Viget did ...

Continue reading "Designing a Custom Flash Player for Brightcove"

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A design exercise that has been making the rounds lately, one I can't get enough of and have to share with anyone who'll listen, is the re-imagining of modern video games, movies, albums, and so on as worn out, classic book and album covers. It takes a product completely out of its element and reinterprets what makes it memorable in the first place. The result being that oftentimes these "remixes" are more elegant and precise solutions than their original designs. They're also just plain fun. The craze seems to have started earlier this year with Olly Moss's series of video games as book covers inspired by Penguin Classics covers and Saul Bass illustration. Just to show a couple:

Continue reading "Take Something New and Make It Old"

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After much debating about purchasing the recent MacHeist 3 Bundle I broke down in the last 30 minutes of the promotion to order the bundle of software advertised as 14 Mac apps worth around $500 for $49. To be honest I didn't know much about MacHeist or many of the apps they were promoting but the thought of trying out Espresso among the mix of apps appealed greatly. To my delight, it wasn't Espresso that captivated me. Instead, an unassuming screen capturing utility called LittleSnapper caused me to forget the other 13 applications in the set.

There's also been a fair amount of buzz about Skitch lately. The combo of the two got me thinking about what else might be out there for capturing, editing, saving and sharing images. At the urging of Peyton Crump, our fearless Design Director from our Durham, NC office, I took to task comparing the two apps. Soon enough, I realized a comparison among a wider breadth of apps might be useful. Thus, this post was born, a comparison of six screen capturing utilities. From a bare minimum of features to some truly groundbreaking ones, these tools are listed by order of complexity (features not ease of use): Screengrab!, Paparazzi!, Web Snapper, Skitch, LittleSnapper, and Evernote

Please note this less of a comprehensive review of the products than it is a glance at some useful aspects of each.

Continue reading "Six Snappy Snap Apps for Mac"

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Many have us have spoken to people who will soon be entering careers in web design related fields this year, and this led us to have discussions with each other about what we thought was important for those people to know. Each of us had different advice to share based on each of our own unique perspectives, so we thought it would be helpful to put it into a blog post. Some of the questions we wanted to respond to were:

1. What trends have you noticed in the past year?
2. What advice do you have for people entering the field?
3. What are some resources to help people get started?

Brian Talbot

Advice: Don’t Grow Up Just Yet

Many of the students I’ve taught and worked with want to hit this field’s ground running, but tend to be confused and overwhelmed by all of the various titles, processes and disciplines involved in working on the web these days. If you’re feeling this way, remember that you don’t have to pick a definitive career path or niche in the web just yet (if ever)! Instead learn about and try all of these disciplines as your work allows. You can always dive deeper into those that really strike a chord. Until then, don’t sweat those fancy terms or titles too much. And here’s a secret, some of the strongest web professionals are “generalists” instead of “specialists” in a particular area.

Advice: Work Smarter

Find ways to automate repetitive tasks for yourself – its usually an enjoyable problem to solve for yourself and will reward you with more efficiency. Finding and tweaking a series of applications and services that help you achieve is crucial. Some of my favorite set-ups include:

• LittleSnapper + Dropbox + A Dedicated Flickr Account = A quick and great way to organize (with tags) design inspiration across multiple computers and to share online.
• TextMate + Some Awesome Bundles + Your own templates + TextMate Projects = The start to a lean and mean front-end development area (for extra points, dive into things like Shell Variables)
• Delicious Subscriptions RSS + Delicious Network RSS + Flickr Design Inspiration Sets and Groups + select blog/site RSS Feeds all in Google Reader or Feedstitch = A good, portable start to having your ear to the ground on what’s happening around you (for extra points, you could add Twitter to this in EventBox.)

Doug Avery

Trend: Tuning Out

I’ve heard more and more designers this year talk about cutting back on blogs, Flickr feeds, and magazine subscriptions, in an attempt to to overcome the noise of “inspiration.” Sometimes, consuming design is a convenient excuse for procrastination, so be careful about how much you’re watching vs. how much you’re doing.

Advice: Try It

You can have a huge stack of Readymades and an RSS reader full of A List Apart articles, but if you’ve never built any of the stuff they’re talking about, you’re missing out. Take some time to play around with new ideas, techniques, or plugins whenever you can. It’s fun, it relieves stress, and you often learn more than you expected to.

Resources: Firebug & Designers Toolbox

For buildout, you should know about Firebug, the smart little tool that makes diagnosing layout woes a snap (and has the muscle to fix much bigger problems down the road). And in general, you should know about Designers Toolbox, a one-stop shop for print sizes, templates, web element PSDs…you name it.

Continue reading "Advice, Trends, and Resources for People Entering Web Careers in 2009"

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As soon as designers got ahold of the web as a design medium (probably about 15 years ago),  they were thinking about fonts, right?  (It was at least in the top five on the "first things to think about" list).  So, in an age where tens of thousands of fonts have been invented, why are we mostly still using the same six?

Techniques like image replacement and sIFR have done us well. They remain the strongholds until something better comes along -- which may have just happened: namely, I'm talking about Cufón by Simo Kinnunen.

Cufón (I'm pronouncing it "koo-fon") is a font-replacement technique that uses javascript and vector graphics to write fonts from a font file (TTF, OTF or PFB) to your browser. It's easier/safer to use than sIFR and lighter on size than image replacement, but has the same copyright issues as both.

Continue reading "Cufón Font Replacement - The Good and The Bad"

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Deep in the heart of Georgetown lies the Center for Digital Imaging Arts (CDIA) an extension of Boston University's applied arts school. I was recently asked to participate in a portfolio review of some of the school's upcoming web design graduates along with representatives from a few other fine agencies in the DC area. Among other options the school offers a Graphic and Web Design Certificate to help get future designers a leg up in pursuing their passions. I've been really impressed with the school's outreach into the local community. They seem to 'get it' and the students are smart to have connected with the school to jump start their careers. 

CDIA Student Portfolios:

• Erin Feliciano: http://erinfeliciano.com
• Pol Klein: http://polklein.com
• Laura Heffelfinger: http://ldhcreative.com
• Corey Clark: http://cclark1.cdiaweb.com
• Daniel Dominguez: http://www.coldfrontdesigns.com
• Jill Cockerham: http://www.jillcockerham.com
• Ronit Rosenthal: http://ronitrosenthal.com
• Theresa Stephens: http://tstephensmedia.com
• Charlotte Vazquez: http://spellsoup.com
• Amanda Kirby: http://amandakirbydesign.com/html/index.html

Continue reading "Portfolio Reviewin’, Thoughts and Ideas for Design Students"

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If you keep up with Inspire you've probably noticed that we use Expression Engine for many of our non-Rails sites. Viget.com and all 5 of our blogs are built on Expression Engine, as are client projects such as PBS Digital TV, Sodexo Esteem Pass and RollStream.  Expression Engine is a very powerful content management system with a lot of great features and functionality, but it isn't the most intuitive CMS to jump into. When I first came to Viget I had no knowledge of EE and found it pretty confusing until I really wrapped my head around it. I learned the basics pretty quickly thanks to some great online tutorials from BoyInk and a lot of help from my fellow designers, but a beginner book would have been helpful. Web tutorials are great but I like to do lots of highlighting and underlining. I'm one of those tree-killers that still prints things out to take notes on.

Recently, Packt Publishing sent me a copy of Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6 by Leonard Murphey. It's the only Expression Engine book on Amazon right now, perhaps because the EE user base is so much smaller than blog platforms like WordPress. I was really hoping it would help make sense of some bigger questions I have about EE, like sorting out the many different ways to organize and build your site structure. Unfortunately for me, neither Leonard nor the Expression Engine team offer much insight about that. Everyone seems to have their own way of doing it, and even here at Viget our strategies vary from site to site. While it didn't answer my theory-based questions, it offers a good introduction for a true beginner and showed me to quite a few capabilities I hadn't explored.

Continue reading "Book Review: Building Websites With Expression Engine 1.6"

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