Type face retailers FontShop.com have produced a wonderful field guide to typography entitled ‘Meet Your Type’. The book walks your through the entire process of selecting the type face that will represent your brand. It provides you with a range of best practice tips and lessons learnt through years of experience. The book itself is beautifually designed so I’d recommending purchasing through the print on demand service Lulu. However, one can download the PDF for free on the FontShop.com site.
In collaboration with Futura 2000, Os Gemeos have produced a beautiful mural in NYC in Chelsea on the exterior wall of PS 11 (320 West 21st street) entitled ‘The Giant Project’. Focusing on the detail of the work – I’m particularly impressed.
From Canadian designers Jonathan Sabine and Adam Pickard comes the ‘Road Proper’ – a bike mounted bottle opener. Not entirely practical but I like it. Check out some more of their projects at www.chromoly.ca
Modern Clix
Price: Free
Designer: Rodrigo Galindez
Crafted by Rodrigo Galindez, Modern Clix is a beautiful wordpress theme that rests at the top of my list of Minimal WordPress Themes. Rodrigo has given considerable attention to typography, alignment, spacing, browser compatibality and SEO. If Rodrigo was to have charged $50.00 dollars for this theme I’d of paid it. At the time of choosing the theme for ThinkVein I was unaware of Modern Clix – if I had of been, ThinkVein would look somewhat different today.
Foliogrid
Price: Free
Designer: FrogsThemes.com
Foliogrid does not conform to the typical blog layout. It’s a personal preference of which depends on the content you’re presenting. I can think of plenty of blogs which are ideally suited to this grid styled layout. One which springs to mind is the newly launched Mosaic-On – an awesome blog co-founded a my fellow Googler and friend Omid.
Foliogrid has a number of other nice features including auto-sizing thumbnails, fluid based layout and some slick jQuery tricks. It’s use of Georgia as it’s principal typeface is well matched to it’s clean yet classical appearance.
Basic Maths
Price: $45.00
Designer: Khoi Vinh & Allan Cole
Given that I’ve been using Basic Maths for over 6 months now, I think I can give a fairly accurate representation of it’s strengths and weaknesses. Firstly, I love Basic Maths for what it is – a minimal grid based theme that was hand coded with every pixel in mind. I’m a stickler for misalignment or inconsistency. Khoi & Allan clearly are too! By pressing ‘Alt + Shift + G’ you can bring up the grid overlay. The Basic Maths Documentation contains all the class attributes you need to include in order to perfectly align to the grid.
There are a few weak spots to the Basic Maths theme. I find the menu controls to be fairly limited and rather ugly when drop downs are enabled. Given the advent of WordPress 3.0, I’d like the see Basic Maths take advantaged of the new menu functionality. I also dislike some of the CSS font formatting. The <blockquote> formatting could be more appealing. As it stands the quote shrinks into itself and doesn’t have the desired affect at all. I’d also like to see more hooks enabling users to quickly align to the grid when editing pages. The most we are provided with is [left column] and [right column] which don’t align the grid at all – somewhat disappointing. Finally, I was super disappointed to learn that embedded videos did not align to the above mentioned grid! All embedded objects were 5px out on their left side which drove me insane for a few weeks until I fixed the underlying CSS code. Overall – a great theme but might be at the expensive end of the scale for some.
Mnmur (pronounced minimur) is the brainchild of two your designers from Turin, Italy. Their products consist of an assortment of bags, wallets and belts – and are made almost exclusively from rubber tubing from the inside of bicycle tyres.
I recently purchased a limited edition M1 Tiger Messenger bag from Mnmur and I have to say, the enire experience was excellent. Marcos quickly replied to every email and as promised the bag was made within 4 days and delivered within the following 2. In terms of quality, the bag far surpassed what I was expecting. Mnmur create high quality products and it’s clear that both Marcos and Laura have a fine eye for detail.
Bags range from 60 to 140 euro including postage. If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, Mnmur also produce wallets and belts to order. I’m looking forwar to seeing the brand expand beyond Turin and into shops around the world. If I had any advice, I’d take a leaf from Freitag – enabling customers to select the exact tarpaulin to be used for the tarps of their bag. If you want to play around with Freitag’s custom design app, go checkout F-Cut.
Notable is one of those apps that you can instantly see value in. I’ve been a casual web designer since I was 16. I’ve experienced the challenges of designing, pitching to clients, receiving feedback and iterating. It can be a frustrating process. Luckily for me, I was only ever dealing with 1 to 3 people at most. Can you imaging if you were leading a web project that have dozens of stake-holders? The process of receiving feedback from designers, coders, marketing folk, management and users can quickly become overwhelming.
Enter Notable App – created by ZURB, an interaction design and strategy company located in Campbell, California. Notable enables all stake-holders in a web development project to review and comment on a site’s design, code, copy and SEO content. What I find most impressive about Notable is that they’ve focused on something very specific and simple – and they’ve absolutely nailed it.
A loyal customer of Notable (Bryan Zmijewski) created the following screencast demo of the app. Although his accent is reminicent of Bill Gates, he conveys the core functionality of the product very well.
If you want a web page reviewed, you simple enter the page’s URL into the Notable App. The page’s design, code, copy & SEO content is scraped from the page and stored in your Notable App dashboard. Here you can invite others to collaboratively review the page. In relation to the design element, users can simply highlight aspects of the screen shot and attach their comments as shown above.
Once you’ve finished reviewing the site’s design, you can move onto reviewing the underlying HTML, CSS & javascript code. The commenting functionality is so smooth and seamless it’s hard to believe it’s a web based app. You simply highlight the code and add your comment inline as shown above.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) has become increasingly important as companies try to drive greater conversions and loyalty through organic search results. As shown above, Notable App enables users to clearly review SEO specific data fields, add comments and start a discussion around what the correct SEO strategy should look like.
Notable have a range of price plans from Free to $119.00 per month. The free version is particularly attractive for small freelance designers who have less than 3 stake-holders involved (You get 3GB of storage and unlimited sets). Whereas the high end plans have enhanced security, private URLs, unlimited workspaces and increased storage capacity.
Round Calendar is designed by Russian firm Saccade – a design agency with a focus on print, identity and visual communication. First off – I love the packaging. The calendar itself uses a very clean and understated font. It’s only appropriate that it’d be housed in an equally minimal yet rugged sleeve. I have to admit, the vertical and horizontal creases really bother me be I’ll take an iron to it when it arrives next week. If you’re eager to purchase an English version of the Round Calendar, email welcome@saccade.ru and they’ll send you through payment details.
As I noted in a previous post, working in Google has forced me to rethink my entire email management system. I’ve worked in Google for just under 6 months and I’ve received just shy of 20,000 emails. My previous GTD workflow utilised labels and multiple inboxes in Gmail to create a cascading workflow system. Although this resulted in significant productivity gains, it was by no means perfect. I’ve since refined the workflow and I would like to share it below. As always, this is a work in progress and I’d love to hear of new and improved ways to manage emails, so please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Issues with V1: The primary issue with V1 of my workflow related to the way in which labels were applied to messages.
Superstars replace labels: Because of the issues I outlined above, I’ve decided to use a Gmail lab called ‘Superstars’. The standard Gmail star feature provides you with a binary option – on or off. Superstars enable you to apply one of a range of stars by repetitively clicking and cycling through the options. It addresses both of the downsides I outlined above.
As messages arrive into my inbox, I scan them and if required, apply one of the following Superstars.
I’ve used a Gmail labs feature called ‘Multiple Inboxes’ to organise my inbox into 4 main categories. You can do so my copy and pasting the following query strings into the Multiple Inbox settings.
Blu has put together yet another amazing stop frame animation piece entitled ‘Big Bang Big Boom’. I’ve covered his previous work here and here before. It’s great to see his techniques advance and become more sophisticated. In particular, I really enjoyed his engagement with mixed media in his most recent work. He constantly challenges one’s perception of space & time whilst making clever use of the everyday objects and buildings around us.
Working under the moniker of The Wrong Objects – Korean based designers Giha Woo and Shin Go Eun have designed ‘front & back’ – an über minimal clock that presents the batteries on the front face with utility as the hour and minute hands.
