Making email work for you

If you use email, you know how much spam rubbish and general clutter floods into your inbox. Some estimates place the amount of unwanted email traffic at 95% (fortunately most of it is filtered out before it afflicts you). Yet despite this white noise, email is still one of the most powerful marketing channels, social media notwithstanding. Most people still maintain an email address, and most still read their email. If you have clients and potential clients you'd like to reach, email is a very good place to start. But beside coming up with attractive, interesting content, you will want your email communications to look professional, and you will need to track the metrics of your various email campaigns. Vision6 and MailChimp offer users a low cost and easy-to-use entry to the world of email marketing. MailChimp in particular offers an absurdly generous free service to users generating less than 12,000 emails per month.  Plus they have a cute monkey avatar that dispenses cheerful backchat.

360 degree world

Google Street View gives users the chance to 'stand' on any of millions of streets and pan to see the scenery. But as every viewer knows, the average street is pretty prosaic, and the image quality is not fabulous anyway. Which brings us to 360cities. This immersive site has thousands of high resolution 360 degree images from all over the world — views of mountains, canyons, urban scenes, forest glades and massive crowds. The images are seamless, sharp and occupy your full screen with thousands of details that you can absorb at leisure. The interface is easy to navigate, piggybacking on Google maps (and also appearing as a layer in Google Earth), and once you get started, stopping is a problem. Check out some of their ultra high resolution images — the London Eye panorama is a jaw dropping 80 gigapixels.

Patterns and Colour

Fascination with combinations of repeating images/symbols and colour seems to span cultures and appear in every historical period. The Mayans, the Egyptians, the Persians and Victorian-era Britons were obsessed with pattern, whether applied to walls, monuments, clothes or jewellery. Those similarly afflicted in the 21st century can use programs like this. While they may not be designing a grand tomb, they could at least generate a nifty wallpaper for their mobile phone or PC...

Get on the Grid

If you can't quite figure out why one website just looks good and is a pleasure to read, and another similar one is hard on the eye, then the underlying structure (or lack thereof) may be to blame. Plenty of interesting material on the topic of web design grids here. 

Gmail now comes with Preview pane

After years of requests from frustrated users, Gmail labs finally offers a preview pane option -- meaning, gasp, a user can now do what they have always been able to do in desktop mail clients -- read the bloody email with clicking into it. With many desktop PC users using very large screens, they have real estate to burn and a preview pane feels like an efficiency improver -- every second counts!

Typography Times Ten

A solid list of both classic and contemporary books about typography, from the folks at Brain Pickings. Each book demonstrates the richness and complexity of the field, and how much typographers in their unobtrusive way contribute to artistic and literary culture.

Uncertain Beginnings

An unusually well designed author website. Jim Bain showcases his book on early exploration of the coastline of Australia, and advances his theory of why the British ended up successfully claiming the continent ahead of their contemporaries.

Crowdsourcing: an Exchange

The Internet has brought many benefits for designers (enhanced communications with clients, easy transfer of files, access to vast image libraries and type retailers, etc) but it has also brought some challenges. One of these is the phenomenon of Crowdsourcing. Certain websites offer clients the chance to post a brief, and receive many potential designs before paying a pittance for the selected artwork. Needless to say, the vast majority of crowdsourced designs are deriviative, poorly thought out and represent the lowest common denominator of graphic design. The exchange here goes right to the heart of this vexed issue and does a great job of explaining why using a real designer is always a better option.

Really Fine Art via Google

Google turns its hyperactive eye to the world of fine arts: tours of some of the world's greatest art galleries using its Street View technology. Stroll along through rooms lined with icons of Western art, then zoom right in on the selected artwork. It's fantastic to see the artworks in such detail, even if the works featured represent only a tiny fraction of each participating institution's collection. And no matter the fidelity of the images, the artwork as artefact is still lost when it makes the transition from reality to pixel.

Vale Louis Braille Audio

With little fanfare, another victim of convulsions in the book trade: audio book publisher Louis Braille Audio. A long term client, Louis Braille Audio published unabridged audio versions of some of the finest Australian fiction, non fiction and children's literature. Director Pauline Meaney had an uncanny knack of selecting books that later went on to feature on shortlists and win awards. Operating as a part of Vision Australia, Louis Braille did important work and will be sadly missed.

Note: All of the covers featured in the image below are Chameleon Print Design originals.

Deserting Facebook

If the recent successful launch of Google+ (with its simple privacy controls and intuitive interface) has you reviewing your allegiance to Facebook, then an escape route is available. A guide here leads you down the path to liberating all of your Facebook data. If only having a social profile did not mean having to leap into the arms of a major corporation... 

Future Books and Dead Authors

Bibliophiles fear the impending death (or serious decline) of the printed book. We fear the often transitory and that the trivial nature of much web content and alleged reduction in attention spans will make long-form fiction and non-fiction less attractive. Even if we tentatively embrace the shift from paper to ebook, we sense perhaps that the very form itself is somehow obsolescent.

The Institute for the Future of the Book addresses these issues in a direct and engaging way, without the dispiriting jargon that accompanies much discussion on this topic. They pretty much skip over the current pallid ebook format and envisage a future embedded into the browser, with the book analogue of the future richly linked to the surrounding intellectual/cultural milieu.

Click to read more ...

Drive-by Fonts

The last couple of years have seen a quiet revolution for web designers. Once limited to the small number of typefaces that 'everyone' had installed on their machines, designers have been completely liberated from that restriction by web-served typefaces. Now it no longer matters what the user has installed -- the website renders typefaces from a remote server. If you'd like to see what your website (or someone else's) would look like using the new web font services, try this neat little demonstration from type purveyor FontFont. Instead of bland patches of Arial or Verdana, imagine your site decked out with typefaces designed for the screen.

Apps versus the Web

Do you prefer a walled garden, or the wide open plains beyond? Apps on iPhone, iPad and Android devices have proven to be a massive success (by some metrics at least), so you'd think the argument was settled. Not according to Christopher Butler, who lists some pretty compelling reasons why the open, linkable web beats the fenced off, controlled app ecosystem.

Office finally comes to the Cloud

After conceding much ground to their competitors, especially Google with its cloud-based docs suite, Microsoft is finally coming to the party. It seems that the Office suite software will be available online later this year, which is about a thousand years in cloud development time. As is the new norm, a stripped down version will be available for free, and a fully featured priced model also offered. Whether that will be enough to staunch the bleeding of users to Open Office, Google Docs and other services such as Zoho remains to be seen.

The M(e)dium is the M(e)ssage

Ebooks are continuing their blitzgrieg assault on print publishing. Book publishing is starting to go through similar convulsions to the recording industry. Unlike the recording industry, piracy is not a massive issue (yet). But Ebooks are not just replacements for the printed book. They are something very different, and will become more different still. If the ebook does largely replace the printed version, designers, publishers and authors will have to make many adjustments. Ebook readers may expect a much more sophisticated and dynamic interface than a print book could ever supply. Their expectations of what constitutes a 'book' will rapidly alter. Content will shift to match these expectations. And unlike the printed book, which took essentially the same form for several hundred years, the ebook will be subject to continued and rapid development. 

The View from Over Here

A funny little riff on how the world looks different from where you live — a Bulgarian designer maps Europe according to the parochial perceptions of each country (including the US, depicted at right). An Australian version would be amusing.

Some Tasks with Gmail, Madam?

If you spend a lot of your working life managing emails, then a task manager that lives inside Gmail is going to sound attractive. Taskforce have come up with a very functional and minimalist task manager that is right at home within the uber email service. Users can run multiple lists for different users, link emails to tasks, add comments, deadlines and reorder tasks easily. Installation is extremely simple. Taskforce is free at the moment, but will eventually morph into one of the many excellent cloud-based services that (shock, horror) charge a little for their wares.

Byliner

If the decline of serious print journalism seems like a bad thing, perhaps there is light on the other side of the digital divide. An increasing number of websites are tackling long-form non-fiction writing and journalism, and optimising their work for all kinds of viewing platforms. Examples include Byliner, Unbound and Red Lemonade. No doubt the medium will change the form of analytical and investigative writing, but new journalistic business models may yet thrive as newspapers fade away.

Georgie Girl (cover versions)

Sometimes a book cover evolves through several versions, keeping some elements and losing others. Clients can change their minds or come up with new ideas. Whilst sometimes time consuming, design iteration has the virtue of being unpredictable and therefore interesting.