elbowruminations | Graphic Design Trends, Tips and Reviews Graphic Design Trends, Tips and Reviews

Much of the time, as I’ve surfing through the blogosphere, I tend to come across fascinating bits of information that may not warrant a full post, but certainly require mention of some sort. With this being the case, welcome to the random reading round-up, a short tour of amazing things. Let’s get started.

Millions of Screenshots

The first stop on our tour is at 456 Berea Street. This is the home of Roger Johansson, a Swedish web specialist and accessibility expert. His blog is always well stocked with cross browser compliance tips and CSS techniques. I found this topic on styling form controls particularly amazing and quite helpful. In this post, he’s coded and taken screen shots of over 200 different form elements in different browsers! Unbelievable!!

Digital Inspiration

If you are in the mood to be blown away, make sure you drop by Think Four’s blog. This post is is loaded with mouth-watering, juicy photo manipulation design, created by experts. Inspiration is just a click away.

Read Once, Print Twice

Next stop is Fuel Your Creativity, a source for ideas, inspiration, and helpful tips from your good friends and mine at Fuel Brand Group. This post, called 3 deadly sins of print design, although a bit more on the elementary side, is a great post for beginners in the print medium, or web developers who may be looking for some helpful advice.

Before you leave, make sure you check out this interesting post from Fuel on dual element logos. One of the most interesting and challenging aspects of identity design is the layers of meaning embedded into the design elements. When more than one idea plays across the logo, you know you’ve succeeded.

Be Good To Your Clients

The good folks at Vandelay Design seem to know what they are talking about when it comes to getting along with clients. In addressing the common problem designers seem to have with communicating well, this post outlines the right way to go about customer service. The emphasis on learning to respect your clients ideas and working collaboratively is a lesson many Graphic Designers could use to learn.

Be Good To Your Ideas

Eric Karjaluoto has difficult last name to pronounce. Don’t let that deter you from visiting this post at ideas on ideas. This is another post about being a better designer, but it’s more from a creative perspective. This is a great read on challenging yourself to take your work to the next level.

What to Read Before You Die

The Die Line claims to be the world’s #1 packaging design website and who’s going to argue with that? My favourite part of the site to visit is the redesign category of their blog for fresh new takes on product packaging.

Enforce Your Design Rights

In closing, here are some helpful templates from the Design Police you can use to vandalize critique other people’s work when you just can’t stand bad design.

Thanks for reading. If you’ve got any other sweet links you’d like to share, please leave a comment!

Popularity: 31% [?]

In 1991, the very first web browser was released. Named ‘Nexus’, it had very basic capabilities, and could not display much more than the most simple stylesheet.

Thankfully, technology has evolved a long way and there are now many options depending on your surfing preferences. Browsers are now able to display everything from a spreadsheet to a feature-length movie. While evolution brings choice, this is not necessarily a good thing. Now, we are faced with the problem of choosing and recommending a browser which is intuitive for both developers and users. Firefox or Internet Explorer? Chrome or Safari? Opera or Netscape? Flock? Camino? Sea Monkey? It certainly is a difficult choice. However, this article should help you to weigh out the Pros and Cons of each browser.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome was released by Google in December 2008, with promises that it would load websites significantly faster, and only one tab would crash, not the entire window.

One largely significant downfall to the browser, however, is the fact that it has no built in RSS reader. If you are rely a lot on your RSS for daily information, be warned that Chrome may not be for you. For example, when reading an RSS feed, the user is presented with many lines of text in a single block, with no spaces, which makes for a rather unpleasant reading experience.

Security is obviously paramount to any developer. Chrome regularly downloads blacklists of malicious websites, to protect the user from viruses and malware.

The user interface is very plain and simple, and there is currently no possibility to expand Chrome with plugins.
In conclusion, Google Chrome should be recommended to users of a website, but I would not recommend it for use by developers.

Development Tools: 2/10
Security: 6/10
Speed: 8/10
Reliability: 7/10
Interface: 5/10

This means that Google Chrome has scored 28/50, but how will it fare against Firefox and Internet Explorer?

Firefox

Firefox is a development-focused browser which was created by Mozilla. The browser is open source, which means users and developers had a say in how it was made. The best thing about Firefox is that it has many development tools built in, such as an expanded page source viewer, a javascript debugging tool and a real-time DOM inspector/editor. However, if the standard tools do not quench your development thirst, then Firefox has literally hundreds of “add-ons” which can be installed to your requirement.

The security for Firefox is standard for most browsers, but again, there are many plugins which can be downloaded to enhance the security of the browser. Firefox is well laid out, but the top quarter of the screen is dominated with toolbars and such, but these can easily be removed.
All in all, Firefox is a useful tool for the developer, and comes with some great stuff as standard.

Development Tools: 8/10
Security: 5/10
Speed: 6/10
Reliability: 7/10
Interface: 6/10

This means that Firefox has scored 32/50. How will Internet Explorer fare against this score?

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer is the default browser packaged with Microsoft Operating System. It is certainly not renowned for its development tools, and offers only a ‘developer toolbar’ download. The developer toolbar includes the tools which Firefox has generically. Many security vulnerabilities have been associated with Internet Explorer. The main way that hackers exploit the browser is through the ActiveX controls that it routinely uses. All a hacker has to do is write a malicious ActiveX control and then they can access all of your files.

Internet Explorer also includes a tool called the ‘Favorites Center’, which is a glorified version of the favorites toolbar.
The browser is typically very slow to load, and with security vulnerabilities, it’s not the ideal developers browser.

Development Tools: 6/10
Security: 3/10
Speed: 5/10
Reliability: 7/10
Interface: 7/10

Internet Explorer has scored 28/50, meaning that Firefox is most likely the best browser to use as a web developer or a graphic designer.

We’ve talked about Firefox tools before on Elbowruminations but if you are looking for more, check out this post by Speckyboy.

If you’re looking for an easy way to make sure your page looks good across all browsers or platforms, check out Browsershots.

And finally, for an exhaustive list of browsers and their history, wikipedia is the place to go.

Popularity: 13% [?]

How does a blog start? Well, if you’re Elbowruminations, it starts over the phone, in the summer of 2006.

“I have an idea,” Neil was saying. I was in Vancouver when Neil called from Calgary. We were getting ready for my year-long stint with Elbowroom, and Neil was pitching me one of our first collaborative projects. “Whether it’s a newsletter or a website, I don’t know, but we need to figure out a way to talk design with our clients on a regular basis.”

“When you get to Calgary,” he continued, “Let’s figure this out.”

Neil’s idea to transmit design-related content to our clients, suppliers and friends eventually transformed into a widely-read graphic design blog covering everything from new technology to corporate re-brands. Two years later, Elbowruminations has now published a total of 140 posts, which have garnered 105 comments from our readers. Today is our two-year anniversary of the first post on Elbowruminations, and we thought it would be fitting to mention a few highlights of our first couple years.

1. THE LIBRARY DEFENDERS

I think one of the most exciting times to be a design blog like us is when the people responsible for the design piece you just critiqued end up stopping by to defend themselves. Case-in-point is the Calgary Public Library.

Neil posted a piece dressing-down the Library’s mystifying transit ads, labeling the ad “a few letters short of a bad first novel.” Library representative Grant Kaiser was quick to visit the comments section. “Libraries face 200 years of stereotyping,” wrote Grant. “With a $100 million advertising budget perhaps we could begin to fight it.”

We’re not looking to make people angry or hurt their feelings, but we’re excited when they start thinking more about good design. Out of this post and its comments came a design contract and a great relationship with the Calgary Public Library. What more could we ask for? Kudos to the Library for keeping an eye on their web reputation. It demonstrates a progressive, evolving institution – which ends up reflecting very well on the Library after all.

2. LONDON CALLING

Next stop is London. When the logo for the London 2012 Olympics hit the web, Elbowruminations was one of the first design blogs to cover the craziness. It was a zoo of activity around here, with a flurry of comments and inbound links helping to bring graphic design perspectives to a globe of Olympic spectators. While our thoughts on the London logo have evolved a bit, the initial eruption of discussion and noise was a joy to be in the middle of.

3. SASKATOON BLADES

On my favourite posts put together by Neil is his review of the Saskatoon Blades logo. I’d asked Neil to supply his “favourite design contribution of 2007” for our year-end round-up post, and Neil’s submission was a review of a logo for a hockey team in the middle of the Canadian prairies.

To this day, I’m still not certain if he was serious or joking, but regardless of its angle, it accomplished a couple of things. First, it was a glowing, honest and humble tribute to small-town Canada – you never get those get of adjectives on a design blog. Second, it served as an ironic roast of the design industry: in the midst of a post peppered with poise and pretense where people were gesturing grandly about global issues, Neil went in the exact opposite direction and headed to the hockey rink.

4. THE BRANDING OF CANADA

Speaking of Canadiana, Neil mentioned over email that the Branding of Canada post was one of his favourites from the past couple years. A thorough look at the visual identity of our country, this post took a tour of the stamps, passports, flag, currency, signage, and typeface of Canada. The tour led us to the conclusion that Canada’s visual brand was consistent, strong and visually appealing. Interestingly, this assessment of Canada’s awesomeness was recently affirmed by Future Brand, a New York consulting firm, which surveyed travelers and discovered that Canada’s brand is second in the world, second only to Australia.

5. THE SECOND YEAR

In 2008, we started trying out a few new things on this blog: first, we decided to get personal. With the recent site redesign, we dropped the corporate facade, showed our faces, and brandished our opinions. The design industry has always benfitted from candor and honesty, and we realized there was no point in pretending to be a huge design blog.

Second, we decided to narrow our focus. Our new tagline is “graphic design trends, tips and reviews” which is a big step away from the old tagline, “Graphic design thinking for everyone.” The thing we realized was, this blog ISN’T for everyone: it’s for small business owners and people interested in design. By making our focus and audience clear, we’re already seeing a sense of ease in the comments, and a renewed sense of clarity in our posts.

We hope you like the new approach. Our intent is to continue to bring you well-informed perspectives on the graphic design industry, in a way that makes you think, laugh, or at least come back again later. Tell us how we’re doing — if you’ve got thoughts about how we can do this better, some tips for stories we should cover, or even if you just want to share reactions to our two-year commemorative post, please leave a comment below. You’ll be richly rewarded with a lingering sense of satisfaction.

Popularity: 19% [?]