Taking a picture of a plastic bag may seem the most inane marketing task but it brings myriad complexities. Faced with an urgent last minute job for an important exhibition and only three wrinkled samples to work with, we were challenged. This is how we did it. Given time and budget, you’d normally get this [...]
We’ve just been updating the design of one of our client’s sites and, as ever, fonts are a focus. Earlier this year, Google released a set of beautiful typefaces for use in web environments. It’s a simple matter of calling the font library from Google via a stylesheet header. Unless your choice includes Droid Bold. [...]
A font in a document or logo or email sends a message as clear as the words you write with it. Choose badly and you deliver entirely the wrong signal. Choose an ubiquitous, bland font and you lose a valuable opportunity to communicate the right sentiments. Choose well and you can subtly and strongly reinforce [...]
Finally, we’ve got some life into this work. And at the last minute, too. After I dug up some lovely vector files featuring gears from Bittbox and passed them onto my designer, our content was utterly transformed. It did the job. It was really important for me to push through some bold thinking, to flip [...]
Engineering and architectural drawings come in colossal sizes and most design offices have large plotters or roll printers to let them push out paper copies with ease. We have a printer that will take A3 rolls but since use is fairly sparse, I needed a way to expand a strangely sized pdf across multiple A3 [...]
At first I had trouble getting my designer to realise my sketch. In the end I sourced some inspiration for him in the form of the excellent Bittbox site. Bittbox has a bunch of free vectors, amongst which was a set of gears that we could easily use to form dramatic backgrounds for our posters. [...]
In a push to get something completely different, I focused on what I wanted to represent. I wanted to show three research units working with a central body. My mind turned to gears turning, working in harmony. The animated graphic on a Wikipedia page inspired me. Out came the pens and I drew a quick [...]
Gut feel told me we had to go back to fundamentals with this project to get the visually arresting design I was looking for. Our designer persuaded me otherwise and I gave him a last shot at turning things around before we wiped the board clean and started afresh. We needed to link the three [...]
Our third iteration of this scientific poster design sees an attempt at strengthening the visual impact of the layout. It features some better integration between the three units we are featuring. We added a segment of colour that linked the items visually to the logo colour of each unit. We also underlined the header box [...]
We’re up to second draft on this and whilst my sketch is realised in a perfunctory way, it’s still on-grid and looking thin & mean. I wanted something much more dynamic. My designer didn’t want to move away from thin, understated lines whereas I really wanted this thing to stand out and shout teamwork. This [...]
Patient Experience videos on our new YouTube channel
How to photograph a plastic bag in 9 steps
Generating pdf newsletters automatically from WordPress: how to include a few pages and resolve memory limit errors
Debugging web scripts with the Firefox REST Client
Analysing web content semantics with AlchemyAPI: Part One – The Semantic Web
Using Ruby on Rails with Alfresco
Employing Alfresco web scripts to answer RESTful calls
Opening up Alfresco to other web applications
PDF manipulation and editing via the command line with pdftk
Google font API makes embedded web fonts easy, were it not for a bug
A Five Step Process to Create a Successful Clinical Trials Marketing Strategy
What’s in a Name? The meaning of Propheris