My MOO business cards arrived yesterday.

The business card holding box was very solid and cardboard rather than the usual plastic boxes, made from recycled pulp and biodegradable.

The MOO branding was fun & funky, as you'd expect, with a paper wrap on the outside of the card holder declaring

"Quick, schedule a meeting! Your Business Cards have arrived."

As for the cards themselves I'd placed the company logo on the back of the cards from an original PNG and it looked OK in landscape. On the flipside I'd placed the logo again but in portrait with my details below.

The logo wasn't as sharp as I expected even though (I thought) I'd supplied a hi-res PNG. The 350gsm card felt a lot flimsier than the cards I created for a client the other week at 400gsm. The lettering was OK - it was from a restricted number of fonts available (about 12) and the choice of formatting was also limited (bold line or not bold line, no bold characters or individual words)

So, on the whole? I like the MOO brand and their marketing, they certainly have an appeal and a personality that is very pleasing. The cards were the "Green uploader" - 100% recycled, totally chlorine free (TCF) and no frills. The limitation of font use and control over the layout was not something a designer likes to have to deal with.

But the price and the relative ease of creating the cards means that they're are popular and MOO will go far. £14.04 for 50 green cards including delivery (That was with a 10% discount code)

If you're a designer or you need to impress your clients with a top quality card or your clients expect no less than a spot-varnished sliver of royal standards then it's probably best to create your business cards in Photoshop or Illustrator and go see your local printer. But if you're on a budget and need a fistful of cheap, quick cards that are better than the usual entry-level fare then MOO are a good choice.

I'm now going to dig out that issue of Computer Arts with the tutorial on designing for the foil/metallic printing process - I need my cards to look like chrome...

Labels: business cards, design, print

In the 9 years that I've been running 22i design I don't recall ever having any business cards. That may sound a bit strange but we've honestly never really had the need for them.

However, with the latest upturn in business (thanks to all the good people who've recommended us) plus recently designing the classy little business cards for ICCTS I decided to dip my toes in the water and thought I'd give the much talked about MOO a try.

Compared to the normal process of designing business cards, where you completely craft the artwork from scratch and send it to your friendly neighbourhood printer, (in our case Charterlith Printers in Fleet) MOO is a simple automated online affair where you pick the type of card you want, upload the artwork, type some text in and then pay.

One of our web clients uses the well-known Vistaprint service for their stationery. You can tell that the print quality and design/style is below what you pay for regular design & print but there is a market out there for cheap business cards.

So whilst we'd dearly love to have dreamt up something along the lines of any one of the 100 really creative business cards (our logo would look great with a bit of spot varnish on a completely matt card) all we're trying to do here is test out the budget end of the market and, all-in, we paid around £14.04 for 50 double-sided 350gsm 100% recycled card TCF business cards to be printed and delivered (by next Thursday). That's about 28p a card.

The process was relatively painless but, as a designer, you miss the total control you have over the creative process. There were, for instance, only a dozen or so fonts to choose from and only line-by-line options (for example you can't increase the weight of, italicise certain words or letters or switch fonts or font sizes).

It's all very simple and templated however, for the price, you can't complain so I'll report back when they arrive; I'm sure they'll "do the job".

Labels: business cards, design, print

Labels: design, services

As I designer I'm all for changing websites; maybe the design got a bit stuffy, maybe there's a new layout you'd like to try, maybe you've got a better idea than before, or even your focus has changed.

Change is good. But yesterday I noticed some websites that once had very important links to my clients' websites had changed. The layout changed and so had the content. The links were missing.

I wish changes to old websites would include keeping the old content. Whilst there may be more work to do in the short-term there's ultimately less playing of "catchup" and you've already got a raft of content that may be indexed in the SERPs, even ranking quite well and picking up some traffic.

Please people, think about a site upate as a full, holistic upgrade including keeping your old content.

Labels: design, development, search, seo

Photoshop is now available as an online service in the form of Photoshop Express. I'll be back soon with some more info once I've tested it out...

Labels: design, services

As a designer I'm quite often working on text files here & there and sometimes cutting & pasting data from various sources into MS Word means that the formatting is all wrong (tip: paste into notepad first to strip formatting then paste that output into Word) or there's no formatting at all.

For instance - I want to find out how many items there were in this small business news page.

Rather than count line-by-line there's a labour-saving technique to be had with Find & Replace in Word. So I copied the main page content into Word and had a one-line output. Seeing that every item began with either '2007' or '2008' I simply executed find '2007' and replace all with '^p 2007' and find '2008' and replace all with '^p 2008'

^p 6p is basically a line break.

So I replaced all the year dates with linebreaks and ended up with 79 lines/articles

Life saver :)

Labels: copy writing, design, development, office, tips

I've been busy using a huge array of free web tools over the last few weeks and the OctaGate SiteTimer has proved to be very handy.

Whilst optimising the HTML and PHP code in a number webpages I used the SiteTimer, checking to see if there were any noticeable speed gains, and the OctaGate SiteTimer not only showed the speed of the page but of the individual files that the page pulled in.

By that it showed me the speed and loading times of:

• The page as a whole
• Favicons
• Cascading Style Sheets
  
• External JavaScripts
• Image files

What the SiteTimer highlighted was that one of the pages I was pulling in had 3 favicons being called when there was only a need for the 1. So I dived into the CMS I was using, hacked the templates and saved 2x file calls and a good couple of seconds of server time.

In addition SiteTimer highlighted that there were a couple of redundant images I was calling in to my pages and not using... now time to hunt down the code for those images and kill them off too...

Labels: design, development, tools

New Life in IT is a premier web design company specialising in the provision of Open Source Software solutions.

With a firm footing in the Joomla! CMS arena, New Life in IT provide a depth of experience from Business Analysis & Consulting through Professional Training to some pretty funky enterprise level web development solutions... we know because we've had the pleaseure to work with them.

Andrew Eddie, Director of New Life in IT, is well known as one of the original developers of Mambo CMS and the recent Joomla! CMS so they're headed not only by a sharp programmer & consumate professional but all-round nice bloke too.

Be sure to check out New Life in IT.

Labels: CMS, consultancy, design, development, news, open source

In the early days, back in '98, I found IE4 to be a better browser than NS Navigator. Personally I found the NSN buttons and tool bars to bloated and gimmicky and the cleaner lines of IE4 allowed just that little bit more screen to show.

But here, 9 years later, I have found that my browsing habits changed and they did so a few years ago. I tried Opera because it was new, it was different. I tried Firefox and fell in love with it. And I know that sometimes Firefox has memory leaks, I know it locks my system up occasionally, but that's because I can often run 20+ tabs at a time and regularly do that in two windows... a work window and a leisure window...

But I'd rather have that Fox logo on my shirt than just a plain old E.

I design clean code and I like my browser to respect that.

Labels: browsers, design, development

I was just knocking up some 120x60 ad buttons for a clients in-house campaign yesterday and needed a little inspiration, some eye candy to kick-start my creative process. Bookmarking ALL the sites where 120x60 advertising buttons are shown is quite cool but you can do a LOT of surfing to get your inspiration & ideas.

So when I stumbled upon the 120x60 ad button section of the site BannerReport.com I found myself in an Aladdin's cave of ad buttons.

And with that inspiration I came up with these...

Labels: advertising, design