Creative Blog

Everfresh Studio

MassMedia Studios — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:24:54 GMT

Australian Infront have a great little interview with Rone of Everfresh Studio. Everfresh has gained great notoriety in the city of Melbourne with a large collection of public paintings and even the National Gallery of Australia has acquired some of their work. They are legends within the graffiti scene - and you've no doubt come across some of their commercial work, with Phibs' work for Absolute Vodka and Meggs pieces for Stussy. They are putting the legitimate graffiti scene on the map with great credibility and talent. A large task, especially in a city where there is a war fought over graffiti, where on one side the Government trying to eradicate the city of graffiti and then you have The National Trust listing some graffiti covered alleyways as heritage sites.

link Everfresh Studio

Cool things we found

MassMedia Studios — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:18:13 GMT

Mash Facebook with YouTube and Flickr, and you have The Profiler, a website that lets you discover more of the things you find interesting, and the things your friends find interesting. It pulls various bits of data from your different online profiles and

http://www.theprofiler.be/

Just as in the real life Red Bull Soapbox Race events, which happen all over the world, Less Rain's site allows users to create their own uniquely designed vehicles online in a 3D garage, and then paint and decorate them with go-faster stripes and bumper stickers. Along with looking good, the design and construction of the machines will also effect how they handle on the race track. It's an impressive, full featured game experience - that wouldn't look out of place on a PSP or a Nintendo DS.

http://www.redbullsoapboxracer.com/

The Economist Thinking Space asks people "where do you get your ideas?" Users are also able to upload and tag images of their own (physical and abstract) spaces, to allow the site to become more inclusive and to grow, breaking away from the brand’s historical exclusivity. The design is quite beautiful, it's built in Papervision by the guys at Hi-Res. Nice stuff.

http://thinkingspace.economist.com

Stockholm-based agency North Kingdom created the ‘Teamgeist’ site and campaign, which also features an Augmented Reality interactive graphic novel and a dedicated blog. Visitors to www.adidas.com/teamgeist help the team win back their identity and celebrate German victories after players become lost in ‘blank’ jerseys. Fantastic presentation, loads smoothly and seems to perform very well.

http://adidas.com/teamgeist

VOB is the derivatives exchange of Turkey with zero brand awareness. The site tried to explain this quite dull subject in the most entertaining and engaging way possible. iGOA has developed a fantasic and extremely creative presentation for this site. We don't understand Turkish, so we have no idea what's going on. But it is incredibly fun to just watch.

http://www.vobnedir.org/

"DanJoe Design is the online portfolio of Joe Nyaggah. A tireless seeker of knowledge, occassional purveyor of wisdom and also, coincidentally, a graphic designer." We see a lot of portfolio sites of designers - but this one just stood out. Lovely simple design, a delight to navigate. All pure CSS, no flash - and looks great.

http://danjoedesign.com/

Red Velvet Art is an online store selling rather cute handmade goods and some great art work. The site itself is a great piece of artwork, with a unique hand drawn style and a retro colour scheme - it reflects the store product well. Great stuff for Christmas pressies too.

https://www.redvelvetart.com/

Avoiding "Death by Powerpoint"

MassMedia Studios — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:13:21 GMT

I hate Powerpoint, I really do. It's unintuitive, difficult to use, its tools and layout almost encourages you to create horribly boring presentations. Unfortunately it is the way of the world, the industry standard, a necessary evil, I suppose - and there is not much we can do about it.

So recently I've been working on some presentations we are giving at some industry events. My job was simple, I was given a draft powerpoint file and was instructed to 'Do your creative thing'. Now, although my first instinct was to do away with the Powerpoint file and make something in Flash, I do see the merit of having it in Powerpoint format - so it is easy for other staff to edit and update, without the need for the designer.

Firstly - I changed the fonts, updated the background theme and layout. After throwing in some appropriate full screen images, neatening up all the text and redesigning the charts - I had a shiny, brand new presentation to go. It was passed around the office and the comments were positive, most were very happy about how professional it looked.

The thing is, you don't need to be a graphic designer to be able to put together a nice Powerpoint presentation.

And although I could go into a step-by-step guide on how anyone can put together a nicer presentation, it's probably more effective if I point you in the direction on useful resources for making a better presentation.

Presentation Zen
http://www.presentationzen.com/
Garr Reynolds blog is full of great tips on how best to, and not to use different elements to make an effective presentation. It's really easy to read, and quite insightful - even for the seasoned graphic designer. It might also be worth checking out his bestselling book. He also has some great tips on slides.

Making Better Graphs and Charts
Ugly graphs and charts are perhaps the root cause of painfully presentations. FlowingData have a great piece with a sense of humour titled: 6 Steps to Make Your Graph (Really) Ugly. Also, if you want to have a go, they have a good beginner guide to designing a graph in Adobe Illustrator.

Finding Images
Sourcing appropriate images for a presentation can be tricky, finding good quality ones can be a bit of a mission. Try using Everystockphoto which is a search engine for free and licensed images and StockXchng which is a free stock image site.

Need some inspiration?
Get some inspiration at the Slideshare World's Best Presentation Content

Simple steps to bring your website up to date

MassMedia Studios — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:26:17 GMT

Although it’s easy to pass off web design trends as they come and go. It’s clear there is definitely a contemporary late 00’s trend going on at the moment. Mostly consisting of good use of white space, large fonts, large images, reflections and bright buttons, we’ve put together a little guide for design features which will immediately bring your site visually up-to-date.

Obviously these tips and tricks are not there to replace updating your website, but they are definitely a great temporary solution when you want to look current, as it might be a difficult time of year for a whole new website build. We hope you find our little guide interesting and useful.

Reflections

Creating reflective objects is very simple to do and it really makes a website looks fresh and new. Right now reflections are very popular, and with the advent of CSS3 which includes reflections as standard in it's stylesheets, it looks like we'll be seeing reflections on things for a while to come yet

Large Background Image

If your site is a few years old, it may have a very small graphical tile that repeats to make your background. This looks quite dated, so you should consider a large full screen wallpaper. Internet connections are so fast now, that even a larger image is not really a problem to load anymore.

Removing underline links

By default a link in HTML is blue and has an underline. With just a little CSS styling this can be changed to a different colour (one that matches your site design) and also removing the underline will make your links look less cluttered.

Using real fonts for your headings

CSS 3 allows you to use real TTF font as fonts on your site. Right now this only works in Safari 4, so a more reliable option is the SiFR tool, which is just a few lines of code and basically it swaps out your <H1> tags with a flash version of the text in the font you want.

Adding Social Media

If your content is GOOD, people will want to repost it in other places. If you make this easy for them by means of social network buttons, more people will re-post your content and ultimately gain you more visitors to your site.

Add a blog

Blogs are all the rage right now, and to add a WordPress blog should take you no more than 5 minutes. It's designed with interactivity in mind, encouraging your readers to comment and leave messages on every page. A blog also gets searched by Google far more than your static site, so by posting your 'latest news' in your blog will mean that people will easily find news relating to your company on Google and the other SE's as quickly as possible.

Make things glossy and add shadows

To add a small 'sheen' to objects is very simple, and to then make it appear to be 'real' by adding shadows is a very Web 2.0 thing to do. It looks slick and very 'Apple'-esque.

These are your first steps to quickly updating your site. If you found this useful or would like some more information on updating your site, please give us a call.

Roger Sho Gerhmann
Creative Director

Choosing better stock photography

MassMedia Studios — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 09:56:58 GMT

One of the more common mistakes I see in web design these days is the overuse of stock photography.

It is an instant downgrade on what could have been a great bit of design.

You could have fantastic headings, logos, navigation, useability and copy.

And then plonking ‘that’ cheesy businessperson with the big grin, can instantly unravel all the hard work.

When possible, use original artwork. If you have the resources available, get illustrations done or have a photoshoot done.

If the budget, time or situation doesn’t allow for this, and you need to delve into the boring cookie cutter world of stock photography.

But all is not lost, careful selection is the key.

Try and avoid stereotypical or clichéd images. Meaningless generic images are a definite no no.

Photos to avoid:

Try and find images, that aren’t necessarily so obvious. Looks for subtext and juxtaposition.

The images don’t have to spell out exactly what you are typing to communicate, you have copy for that.

Treat the images not as decoration, but as tone and emphasis. Think of it as a visual highlighter.

Look for honesty, natural expressions and good lighting.

Photos to look for:

Remember the perception of quality of your site and its content will be very much affected by the images and photography you choose.

Roger Sho Gerhmann
Creative Director

Website launch checklist – 11 things to check and recheck

MassMedia Studios — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 11:36:48 GMT

Okay, so you’ve got your great new design. The code is tight, and the content is all there and approved. Now you’re all ready to push that upload button, but hang on there – there’s just a few things you should check off this list before the big launch.

11. Meta tags
Have you put in the relevant keywords and description? You’d be amazed by how often this is forgotten even on high budget websites by big agencies. This will affect your sites performance exponentially. Make sure this is done!

10. Favicon
More of a style choice than a necessity, but it is expected these days for professional sites to have a small graphical representation of the website name or logo in the URL bar. Makes it easy for people to find your site among the jungle of tabs they have up. Also it makes it easier for people to remember your site, so long as your favicon is simple and effective.

9. Browser compatibility check
Okay so it works in IE8 and Firefox3. That’s great. What about the other half of the world using Safari, Opera, IE7, IE6 and Google Chrome? Well you should probably be catering for them too. Time to install all the browsers under the sun.

8. HTML version
So you have put together a beautiful Flash based site. Fantastic. Everyone has flash right? Yeah pretty much. But if I was to load it up on my BlackBerry or my iPhone, it’s not going to work. It’s best to simplified HTML version of the site – primarily for mobile users, but also for dinosaurs that own desktop computer from the late 90s.

7. Site map
Adding a sitemap to your root directory allows search engines to easily index your site. It’s not hard to create an XML based sitemap, and there are plenty of tools out there that do this for you.

6. Check the links
Click all the links. Make sure they all work. Do the right ones open in a new window?

Do the external ones work? A really common oversight is not using absolute paths, that is, skipping the front part of the URL. This might work now – but might mess things up if the folder was moved. Also make sure HTTP:// is used at the front of all external links.

5. Check loading time
How quickly does your site load? Make sure you test this on the actual server the website will be running on. The local server or your own desktop will not give an accurate representation of this. If it does load slow, make sure all you images (ALL OF THEM) are optimised and correctly compressed. Check all rich media content, and it’s also better if all files are hosted on the same server. If it’s fetching content from other servers – this can bottleneck the whole site. A few seconds might not seem like much – but remember it will be a lot worse on slow or mobile connections.

4. JavaScript Issues
Look at the bottom right corner of the browser. It should never be reporting any javascript errors. It’s becoming more common these days for professional websites to have javascript errors, as long as the website works (more or less). This is unacceptable. It just looks like you don’t care. And on that note, your website should also work without javascript enabled. Many people disable it for security reasons.

3. RSS feeds
If your site is a blog, or has any kind of newsfeed at all, you should have an RSS feed. It’s really easy to set it up. Also it should be easy to find and access the RSS feed. Putting a small line of code in your <head> tag will give you the RSS icon in the browsers URL bar.

2. Counters, analytics, Stats
I’ve literally seen loads of high budget commercial sites get launched without any analytics or statistics tools setup. It’s easy to forget this for the designer, but this is of extreme importance to the client. There are a lot of ones out there, commercial and free. Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) is perhaps the most popular free one. It’s also worth checking out Clicky (http://getclicky.com/), Mint (http://haveamint.com/) and StatCounter (http://www.statcounter.com/).

1. Check the copy, yes again.
Read it. Read it again. Get your friend to read it. Get your mum to read it. For gods sake get a copywriter to read it. Just because you got a A in 10th Grade English class doesn’t mean you are any good at understanding the intricate complexities of the English language. Oh and your spelling probably sucks too.

Oh and here is a bonus tip. Don’t EVER launch something on a Friday evening. I know you’ve been working all week, and you just want to get it out – so you don’t have to worry about it cause you know nothing will go wrong… let me tell you, it most definitely will. You don’t want problems arising over the weekend (when internet usage can be up) and you don’t have resources available to you to attend to them. Leave it till Monday morning.

Roger Sho Gerhmann

Creative Director

So what the hell is all this stuff about Twitter?

MassMedia Studios — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:58:51 GMT

Twitter is getting a LOT of media coverage these days. It’s almost a bit scary. For something that’s been around for sometime – its funny how the traditional media has pounced on it as the next big thing (a little bit late). Facebook I guess isn’t newsworthy now, so I guess they have made the jump.

So what exactly is Twitter? Well until you use it, it’s really hard to get your head around it. Comparing it to Facebook doesn’t help either – on paper they seem very similar: social networking tool, status updates, mobile updates etc etc.

The key differences are the relationship model and the content type. Facebook is kinda closed, exclusive and personal; you need to be accepted by others to make friends. Lots of content is kept private etc etc. The content is also fairly unlimited, with a large emphasis on photos and videos.

Twitter content is simpler and shorter. Text limited to 140 characters, maybe you can attach a link or two. It’s all open and public, even if you are directing messages at people. Messages are the wrong term, twittering is like making little public broadcasts.

The big difference is between them is philosophy. Facebook is about about a lot of stuff. It’s loud and it’s big. It’s like a big house party and everyone is hanging out in their own little cliques.

Twitter is simple, minimal and concise. It’s like a giant café gathering of people and everyone is politely commenting and muttering about what they are all doing.

This probably sounds all very silly. Again, you won’t really ‘get it’ until you use it and give it a good go, to see if it suits your lifestyle.

Here’s a quick guide to helping you ‘get it’ quickly.

1.      Sign up to Twitter

2.      Add a photo.

3.      Write a short bio.

4.      Add at least 20 people you know in the real world (and like).

5.      Add at least 20 people you are interested in. Celebrities, comedians, public figures, businessmen, politicians – whoever you feel like.

6.      Install a Twitter desktop app

7.      Install a mobile app if you have a smartphone

Give it a few days, and I will guarantee it will all start making sense

Roger Sho Gerhmann

Creative Director