Until you start having some problems with your website hosting provider, or you decide to have a redesign with a different company, and you then realise that you actually don’t have any control over your domain, or worse; don’t even own it.

This is something we’ve seen a few times at Storm, and something I’ve experienced with many friends personally. It’s all too easy to sign up with a web host who will happily register your domain, sometimes even for “free”, but the price is that they actually own your domain and if you’re not very careful, you’re going to be facing a battle to get it back from them when the time arrises.

Here at Storm, we don’t register domains on behalf of clients; We’ll always guide you through the registration yourself with a trusted registrar to make sure you never have this problem.

How Do I Check?

If you’re not sure who owns your domain, you can look up the registered data with a whois tool, such as the one provided by Network Solutions (who will cover the results in adverts trying to sell you their products!)

You’re looking for the “Registrant” field to contain your name, or your company’s name, rather than your web host or provider.

If it doesn’t, then it’s a good idea to check the small print of your web hosting contract, or even contact them to ask if you own it, and how to transfer it into your own name.

In the worst case scenario, you may be able to contact the top level domain provider (such as nominet for .uk domains) and ask them for help recovering your domain –  but that can be a lengthy and expensive process!

We’ve recently blogged about our use of Adobe Muse for wiring framing, but today I’m going to talk about our newest discovery for the dev team, Twitter Bootstrap.

The bootstrap gives you a CSS file you can easily include on any project, even by hot linking to their URL on GitHub (if you’re comfortable knowing things will break should GitHub go down!) and provides a grid layout system, along with styles for all the common elements used on a website. From tables, divs and HTML5 elements; they’re all styled for you out of the box in a simple admin interface kind of way.

They even provide source code as jQuery extensions for making modals appear, and HTML Table sorting.

Their documentation on GitHub is also excellent, and explains the grid layout system easily with lots of examples, which makes life easier for me coming from a background of preferring to roll my own code rather relying on frameworks.

Before I go on it’s very important to note that I have tried loads of wireframing tools in the past year. From Mockups, Mockingbird and Mockflow right through to Axure, and a dozen more along the way. I found faults with each of them; be it a poor interface, lack of flexibility, lack of master pages or simply a poor quality output.

What I found with mockups is that you can very quickly build clickable wireframes through a beautifully lightweight yet fairly comprehensive Adobe Air based platform. Further to that, publishing to the web is painless, as Adobe are piggybacking on BusinessCatalyst (another Adobe Product).

Rather than this post being all talk, I felt the best thing to do was to time myself and spend a mere 30 of her majesties finest minutes building a very simple, clickable wireframe in Muse. I guess the results speak for themselves:

http://storm-wireframe.businesscatalyst.com

The best bit is that Muse is currently free, including the hosting. So if you want to have a play I’d wholeheartedly recommend it.

So what do you think? Does Muse provide quick and easy wireframing or is it just another in the long list of ‘not quite’  tools?

The simple logo- small, pretty and simple. But nestled somewhere in those few pixels lies the power to make or break a business. That’s some heavy weight for such a little guy.

Having just finished working on an identity for a project my agency is involved with, I thought documenting the evolution of the logo from conception to completion along with how I personally go about designing logos would make a pretty sweet blog post. So without further ado, Designing a Logo- the Creative Process.

———

If you’ve ever seen Men In Black, there is a scene where Will Smith’s character, Agent J is finally deemed worthy enough to be given a gun to defend himself by his mentor Agent K. They head into an armory packed with huge guns, of which Agent K awards J with the tiniest one of all, ‘The Noisy Cricket’. A disgruntled J accepts the tiny weapon, not in the least bit impressed at it’s small, elegant stature.
When the opportunity finally arrives for Agent J to use The Cricket, the little gun turns out to be so powerful it obliterates everything in its path, and blows him a great distance off his feet.

When designing a logo, it has to be a Noisy Cricket. Simple, sleek, and pack a lot of power.

Getting Started

As with anything in the creative industry, before the fun begins there needs to be a proper period of planning and research into your project or client, but this is particularly vital in the case of logo design- like the Noisy Cricket, a lot of power has to be packed into a tiny object.
My method of getting started on a project like this begins with talking to a client. A proper discourse with a client is integral to a successful project. I  tend to ask about their target audience, business values and presence, and whether they have existing colour schemes they may use in other aspects of the company image that they want to factor into their logo.

I then sit down at my computer with a pen and paper and just mess around for a few hours, not specifically drawing logos (though many do get doodled during this stage) but just noting down keywords, associations, anything that might prompt a thought.

The logo i will be discussing in this blog post was for ‘Bath Digital’, a project intended to educate Bath-based businesses about the powers of web and Ecommerce.

In getting started with the Bath Digital logo, I decided on creating two separate streams of thought- one for ‘Bath’, and one for ‘Digital’. I find these sorts of techniques are particularly useful in logo design, as they enable you to visualise many factors of a word or idea that you may not ordinary see.

For example, in the image on the left, you see my doodle of an ‘On’ button, the connotations between an ‘On’ button and the word ‘digital’ are fairly obvious, but only through dismantling the word ‘digital’ and writing down everything that came to mind, I got close to a possible idea. If you look at an ‘On’ symbol, you can sort of see a lowercase d, back to back with a lowercase b, almost the initials of the business! Obviously in this case it didn’t work, but it’s an example of how ideas begin to materialise if you properly analyse the stuff you get from good research before a project.

Ideas into Imagery

After this stage, the real design begins. I begin transferring all my sketched ideas to screen, and play with various colour schemes and fonts. Below you can see the first set of four logo ideas I created. 

I like to present a client with 4 options- I feel any more than this complicates things and dilutes your hard work. I like to make these 4 options fairly diverse, I attempt to cover a broad area, from simple, corporate-style stuff to more abstract or trendy design. I have them pick their favourite, then move on to step 2, refinement, which i will cover in the next section of this post.

In terms of the Bath Digital logo, the team decided that out of these 4, we should narrow it down to two for further development, rather than one, as they were both very much liked.

Refinement & the Finished Product.

After some feedback on one of the Bath Digital logo choices below (feedback is a key role in refining a logo) there was some worry that the ‘b’ & ‘d’ weren’t working well enough to convey that they were letters, and that the mouse lead wasn’t sufficiently mouse lead-like (it looked more like a devil’s tail somebody said) so during refinement I decided to add indents and curves to the ‘b’ and ‘d’ in the logo so as to better identify them as letters, and after a lot of work managed to convey the idea of the mouse to a fairly okay standard, I think.

from this:

to this:

Even though I was really pleased with this design, what you as the designer think is best can sometimes not be what’s best for the business you’re designing for, and in this case we decided that it didn’t fit the image of what Bath Digital was setting out to achieve, and who it wanted to attract to use its services- and that a simpler, more accessible logo would be needed to appeal to the wide range of businesses it wanted to communicate with.

I rarely am able to nail a logo first time, only after numerous tinkering and adjusting, and a prime example of how much a particular idea can change is the design we chose to finally go with for Bath Digital. With the other logo option the team chose for developing, everybody loved the mouse within a speech bubble design you can see on the second of the four logo ideas sheets posted above- it seemed to simply and properly communicate the idea of what Bath Digital was about. I decided to start from scratch with the idea, re-doing the font and adding some layer styles to produce something completely different to what was originally a fairly lifeless logo.

After a lot of umming and ahhing about the colours within the team, an agreement was reached and we had our logo. Simple, accessible, and it conveys a message.

A Noisy Cricket? I’ll let you decide.

]]> http://www.storm-consultancy.com/design/design-tutorials/designing-a-logo-the-creative-process/feed/ 2 http://www.storm-consultancy.com/design/newsworthy-bits/google-getting-into-the-web-fonts-game/ http://www.storm-consultancy.com/design/newsworthy-bits/google-getting-into-the-web-fonts-game/#comments Wed, 19 May 2010 07:37:41 +0000 Adam Pope http://www.storm-consultancy.com/blog/design/?p=345 Earlier today I was on Smashing Magazine when I saw something strange in my status bar.  As I watched the hostnames flash by as the page loaded, pulling in resources from numerous sources, my eyes stuck on one in particular:fonts.googleapis.com. So, I pulled up the source of the page and  right there, on line 3, was a link element pulling in CSS from fonts.googleapis.com!  The request is for a font called 'Droid Sans' in regular and bold.]]> Earlier today I was on Smashing Magazine when I saw something strange in my status bar.  As I watched the hostnames flash by as the page loaded, pulling in resources from numerous sources, my eyes stuck on one in particular: fonts.googleapis.com. So, I pulled up the source of the page and  right there, on line 3, was a link element pulling in CSS from fonts.googleapis.com!  The request is for a font called ‘Droid Sans’ in regular and bold.

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid Sans:regular,bold' rel='Stylesheet' type='text/css'/ >

I dug a little deeper and had a look at the source of that CSS file and found:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Droid Sans';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: normal;
  src: local('Droid Sans'),
       url('http://themes.googleusercontent.com/font?kit=POVDFY-UUf0WFR9DIMCU8g')
       format('truetype');
}
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Droid Sans';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: bold;
  src: local('Droid Sans'),
       url('http://themes.googleusercontent.com/font?kit=EFpQQyG9GqCrobXxL-KRMVtXRa8TVwTICgirnJhmVJw')
       format('truetype');
}

From this evidence it’s looks very much like Google is getting into the font serving business alongside current providers such as: TypeKit and Fonts.com.  You have to assume that this is bad news for those guys as Google is highly likely to be offering this service for free, where a subscription is currently required for high volume use.

Update: Google has now officially announced this as the Google Font API with the Google Font Directory – you heard it here first!

However, it turns out this isn’t  a move to dominate the Fonts market – instead this is a collaboration.  Google has been working with TypeKit to produce the WebFont Loader – A JavaScript API to make loading web fonts faster.  Google have posted an example of using the new API – perhaps controversially, it introduces a little bit of noise into your CSS.

<html>
  <head>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/webfont/1/webfont.js">
    </script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      WebFont.load({
        google: {
          families: [ 'Tangerine', 'Cantarell' ]
        }
      });
    </script>
    <style type="text/css">
      .wf-inactive p {
        font-family: serif
      }
      .wf-active p {
        font-family: 'Tangerine', serif
      }
      .wf-inactive h1 {
        font-family: serif;
        font-size: 16px
      }
      .wf-active h1 {
        font-family: 'Cantarell', serif;
        font-size: 16px
      }
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>This is using Cantarell</h1>
    <p>This is using Tangerine!</p>
  </body>
</html>

However, the new loaded is able to load fonts from both Google and TypeKit simultaneously:

WebFont.load({
    google: {
      families: [ 'Tangerine', 'Cantarell' ]
    },
    typekit: 'myKitId'
  });

A move that will drastically improve the load times of web fonts as users being to have a cached version of the webfont.js file in their browser! Currently, each TypeKit user has to include a unique JavaScript file on their site, eliminating any caching potential.

Here is the process which lead to my plain text password being sent (we’ve verified this by checking with a second account in the office now, so this isn’t a one off fluke!)

1) I was an old P4 users upgrading to P5.
2) I used the upgrade path link from the UK store. At the checkout phase requested the password from my P4 account.
3) The password reset page displays an error (Shown below)
4) Your plain text password arrives! (Email below)

We’ve contacted Parallels regarding this issue and will update you with any comment they make on the matter.

****************************************************************************
element 5 order number: **REMOVED**
****************************************************************************
This e-mail was generated by a mail handling system. Please do not reply
to the address listed in the “From” field.
Please read the CUSTOMER SERVICE section for answers to your questions.
****************************************************************************

Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for placing an order with element 5.

We are sending you the data for your customer account at element 5 as per
your request.

User name: ****@storm-consultancy.com
Password: **!!REMOVED!!**

Please use your user ID and password for future orders as well.

https://ccc.element5.com/ccc/my_account.html?languageid=1&pid=**REMOVED**

****************************************************************************
CUSTOMER SERVICE

Questions about your order, payment, or delivery?

Answers to the most frequently asked questions / Contact:

http://ccc.element5.com/ccc/?languageid=1&pid=**REMOVED**

Your order data:

https://ccc.element5.com/ccc/my_account.html?languageid=1&pid=**REMOVED**

****************************************************************************

General terms and conditions of business:

http://esd.element5.com/termsconditions.html?p=**REMOVED**

Best regards,
Your element 5 team
_____________________________________________________________________

element 5 – a service of digital river – www.element5.com
Digital River GmbH
Vogelsanger Str. 78, D-50823 Cologne, Germany
CEO: John Strosahl
Corporate Headquarters: Cologne / HRB 56188 / Cologne Local Court
_____________________________________________________________________

Here are my top 11 reasons for buying an iPhone.

We’re big iPhone fans here at Storm – hopefully the list below will show you why!

#1 – iPod

One of my favourite iPhone features is the iPod functionality. Essentially your phone comes with an iPod touch, with all the features and performance you can expect from the Touch. The large majority of people who are put off from buying the iPhone cite higher cost as their reason, yet are happy to shell out for an iPod (or equivalent music player). With the new iPhone rumored to have a 32Gb hard drive, the potential to put all of your music and video on one device is a big iPhone plus.

#2 – Style

The iPhone is undoubtedly one of the nicest looking mobile phones on the market. Its vivid 3.5″ screen encased in a sleek chrome and black housing is not only good looking, but surprisingly durable. The iPhone screen – protected by toughened glass – is very hard to scratch!

#3 – Ease of Use / GUI

The iPhone user interface has led the way forward for touch screen devices. Its fast and responsive system makes browsing the device very intuitive. Even the touch keyboard becomes second nature within a couple of weeks of use.

#4 – Web, Wi-Fi and 3G

Prior to the iPhone, mobile Internet browsing was sluggish and very limited (WAP, GPRS and Edge). With the iPhone 3G you not only get fast browsing speed, but a well thought out browsing interface. Use of the iPhone’s multi-touch technology means that you can scale or zoom fully HTML pages.

#5 – Push Services

This is actually a feature which will come into maturity in the next software update for iPhone (3.0 – due in the next month or so). The iPhone will already ‘push’ any emails, diary dates and contacts to your mobile phone, but with the latest software release you will be able to receive further alerts, ‘pushed’ to your phone such as News alerts, Social Networking alerts etc.

#6 – Social Networking

The iPhones 3G Internet capability means that you can stay connected to your social networks (Twitter, Facebook etc) on the go. You are able to catch up with your friends and post photos and updates straight from the phone. Without devices such as the iPhone, services like Twitter would almost certainly not be as popular as they are today.

#7 – Games

Who doesn’t love a few fun games on their mobile to aid with procrastination? The iPhone is the first mobile phone to truly provide high quality games – some of which are more than capable of competing with hand held gaming consoles such as the Nintendo DS or PSP. And whats more, the games for iPhone are generally much cheaper and receive frequent updates for free.

#8 – GPS and Google Maps

The iPhone has the benefit of having a GPS receiver built in. Unlike many other phones which merely triangulate their position via telephone masts, the iPhone can actually pin your location on a Google Map, plan a route and feed you instructions as you walk or drive the route.  The GPS functionality also allows for a host of location aware applications – being able to find the nearest.. Train Station, Bus Route, Bar, Hospital etc, or finding out which of your friends are near you.

#9 – App Store

The app store has really set the iPhone apart from pretty much any other mobile device. You can grab any number of fantastic applications that extend the native functionality of the iPhone. There are plenty of free apps to get stuck into, along side the reasonably priced ‘paid’ apps. Even these are usually under £2! Some of my favourites include: Facebook, Tweetie & Skype for keeping in touch with the world; Shazam for finding the names of songs by holding your phone to a speaker, Pocket God (clue is in the name) and BounceOn (hours of fun!)

#10 – Software updates

Another feature that Apple brought forward with the iPhone is software updating. Apple are constantly improving your iPhone, for free! – bringing you new and improved features.  You also have the option of purchasing major upgrades for a nominal fee, normally under £10 – giving you access to a whole host of new toys to play with.

#11 – All in your palm

What I love the most about the iPhone is that you get all of the above, and much much more, in the palm of you hand. That’s a mobile phone, a games console, an iPod, a GPS navigation device and a portable computer running Skype, email and documents. Anyone who complains about the extra few ££ or $$ for that level of functionality really is missing out!

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the iPhone below! What do you love the most? Or what do you hate! What would you like to see in the next iPhone?

The photo that I will be using for this tutorial is available at Stock Xchange. So if you want to download a copy and see the heal brush in action for yourself – please do!

As mentioned in the intro, this airbrushing and healing technique works on all damaged surfaces. It  can be use to remove scratches from tables or walls right down to removing a spot or blemish from a holiday snap. Heres the image that I will be working with..

Select a clean area of the photo

The first step is to identify an area of the photo that is unblemished. Concentrate on picking an area with the correct texture rather than one that has a colour match. Photoshop will modify and blend colours for you.

As you can see below, I have selected the heal tool from the left hand menu. Holding ALT brings up the sample selection cross hairs – click the clean area to sample and this will be stored.

Brush away the blemishes

Next, go to the area of your photo that requires healing. You can either click or brush the texture from your selected ‘clean’ area over the top of the blemish.

You will notice that the brush area contains a preview of the texture you will be clicking or brushing into place. Don’t worry about the colour mismatch at the moment!

Note that if brushing, to keep the texture fresh Photoshop will sample texture using your selected clean area as a start point – this means you could pick up another blemish if you pick a ‘clean’ area which has blemishes surrounding it.

Notice that under my brush stroke looks discolored – not at all a fit with the surroundings. Well don’t worry! As soon as you release that brush click Photoshop will look at surrounding pixel colours and light levels and auto-magically recolour it. It does this so well that you cant even see where the brush was!

As you can see the colours have matched, and the deep scar has been removed.

Keep on brushing

Now carry on brushing away those blemishes. Keep adjusting your brush size to match the area you want to heal, and try picking different ‘clean’ areas for different textured finnishes.

The below image took around 2 minutes from start to finish! That’s how powerful the heal tool is.

So why not have a go!

If you’ve found this tutorial helpful why not consider leaving a comment, or even sharing it with your friends via Digg, Twitter etc! Happy Airbrushing!

To start playing you’ll need 4 things;

1. A camera which allows slow shutter speed, giving a very long exposure (all DSLR cameras will allow this). I will be using my old Nikon D40, which is a basic ‘start of the line’ DSLR.
2. A small maglite (or equivalent). We’ll need to use either the AAA or AA battery powered maglite as they have a suitability small bulb for our purpose.
3. An object to be photographed. I’ll be using my beloved Ibanez SA Guitar in this tutorial!
4. A dark backdrop. A dark curtain or sheet would be perfect.

Preparation

Next you’ll need to prepare yourself for the shot. Unless  you have a room / studio that you can totally black out, I recommend waiting until night time to take your shots – to achieve best effect.

First, place your object (e.g. guitar) against a dark / black background. I propped my guitar against a black amplifier so that it was stood up, with a black sheet behind it and running along the floor.

Next, mount your camera on a tripod if you have one, with the object in shot. If you don’t have a tripod, find a stable surface for your camera.

It’s a good idea to put on a dark top at this point – and if you have any dark gloves they will help keep you ‘out of shot’. Now your ready to shoot!

Camera and Torch Settings

To achieve the lighting effect we need to set the camera to take a very long photograph. To do this you need to set your camera to have a very slow shutter speed / set a long exposure time. If your unsure of how to do this, consult your camera manual. I set mine to 30 seconds, but you may want to try 45 – 60 seconds if you don’t achieve the effect you desire, or simply don’t have time to complete the shot in 30 seconds.

Finally, before taking the photo, remove the front part of your maglite by unscrewing it (as shown below) this will expose the bright white bulb.

Click!

We’re ready to go!

With the torch on and bulb exposed, switch off all other lights, hit shoot button on the camera. You should hear the shutter click open.

Now you can play! Draw sweeping arcs or trace detail of your object. Try going over areas of an object more than once to light it differently. The closer to the object you are, the more you will pick up the reflections.

Below are a few examples of my photos… Happy snapping!

We’d love to see some of your attempts so please feel free to link to them below in the comments area. If you’ve enjoyed this blog please consider sharing it with your friends through Twitter, Digg, Delicious or any other method you feel fitting!

#1 – Virus-free & secure

Whether you’re a business or home user, you’ll be well aware that computer security is a major pain in the backside. With Mac, you have the comfort of knowing that there are (almost) no viruses to harm your computer! And you know what that means? No bulky obtrusive anti-virus and anti-spyware programs clogging up your computer – updating every 20 minutes and hogging your CPU.  If that’s not enough to make you buy a Mac already, here are a further 12 reason.

#2 – Quality of components

With a Mac you really do get what you pay for. Sure it may be a little more than typical PC specs, but Apple use top of the line, top spec components in their Mac’s. That means better performance, longer life and less breakages.

#3 – Software architecture based on Unix

This one’s for all you programmers out there.  When you buy a Mac you also get a machine with a Unix core.  That means access to a fully functional shells, including sh, bash, zsh and ksh.  You also get the Darwin Ports system to update your application, Cron to schedule tasks easily and a whole host of programming and scripting utilities baked in, including: awk, Perl, PHP, Python, Java and C.

#4 – Looks that could kill

You have to admire the design and craftsmanship of all of Apple’s products; the Mac line-up is no different!  Better yet, Apple don’t compromise performance for design, with a Mac you get stunning equipment that will outperform the majority of its PC rivals.

#5 – It doesn’t crash!

Wouldn’t it be nice to know that as you are typing the last few words of a long letter, or adding the final touches to a complex graphic, your computer isn’t going to ‘stop responding’. Whilst Mac’s aren’t 100% perfect, I can honestly say that my Mac has crashed 2-3 times in the last 2 years. That’s 50 – 60 times less than my Windows based notebook, which I use for 10% of the time I use my mac. Convinced yet?…

#6 -  Time Machine

We never know when we’re going to need a file that’s been accidentally deleted or lost. Apple offers inbuilt backup software with its operating system (OS X) which automatically keeps backups of all your files. With the use of an Apple time capsule, your backup hard drive doesn’t even need to be attached to the computer. Hiding it away behind a book case could see all your data saved in the event of a theft.

#7 – Saves you money

It does! Honestly. Whilst it used to be the case that we would require new PC’s every 1-2 years, your Mac will far outlast a PC, meaning you don’t really need to update for 3 – 4 years. All PC users will be aware that Windows based machines seem to get slower and slower as time goes on – soon you are reduced to de-fragging hard drives or wiping the computer and reinstalling everything. Well not with a Mac! Much like the Duracell Bunny – it’ll just keep going.

#8 – iLife

iLife offers you everything you need for everyday media. Organise your photos, make home movies, compose and arrange music and build websites. You cant ask for much more! Whats better – it all comes with you Mac as standard. Even better – its quick and easy to use, whilst still giving you a large number of features to play with.

#9 – OS X

OS X (The Apple Mac operating system) is the envy of Microsoft. We know this, because Microsoft appear to try and copy it as much as they can! The operating system is not only sleeker, quicker, more robust and more secure than its Windows counterparts but is far more stylish and intuitive to use. Apple really are a good few steps ahead of Microsoft in this field.

#10 – Genius Bar

Apple offer all Mac customers Genius bar assistance. This means you can make an appointment at any Apple store and get face to face technical assistance from an Apple professional. They often make repairs on the spot and are always happy to help. Its certainly 10x the service you’d expect from PC outlets such as PC World.

#11 – Closing software gap

In times gone by, Apple Macs were seen as an industry tool. Today, they are still prominent as an industry standard but have taken on the home computer market as well. Today, the large majority of  mainstream software can be run on a Mac (including the likes of Microsoft Office). And for those rare occasions that you find some software that hasn’t yet been made Mac compatible, Mac offers Boot Camp, Parallels and Wine which allow Windows only software to be run on your Mac hardware.

#12 – Comes with everything you need

When you buy a Mac you really do get the whole package. Apple don’t leave you needing to buy more once you purchase one of their Mac’s. With a Mac you’ll have the pleasure of inbuilt Web Cam and microphone (iSight) high quality speakers as well as access to a plethora of software to get started with your day to day activities.

#13 – Your friends will want one

Finally we come to the end of our list. Heres one last thing to keep in mind.. Once you’ve purchased a Mac, all of your friends will want one!

So what are you waiting for? Next time you come to change your computer – go Mac!