Red berries

Christmas card sketches

My chocolate Santa

It’s the first day of December today and the Christmas countdown has formally begun. To mark the occasion, we thought turning our blog into a makeshift advent calendar would be a rather festive idea and so throughout the month we’ll be posting images of (sometimes only mildly) related seasonal greetings. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!

The pound is expected to fall even further this week after hitting a 13 year low and losing over quarter of its value, which is now below $1.50 and at its weakest value ever against the euro. I thought a bit of PR for sterling was needed so let’s look at the new design which was chosen via an open competition and was widely advertised in the national media in August 2005. The competition was ran by the Royal Mint of the UK, it attracted around 4,000 entries but a young and aspiring designer, Matthew Dent, came up with a new, innovative design and contemporary treatment, which won through. His ideas were to be implemented on the backs of the one, two, five, ten, twenty and fifty pence pieces… a design that brings them all together.

His concept lends a more uniformed and intriguing idea to the brief, each coin with an oversized shield positioned attentively as the quarters of the shield. When all are placed together they represent England, Scotland, Ireland, and England again.

When you start to look at what hasn’t been included on the new coin, for example, the exclusion of Britannia from the 50 pence piece or no acknowledgment of the national symbols of Wales, one wonders the lasting effects that these omissions would cause. One thing is that in comparison with the new 5 Euro coin called “The Architecture Fiver” which was based on the subject “Netherlands and Architecture” and would be used within the Netherlands. The new pound coins have by far the best pound for pound (excuse the pun!) contemporary treatment than its euro counterpart. The new five Euro coin has a typographic mosaic of the Dutch Queen Beatrix with names of important Dutch architects while the back is designed as a book shelf.

The design process used for the five Euro coin is more technical than one used for the pound. A programmer, Gepostet von Stani, used custom software in Python within the SPE editor and for the visual power, he used PIL and pyCairo. All the developing and processing was done on GNU/Linux machines, which were running Ubuntu/Debian. This is an impressive stuff by our Dutch counterpart but I can’t help but feel a bit patriotic by siding with the new pound coins and declaring the graphic concept used as the winner of this duel.

Gaucho won Best Group Website Award at the Caterersearch.com Web Awards 2008 last night beating Belgo and Café Rouge into the top spot. Dusted designed and developed the current Gaucho site as part of a major re-branding and positioning exercise in 2006 and since then has maintained and looked after the site to ensure it stays ahead of the competition.

Having experienced the culinary delights of both Belgo’s and Café Rouge, it’s great to see all our hard work on Gaucho formally recognised amongst such a highly competitive sector. The judges praised the Gaucho site for ease of use and impressive statistics, proving the point that strong branding and usability were as important as eye candy and moving imagery.

Gaucho’s operations director, Martin Williams, accepted the award and commented afterwards on the work we did, saying how well we had interpreted their business needs and delivered such a highly effective on-line solution.

Reflecting the tremendous growth of the Internet as a tool for business, the inaugural Caterersearch.com Web Awards honour the best websites in hospitality across 12 categories. The awards recognise the best websites in the industry and reward the organisations and individuals involved in designing, managing, marketing or promoting them. Websites were judged on criteria including visual design, innovation, content, interactivity, ease of use, commercial success and potential and overall user experience. The awards were presented last night at The Imagination Gallery, London.

Design

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Life

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This list joins my other subscription list… Podcasts. Anyone got any others I could add (or more likely swap-out… not sure I could consume any more)?

Firstly, what do these two things actually mean? Well, they are Ying and Yang of one and the same thing really. Imagine your web site is a Darwinian Evolution diagram… The one that shows the journey through time from Ape to Man, (like the one at the top of this article). At either end is a perfectly functional version of one and the same thing (albiet the modern man being more refined and the Ape being more primal). If you stuck a pin in the centre of the diagram, halfway along the evolutionary journey, took this as a starting point and travelled left (essentially devolving) this would be Graceful Degradation, losing features and abilities but still functioning. However, if you went right from the pin moving forward through time, this would be the equivalent of Progressive Enhancement, each evolutionary step gaining features and optimising.

The difference between these two techniques is wholly dependent on where you stick your pin. Push it into modern Man and there is no Progressive Enhancement to do. This is the equivalent of designing a site for Safari 3. Stick it in the Ape and there is no Graceful Degradation to do (unless you go back as far as pond-life… but that would be the equivalent of going back before the Internet). For the purposes of this article I need to ascertain where I’m sticking my pin. I’m going to say my pin has been shoved squarely into Internet Explorer 7. Therefore, minimal CSS 2 implementation, but mostly decent HTML and javascript support.

Using these techniques isn’t as simple as it first may seem though. There are many facets of a site that can have PE and GD applied to them. And even once you have employed these techniques, how do you demonstrate this to the site owner at concept stage? Let’s cover the different applications of PE and GD first.

PE and GD in design

As browsers evolve and incorporate more and more visual effects, how can designers utilise these extra tools at their disposal without alienating older browsers? When it comes to the visual elements of web sites PE is the most common technique. A simple example is rounded corners on boxes. Currently only Firefox 3 and Safari 3 can do these via CSS. If you place the correct code in your stylesheet for these, the aforementioned browsers will show nicely rounded corners on your boxes. All other browser will see standard square corners.

Herein lies the problem with PE (and GD). Something like curved corners is usually a conscious design decision taken very early on at concept stage. It’s integral to the design of the site in the same way that the background colour and the navigation are. So if you had curved corners in your visual, but you only showed them to the minority of your users once built, surely you’ve taken a key design element out of the site? Not to mention potentially baffling the site’s owner if they aren’t up to scratch with their browsing technology. There are ways around this, such as the option of going straight to HTML to demonstrate a site rather than using flat Photoshop visuals, but even this doesn’t take away the issue of a site looking potentially very different to different people. There could well be branding issues and in the case of something so integral to the style of the site I personally would choose to incorporate something like curved corners without using PE even if it does mean using graphic elements to achieve the same result.

I do think there are exceptions to my exception. Subtle enhancements that do not change the design to a large degree I feel are acceptable and of course the all time daddy of GD, alternate content for rich (Flash/Video) elements. Other than these, probably the most acceptable use of PE and GD in design is when it is used to add/remove little visual effects such as rollovers and animation.

When it comes to GD in design, there is very little need for it (again based on where I shoved my pin earlier). If I had stuck it in at Safari 3 then it would all be about GD, but all the most common browsers in use today have CSS 1 support, so unless you’re employing bleeding edge styling techniques, your site wont need too much GD.

PE and GD in functionality

This is really where PE and GD come into their own. Firstly, unlike design, PE and GD in functionality tend to be a less visible. They are certainly very rarely shown at concept stage so are easier (or even unnecessary) to sell in at that early stage. Again taking a simple example like the curved corners mentioned above, a tabbed interface is something that can be enhanced using AJAX to dynamically load content without refreshing the whole page. With our pin in IE 7 this would be the default behaviour (assuming Javascript is turned on, but this would then rely on GD in the same way an older browser would). So GD would be employed here. You need to ensure that for the less evolved browsers the content is accessible. This is simple enough as the tabs would (if coded correctly) revert back to standard links that would refresh the whole page with the new content in place. Not as slick, but still perfectly acceptable. This is exactly how the tabs on our very own home page work.

It’s pretty apparent that you need to use these techniques now and even more so in the future as the web matures along with the browsing technology involved in viewing it. For a lazy designer/developer it is too easy to ignore these techniques and in the process creating one of two things.

1. A web site that is stuck in the past, visually unappealing and functionally stagnant or;
2. a site that has all the bells & whistles that just disintegrates on anything other than their favourite browser.

A smart designer/developer uses these techniques to create something that is accessible, solid and beautiful and can rest easy in the knowledge that no matter who looks at the site in whatever situation they’re going to see something that quite simply works on every level.

Nowadays though, there tends to be three key milestones that mark the ‘official’ build-up to Christmas:

1. Supermarkets piling their shelves with Christmas stuff
2. Seeing the first Christmas-themed ad on TV
3. Receiving the first Christmas card design brief!

This year, these all seem to have happened way sooner than normal; my local supermarket already has the Halloween stuff rubbing up against Christmas stuff and last week I’m sure ITV aired a commercial for Christmas at Disneyland Paris.

And today, we received our first Christmas card brief and with October turning out to the warmer, sunnier and dryer than August, it seems even stranger to be discussing the most politically correct way of saying “Seasons Greetings”.

This could well be it though!

Canon gave Vincent Laforet a pre-production model of their new EOS 5D Mark II camera and he recorded a short movie, Reverie.

The result… Well the quality of the footage taken is breathtaking, and the movie on the Canon site has been sized down by a quarter! There has been no post-production on the clips. It is made up of the raw footage taken. I think I know what camera we’ll be looking at when it’s time to upgrade ours.

You can read more about the making of the movie at Vincent’s blog, as well as watch a behind the scenes video.