2010 February Archive - Paper Leaf Design | Edmonton Graphic Design, Edmonton Web Design

Archive for February, 2010

How to Fail at Your Design Business

February 8, 2010

If you don’t know about Inspired Magazine, I suggest you head over there and check ‘em out/bookmark them/follow them etc. They’re a daily design inspiration web mag that posts links, articles, design elements and a whole bunch of other goodies.

This week, I wrote a guest post for them called How to Fail at Your Design Business. It’s a tongue-in-cheek article that provides good information on what to avoid when running your own design business:

This is it. You’ve worked many long, hard hours developing your Pen tool skills in Illustrator to the point you could probably add “Pen Tool Ninja” to your business card. You’ve learned so much about graphic design that your head is bigger than Rush Limbaugh’s waistline. You know so much about web design that you pretty much invented the Internet. Now’s the time.

You’re starting your own design business.

Running your own design business is part awesome, part OHGODWHATHAVEIDONE. You’ll find tons of How to articles online, dealing with how to be a successful designer slash businessman. But where can you find an article on how to fail at your design business?

Read the rest of the article over at Inspired Mag!

10 Best @font-face Fonts

February 5, 2010

As soon as I learned about the @font-face CSS declaration, my life as a designer changed permanently. A whole world of possibilities are opened up by this feature – no more relying on Arial, Verdana, Georgia and all the other “web safe” fonts. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with those fonts, but after seeing them day after day on the web, I know I long for a bit of variety.

However, just because a font is @font-face compatible doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good for the purpose you want to use it. The obvious examples are there – don’t use display fonts as your body text, for example – but some fonts just aren’t great for the web (or great at all… or good… or passable).

So I’ve come to save the day with my opinions. Here’s the 10 Best @font-face Fonts, broken into Display (aka Heading 1, Heading 2 etc) and Body listings.

DISPLAY

Use these guys for your H1, H2 etc tags – but if you set your body text in them, I’ll come right through the internet and beat you up.

Museo & Museo Slab

The Museo family has exploded in popularity, and with good reason – it’s a well-designed typeface all around, unique & usable with character. Museo & Museo Slab are great options for headings on your site using the @font-face declaration.

Hit the jump for the rest of the 10 Best @font-face Fonts! Read the whole article >

For Our Clients: CMS Websites Screencast

February 1, 2010

Businesses need to be able to control the content on their websites. We understand that at Paper Leaf, which is why we offer CMS-powered websites. Our solution provides you with a very simple way to add, edit, or remove pages, text and/or images on your site. Plus, we brand the content management system for your business, and give you a training session on how to use the administration side of the website. That’s right – we don’t just design aesthetic & usable websites, we also do the implementation side of things. But instead of rambling on in text format, we recorded a short screencast for you.

In this screencast, I go through a testing site designed & built by Paper Leaf and show how easy it is for clients to add a page with an image & some text, as well as how easy it is to change text on another page. We also talk about users & permissions, and website stats. Have a look and contact us if you’re interested in our services. Thanks!

* Keep in mind that this video showcases just a small part of what a Paper Leaf built, CMS-powered website can do. There’s a whole lot more under the hood, so drop us a line!

February 2010 Desktop Wallpaper

Welcome to February, all! Hopefully the coldest of the bitter cold in your town is gone. It might be gone here in Edmonton, but who knows? It was minus 40C before it was even officially winter this year. GO CANADA. Anyway, as promised, here is the second installment of our Monthly Calendar Wallpapers. This image was taken by me this weekend, at a photo shoot for a local band called Desert Bar. Check out a few of their songs here – good, raw rock ‘n’ roll. The image was taken for potential use in their album art, and to reflect their simple approach to style, their minimalist nature. The shot really just says February to me. It’s grey and blank, but beautiful in its own way – plus, it lends itself well to minimal Swiss-influenced design. Enjoy, share & subscribe to the RSS feed!