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Found Friday Vol 36

December 3, 2010

Welcome to December, and volume 36 of Found Fridays – 36 weeks we’ve been running this series, which showcases the best design finds of the week (in my humble opinion). This week, we have: 24 ways – an advent calendar for web geeks, 50 great examples of snowboard design, a great tutorial on icon design, an article on design briefs and some awesome “lens bracelets” for photographers. Enjoy!

24 Ways: 2010

Let’s just let the website authors explain: “24 ways is the advent calendar for web geeks. Each day throughout December we publish a daily dose of web design and development goodness to bring you all a little Christmas cheer.” Sounds like fun to me!

50 Beautiful Examples of Snowboard Designs

‘Tis the season! To get out on the slopes and shred, that is. If you’re lucky enough to be working on a snowboard design, or if you just want to see some great work, check out this post for inspiration.

Tips to Create Awesome 48×48 Icons

WeGraphics has a great tutorial on creating a 48×48 pixel Wacom tablet icon. Not only do they go step-by-step, but they explain a bit of the thought process behind the decisions. Good read.

Gains Clients & Avoid Stress with a Solid Design Brief

We’ve talked about design briefs before; this article takes it a bit further. Have a read, freelancers!

Lens Bracelets

If you are a photographer nerd, or if you have a photographer nerd friend, this would be a great stocking stuffer. A bracelet – a la the Livestrong style – but designed to look like part of a camera lens. Brilliant!

See you next week!

December 2010 Desktop Calendar Wallpaper

December 1, 2010

Welcome to December! The month of awkward work parties, checkstops, insane shopping experiences… and Christmas. Bust out your decorations if you haven’t yet, and if you need new ones, perhaps let the weird-but-awesome color palette of this month’s desktop calendar wallpaper guide you! Enjoy… both the wallpaper as well as the holidays.

Click to download the December 2010 Desktop Calendar Wallpaper at 2560X1600, 1920X1200, 1680X1050, 1440X900 and 1280X800.

How to Lower Your Bounce Rate by 64%

November 29, 2010

Bounce rate is an important metric for website designers, developers and owners to know. Bounce rate, according to Wikipedia, “essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site. The formula used to calculate bounce rate is: Bounce Rate = Total Number of Visits Viewing Only One Page / Total Number of Visits“. Based on this explanation, you can see how important having a low bounce rate is. The lower the bounce rate, the more people are staying on your site and clicking around: increasing pageviews, learning more about your business, and perhaps leading to more follow-through (if that’s your goal).

But how do you lower your bounce rate? Keep reading to find out.

How to Lower Your Bounce Rate by 64% Read the whole article >

Found Friday Vol 35

November 26, 2010

This week has been crazy. Crazier than Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind – and that’s crazy. This week’s design finds include: how to make your own font, how to use your logo to up brand recognition, an awesome designy gift shop, some cool sleeves for all your gadgets, and a book on beer (designs from around the world, so it fits!). Sounds good for a Friday, right?

How to Make Your Own Font

I imagine most designers out there at some point or another have tossed around the idea of making their own font. If you’re interested, this article from Just Creative Design is a good starting point.

10 Places to Use Your Logo to Maximise Brand Exposure

Instead of the oft-heard “make the logo bigger!”, why not follow the tips in this article? It’ll be a better way of doing what your client really wants: upping brand exposure.

SwissMiss Gift Shop

SwissMiss is a daily read for me, and now she’s launched an Amazon shop of some of her favorite things. Have a look – there’s some beautifully designed stuff in there.

Selvedge Sleeves

Sleeves for everything! Passports! Laptops! iPhones! And they all match to boot – you’ll be so stylish and whatnot. I dig ‘em.

Beer

It’s Friday! Fitting to have an entry about beer, but this book is “a visual tour of a collection of cans … vast and varied”. So you can have it on your desk with the excuse that you have it for the DESIGN aspect, not the BEER aspect. But we all know the truth.

See you next week!

My Attempt at the Worst Logo Ever

November 22, 2010

On November 15, 2010, some fine ladies & gents launched a fun contest for graphic designers called How Low Can Your Logo? The gist of the contest is for designers to “willingly create that which you spend your entire life trying not to create: the worst logo ever. ” It’s an awesome way to bring the design community together and have some laughs, and it was a really fun, quick project to complete.

Perhaps the most fun part of the whole contest is the client writeup, where you get the most jargon-laden client brief to work from ever. Full of contradictions and punchlines seemingly pulled straight from ClientsFromHell, I had a good laugh reading it. Here’s a few sections pulled from the client brief, so you can see what we were tasked to create:

Meet the Client

Excellencico (established in 1996) is a global leader in providing a focused, broad range of services to a world-class, international, region-centric clientele. Excellencico harnesses evolving, dynamic e-technologies to provide unparalleled levels of synergistic e-products to a heterogeneous set of unperpendiculated e-applications…

Direction

Our logo needs to be simple and yet detailed, complex yet spare. We prefer that the logo convey the forward-thinking nature of our company without looking too futuristic or flashy but we also don’t want anything too conservative or neutral. “Just right” is the vibe we are looking for. We believe that “e” best defines our unique approach and core company culture. We’re very drawn to the colors one finds in a rainbow but color wheels are a significant turn-off. I have attached a picture of our puppy. We don’t want the puppy incorporated into the logo but we do want you to capture her spirit and attitude and expect that to be conveyed through design elements.

Pure designnerd comedy gold, I tell ya. Armed with this information, I opened up Illustrator and, with much thought, created this monstrosity of a logo: Read the whole article >

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