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Found Friday Vol 15

June 25, 2010

We’re back with Volume 15 of Found Fridays – all the best designy finds of the week. This week includes a great jQuery trick for full-page backgrounds, ruminations on design agency life vs. freelancing, 3 takes on blogging as a marketing tool, a cool Helvetica lowercase ‘a’ stool, and a sweet dual-screen laptop. Read on, readers!

jQuery Easy Background Resize

We shared another method on how to do this in our Top Web Design Bookmarks of 2009, but this version is much easier with way less code. Check it out!

Design Agency Vs. Freelance Life

Jacob Cass, of Just Creative Design, now also works for NYC’s Carrot Creative. He shares his thoughts on the pros & cons of agency life versus freelancing life. An interesting read for sure.

3 Perspectives on Marketing a New Business through Blogging

In my opinion, blogging is a great tool for any small business – whether you’re a freelancer designer or not. This article links to three different perspectives on blogging as a marketing tool, with some great info being shared. Read it if you’re involved with small business.

Hastell Bold ‘a’ Stool

(via swiss-miss)

It’s ridiculously expensive, but also a beautifully crafted example of thinking outside the box. Is there anything Helvetica CAN’T do?

Toshiba Libretto W100

This dual screen laptop is gorgeous. I have no idea how well it runs or anything “important” like that, but c’mon. Look at it and tell me you don’t want it.

That’s it! See you on Monday!

When, Why & How: One Page Website Designs

June 21, 2010

Web users are bombarded with information on a daily basis, and it’s been shown that the way users read on a computer is completely different to how they read offline. Skimming content is the name of the game, and if the user doesn’t immediately see what he or she wants to see in a few seconds, off they’ll go into the internight to find what they want.

That’s right, website designers and website owners: most people who come to your site will hit & run.

This revelation can be a harsh one, and especially tough for designers to inform clients of. Clients all too frequently get caught up in the excitement of launching a new site, which can lead to major scope creep and feature bloat on a site; all of a sudden, a simple site has turned into a 75-page monolith, despite the designer/developer’s requests to keep it in the tracks.

When, Why & How: One Page Website Designs

But increasingly often, these monolithic sites aren’t required – in fact, they may prove a detriment as unless they are superbly designed, chances are it will be difficult for the user to find what they want within a few clicks, leading to a higher bounce rate than desired. It’s important to remember that a lot – I may even say “most” – viewers aren’t going to be nearly as interested in the website, or the business in general, as the website designer or the business owner. With that in mind, it’s important to embrace brevity, clear information hierarchy and structure in a web design. One (increasingly popular) way to do this is via the one page website.

One-pagers won’t work for all sites, obviously, but they can work for more than you imagine. The benefits to a well-designed one page website include

potentially lower cost to the client
high usability
information brevity
increased conversions
opportunity for unique design decisions and more.

Let’s explore these benefits a bit more deeply. Read the whole article >

YourBand: a Free HTML Template

June 17, 2010

Most indie musicians are either poor, barely scraping by, or living with their parents. It’s a tough racket, and there are a lot of things to pay for when you’re a musician: touring, gas, recording, printing an album, promo materials and so forth.

With that in mind, we donated some time to create and give away a free, killer one-page HTML template for musicians through Chorus Magazine. We call it the YourBand HTML Template. What is this, exactly? Well, you can download this file for free, get a domain name & hosting for your band or client, change a few lines of HTML and upload this file to your server. Presto! You have a gorgeous one-pager website for your band/client. This is what the template looks like, which can be edited to suit your needs:

Click here to view a live demo of the template.

The template has been designed and coded so that you can easily change the background & fonts if you know a little CSS. Doing this will completely change the look & feel of the template. To get an idea of what we mean, here is another version of this template with just the background, fonts & a few other small CSS changes applied. This shows you how easy it is to make this template your own.

Wondering why only one page? Well, one-page websites are seeing a huge surge in popularity. This is due to a few reasons: a) they’re more cost effective, and b) they provide more concise information. I mean really, how many pages do you actually need for a web presence? The amount of information on the Internet is overwhelming; thus, one page sites are growing in popularity due to their simplicity and ease of use. That being said, any somewhat savvy web guy/gal can easily turn this template into a multi-page site.

Features of the YourBand HTML Template include:

A lightweight, easy-to-manage music player
A cool photo gallery
Standards-compliant, valid XHTML
Ready-to-edit links & content

This is what’s included in the download:

Two differently styled versions of the template: “Granite” (shown above) and “Cardboard” (linked above).
An Editing guide
Screenshots of each version

So get downloading, and if you have questions about implementation or anything else, leave ‘em in the comments!

Free Client Presentation InDesign Template

June 14, 2010

As a design studio that does a lot of branding & identity work for small businesses, we often find ourselves creating PDFs to showcase design concepts to our clients. A good presentation of design concepts can greatly influence a client’s view of your skill and professionalism. However, it’s not very efficient to create a new InDesign document each time you have to present a design concept to a client. With that in mind, we’ve created this free client presentation indesign template.

The idea here is that you, a graphic designer, can download this template, change the text and brand it to your design company, and use it to present design concepts to your happy clients. This will save you loads of time if you don’t have a template like this in your arsenal, and your concepts will be presented to your clients in a professional, clean and easy-to-understand fashion.

Here’s the quick list of details:

Brandable to your company
Populated with fake content you can replace easily
Space for logo designs and complementing material (business cards etc)
Color swatches
Suggested text for describing your design concepts

Here is an example of one page layout; here is an example of another.

This is fully open-source; download it and distribute it, use it for personal and commercial projects, but please don’t pass it off as your own. So that’s it! Hopefully you’ll find this useful; if so, please share & vote this post up on any or all of the social media sites below. Please note: this was created in InDesign CS4. Thus, it can be opened in CS4 & newer programs. There is a .INX file that should be able to be opened by InDesign CS3. Any older than that and you’re out of luck. Sorry, out of my control!

Found Friday Vol 14

June 11, 2010

Welcome one & all to Found Friday Vol 14. This week gives a special shout-out to SwissMiss, because 3 of the items featured here I found first on her blog. I suggest following & bookmarking her site, as it’s a gold mine for solid & interesting design. This week’s finds include a super simple link-compiling web app, a new entry into the simple online store category, a Tumblr blog devoted to awesome & old-school letterheads, a beautiful HTML5 infographic, and a good tutorial on using patterns in Photoshop & Illustrator. Enjoy, share, and see you next week!

URLIST

Urlist is a super simple & useful web app. It’s a way to compile & share links you’ve found – for example, say you are building a website that has a mega-huge navigation system. You could research for sites that have good examples of large nav systems, compile the URLs using Urlist, and share it with your client/designer. Like I said: simple & useful.

Vendr

It seems that, while so many web-related applications have gotten easier & easier to implement, ecommerce is still a little daunting. FoxyCart is great, but still takes a bit to set up and get running. Enter a new, purportedly simpler solution: Vender. Essentially, you set up a “store” link on your website, and when you click it, Vendr opens in an overlay (not a pop-up). Sounds pretty great; there are various pricing schemes to check out on their site.