Being a web company means your clients can be all over, from London to New Zealand, New York to South Africa. Sounds glam, but I think it’s easy to forget what’s on your doorstep – and there’s a great saying: ‘Don’t forget your roots, for they’ll always support you‘, which I think is a nice approach to working with local companies. When I started at Big Eye Deers, I was keen to meet up with local business people… Continue reading
Our blog
We are really strong in the areas where branding meets digital
Category Archives: Web Development
Google have been helping make the web a better place to be for a while now, even though their market dominance is quite scary, we all admire their input to the web community by helping smaller businesses and people with their sites by using Google’s web tools and apps.
Every now and then when trawling the interweb something genuinely useful pops up, like this presentation given at the PHPBenelux 2011 convention.
None of the content is particularly ground breaking or revolutionary, just some great common sense advise that all developers should consider to improve their skills…
According to jQuery support the popular open source library has now ‘overtaken’ Flash, in terms of how many websites have deployed each technology, at least when it comes to the world’s ‘top’ websites.
Google+ has been around for about month now and users can now sign up and get involved with the new social media craze. Besides the cool new features that could give it the competitive edge over its neighbouring rivals, other features coming from Google could help rankings of websites through its new social media feature, ‘Circles’ and give sites more credibility through its ‘+1′ buttons. Continue reading
It used to be that if you wanted to create an animated, interactive interface for a website, you needed to use Flash. You might be able to get away with some basic animations using JavaScript, but if you made it too complicated, all you’d end up doing is bogging your visitor’s computer down and causing problems.
Plus, JavaScript was potentially more complicated to use than Flash, at least for those who aren’t fond of coding. But, of course, Flash doesn’t always work well (or sometimes not at all) on mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPad.
Enter HTML5. HTML5 works on just about every mobile platform out there. Anything you could create in Flash can be created with HTML5 (and sometimes added JavaScript and CSS3): animations, interactive elements, and more.
But it reintroduces the coding issue for a lot of designers, who might not be crazy about hand-coding everything. That’s where Adobe Edge comes in.
It’s an entirely new program (currently available as a free preview version) that helps you create animated web content using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. It includes drawing and text tools for creating new compositions, lets you import images in a variety of formats (SVG, PNG, JPG and GIF), and choreograph animation with a timeline-based editor. You can animate position, color, shape, size, rotation and other elements at the property level.
The great thing about using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript rather than Flash for your animated and interactive content is that your site remains standards-compliant. It preserves your CSS layout and keeps your content layer separate from your presentation layer. Because of this, your site will be compatible across a wider range of platforms and will be more search engine friendly with less work.
Because Edge is currently only in preview-stage, it’s bound to have some bugs and feature limitations. With that said, it already includes twenty five built-in easing effects, and other features to get you started. No word on how much Edge will cost after the 150 day trial period ends.
The Edge interface looks similar to many of Adobe’s other programs for working with interactive content, like Premiere Pro or Flash. If you’re already familiar with these programs, the Edge interface should be pretty easy to adjust to. If not, there’s going to be a definite learning curve, but it’s still a relatively easy interface to figure out.
Go have a play…
BBC has published a report from insulting, I mean consulting, firm, AptiQuant who gave internet users an IQ test and then compared their scores with the browser they used to take the test.
Users of IE were tarnished with being the least intelligent. (Well, of course, Firefox all the way, eh!) Anyway… the report from AptiQuant has caused uproar from supporters of IE who are looking to take legal action against the firm.
We do love a good HOAX! BBC suckers! Haha. Do your homework – did you even check out the company who released the report? Epic fail. Haha.
The team at WordPress have recently released their *NEW* in-house theme, ‘twentyeleven’ which now comes as standard with the latest WordPress install (version 3.2.1). The new theme has taken all the features from their older theme, ‘twentyten’ and given it a good ol’ update! Continue reading
David McCandless of Information is Beautiful and PostGrad.com ran a competition to find the very best in the data presentation. Some of the entries are pretty awesome, a real mix of concepts and execution – flash through to HTML5 examples.
The entrants were given a data set relating to the demographics of university students in the UK, and were free to mash it up with additional data of their choice. It was judged by a panel including McCandless and .Net Magazine.
“The eye-catching simplicity is what makes this work along with boldness of the colour palette and the addition of neat visual aids to identify specific universities.”
Check it out.
http://www.postgrad.com/blog/data-visualisation-competition-the-winners/#more-317
A quick blog as we’ve been so busy we missed telling you about one of our more salubrious and design-driven clients, Red Square Creative Consultants…
RED SQ provide a high-end, comprehensive interior design solutions for both the discerning commercial and residential client. As such, a strong, unified web presence was needed that has the flexibility to meet the demands of both these markets, allowing scope to represent the full range of services Red Square offers. We built on the strengths of the existing brand, extending and developing it to introduce flexibility and a framework for future expansion. Continue reading
Featured Work
Flickr
