Miscellany

An end to entity envy

Miscellany

Using entity codes in your web copy is the right way to ensure that what you say comes out the way you intended. It’s also good practice if you want your code to validate. Blogs are particularly prone to mishaps with missing entity codes. &s; frequently get mangled and text cut and pasted from a [...]

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I don’t always know which colours go, but at least I now know where to go to get them.

Miscellany

It’s a sad confession for a designer, I know, but it’s born out of experience of hearing colour consultants speak about colour at a professional level. It showed me I really have no idea. We used to share office space with a colour forecasting company. The sort of business that predicts what we’re all going [...]

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House hunting made easier

Miscellany

A few years ago when I was moving house for the umpteenth time I remember thinking wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a map based around travel times so that you could shortlist possible areas to live that would combine the quickest door-to-door times with house prices that fell within your budget. It didn’t [...]

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A virulent infection in adland?

Miscellany

The latest VW and Audi ads seem to be evidence of a virus infecting the advertising world. The disease leads agencies and their clients to believe that they must make ads with lots of people busily building something related to their brand, in some suitably inventive way. Except they’re all looking distinctly uninventive now. The [...]

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Spam-free forms

Miscellany

It is a constant source of irritation that most forms submitted from our web sites are simply spam. And although it’s not the friendliest way of securing a form’s integrity I’ve finally succumbed to using an image based ‘captcha’ system as a way of separating the real visitors from the automated form-filling spambots. It did [...]

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Top quality mash

Miscellany

It’s hard enough keeping on top of the latest to-ings and fro-ings on even a handful of the social media networks. As new communities proliferate the temptation is to give up on it altogether. Add to that the growing number of other required viewing sites and there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Recently [...]

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Just brilliant enough

Miscellany

Leading by example, and making a big impact at the same time: genius. (Via the always interesting Billboardom.)

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Preventing your domain name being used by spammers

Miscellany

When we design web sites for clients we will often get involved in helping buy the domain name, choosing an ISP and setting up email addresses alongside all the other internet related resources. In building the site we will want to make it as visible as possible on the internet. In doing so we potentially [...]

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Rip it up and start again.

Miscellany

Following on from the short piece on Street Blitz, I came across an article on São Paulo and it’s decision to remove all billboard advertising from the city. That’s the way to do it. Rather than adding more unsolicited visual ephemera as a protest against the intrusion of big business advertising, the populist right wing [...]

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Street Blitz London 1- 15 July 07

Miscellany

Five days into this 15 day anti-advertising fest and the apathy is apparent. Only four posts to the Blitz map so far and the clock is ticking. Possibly the organisers should have advertised the event a bit more in advance. Hardly in the spirit of the thing I know, but at this rate the event [...]

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