Posts Tagged ‘information’

About 95% of the work I do tends fall into the “logos and web­sites” cat­egory, but every now and again I’m given the oppor­tunity to work on some­thing a little dif­ferent. One of my favourite “little dif­ferent some­thing” is the resume. I’ve designed a number of them, and I always enjoy them. They’re chal­len­ging from an inform­a­tion hier­archy point of view, and people really notice them. I’ve heard all kinds of com­ments, in part I think because people are so used to seeing the same boring MS Word tem­plates.

Julie Smith is a Toronto lawyer whose resume I recently designed. She sent her resume out to two dif­ferent com­panies one day, and was given an inter­view on the second. Later, she passed along this com­ment from a headhunter:

Your resume looks fant­astic! One of the best I’ve ever seen!

So, if you find your­self facing unem­ploy­ment (I’m not going to use the “R” word, or even the “D” word, but do feel free to ruminate on the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate in whatever manner you’d prefer), you should invest in a custom-designed resume! It’s cheap, it’s fun, and it may even get you a job. And I get that warm-and-fuzzy feeling that comes from helping someone out.

I don’t believe in showing up early for a party (after all, it’s important to make an entrance). In a busi­ness con­text, this prob­ably isn’t the best thing in the world, and in an internet con­text, it’s even less so. For instance, I just recently started making use of Twitter. I hon­estly didn’t get what the big idea was. Then I started using it.

It’s amazing. News stories break on Twitter before the news­pa­pers even have an idea what’s going on. You can see real-time photos of Stephen Fry stuck in an elev­ator. If you com­plain about a product, its man­u­fac­turers will help you out. But most fas­cin­ating are the con­ver­sa­tions: it’s like what I ima­gine The Crysalids was like. Someone makes a com­ment about the colour of the sky, and people respond; threads of con­ver­sa­tion begin spidering off in dif­ferent tan­gents. Anyone can jump in at any point and drop out just as easily, and nobody dom­in­ates because every response is lim­ited to 140 char­ac­ters. It’s the digital rep­res­ent­a­tion of the col­lective uncon­scious­ness. And it’s searchable!

Social media, I’m sure you’ve heard, is chan­ging our world. If you’re late to the party, like me, it’s time to get involved! Rather than give you a bunch of inform­a­tion that may or may not be true, I’m going to point the way to some resources from more cred­ible experts than I.

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I gave a present­a­tion to my BBC group last week, giving some tips and guidelines for how to make a web­site more effective. It’s aimed towards the non-technical person, though imple­ment­a­tion of much of the advice would likely require a designer or developer’s help. How­ever, I thought it might be a useful resource, espe­cially if you’re in the pro­cess of cre­ating a new web­site, or revamping an old one.

Do note that I’ve not been fero­ciously good at fol­lowing all of these guidelines myself—but it’s cer­tainly given me some better ideas about where I ought to be taking my web­site! (more…)

So, let’s say you’re having a problem with your email, or if you’ve found a bug in your web­site. Your first instinct, nat­ur­ally, is to fire off an email to your trusty web-person. But wait! Before you hit send, make sure you’ve included as much detail as possible—what you were trying to do when the error happened, what sort of error mes­sage (if any) you got, what soft­ware you were using at the time, etc. This will help your trusty web-person track down the problem far, far more quickly.

An excel­lent way of sup­ple­menting this inform­a­tion is by sending along a screen­shot. I’ll often request this of cli­ents when I can’t rep­licate a reported bug—if you’ve sent one to begin with, I can be that much more effective.

Here’s how you do it.
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Con­fused by CMYK, RGB, and the like? Got a plethora of logo formats and no idea which to use? Read on for some quick tips about how to get the most out of your colour. (more…)