We’re able to design imagery and layouts for every part of your business life. Be envelope, compliments slip, letterhead, invoice, business cards, cd/dvd covers and cases, or presentation folders, we can design a coherent and organised layout for all of them. Combining this stationary with our email template service results in a complete business image, with no detail overlooked and the best possible quality graphic design.

Image is everything.  We understand this all too well at Hub Internet Media, for its the very foundation upon which we are built.  We build websites to engage customers, but the website itself is only one section of the complete image.  We also provide full graphic design services. We can create all stationary required to take your company to the next level, or complete its image.

Click here to see some examples of what we can do!

We have recently undergone a mascot change!  You may notice a new little guy around the site, try not to scare him, he’s kinda shy.

Hub bot replaces our older generic monster mascot.  We hope this re branding will help Hub Internet Media stand out even more.  If you just can’t get enough of the little guy then why not download the EPS file!

Download Hub Bot Now!

Web design is big business. There are a lot of companies offering similar services, and at times there can be a real struggle to stand out from the crowd and offer something different. You might know that you do the work for less, or offer better designs or features, but the key is persuading prospective clients that you’re different to everyone else. You’d think then that all this would lead to rivalry and disagreements betweens web designers, separating us all and making us view each other with distrust and suspicion.

That’s not the case. In fact, there is a fantastic sense of community between a lot of web designers. We’ve been to networking events and met other web designers and ended spending more time than is strictly sensible talking about our jobs and ideas. We’ve filled in for people while they’ve been away, we’ve outsourced things to other developers… the sense of community between local webs designers is incredible when you consider that we’re all aiming for the same market and demographic.

The binding agent for the community is a passion for what we do. We’re in the fortunate position that something we love is also what brings in the money, and it’s that combined love of our work that brings us together and stops us constantly fighting for position. Yet another perk of the job, I suppose!

As promised in the previous post on typography resources this is the follow up post which will contain links to fantastic online typography tools to aid in graphic and web design.  This post will follow the same format, link then brief explanation.

Join me after the jump.

TypeSet

TypeSet is designed to help set justified text in the new HTML5 canvas element.

ettering.JS

jQuery plugin for mental crazy typography!

Web Font Specimen

Great tool for working out which typefaces work well together to compliment your designs.

Soma FontFriend

FontFriend is a bookmarklet for typographically obsessed web designers. It enables rapid checking of fonts and font styles directly in the browser without editing code and refreshing pages, making it the ideal companion for creating CSS font stacks.

Font-Family.com

Work out what font family any given font belongs to.

EmChart

EM chart with all values relating to font size.  Great for keeping the vertical rhythm of a web page when resizing text in a browser.

TypeIt

Only have an English keyboard? That’s no problem now you can type in any language you want!

Letters & Ligatures

Find the letter you’ve been looking for and copy/paste into your text.

JavaScript / CSS Font Detector

JavaScript code to detect available availability of a particular font in a browser using JavaScript and CSS.

wp-Typography

A plugin for your WordPress engine that helps you improve your web typography including hyphenation, space control, intelligent character replacement as well as CSS hooks.

It’s really easy to go onto Google and search for hosting, finding the cheapest, easiest option and buying it without a second thought. Some companies offer truly fantastic prices, with promotions and discount codes giving you a years hosting for as little as 12p. You can’t argue with that price. It’s usually the bigger companies that offer these discounts, and that’s what draws a lot of people in.

We, however, don’t take up these offers and discounts. We don’t go for the cheapest company we can find, either. What we like is a small company. Huge companies are faceless; you don’t talk to a person, you talk to a chat box or an email address. You can send your email to one person, and receive a reply from another. They talk to you as though they’ve been dealing with you the whole time, when an hour ago it was a totally different guy replying to your query.

We like small companies because like us, they offer a personal service. We use two main hosts, and for both, we have direct contact with someone. They deal with any problems or questions we might have. When we need something sorting out, we send them a message and they deal with it, giving us constant updates as they go. We use first names, we have regular contact, and because of that relationship everything we do with that company is that little bit better.

We love small hosting companies because they are like us. Who better to do business with than someone with the same ideals?

Carrying on from my earlier post on the art of typefaces I’ve decided it would be a good idea to list  good resources which help us understand, design and work with typography.  This is going to be more of a link fest than an in depth post by myself.  But I’ll give each link an introduction so you nkow what your getting into!

So lets get on with this baby, join me after the break for typography fun and links!

So you want to create a font?

This link covers the basics of making your own font, the types of software you will need and all that kinda stuff.  Great read if your thinking about producing your own fonts.

Kerning Type and Great Typography

Some great tips on how to kern.

Perfect your Kerning Skills

Taking your kerning skills to the next level is only a click away, hit the link already!

Font Hinting

This is the process of making fonts easier to read on computer monitors.  The link explains it all.

Type Rendering On The Web

This link explains the process of transforming a font into pixellated text for web use.

Type Rendering: Web Browsers

An article explaining the different text rendering methods of each browsers, and how to compensate for each.

Four Ways to Mix Fonts

4 ways to mix up fonts in your design, good read!

Mixing Typefaces

Nice pdf download comparison chart, good for quick reference use when it comes to picking font combinations.

Font Metrics and Vertical Space in CSS

Show you why in some cases the vertical space between characters can be all funky sometimes…….

The Ails Of Typographic Anti-Aliasing

Outlines the issues with aa on text.  Sure it can look great in print which fancy high resolution printers but on-line it can look totally different.

The Grammar Cheat Sheet

Grammar is such an alien thing, every body gets it wrong.  God knows how many times I’ve gotten it wrong in this very post.  Read this grammar cheat sheet, in fact I’m off to do the same thing.

eXtreme Type Terminology

detailed introduction to type terminology.

I think that’s enough for now, I’ll put together a post on typography tools in the coming days to cap this mini type series off.

Being asked for quotes is both good and bad. It’s good because someone is interested in the product you provide, and want to know how much it would be for you to create something for them. It’s bad because a quote is not that simple.

It’s easy to just give out throwaway quotes that have a different time and date on them to every prospective customer that comes along, but there’s no way of providing an accurate, honest quote without really spending some time with a customer. To get an idea of what a customer wants and needs, you need to spend time with them. Not just five minutes to exchange names. Not ten minutes to have them give you a list of things they want on the site. A proper sit down discussion. Some of our first meetings with customers have gone on 2 and half hours plus over time, and while that sounds excessive, it’s the only way to get a good feel for what they want.

Before we’re willing to issue a quote, we need to have that meeting. We need to know what they want, what they like, what they don’t like, whether they have any design direction themselves, and of course, we need to know what they themselves are like. A quote, after all, is a list of components and a tally up of what the lot will cost. Depending on the client, the list of components might contain a portfolio. Or it may not. The list of features for a website relies entirely on what the customer wants, and you simply cannot get a good idea of that over the phone or by email. Just talking it out will often mean that features the customer hadn’t even thought about suddenly get added to the list.

When someone says via email or over the phone “So, if you can send a quote” the answer might be yes, but it comes with a condition. That we see them for a meeting, so that the next quote will be 100% accurate and tailored to their needs.

Back in 2002 the bbc stated that people on average spend 8 seconds on a website before leaving.  That was 2002.  At the time the Internet was still growing into the beast we know and love today.  That’s the problem!  Back in the day Google would cough up loads of pages of content for any given search term….but now Google will cough up millions of pages!

The problem is information overload and how readily available it is to anyone searching the net.  Searchers can simply leave the first result and pull the next one up and the next and the next and the next (you can see what I’m doing here).  The key is to try and capture the users attention on your website and make them take your information on-board.  You don’t want them leaving the site, but you want them to stay on their own, don’t force them to stay!

I want to talk about why its important to create an instant impact to cause people to stay.  There is more information on producing quality content and ways to make people use your website within our blog, check it out.

There are different types of websites, as such they need different types of treatment.  Its all to easy for designers to produce something with is visually appealing, but the content may be poor in comparison.

Most people are not graphic designers, they are searching the Internet for information on a certain subject.  They want that information right there in front of them, not hidden behind or under the most amazing graphics you have ever seen.

People can and will navigate away from websites for all kinds of reasons.  In my mind the main reason is simply not being able to find the content they desire.  You need to make sure the information is easy to get at and is displayed in a user friendly format.  Look around the web, almost all of the most successful website have very simple designs.  Just look at Google.

On the flip side of the coin, you have websites designed to sell products or promote action by the user.  The same issues with presenting content apply here, however there are other aspects to consider.  Its great idea to display special offers to people as soon as they hit the pages looking for the products they want.  This captures attention, it can promote value for money.

There are literally loads of different things to take into consideration when it comes to producing content which captures peoples attention and keep them using your website.  Far to many for me to go into detail on in this post.

I just want to raise awareness on how the quality of the content directly impacts on the performance of the website.  When you produce content for a website, remember this…..the more effort and time you put into producing, the more you will get out of it.

Yesterday I saw Intels new advertising campaign, and I have to admit that I wasn’t really all that impressed. It’s not because I have anything against the fine people at Intel, it’s more that the advert itself didn’t seem all that coherent. I’ve linked it above so you can see what I mean. Watch it, and then just take a moment and think about what you’ve seen. Watched it? Good.

The first 3 examples given in the advert show genuinely ground breaking stuff, from one of the first video games ever produced, to the invention and world changing development that was email, and finally, wireless networking. Those three steps are all incredibly important in the development of both the Internet and the way in which people have interacted with that technology ever since. Nearly every household has a games console now. Nearly every house has the Internet, and everyone in the house has an email account. If you enter a housing estate and turn on your laptop, you’ll notice that there are tens of wireless networks to choose from (and invariably one of them is called Skynet).

Outlining some of the greatest advancements in computing is a good way to start. A bad way to end though, is to say “It’s boosting performance… automatically!”. Why, I hear you ask? Because it’s meaningless. It doesn’t have any bearing on anybody. The people who enjoy Wii Sports of an evening do not care or know anything about why it’s good that a processor boosts performance automatically. The people who send 100 emails a day from the office only want to know if it will make the accounts a little easier to do, or whether you can attach a spreadsheet to it. The guy sat in Starbucks with his laptop out browsing deviantART is not fussed whether the processor is the pinnacle of creation or an entirely fictional piece of hardware. He just wants to show everyone the new chapter of that book he is writing.

The only people who know anything about processors won’t look at it’s performance boosting capabilities, they’ll look at how fast it is, whether it has a better FSB than the last one, whether you can overclock it, and whether it fits their motherboard. Who’s left? The general public don’t buy computers because of the processor. They buy them because they’ve been told that this particular machine can play movies, or music, or can store all of their photographs.

Intel’s latest advert is no good. It caters to nobody; it has no target audience. That, I’m afraid, is marketing at it’s worst.

These days every website we produce features a CMS.  Our CMS of choice is WordPress. While they make it very easy for the user to edit content without years of technical knowledge, they are far harder to design and produce for from our point of view.  If we were lazy so and so’s we’d love to churn out static websites day in day out.  We can cut corners and design code only we can understand!  But when it comes to designing for a content management system everything changes, everything needs to be more formal and consistent to produce the desired results.

I’m going to use this post to speak about how we tackle designing for content management websites.

Weapon of choice!

The very first thing you need to understand before attempting to design for any CMS is the CMS itself.  They can be prone to strange things and you need to understand just how they fully function.  One thing we have to remember is the amount of freedom WordPress gives as a platform.  The user can almost change anything so we have to make sure to the best of our ability that any change a none technical client makes won’t break the design and cause one horrible case of epic collapse!

That’s just the right consistency!

Its very tempting to make all kinds of mad design changes to really show the CMS off, but you really need to fight this urge off.  Content management systems really flourish when the design template they are working with is consistent in its make up.  This not only reduces all the possible design errors changing content can cause, but also gives the design clear direction.  The last thing you want is all kinds of designs mashed together.

Navigation unlimited!

Its a strong feature allowing the client to change the site navigation structure, but it can be a complete nightmare for the designer.  I’m not going to lie, we restrict what our users can do when it comes to navigation editing.  The reason why is to ensure the experience remains constant at all times and more importantly works.  The last thing we want is a client adding new parent pages which will result in the overall site layout breaking.  That being said, if a client requires the functionality and is willing to receive training, we are more than happy to give full access.

Make sure HTML elements can be stacked

Make sure all possible HTML elements work when stacked together.  Its to easy to assume the user will layout content as you recommend. For example having h1 followed by text then another heading.  Assume the user is going to stack titles and do all kinds of mental stuff, hey after all they aren’t web designers that’s why they’ve hired you (or us, yeah us hopefully lol!)

Force the semantics and design with CSS

This is more of a safety feature than anything.  Its to make sure the user does not edit the style too much in the WYSIWYG editor.  In time its quite likely that the person you trained to use the system will move onto another position allowing somebody else to take over.  They might want to get all creative and make design changes.  But unbeknown to them such changes may cause unwanted side effects.  To get around this force style where possible with CSS.  A simple example is forcing the use of only one h1 per page.  Then automatically convert other h1′s to another heading.

Use real content when testing

Instead of using demo content, fill the site with real content.  Abuse the website, really go to town on it.  Its the only way your going to be able to see the site functioning in the real world before it goes live.  The people using the website will not really care about conforming to what you say when it comes to content.  They paid for the site so they’ll do what the hell they want!  Get into this frame of mine and overload the website with content really push it to the limit.

Be restrictive to help the content editor

You can’t train somebody with zero experience how to use everything possible when it comes to the CMS.  To get around this remove or restrict access to tools the user will simply not require.  Do you think your client is going to be putting in line CSS into theer edits? No? Then remove the option.

Fully explain!

Do your best to show the user how to fully use the website.  Remember the better you train them the less mistakes they will ultimately make!