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AIGA SC InShow 2011 Entries Open Now

Gene — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:13:08 +0000

The AIGA InShow is a statewide design competition in South Carolina.
Entries are now open and drop-off sites are set up in Columbia 09.16, Charleston 09.12 and Greenville 09.13 to make it easy for us to submit our work. The competition is now open to anyone who works in the design field, not just AIGA members – which is cool.

A little background: the competition was designed to be the “Anti-Addy’s,” meaning that instead of having a huge category structure with many tiers and multiple awards, InShow’s concept was a simple one: You’re either “In” or you’re “Out.” Once submitted, work is divided up by category and three judges from outside of the South Carolina market decide their fate by judging it either “In” or “Out.” Judges are not given quotas, or rigid judging requirements, so the show totals and types of entries vary from year to year.

There are some pretty cool judges this year, who are really hip to interactive work. So you should seriously consider entering this year.

The 2009 Survey

Jason Beaird — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:21:20 +0000

In the graphic design field, many people depend on the yearly AIGA | Aquent Survey of Design Salaries to see where they stand among other graphic arts professionals. The A List Apart’s Survey for people who make websites provides a similar service for the web industry. Sure, AIGA includes some web jobs, but the ALA Survey is by web makers, for web makers. I highly recommend that anyone who makes anything for the web go take the survey – right now. It’s completely anonymous and the more people who participate, the more accurate their State of the Web report will be.

http://alistapart.com/articles/survey2009

State of the Web 2008

Jason Beaird — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:51:57 +0000

From December 1st through December 20th, the organizers of the Web Directions Conferences polled over 1200 professional web designers and developers about their trade. From the survey results page:

The goal of this “state of the web” survey is to try and get behind the statistics, and get a sense of the philosophies and techniques as well as the technologies, that web designers and developers are using today. Over time, hopefully we’ll be able to track changes in how web professionals design and develop for the web.

There’s a lot of information here, but be sure to check it out:

Web Directions: The State of the Web 2008

Blue Beanie Day II

Jason Beaird — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:11:19 +0000

Kyle reminded me the other day that I should promote Blue Beanie Day here. The concept is simple, but a little obscure, so I’ll summarize:

One of the most profound and ground breaking books about web standards was Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards. The book advocated the use of accessible, semantic web content at a time when most designers were still slicing up Photoshop comps to create inaccessible table-based websites. The cover of that book featured Zeldman himself wearing a blue beanie. That iconic image is now the Che Guevara icon for web standards revolution. To show support and appreciation for web standards, designers & developers around the world will be donning their own blue beanie hats on November 28, 2008.

Learn More: Jeffrey Zeldman’s Post about the event.
Participate: The official facebook event page & flickr group.

David Airey on The Contract

Justin — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:53:28 +0000

Contracts are one of the most important things in any designer or developer’s repitoire, yet it is one of the least talked about items. Thankfully, David Airey has taken some time and gathered a few resources about contracts that we can all delight in. You should also subscribe to his blog as he comes out with some amazing posts and will be expounding on contracts in an upcoming post.

David Airey: Using freelance graphic design contracts

Industry Survey

Justin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:23:01 +0000

The annual A List Apart Survey is out again. They ask questions related to working conditions, compensation, benefits and competency in order to show trends in the web industry. The survey is slanted slightly towards designers but there is still a benefit for those of us in development. Head over to their website to help gather metrics on our work! There are 44 questions on the test which took me about 5 minutes to complete.

A List Apart: The Survey 2008

Web design, blogs and statistics

Justin — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 18:34:14 +0000

This is a great rundown of statistics on design decisions for the top 50 blogs. It takes into account typography & layout and provides statistics such as placement of the content rail, number of characters displayed per line, and lots of other fine-grained detail.

While the data involved may be a bit too fine-grained, it is quite interesting with regards to best practices. It basically boils down to a simple “Do what’s right for your content”.

Smashing Magazine: A Small Design Study of Big Blogs

15 mistakes made by designers

Will Gettys — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:54:29 +0000

A really interesting article by Jeff Finley from gomediazine that, though written for designers working in the music apparel industry, makes points that impact the larger design community. Interesting tidbits include: valuing your work (and why you maybe should be charging more) , why you should really care about typography, and other info-taining stuff. (part 1 of 3)

GoMediaZine: 15 awful mistakes made by designers in the music apparel industry (part 1 of 3)

Designers: The Client’s Guide

Justin — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:30:49 +0000

I came across this nifty article via Jeff Croft‘s link blog. It overviews some of the things a client can do to make being a designer an enjoyable experience. Most of it is common sense for the designer types.. Trust us, focus on the design from the customer’s perspective, etc. The best part of the article, however, is a nicely typeset PDF that can go in the project folder you give your clients.

Daniel Will-Harris: How to (and not to) work with a designer

Phasing Out Support For IE6

Jason Beaird — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:10:41 +0000

Not a week goes by that I don’t wish Internet Explorer 6 would just disappear from the world’s computers. It’s incorrect interpretation of the box model, lack of support for png transparency, and countless bugs transform the task of designing for the web into an obstacle course. This 7 year old brick of a browser has frozen the potential for innovation in our industry. But what can we do about it?

According to the W3Schools Browser Statistics, IE6 users still make up over 26% of web traffic. For that reason, most of us are stuck dumbing our code down to this lowest common denominator browser. Not 37Signals though; they’ve decided to phase out support for IE6 in no less than a month and a half. I agree with their reasoning and would love to slap a “We’re Sorry. Your browser sucks.” sign up for IE6 on every site I create from here on out. Unfortunately that won’t be practical for quite a while in the real world. So what do you think? If not now, when will it be time to turn the lights out on IE6 users?

37 Signals: Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products on August 15, 2008