The Brilliant creative team blog

Graham Smith, the guy who brought you Unevolved Brands is a logo designer from Sussex who has come up with a new fun game called FontFuddle.

After attempting the first one I realised that my typography jargon was a little out of whack when faced with the need to know the technical term for the end of the stoke on a lower case ’e’.

A quick Google search later and I found this great resource which has won itself a place within the select ’elite’ of my bookmarks. Typography Deconstructed is a guide to the anatomy of type with simple graphical reference to each part of character, It’s also a nice looking site.

I would recommend everyone to take a look and give it a bookmark for later reference.

IAW is a great website by jarrett green who like most of us tend to get sidetracked from our work to look up something and end up on a magical information journey from the most utterly useless through to the fascinating yet still useless.

He has taken it upon himself to share his findings and has executed it perfectly with some really nice graphics and humorous narration.

I immediately found something Jarrett had taken the time to find out that I had always wondered: Why didn’t all GI’s get a Thompson during WWII?

Go, have fun

Whilst flicking through a news article about website design and user friendly interfaces I came across a term I had not heard of before ’false simplicity’. After reading up on it a little more it seems that false simplicity is a relatively new term and put very simply refers to minimalism taken too far!

As designers we are constantly striving for clean, great looking and easily navigatable interfaces with an aim to increase user-friendliness but are we in danger of making the features so simple and minimalistic that their functions become cryptic?

There are a few items on the list that fall under the ’false simplicity’ moniker:

- Icons as links with no supporting text or no supporting visual indication.
- Symbolic representations of large or vague ideas that would be better explained in text.
- Minimal (or even zero) text.
- Interfaces so “clean” that it’s hard to find the menu bar or other options.
- Reliance on mouse-over descriptions to convey what buttons do.

False simplicity is particularly insidious for designers because it’s hard for them to see. A cryptic GUI can make perfect sense to the designer, who knows everything about how it works already, while completely stumping everyone else.

Simplicity is the ideal middle ground maintaining a healthy balance between minimalism and robust features.

... so there you have it ’false simplicity’, feel like you have learnt something new today?

I have been forwarded an interesting interview with Gerry McGovern hosted on the American Express Open Forum entitled ’Why websites suck’

Gerry is regarded as the worldwide authority on increasing web satisfaction by managing customer tasks since 1994. He talks about a websites ’top task’ and customer satisfaction with web design being created around the consumer.

He brings to light some good tips to remember when confronted with a website GUI job, some reflections that I thought were obvious and a view on the graphical appearance of a website that I completely disagree with.

View the article here

Wow! Brilliant picked up not one, but two awards last night at the Harlow & District Business Awards 2010: Business Website of the year and Employee of the year (Adriaan van Marle). What an achievement! Having spent some time looking carefully at the quality of the competition beforehand, we agreed not to set our expectations too high!

Awards evenings are always good fun, but this one will be difficult to top next time around. The production and organisation was excellent.

On a personal note, it was pleasure to be recognised and acknowledged once again by the local business community as a winning team and I think it’s going to take a while for us to stop talking about it!

It’s also a poignant moment to reflect on the changes that Brilliant, as individuals, have undergone over the last six years, all of which have been positive and fulfilling. Furthermore, with some promising new and existing business on the horizon, and with four members of our table being expectant Mums and Dads in the forthcoming months, on behalf of the Brilliant team, I can’t help looking forward to 2011!

Following on from Jon’s blog post about an interesting 404 Error Page, I came across this list of beautiful "Coming Soon" pages.

I think it’s fair to say that this is a neglected area of web design; but these examples show that there is a lot of potential in "Coming Soon" pages for developing interest and collecting user details before a website has even been completed.

What better way to use your dead web space? If you find any more good "Coming Soon" pages, we’d love to see them!

It always amazes me how quickly things on the internets get passed around, I often feel like the last person to know about the newest fad.

What amazes me even more though is the amount of people who piggy back off of a virals success! I have recently stumbled across this 404 page on blippy.com, not only does it illustrate the awesome Guy "Bear" Vasquez and his "Double Rainbow" but also incorporates a little guy in a unicorn suit, could it be referring to this this ?

So what do you think, a bit of fun from blippy.com or a shameless marketing ploy? :D

Currently working with Adobes Creative Suite 3 I had missed all the new features of CS4 and before I knew it, the software giants were starting to release CS5!

Adobe have just released the trials for CS5 and I managed to get my hands on a trail version of Photoshop, first impressions... awesome!

The workspace has been updated once again to allow a free flowing environment even allowing you to change layer opacity over multiple layers and an on-screen color picker. I have been desperate to try the new ’Content-Aware Fill’ which matches lighting, tone, and noise when content is removed from an image and fills the background as if the object never existed, although I was skeptical it didn’t disappoint and seemed to work flawlessly over the three images I tied out.

The new interface also has a ’Bridge light’ palette which makes finding images and graphics a breeze without having to have Adobes Bridge program open or manually navigating to images.

The most exciting development for me is one of the new transform option called ’Puppet Warp’ which allows you to select an object or part of and distort it to a curve without degrading the image, it may not seem like a big deal but performing this task manually with the original warp transform tool was a drawn out process of trial and error which usually ended in trying to find another way of getting the result along with a few strong curse words.

There is plenty more that CS5 has to offer and I personally cant wait to get it installed :)

In this article on the Guardian website, internet guru Clay Shirky shares his predictions about the future of online services.

He surmises that printed media such as newspapers will disappear in less than 50 years, and claims that "... no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds."

Whilst I too believe that the traditional channels for delivering certain content will eventually be replaced by cheaper, more convenient and environmentally friendly media; I do not think this portends the end of print in a wider sense.

Much like the survival and resurgence of vinyl due to demand from music enthusiasts, there will always be a market for high-quality printed material.

There’s nothing quite like opening a new magazine and being hit by the smell of freshly-printed ink on a special paper! And that’s the point: we mustn’t forget that with print, our senses are spontaneously engaged in a unique way. In any case, if print dies how else will we package all that lovely vinyl in the future ;-)?