We are proud to announce the launch of a project we have been working on over the past couple of months…Uwemp (http://www.uwemp.com).

Jordan Wolfe, founder of Uwemp says, “Uwemp is an open-source, online community focused on building out a network of interesting and inspirational people to share their success stories and accomplishments with an emphasis on ‘The Journey’ and the wisdom and insight people have gained from their experiences. The content can touch on any topic that you find interesting. We are excited about changing lives every day, and what better forum to do it then through inspirational stories that provides others with the necessary support and resources to fulfill their dreams and goals in life.” (more…)

Josh and I were approached a few weeks ago about the possibility of creating a church Web site that could be easily updated by the pastor and staff members. Having no knowledge of HTML or Web coding whatsoever, it was important that the church’s Web site feature an easy-to-use content management system that could enable church members to edit text and post new photographs on the Web site. The church (Living Hope Grace Brethren Church in Saxton, Pennsylvania) had no budget for a Web site project, so we made the decision to do this project free-of-charge as a gesture of good will towards a non-profit organization.

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Planning on redesigning your site but have a tight budget? You may want to rethink how you are going to spend your funds. Sure you can look into outsourced companies, chop shops, pre-designed templates or student designers, but in most cases (not to be cliche) you are going to get what you pay for. As long as your site is not a usability nightmare and looks like it was designed in 1990, there are a lot of other ways to draw attention and traffic to your site that are more important than a few bells and whistles.  Here are a few things you may want to allocate more time/money towards that in a business sense will be more advantageous to your site. If you are interested in getting help with any of them, please let us know! (more…)

Being both a graphic designer and business owner, I have a love hate relationship with Microsoft Excel. Having an uncontrollable need to make things look clean, organized and professional in my layouts often leads me to clash with Excel. Being a business owner as well, it is essential that I use Excel for a variety of reports and spreadsheets. Today however, I stumbled across a few tips that help Excel users customize their layouts (among other useful tips) that helped bridge that gap within me between design and business. (more…)

Data Matrix Solutions, Inc. (DMS) is a professional services firm offering business, financial, scientific, and engineering solutions to a variety of governmental agencies. As part of a larger re-branding contract agreement with Riddle Brothers Web Design and Development, LLC, I was tasked with the redesign of their current logo. (more…)

Just when the Web 2.0 trend begins to subside, everyone starts talking about the next “age” of the internet: the Semantic Web. I’m not going to bore everyone with a description of how Web 3.0 is different that Web 2.0 and why or why not you should invest $500K in the next popular site. Rather I would like to address the new technologies that will become more popular in a very simplistic low-level language so that everyone knows what it is without losing their heads.

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While most of the work we do at Riddle Brothers is relegated to electronic medium, there is a good portion of our work that is devoted to print media. Even though the World Wide Web seems to double its size daily, there is still an absolute place for printed materials within a marketing plan for all businesses.

My first entry in this series shares presentation points I received at a recent conference by Brenda Foster and Domencia Genovese of GCF Marketing Communications for Education. During this presentation, Brenda and Domencia investigated how printed and Web-based materials can work hand-in-hand to help successfully market higher education institutions (and businesses as well).

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I prefer using left justified / ragged right type for body text (especially in newspaper articles). Justified type looks nice from a distance, but can really throw off the tracking of your type when you look at it up close.

When working with InDesign and laying out publications, getting ragged-right text to flow in a visually pleasing manner can be a pain in the neck. Due to the various length of words in the English language, I sometimes find myself having to insert soft-returns to flow text to the next line so that you are left with neatly organized, easy-to-read columns of type.

That is where this tip comes in handy!

Balanced Ragged Lines to the Rescue

This tip was provided to me by my friend Craig Fultz. We are both designers and sharing tips between each other does wonders for increasing productivity.

Using the Adobe InDesign feature “balanced ragged lines” automatically cleans up the “rag” of your type and auto-flows the paragraph. The best part is it does this without messing up the tracking of the type.

1. Highlight the paragraph whose rag you would like to clean up.

2. Go to the paragraph pallet. Fom the extra pull-down menu at the top right choose “balance ragged lines”.

3. Wallah! The rag of your type is cleaned up automatically!

I recently read an excellent blog article on Web design written by Ben Hunt of Web Design from Scratch. Within the article, Ben explains how clarity and ease of use are the only factors that matter when designing and building a Web site. 

In summary, the design of a Web site should allow the visitor to find what they are looking for and accomplish their goal with great ease. Following the basic principles of graphic design will help the resulting Web site project to have a natural beauty…not a design that puts itself forward at the expense of clear navigation and usability.

You can read Ben’s full article here:

http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/web-design-versus-design-toss.cfm 

Roughstock Studios has posted an excellent article on five very common design myths. If you are a designer, I can guarantee you have encountered one or more of these myths as one point. 

You can read their blog entry here:

http://www.roughstockstudios.com/2007/09/killing-off-five-design-myths.html 

Hopefully it will give you some good ammunition to use if you are faced with a rather stubborn client. 

The article is © 2007 Jessica Sand, www.roughstockstudios.com