Happy Christmas & a Fabulous 2009
Happy 2008
To all our many clients and friends, we wish much happiness and prosperity for the coming year! If you look closely, in the foreground you will see a hungry green critter who shared the solstice season with us sheltering from the wet, enjoying christmas cake.
Prosperity, intellect and wisdom for 2007
This year, we send our best wishes for prosperity and peace – it’s about time all of us had a bit of a rest from interminable bloodshed over resources, religion and global supremacy. Rather than using reason to develop a logical, secular code of ethical behaviour which considers the best interests of fellow human beings as well as their own, it seems too many humans depend upon crude instincts and irrational brutish faith to justify baseless feelings of cultural superiority and barbaric slaughter of and stealing from other humans.
To celebrate our alternative peaceful vision for enlightenment in 2007, we’ve made a desktop wallpaper featuring Ganesha, a Hindu deity symbolising intellect, wisdom and prosperity.
We’ve also taken the time to add some of our latest artwork and greeting cards to our online art gallery.
Enjoy!
Noosa Art Exhibition
Don’t miss the latest treasury of art works by Judy Hall-Grieve and Ian Grieve now on show for a week, and for sale at their Paradise art gallery and studios at Justin Road, Doonan.
Judy is exhibiting her colourful impressions of the early women’s movement in the Australian city environment, while Ian is displaying Noosa beach, river and hinterland paintings, as well as some delicious still lifes and his wonderful ceramic gecko vases, golden unicorn and gold panners.
Judy and Ian are Australian artists par excellence and their beautiful works are highly collectable both for investment and sheer pleasure.
Graphic Design Bugbears
There’s a very funny and applicable list of gripes which will be familiar to most graphic designers at Adland.
My favourites are
15. If three designs are shown to a client, your least favorite will be chosen or any combination of worst components of each.
16. If two designs are shown, a third will be requested. If provided, then one of the first two will be chosen.
And there’s more notes about bad design projects at Andy Budd’s blog.
National Library Archive
Country and gospel singer Paul McCloud’s site has been chosen for archiving in the Australian National Library Archive.
Font sources
Collecting fonts is one of my passions. I was most pleased to stumble across Fontleech, a blog devoted to fonts. The site continuously alerts its readers to and catalogues a range of free font sources I haven’t discovered before as well as some beloved old ones, including the archives of the prolific and luminal font designer Manfred Klein.
Font sizing
As well as through the font checking utilities on this site, the perennial problem of font sizing methods acceptable for all browsers is discussed by Owen Briggs at his site. He supplies some handy cross-browser comparison screen shots.
Owen leans towards using percentages due to their compatability. I’ve recently started setting html {font-size:100%} then body {font-size:90%} and em units throughout the rest of the style sheet. Wondering whether it may be best to go back to using percentages only as it doesn’t seem to make much difference as long as the base font is set at 100%.