The truth is that simplicity is hard. It takes a lot of effort to take a rough, loose idea and shape it into a tight, bulletproof thought. People love to add, not take away. We feel empowered when we contribute, not when when we pare down.

I Recently received an invite to an online community of designers, initially I was really excited (and I still think it’s great) but i’m a little turned off by some of the community’s tendencies. There is a lot of love given to trend of the moment. These “hyper trends” promote short lived design. And loving them just because your favourite designer made them isn’t good for anybody.

I got an email from one of our customers on Parade a few days ago saying that her site was blatantly copied. We took a look at the link she sent, and sure enough another photographer had completely copied her site code and installed it on his own server.

Keeping projects on task can be a challenge. To ensure things keep moving, you need to help your clients (and team) know when to think and when to move on.

Great websites link out and don’t try to hide the fact that the web is a serious of connected entities. Making sure that we open external links in the same window instead of opening new windows and tabs actually encourages users to return to our site because they can click the back button and return more quickly.

I recently stumbled across a fractal generator and thought I’d share the results here. I’d used them before but this one was a little simpler to use. It called Fractal4D and it’s an Adobe Air application so you need to have air installed to run it. Cyberra asked us to design a banner stand with the tagline “Cyberinfrastructure: The invisible infrastructure making things work” I thought a ...

“Using natural ingredients, we brew a root beer so pure, so rich and creamy, you’ll swear it’s made in heaven!”

Luke was nice enough to share a 5 litre keg of Virgil’s Rootbeer with the rest of us here at lift. If you haven’t tried it, it’s pretty tasty stuff.

The thing I really enjoy about Virgil’s root beer is how much fun they ...

I Found this online Grid Designer tool a little while back and it has proved to be very useful for determining the grid size in layouts.

Alternatively you can print your own grid paper for old fashioned drawing

Since owning a mac and seeing my type render nicely in my browsers I’ve been very frustrated with how type looks in Windows. I was checking on one of our sites the other day to see how it was looking in Explorer and was especially horrified at some italic text.

I’ve done some digging and for those of you on a Windows system there is hope.

For XP ...

“we were more than thrilled when Dale and Michelle phoned us up…”

I first heard of Roth and Ramberg Photography around a decade ago while I was working for a local ad agency. If someone needed “the best” it was Roth and Ramberg that would get the job. Through the years, we’ve seen Dale and Michelle (he’s the Roth, she’s the Ramberg) win countless local awards and ...