About QR codes
We’re still skeptical about QR code use. When we’re asked to put them on designs, we follow a few guidelines
Communications
You can write your titles last
Writing is a joy. But it’s also the other stuff. Don’t make writing more painful than it needs to be; don’t get stuck on headlines or subtitles. Titles are friction. In WordPress, like most CMSs, the headline entry looms at the top of the page. Never forget you have several options: Ignore the title field…
Archiving against erasure
There are many decisions to be made when building an archive. These decisions have often been made by individuals in positions of privilege or by institutions themselves. This means that archives have often been used to perpetuate misinformation or selective information in the name of crafting historical narratives that maintain current power structures. This potential…
Disrupting the myth of the archive
Perhaps the most significant piece of misinformation generated by archives is the impression of their own authority.
Drucker and humanistic design
At the University of California, LA, Johanna Drucker works as a professor of Bibliographical Studies. She is also the author of Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production.
Historiated initials and the medieval selfie
Humans are meaning-making machines with an impulse to organize. Today we code paragraph breaks into our web pages. In the medieval period they rubricated signified paragraph breaks with colour-shifts.
Reflections on the digital film screening Lesbian Liberation Across Media
In June I had the opportunity to attend “Lesbian Liberation Across Media.” It was a film screening put on collaboratively by queer archives and media projects in Canada, and hosted by some of my personal academic heroes. One central theme from this screening was control over media. But equally important were the themes of learning…
Seven new media projects worth following
These seven media projects are embracing this new reality and bucking the status quo. They give me hope that there is a future for writers and journalists in Canada, one that doesn’t look the same as it did fifty years ago, but which could thrive just as much, and be a lot more inclusive.
You are the expert on your content
Content is supreme, be it text or image. An image can be riveting, but a contextualized image can capture more than passing interest. It can entice someone into seeking a deeper understanding of your work. And you are the expert on your content.
Web first publishing
Web first publishing means publishing your carefully crafted content to your website first. We recommend it nine times out of ten…
The value of short and simple blog posts
Lately I’ve found myself advocating for blogging and microblogging. Microblogging is a loose term. Sometimes it means posts that don’t have titles and other features of full-fledged articles…
Great message design: Hello there
Social change is one of the reasons that I care about advertising and communications design. Here’s a great example…
Winter solstice. Awe.
It is winter solstice again. We are very close to the sun now; roughly ninety one million miles. But due to the tilt of the earth, and our latitude here in Victoria, and our position in our…
Brainstorm, bluesky, spitball, idea-eration
Generating ideas is a deeply important talent. Problems can be solved. Solutions get chosen from pools of ideas…
Branding: larger issues abound
This talk by Morgan Spurlock interests me because he explores branding and asks us to reflect on commercialization…
Mall-o-ween: Advertising a safer Halloween
It is widely recognized that our holidays are increasingly enmeshed with commercial interests…
Portraits in Glass and Light
Lynn Strongin and Penelope Weiss have finished their recent book, Portraits in Glass and Light…
Why Flash is okay, but not for an entire website
Flash can be pretty and neat and can even help present important information. But it can be a liability too…
Uni 102 Journal 2010
University 101 is a program that provides free non-credit university courses to people that face barriers to accessing post-secondary education. It’s a cool program that does an awesome …
Shortcuts for InDesign
These are some of the keyboard shortcuts I use most when working with InDesign CS4. Using shortcuts speeds up what you are able to accomplish and it reduces the chances of shoulder and neck injury due to over using the mouse …