Seattle Design Festival — 10 Days of Design

Posted by on Sep 16, 2011 in Art Around Us | One Comment

Today is the start of the Seattle Design Festival, a celebration of how design affects the lives of people — driving innovation, adding beauty and making Seattle a more livable city. This 10 day festival features speakers, tours, exhibits, films and activities for the whole family.

As you travel around Seattle, you may notice 8-foot tall columns/markers placed around some of Seattle’s landmarks. Located in front of the Seattle Art Museum, the column to the right was created by created by the Seattle Design firm, Vivitiv as part of Design Marks. AIGA Seattle invited 25 local design firms to participate in this event and they have created location markers, each with a QR code that leads to a video. Viewing the video will “connect people more deeply to their community through design—enhancing their personal experience of that location.”

The Seattle Design Festival runs September 16-25th.

Adding an RSS feed to websites

Posted by on Sep 14, 2011 in Techniques | One Comment

RSS iconOver the last month, a few of my clients have asked me to add an RSS feed to their website so that visitors would be able to “subscribe” and receive updates to their blog posts.

In order to do this, I had to learn a bit more about what RSS feeds are. RSS or Rich Site Summary is a format for delivering regularly updated web content (like blog posts) to people who want the new content delivered directly to them. In the past, people would often “bookmark” sites that they liked and would have to visit those sites frequently to see if any new content had been added. A site with an RSS feed allows visitors to sign up to have these updates delivered to an RSS Reader automatically whenever new content is posted. Another option allows visitors to subscribe to an RSS feed email option, which delivers the feed directly to an email account.

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Creating E-Books with InDesign CS5.5

Posted by on Sep 1, 2011 in Lifelong Learning | One Comment

ebooks on a reader

Recently I attended an Adobe workshop called “Create digital magazines, eBooks and more with InDesign CS5.5″. In this workshop, I learned more about creating ebooks and how InDesign CS5.5 can make the process easier.

Although 85% of all Adobe product users are still creating artwork for print, more people are starting to use smart phones, tablets and e-reading devices. As demand for digital media content grows, clients will be asking their designers to design for this media in addition to the standard print formats.

Designing for ebooks (or EPUBs, as Adobe calls them) is different from designing for print. While you can create ebook versions of printed material, ebooks handle content differently and can be challenging to work with. Where print can support multiple columns, ebooks are limited to a single column. Where print text is set to a point size that does not change, ebook text can be re-sized, causing the text to re-flow and fit the size or orientation of the device’s page. In addition, each device will render content differently depending upon its format or capabilities (e.g, a smart phone is narrower than most readers).

I’ve never tried to create an EPUB but it looks like a skill I’d like to learn and be able to offer to my clients. I will be experimenting with this soon.

Adobe has several resources with more information about this including an upcoming online seminar Digital Publishing: eBooks, eMagazines & Apps and Adobe TV has just posted a video, Create More Compelling EBOOKS with InDesign CS5.5 on their site.