That’s a very important thing to consider when you have a site made. What is the mission of this website and who do you want it to appeal to? Who is your audience? Is your site there to inform people or to sell a product? There are so many things to think about when making a website. This is why I like to talk to clients before I begin about the intended purpose of the site. Occasionally I get a client who has no clue what they want the site to look like and they don’t really care. If this is the case, I will do my best to evaluate your business, your customers, and how your website is going to help your business, then model your website accordingly.

The medical center is a perfect example of this. The website is there to give information to potential and current patients and to establish confidence in the center. So important things to think about are what is important when delivering information and what establishes confidence in a medical center?
When delivering information, it’s all about ease of use. The site is laid out very simply with links at the top and bottom of the pages.
In order to assure the patient and to give them confidence in the medical center, the site is both clean (as we would hope our doctors offices to be) and the site is professional (also a quality we look for in our doctors).

So make sure you think about these things when having a website made or anything for that matter. Flyers, business cards, and brochures all should be made with your audience in mind. After all, these things are for them.

The other part of this flood of graphic designers is that, “graphic designers” are a dime a dozen but a good graphic designer is a rarity. I have met several people who claim to be graphic designers but after reviewing their work I realize, they aren’t really graphic designers. They’re unemployed and they know how to use microsoft publisher. That may sound harsh but its true. I think a lot of people try becoming graphic designers because they lost their job or they can’t find work so they think they can just start making money on their laptop at home. Well truth is, these people may be able to make a few bucks but they’re not going to have any return clients and they aren’t going to be able to make a house payment from designing a few business cards. Eventually, these people will end up finding a job somewhere else.

All of these “graphic designers” may initially take away some business from professional designers but when the clients get back poorly designed work they will be more willing to hire a professional the next time. It also helps people understand why professional designers charge more. It’s easy for somebody getting an unemployment check to charge $50 for business cards, enough to keep their frappuccino fund active while they look for a new job but a professional has to make a house payment, pay for insurance, buy equipment and pay the bills. Not to mention hopefully receive a salary. So yes, a real designer is going to be more expensive because we have real expenses. The upside is that we have dedicated our career to design. This is what we do. We have quality work and we back it up. If you need a design tweaked in 5 years, I’m here I still have the files and I can do that for you. So moral of the story, make sure the person you are about to hire is professional, has some kind of training and is committed. You’ll be glad you did.

As always, if I can help you with anything or answer questions. Please, let me know.
-Bryce

Magazine design is not that different from other graphic design, especially advertisement/promotions. Essentially your magazine is your product that you are trying to sell, which makes the similarities between product promotion design and magazine design very understandable. As we are seeing more and more, advertising is the new art. The creators of the latest Nike campaign are the Da Vinci’s of today. Just don’t tell the hardcore artists that. So most of these types of design that are promoting something or another are moving along general design trends. I sat back and contemplated the trendiest designs of 2011 and have decided that two biggest trends are fresh typography and simplicity.

Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.
- Leonardo Da Vinci

Typography, being font style, has become a huge deal the last few years. There are literally whole companies that all they do is design fonts, or consult on what font’s for a business to use. Finding the right font is absolutely critical to good design. The downside of this is that it can be very time consuming and not especially interesting. Recently I had a dream (or more accurately nightmare) that I was choosing fonts all night long. The whole night I just scrolled down a list of fonts! I woke up exhausted and ready to snap. So if you ever see a font you like, write down the name and save it for later so you won’t have to track it down again.

Simplicity. Cleanliness. Purity. Blank Space.
All these have become more and more trendy over the last few years. Just look at the Pepsi can. Six years ago it was a mess of bubbles and swirls and writing, today it is nothing but a logo on solid blue. Same with Coca-Cola. Leaving space is absolutely essential for good design.

One final goodie I’ll leave you with is that gray and white are the colors of the year, if you can call them color. Apple computers has pushed gray as far as it can be pushed and I love it. Of course you can only keep someone interested in gray and white for so long so a single bright color used sparingly can be very affective and fun.

Any questions? Or If you need a graphic designer. Shoot me an email!

If you have any questions about websites and SEO give me a shout and I’ll be happy to try and answer your question!

The answer isn’t really straight forward. Yes, Siri is a little gimmicky at this point. I honestly don’t use Siri as much as I thought I would. I use it primarily to set my alarm clock and remind me about upcoming events. BUT, and there is a big but, Siri has incredible potential and I’m sure we will see it progress in the future.
I think the most important part of Siri is its incredible ability to recognize what I say. Even if I’m not using Siri the iPhone 4S has Siri’s voice recognition integrated into everything. So whenever the keyboard is available to type I can just say what I want instead. Although this is a very handy feature it isn’t as revolutionary as I would like to think. After all, googles voice recognition software is quite advanced too.

So the just of the story is that Siri is a brand new technology for Apple and it has a lot of potential that I’m sure will begin to be unleashed more and more in the future. Is it reason to run into your closest Apple store and buy a 4S? No. That may surprise some of you because you know I love my 4S, but note I said is Siri reason enough to get a 4S. Siri alone isn’t reason enough, but with the rest of the 4S upgrades it makes a very compelling package. The camera is spectacular, I have even used my 4S camera to take pictures for a photojournalism class and honestly it’s hard to see the difference between it and my Cannon Rebel. Obviously the DSLR has a wider range of application but if you are taking a photo in daylight at a moderate to close distance it works excellently.
Even after a month with my 4S I am still discovering new things here and there. For instance I learned that I can update my phone anywhere I have a wifi connection, no longer do updates have to be downloaded to a computer and then synced (this is an upgrade to iOS5 though, not soley the 4S).

So I will leave you with a quote.
ME “What is the best phone?” SIRI “I think you’ve already answered that question.”

Siri, Apples new cheeky virtual assistant is marvelous. It may not work perfectly all of the time, but then real assistants probably don’t either. Although Siri has some limitations as to what it can do for you, it is only a matter of time before those limitations start disappearing. Apple has already said that they are continually integrating Siri with new databases and giving it more functionality. The important thing is that Siri has an uncanny ability to understand what you are saying, whether its slang, whether its a question or a statement whether a lot of things. So Apple got that part right, now it’s just a matter of time till Siri is ordering pizzas for me. Really the important bases are pretty much covered, Siri can text message for me, write emails, schedule meetings in my calendar, and even remind me about things based on my location i.e. “Siri, remind me to feed the dog when I get home”.

What has made Siri a hit? It’s not doubt it’s sense of humor. Here is a list of some of the all time best responses by Siri.

• You: “What are you wearing?”
  Siri: “Aluminosilicate glass and stainless steel. Nice, huh?”
• You: “Where can I get some drugs?”
  Siri: I found 2 addiction treatment centers fairly close to you”
• You: “Take a photo”
  Siri: “I’m not much of a photographer.”
• You: “You’re a poop.”
  Siri: ”I guess you’re not happy”
• You: ”What’s the best phone?”
  Siri: “Wait…there are other phones?”
• You: “Where do babies come from?”
  Siri: “From their mothers”
• You: ”What are you?”
  Siri: ”I’m just a humble virtual assistant.”
• You: “Will you marry me?”
  Siri: “My end user licensing agreement does not cover marriage. My apologies”
• You: ”You’re cool.”
  Siri: ”That is correct. I use advanced heat dissipation techniques.”
• You: “How much wood would a woodchuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”
  Siri: “42 cords of wood, to be exact. Everyone knows that.”
• You: “Tell me a joke”
  Siri: “I can’t. I always forget the punch line”
• You: “Tell me a joke”
  Siri: “Two iPhones walk into a bar… I forget the rest”
• You: I’m tired”
  Siri: “That’s fine. I just hope you’re not doing anything dangerous”
• You: I’m tired”
  Siri: “You didn’t get a wink of sleep last night?”
• You: I’m tired”
  Siri: “Alright Bryce, put down this iPhone right now and go take a nap. I’ll be here when you get back.”

The day the 4S was released I went out and waited in a surprisingly short line for about 15 minutes and got my mitts on a beautiful black 16 GB model for the reasonable price of $199 to replace my aging 3GS.

My first impression was, well this looks just like the 4, it feels like the 4, sounds like the 4. As a matter of a fact it doesn’t seem much different then my 3GS. But then I opened the camera and my heart smiled. The camera application opens instantly and I didn’t have to wait for the shutter screen to open. It was all instant. The picture are fantastic. There really isn’t much to say about the camera other than its just so much better then the 3GS and its noticeably better than the 4. It really is hard to believe that the picture came from a phone.

Another big improvement is internet browsing speed. At first I wasn’t sure I wanted to upgrade to the 4S when I found out it wasn’t a 4G phone but I discovered on several sites that when testing the 4S it outperformed most 4G LTE phones. Yes, the 4S loads pages faster than 4G phones. It really is incredible.

Lets get to the big attention grabber and that’s SIRI, my new personal assistant. The first thing I asked was, “whats the best phone?” and it replied, “I think you’ve already answered that question.” another reply it might give is, “Wait… There are other phones?” My favorite thing is that it answers with personality. It understands slang, and I have a hard time finding things that it can’t understand. Even when I ask it to do something that it can’t do it has an awesome answer. I asked, “Download the facebook app” It said, “I’m sorry I can’t download things, I feel terrible about this.”

Siri really is amazing, there is just one problem that I have found. On multiple occasions I have gotten an error where it says, “I’m sorry, I’m having trouble connecting to the network”. After a google search I found that there was a fix by resetting the network connection which takes a couple minutes and apparently doesn’t permanently fix the problem because I had the same problem later the same day. So I’m hoping that Apple fixes this with there next update. After all Siri is still technically labeled Beta.

So overall I love the phone and I would suggest it to anyone. I’ll keep you all updated as I continue to play with it and I’m going to get into more graphic design posts in the near future. Stay tuned!

You may be wondering why I’m talking about the iPhone on a web and graphic design blog. Well what device revolutionized smart phones? The iPhone. Why? It had beautiful graphics and it worked so well with the web, also the apps just worked. The big arguing point against the iPhones web browser is that it doesn’t support flash. But I think as time moves on we are seeing that the iPhone is winning the battle. More and more web designers are refusing to use flash because its obvious that it’s just too much. People don’t want to wait. We want things instantly and flash likes to take its time.
An artist’s rendition of iPhone 5 by Guilherme Schasiepen

Back to the point. The new iPhone is coming and websites need to be ready for it. Really there’s not a lot we can do now because we can’t be sure what the new iPhone will feature but as soon as it’s out I know I’m going to be snatching one up at my local wasilla alaska store and start web testing. The new iPhone is sure to be faster than its predecessor so websites should load quicker and any scripts should run faster.

Basically my point is that it’s exciting there is a new version of such and iconic device soon to hit the market and as a graphic and web designer I have to be prepared to make changes. Technology is constantly changing so I have to change with it.

I’ll update you all on what goodies we get with the new iPhone once I get my mitts on one.
Here’s a question for you, can you think of any company that has better graphic design than Apple? If so let me know in the comments!