AC Vent

If you’ve ever had an in-depth conversation with a designer, you’ve probably been bombarded by letter combinations like CMYK, RGB, DPI, and odd terms like bleeds and spot colors. We designers throw these terms around all the time, maybe without realizing that not everyone lives and breathes these things like we do.

I’m going to start with decoding just a few basics in this article, namely the acronyms pertaining to color profiles. They are: CMYK, RGB, and PMS.
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Starting this month, I’m going to be doing a series of articles here on the AC Vent that aims to help clients and prospective clients understand a little more about the world of design. Design is a skilled trade, so there is a lot of technical know-how and industry-specific lingo that we designers use without a second thought, but which people outside of the design industry may be confused about. This series will hopefully help to bridge that gap and help make sure everyone is on the same page.

It’s going to be called Decoding Design, so whenever you see a blog post with that in the title, that’s what’s going on! The first article in the series will be coming up this week, so check back in a few days.

Here are the parts of the series so far:
Decoding Design: Color Lingo
Decoding Design: Web Lingo
Decoding Design: Print Lingo

Earth Day was last week, and since then I’ve been thinking of all the things I can do or have already done to make my business more environmentally-friendly (and by extension, my home, since my office is part of that).

1. I’ve switched to a carbon-neutral host for all of my websites, and will be recommending it to any future web clients. Not just because they’re an eco-friendly company, but because they have an amazing deal on hosting, have easy to use control panels, and are reliable.
   
2. I use online fax (MyFax) and file sending services (YouSendIt) instead of wasting paper, disks, envelopes/tape, and transportation costs on communicating and sending files with my clients. Read the rest of this entry »

UK identity designer Graham Smith over at ImJustCreative.com has been doing a wonderful series recently called the Logo Design Roundup: Over 50 Ways Designers Promote and Brand Themselves. It’s a collection of logos designed by/for different freelance designers and design agencies. It’s been interesting to see the logos that designers create for themselves, as opposed to logos that have catered (in however small an amount) to an outside client’s whims and demands.

Check it out here:

Logo Design Roundup Part 1
Logo Design Roundup Part 2
Logo Design Roundup Part 3
Logo Design Roundup Part 4
Logo Design Roundup Part 5 (my own AC logo is part of this collection)

Any one who knows a web programmer even remotely well will probably have heard a rant about the Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) browser at some point. If you are a programmer yourself, you’ve likely been the voice of numerous such rants yourself. I certainly have. You build a beautiful site, it looks perfect in every major browser – even IE7, which has it’s own ’special’ quirks. But IE6, for some unfathomable reason, refuses to recognize one little style or div tag, and suddenly it looks like your site got hit by a virtual grenade and is splattered in a haphazard fashion all over the screen. It’s a mess and fixing it, more often that not, results in the site looking bad in every other browser. So you have to do these complex, inefficient hacks on your own code just to get it looking good everywhere. This of course takes a considerable amount of time, as you can’t always tell right off which small tag is the one causing the problem, let alone hash out the work-around. Read the rest of this entry »