Skip to main content

Design21

Thoughts, ideas and notes on the discipline of design as applied to new media.

DesignTutorialsWeb Development

Git Primer

What is git? Git is an application for distributed version control. It’s version control because it lets you deftly create and manage versions of your files, and it’s distributed because there is no server. What is a git repository? A git repository is a collection of files that git is…
Taavo
July 5, 2012
DesignTutorials

A Simple Overview of Responsive Web Design

Many clients ask about creating a mobile version of their new website or website redesign. In the past, this process often involved creating two versions of the site and then using some "sniffer" code to redirect mobile users to the mobile-specific version. More recently, though, there has been a movement…
Hilary
May 29, 2012
DesignNews

My First Logo Design Commission

In 2000, while in my senior year of college, I somehow managed to secure my first paid commission. This is probably standard fare for graphic design students, but I was an Electrical Engineering major, and the concept was truly novel. You mean people would pay for something I was doing…
Todd Dumas
May 11, 2012
WordPress local install guide Instructions
DesignTutorials

WordPress Local Install Instructions

This is a rough guide, since I don’t have a specific project to test it on. When we get there, I’d like to test it out myself to improve this document. That said... 1)  Download and Install MAMP/XAMPP There are XAMPP downloads for both Mac and Windows, although I’ve never…
Taavo
April 28, 2012
DesignTutorials

What makes a great logo design?

What started off as a grand thesis, though apathy and time constraints, became a nice little list of concepts and standards to evaluate a the quality, caliber and effectiveness of a logo design. Logo Design Considerations Visual Balance Make and break the grid A Hook Optical illusion, Visual trick Graphic…
Todd Dumas
September 30, 2011
DesignTutorials

What Photography has Taught Me About Design

I started my graphic and web design career by way of photography. I shot for my own clients, worked as a studio coordinator for photographers I respected, and assisted on as many gigs as possible, everything from small editorial shoots to national advertising campaigns. Here are the three most important…
Alex
August 18, 2010
DesignNews

A New Decade Of Design

It will be interesting to see how design, particularly website design, evolves over the next ten years. Couple of hopes/requests/wishlist items: Get CMS systems to play nicely with custom databases & custom applications Figure out way of unifying user login/accounts across multiple website applications Clean URLs system for customs sites…
Todd Dumas
January 4, 2010
DesignTutorials

And a brief(er) list of uber helpful tools

From Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 - awesome package InContext CMS - great way to upgrade static sites to allow for basics client CMS Spry Datasets - fast way to create a mini-database.  tragically, not readable by search engines Flash FLV player - quickly stream most media From others Wordpress - fast, simple, powerful…
Todd Dumas
February 4, 2009