We’d like to thank you all for your continued support and wish you all a merry Christmas and a very happy and prosperous new year.

Love John and Al xx

Google Fonts allows you to use different typefaces on your website. If you’re on a budget it’s a great alternative to Typekit or any of the other paid services. It’s very easy to implement and there’s a great selection of optimised typefaces available.

Dropbox is essentially a folder that lives on your computer and in the ‘cloud’. Any document you put in Dropbox is accessible on any computer that it’s been installed on. You can also share files and folders remotely with other users.

Mailchimp’s Inbox Inspector is a really useful service that tests your HTML email templates in a range of email clients. It’s incredibly useful if you’re coding your templates from scratch. It will also tell you if your templates will get past popular spam filters.

Subtle Patterns is a website full of beautifully subtle patterns and textures that you can download and use in your digital projects. You can get each pattern separately or download all of them together as a Photoshop pattern file.

Perch the tiny cms now sports some fantastic new features like a site search facility, e-commerce support and the ability to automatically build web forms.

We started from scratch and took the ‘mobile first’ approach, designing for the smallest screen resolutions and working our way up. The re-designed site should now feel a lot nicer to use on a smartphone or tablet computer, and of course it still looks great on a Desktop PC.

The re-design has been a really interesting process and using smaller resolutions as a starting point makes you look at the process in a completely different way. It helps you focus more on the economics of space and makes you think very, very carefully about user experience.

New to the concept of responsive web design and mobile first design? Here are two really interesting and well-written articles to get you started.

• Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte
• Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski

I intend to write a more detailed post on the re-design in the new year but for now another mince pie!

Apple’s tiny box of tricks does so many incredible things but personally I’ve always wanted an iPhone solely for the camera. I already own a Canon DSLR and a Panasonic Lumix and they’re terrific, but there was just something really appealing about being able to take a photo, process it and share it all from one pocket-sized device.

When I got the iPhone I immediately downloaded a few camera apps that I liked the look of and off I went on my travels. The iPhone rekindled my love of photography. No filters, no tripod, no lenses and no camera case. Where I’d subconsciously set myself rules in the past, the iPhone had helped me break free of them. It felt like photography re-invented. Suddenly I wasn’t worried about blown highlights or white balance anymore. It was really liberating and great fun.

A month ago I looked through the hundred or so shots I’d taken and I found myself seeing a natural flow to the images. It wasn’t something I’d planned but I had a collection of serene images full of shadows, reflections, natural shapes and ramshackled buildings. Using Blurb’s Bookify I made a small book called “There’s a place”. It’s my year of wandering around with the iPhone and snapping anything that I liked the look of.

To give all the images in the book a bit of consistency I shot all the photos using the basic camera app, loaded them into Camera + and processed them with the Contessa effect, to give a sepia feel, and the Clarity scene setting, to bring out the detail.

“There’s a place” is available to buy in softback and hardback formats. There’s also an ebook version for the iPhone and iPad which costs just £2.71. Any money I receive from sales of the book will be going to KidsCan, a cancer charity based at the University of Salford. If you’re stuck for a Christmas present why not give it a whirl!

This week I attended my first Creative Coffee Morning at Rhode Island in Stockport. The network is run by Stockport Council’s Economic Development Team and brings together local creative businesses for a chinwag and a coffee.

There are some exceptionally talented people in and around Stockport. The delegates included a diverse mix of photographers, television companies, web designers and an environmental artist.

It was a very interesting morning and it gave me a real insight into how other businesses work, the challenges they’re facing and their ideas and aspirations for the future.

It’s an event I’ll be attending regularly and I’m sure I’ll make some new friends through it. The coffee was really rather good as well!

If you’re a creative business based in Stockport email Kate Ruddick for more information.

Avanti are a Manchester based software company who produce accounts software for Windows. They came to us looking for an elegant and striking brand identity and a website that would help sell their accounts packages.

From early discussions we decided to create a ‘type only’ logo set in a timeless typeface. We eventually settled on Gill Sans, which is elegant and thanks to its structure also quite contemporary. The colour palette for the website includes charcoals, greens, blacks and oranges to give a modern feel that’s easy on the eye.

We did a lot of research and work on the home page, spending time thinking carefully about what potential users would want to see on there. From the home page you can download a free version of the software, see the benefits it delivers, find out what existing users are saying and get a quick overview of the company.

Bringing these elements together with e-commerce integration has given Avanti an affordable, professional and elegant platform from which they can confidently sell their software.

Thanks to the lack of wi-fi and our nine-month-old daughter Hannah we were able to leave the Internet and social media behind for a week and go exploring with our cameras, stopping for the occasional pint of local ale!

Yorkshire villages, particularly those off the beaten track are fantastic places full of quirky charm and character. We saw some wonderful things on our travels like this old post box and weather vane.

On a short walk by the river we stumbled across an old, abandoned Morris Minor. Being fans of classic cars we thought it’d be interesting to create a little visual study of it using just the iPhone and a superb new black and white processing app we’ve discovered called Noir. The iPhone is great for capturing these little details particularly as it’s very well equipped in the Macro department!

This incredible time-lapse video is the result of almost one and a half years work. Alex, an amateur Astronomer spent 31 hours taking a series of still images on the Southern Ocean Coast in Australia, he then combined them into this stunning video sequence. Ocean Sky was awarded the overall winner prize at Starmus astrophotography competition.

Designer Howard Wakefield was recently commissioned to create a cover for Clash magazine that celebrated 30 years of New Order. Howard chose to use the iconic album sleeves created by Peter Saville and reduced each one down to nine squares and their basic colour elements in an attempt to find out how iconic and recognizable the sleeves actually were. The first one we spotted was True Faith.

The Tate in Liverpool is currently hosting an exhibition dedicated to the astonishing work of Belgian Surrealist, Rene Magritte. The ‘Pleasure Principle’ runs from 24th June to 16th October and features the artist’s drawings, collages, examples of Magritte’s early commercial work and rarely seen photographs and films.

In life it’s nearly always the simple ideas that capture people’s imagination and Dear Photograph is a wonderful example. People take a picture of a picture from the past in the present day. The results are emotive, beautiful and at times heartbreaking. Our favourite was the elderly couple on the bench.

Finishing this week’s Friday Five we found this wonderful ‘Field Guide to Typestaches’ poster created by Tor Weeks. Personally if I could choose one to have as a moustache I think I’d go for the very decorative, Mr. Filosofia, although it would certainly take a steady hand to sculpt! The poster is available to purchase at Old Tom Foolery.

1. Approach the start of every web project as a user

Look at the last 10 websites you visited and think about where you got frustrated or lost. Were there any tasks you found really difficult to achieve? How would you have improved them? Approach any web project as a user first and a designer second.

2. Don’t make your user think

If you have to instruct your users how to use your site then there’s something wrong. Your users shouldn’t need to think too much about performing tasks. Your website should be designed so carrying out simple tasks and moving around is effortless.

3. Don’t overload your site with copy

People don’t read long pieces of copy on a website so don’t overload your pages with endless paragraphs of text. People scan web pages quickly and pick out words, phrases and links that interest them. Try and design your site so a page scans easily from left to right. Pay attention to font sizes and line heights. Make whatever copy you use easy to read. Avoid justifying text. Users with Dyslexia can find the uneven spacing between words particularly challenging.

4. Don’t be different for the sake of it

If you look at 50 different websites you’ll find that elements on a web page are generally always placed in the same location and there’s a good reason for this, it works and people are familiar with it. Don’t try and re-invent the web. Be innovative by all means but not at the cost of confusing or frightening away your audience.

5. Don’t worry about outdated web myths

Don’t worry about users having to scroll vertically. People understand how scrolling works and how to use a scrollbar. Forget the three clicks rule. There’s no evidence to suggest that users leave websites if they have to click more than three times to find a piece of information.

6. Don’t break the back button

Opening new windows from a hyperlink is an outdated practice and should be avoided. Not only does it break the browser’s back button and stops the user returning to the previous site, it also leaves them with an unnecessary stack of browser windows or tabs that they have to close.

7. Be careful with Javascript

Javascript is great for enhancing a user’s experience with dynamic effects such as animations, but make sure the core functionality of your website still works when it’s turned off.

8. Use a tagline

Use a tagline at the top of your site that describes what your company does and make it one of the first things your users see. You only have a few seconds to make a good impression and get their attention. If you’re not clear about the content of your site and what you’re offering, users will quickly leave.

9. Make Hyperlinks descriptive

By including a ‘click here’ link at the bottom of a paragraph of text you’re essentially forcing the user to read the whole paragraph to find out where the link goes. Make your links descriptive so that users scan reading the page can instantly pick out links that interest them.

10. Consider using breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are great navigation devices that stop a user getting lost on your site. They provide the user with details of their journey and enable them to jump to any of the sections they’ve visited just by clicking the relevant link. Breadcrumbs are particularly useful for large websites.

Images, video, web pages, links; Zootool lets you tag, sort and organise all the useful media you find on your travels, and the slick visual interface essentially turns it into a powerful online scrapbook.

Last week we were delighted to finally get our hands on the new Zootool iPhone App.

The app looks fantastic; it’s quick, stable and easy-to-use. From the opening screen you can locate the items you’ve stored by browsing through your packs or tags. You can also view other users, who you can choose to follow and there’s a link to the public timeline to see what people are currently bookmarking.

Where the App really wins is in its ability to save content using Mobile Safari. You can either hit the “+” sign on the home screen and insert a url or install a special bookmarklet which then operates like the lasso button on the Zootool website.

Impressively, the App offers an almost identical experience to the desktop version. If you’re still using Delicious it’s worth considering switching to Zootool. It’s simple, elegant, visual and a lot of fun to use.