Category Archives: Design

Alternate Transportation

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDaAoXXA8Cw] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-KczCp0OQ4] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvD8zuGy1z4] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZo54RyUWg0] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXxkWXncuo] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUXDjg6_bhM&feature=related] Sustainable transport (or green transport) refers to any means of transport with low impact on the environment, and includes walking and cycling, transit oriented development, green vehicles, CarSharing, and building or protecting urban transport systems that are fuel-efficient, space-saving and promote healthy lifestyles. The advantages of increased mobility need to be weighed against the environmental, social and economic costs that transport systems pose. But the real purpose of transport is access – to work, education, goods and services, friends and family – and there are proven techniques to improve access while simultaneously reducing environmental and social impacts, and managing traffic congestion. Communities which are successfully improving the sustainability of their transport networks are doing so as part of a wider program of creating more vibrant, livable, sustainable cities. The social costs of transport include road crashes, air pollution, physical inactivity, time taken away from the family while commuting and vulnerability to fuel price increases. Traffic congestion imposes economic costs by wasting people’s time and by slowing the delivery of goods and services. Transport systems have significant impacts on the environment, accounting for between 20% and 25% of world energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.

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WordPress gets a new default theme

WordPress is working on a new theme for 2010, called “Twenty Ten” http://2010dev.wordpress.com/ The new theme supports a lot of built in options for customizing the banner, background, and typefaces. Kubrik was a great starting place for a lot of <= 2.8 themes, but with 2.9 and 3.0 coming out, it’s time to embrace the upgrade. Go WordPress team!

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Click Affinity

I’d like to coin the term “click affinity” in the world of web design – if it does not already exist. I just realized this concept when I visited the Wall Steet Journal’s online magazine site and was immediately tempted to click on many of the stories. It was a difficult struggle as I had many other things I needed to be working on (ie: no time to visit that site) but there was still a pull to get into their content. In addition to having good design and usability, the real core piece of being popular online is having good content, which is: Unique / Original Up to date Well-written / Easy to understand I believe having valuable content, content-teasers, graphics, and yes – even ads will increase that content’s “click affinity,” which will  engage users. Try to present good content! Raise the click affinity for the items on your website.

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Custom WordPress Theme for WH?

I’ve been thinking that I need to revamp the site again, maybe do a more custom template. I don’t really do any advertising here, nor do I plan to, so I’m thinking of going with a minimalistic theme that just highlights the content well.

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Coming Soon: WFU Marketing Summit

Get live updates of the Marketing Summit

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New site launch

The WFU Energy 2010 Conference has launched: http://energy2010.wfu.edu/

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Sweet Typography at Sweetwater

Getting typography right is hard enough, even when you have all of the image editing tools to aid. But as we all know, many times images are blocked on e-mail clients, which makes the task of designing an effective e-postcard with high penetration difficult. Sweetwater has done an nice job mixing an e-mail promotion with a graceful fallback on a recent e-mail promotion. Take a look at the email below with and without images. I especially like the second heading which uses a -2px letter spacing css attribute to achieve a nice kerning. The ad was available here when I posted this.

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Capitalism Site Launches

The second, more official launch of the BB&T Center for Capitalism at Wake Forest University was today We tried launching the site for the first time back in August but there were too many revisions to make. It’s looking much better now.

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wonderful designers

There are a TON of wonderful designers out there to bookmark. Be sure to look into the classically great as well as the contemporary. Here’s a starter list: Paul Rand Stefan Sagmeister Milton Glaser Chip Kidd Michael Bierut Neville Brody Paula Scher Lucille Tenazas Alan Fletcher Wolfgang Weingart Armin Hoffman Eric Spiekerman Josef Muller-Brockman Kyle Cooper Thanks @JamesKurtz!

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Twitter on Facebook Pages

Thought I’d post this here, too: I wanted to share a facebook application I just learned about. It adds a tab to a facebook “page” that shows twitter updates: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=53267368995#/apps/application.php?v=wall&id=53267368995 It was difficult to find, I didn’t realize it was possible. For a long time I thought facebook only allowed you to push your FB updates to twitter, and not vice versa. Hope you find it useful. They have a free and pro version. I’m using free.

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