trends

The Power of Pinterest

The Power of Pinterest

A fresh, young female graduage, it’s not at all shocking that I fell headfirst into the Pinterest epidemic. If you’re not familiar, Pinterest is a site that allows you to keep track of links you like by letting you “pin” them onto “boards,” or categories. Some of the more common boards you see are DIY boards, fashion inspiration boards, and recipe boards – that’s only skimming the surface.

Sites like Pinterest are a good way for people – not just women – to stay in touch with their creative side and at the same time build a visual portfolio that is representative of who they are.

Just like any writer has a portfolio of their clips, a person in the visually creative field – photography, graphic design, stylist – could turn their Pinterest page into boards of their work along with other pins that could help define who they are as a professional. Imagine it as a visual portfolio that you can keep updating as your ideas change.

Here is a great guide by Onward Search on building the perfect Pinterest portfolio. Good luck!

Diane Ly advice, career, creative services, design, inspiration, marketing, trends 0 , , , , ,

Creative Village Meetup Highlights by GraphicDesignNYC

There are many components to GraphicDesignNY, one of our jobs is to capture as much of the NYC arts and tech scene as physically possible. As a meetup group, we enjoy the camaraderie of supporting other groups and organizations in the visual arts and digital communities throughout the tri-state region. Recently we were lucky enough to attend a ‘Demo Night’ event hosted by our friends over at the Creative Village Meetup group.

The presenters for the evening were VYou.com and Squidoo.com. VYou is a video Q & A utility that is used to intimately communicate with audiences across multiple social platforms. Squidoo creates huge waves of social curiosity, builds trust and communities around content.

The event was well attended by a variety of people interested in media and web technologies. The venue, Wix Lounge is a great friend of Graphic Design NY and has been gracious enough to allow us to host not one, but two of our own events there (and hopefully more in the future)! Wix Lounge is a completely free co-working and event space for creative professionals. Wix Lounge is run by Wix.com, a free website publishing platform providing user friendly tools for building beautiful, easy-to-make desktop, mobile, and Facebook sites.

We plan to bring you more video coverage of as many design, creative, digital and tech events as we can get to. NYC always has plenty of things going on and the new media sector is extremely hot. We will also be uploading interviews, tutorials, creative videos, product reviews and job/career specials. And if you have any ideas, content or interesting story you want us to cover, let us know.

Please rate the video, leave a comment and subscribe for updates.
Also head over to our creative events group:
http://www.meetup.com/GraphicDesignNYC

Marc Scoleri creative services, education, events, inspiration, startups, technology, trends, videos 3 , , , , ,

Responsive Design: More than just a trend

Responsive Design - Progressive Enhancement example

Web development is a lot like the Fashion industry. No, I’m not crazy. There are always new technologies and trends. We have to think and work 6 months ahead of everyone else, instead of catching up with current thing.

What is a trend? The oxforddictionaries.com defined trend as:

A general trend in which something is developing or changing.

A current trend in web development is responsive design. George Chaney of SEOKing.com wrote that it was THE trend of the year [1]. Many creatives in our industry are currently creating responsive sites or want to do it. There is something about responsive design that sets it apart from other trends.

Take parallax scrolling effect as an example. This is something everyone wanted to replicate after nikebetterworld.com. It looks awesome and I’ve seen great application of this effect on many websites. What purpose does it serve? The parallax trend is less prominent now then it was last year.

Responsive design is a solution for developers and designers to accommodate a website for multiple devices. We all held on to the 960 standard for many years and just worried about how a website would look in each browser. Now we have to think differently. Responsive Design isn’t just a trend, because it is changing the way we design and develop websites. Designers must stop thinking of websites in pixels and the pixel perfect ideal. It’s about designing in terms of proportions and looking at all of the elements of the webpage in relation to one another. Web developers must focus on core functionality and take advantage of new technologies that comes with mobile like geolocation and touch events.

A lot of the responsive work has been done for us. Responsive frameworks are great building blocks for designers and developers to utilize. I’ve been experimenting with the Bootstrap framework. LESS framework and Foundation are very popular. If you haven’t played with one, then I suggest you start immediately. Present this to your agency or client and explain to them why they should develop responsive websites if they aren’t doing so already.

[1] Chaney, George. “Trend Of The Year – Responsive Design.” SEOKing. N.p., 03/024/2012. Web. 3 Apr 2012. .

Elif Bayrasli design, development 0 , , , , ,