Welcome to the fourth installment of our Be Aware group posts.

Donovan Beery - Web Tips

If nobody sees it, does your cover page exist?

This is the one thing that you always need to keep in mind when designing for the web. As a large amount of viewers get to your site through search engines, links from other sites, and links sent to them via email, they may never see your homepage. Always be sure that any one page of your site will make sense by itself. It’s no fun making sure links back to your homepage, and site identifiers are on every page, but it is a necessity. Links labeled “back” make no sense to viewers who don’t even know where they were suppose to have come from.

Drew Davies: Seen and Noted in the Design World

Design for the Movies

I’d always wondered about something, and recently had a lot of my questions answered by a clip that Joe from my office forwarded to me. Turns out, by all outward appearances, being a designer on the crew of a major motion picture may be one of the most awesome jobs ever. For those needing any convincing, just check out this mini-documentary on the design team for the new Superman film.

Sure, there’s no actual strategy involved, no deep concepts, no measurable results. But look at all of that awesome stuff they get to design from scratch: identities for dozens of companies, complete city maps, a city-wide signage system…every last artifact of design you see in the movie. Maybe it’d get old after a while, but I’d sure trade jobs with any of them for a year.

Travis Gray: TypeWatch

Adrian Hanft - Alternative Photography

Does size matter? Here are some links to a few unusual sizes of cameras:

Bite size - Justin Quinnell builds pinhole cameras and takes pictures looking out his mouth.

Oversize - Justin also makes large pinhole cameras out of trash cans.

World’s largest camera - The Mammoth camera was built in 1900. It weighed 900lbs and made an 8 x 4.5 foot negative.

David Kadavy: Design and Technology

With the merger of Adobe and Macromedia, there has been a great deal of talk about a possible integration of PDF and Flash. That sounds good to me, but I want to see an integration of Flash, and a page-layout program such as InDesign.

Sure, someone can learn to automate tasks in InDesign through scripting, but with the increasing need for designers with web and print skills, why not harness a great language these people already know - ActionScript - to make automation even easier?

Imagine, for example, that you have a series of business cards to create. You could try automating it with scripting or even Illustrator Data Sets, but why learn yet another language, or use a very limited method of automation? Your master pages could hold arrays of the various people’s names and other information, as well as functions that dictate placement of various elements on the business card based upon the characteristics of that information. For example, you may want to place a graphic element based upon the length of someone’s name. All of the elements on the page could be “Movie Clips” so it would be easy to call them with scripts and dictate their placement. The individual pages could be “frames” that could hold still more variables and functions.

This would of course take some adaptation, but it would give a familiar language and conceptual model a new and powerful use.

Tom Nemitz: Awesomely Bad Website

There’s been an awful lot of spoof/parody websites lately purporting to be promotional material for a celebrity running for President in 2008, some better than others. The Christopher Walken site is an example of a spoof done well, as it was just good enough to put some doubt in your mind as to whether it was actually real. Some just are done so poorly, they never fool you for even a moment. In that vein, I present to you MacGyver For President: 2008. (Suspend your disbelief for a moment that the entire site is an offshoot of a blog and doesn’t have a distinct URL, and humor me.) This site has it all: wretchedly pixellated photos, hideous kerning, murderous widows, canyon-esque leading, sloppily inexcusably bad grammar spelling and punctuation. That makes it bad. But, a staple of political sites is quotes from the candidate, and its here where this site goes from “bad” to “awesomely bad”. These gems that randomly appear on different pages don’t disappoint: “A paperclip can be a wondrous thing. More times than I can remember one of these has gotten me out of a tight spot”; “Human nature. I do something nice for you, you do something nice for me, like not kill me. Next thing you know, we’re friends.” I’m speechless.