Matt Hamm's Design blog

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Thanks again to Faveup.com for featuring matthamm.com

Thank you to Faveup.com for featuring me on their website.

Please vote for me. Give me the love.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

My business card design featured on faveup.com

Thanks to http://www.faveup.com for featuring my business card design.

http://faveup.com/design/4828

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Web design rip offs. Flattering or despicable?

It has happened to me a few times in the past. A friend or old work colleague sends you an email or IM “check out this link… somebody’s ripped off your site”. The most recent being a ripoff of a website I designed while working for Chaos Design in Guildford earlier this year. My original design is www.estrelasantiago.com. Today somebody sent me a link to this site: http://copyright-budva.com. I was amazed that it wasn’t even a half hearted copy, they had actually just cloned the site and dropped their content in. They had even left the CSS untouched, to the extent of leaving in my name and copyright information at the top of the CSS. I mean how lazy is that!

Bev, who informed me of the cloned website, said “You should be flattered, that somebody wanted to copy your design”. I was thinking about this and I guess I am a little flattered and not really that angry about it. The problem arises when somebody else spots the copied design and points out that the original site that you designed is in-fact the copy!! This happened to me a few months ago when I noticed that a company in Guildford (who have since taken down the site) had ripped off one of my designs www.charcol.co.uk. An old work colleague thought that the coincidence that the company that copied my design was based in Guildford which is very close to where I live now and I was half accused as being the perpetrator. This made me more angry than anything, So I rang them and had a good rant. They took the site down the next day and even phoned up my old company to apologise.

I don’t know how these people sleep at night knowing that they have ripped off designs like this. I mean I feel bad even if my designs hint at other designs or are too similar to something else.

There is a great tool for checking that your website hasn’t been ripped off. Visit www.copyscape.com and type your URL in and it’ll check if other sites on the web have similar text to yours.

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Brand Identity Process

Before I start designing a website or even a logo, I always start to approach it as a brand identity process no matter how small the project. If you work with large blue chip clients, more often than not they already have brand identity guidelines, which is fantastic and makes the process a lot easier with with rules and regulations in place.

However if brand identity fails to appear, I just start to make one. I find it makes the design process so much easier.

The way I approach this is to ask questions in the form of a ‘Discovering the Brand Identity’ document. this consists of:

1. Brand keywords
2. Brand values
3. Brand history/knowledge
4. Brand goals
5. Brand symmetry
6. Social responsibility
7. Target demographic
8. Brand in the marketplace
9. Competitors
10. Understand the brand’s customers/clients
11. Visual exploration
12. Reference material

Once you have the answers to all these questions you have a great reference and starting point to start the design process.

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Starting a fresh blog using Expression Engine

I’ve used Text Pattern and Word Press in the past as a blog tool but they never really worked out with me and I’ve heard such rave reviews about Expression Engine, I’ve decided to try it out. I intend to write a proper blog this time and not faff any more, so here we go.

The EE admin seems slick and well designed on first impressions. I’m still finding my way around, so not much to report yet. I’m using the default template while I’m figuring out how to load in a new one and integrate my own template eventually.

Word Press never really did it for me, It just seemed a bit ‘hacky’ to do the things you wanted to do. What I find nice about EE so far is that it feels more like a proper CMS rather than just a blog tool. Hopefully it’ll be a lot more flexible than Word Press.

Text Pattern on the other hand is very flexible, but I found the admin panel very painful to use and really badly designed. As I use EE I will write about the features and tools which I like and don’t like and we’ll go from there.