Every year, Awwwards recognises and promotes the talent and effort of the best web developers, designers and agencies in the world.

 The international jury selects the best of the best each year and this year they would like users to select the “Site of the Year (Users’ Choice)” award with their votes.

To take part in voting, all you have to do is log in to your Facebook account and click on the “Like” button on the awwwards website.

Carter has been nominated this year, and would be honoured by your vote here: http://www.awwwards.com/web-design-awards/carter-digital

With great and humble appreciation, thank you from all the Digital HTTPsters at Carter.

Happy New Year to all for 2012!

- It is required to support the corporate identity developed by the designer;
- It has to enrich the design of the publication;
- It is necessary that the typeface suited the overall design.

In order to meet these requirements, a good designer always goes on looking for new typeface ideas. Sure, it is possible to work out a typeface on your own. However, there is no need to do so, as the experience proves everything really worthy is already created.

So, we would like to offer you to get acquainted with the following resources offering you to download creative and awesome typefaces for professional design:

Alexandria – Download

Alexandria is a serif font typeface created by Hank Gillete. It corresponds to the neo-grotesque sub-classification.

Slab Tall X – Download

And again a tall and condensed Slab Serif designed by Manfred Klein, very much like Typo Slab Serif (also from the same designer) only here the X-height is even taller.

Fette Egyptienne – Download

Beautiful bold slab serif typeface, just great for headtitles, gives a uber-vintage look. Combined with a nice serif and it’s pure magic. This free typeface is designed by the German Typographer Dieter Steffman.

Tertre Extra Bold – Download

Tertre is a display/short text typeface with a wide range of applications from signage or posters to menus and pricelists; branding, packaging or publishing. The letters have no overhangs and the stroke thickness of capitals and lower case letters is identical, making hinting or anti-aliasing more uniform at any point size and zoom combination. Two weights, Extra Bold and Extra Bold Italic are available for free download and use.

Nadia Serif – Download

This serif typeface is available for free download; the only requirement for using it is to send a PDF or any other copy of the work using this typefaces to its designers. Designed by Switzerland-based graphic designer, Nadia Knechtle, Nadia Serif is a clean, thin but strong slab serif font.

Typo Slab Serif – Download

The Typo Slab Serif typeface wouldn’t be available without the great work of the Manfred Klein. A beautiful light slab serif typeface, and it’s one of the more condensed versions of the shown Slab Serifs.

Mido – Download

A medium-bold Egyptian face, Mido Medium (2007) is a contemporary font by Swedish designer Eva Wilsson Grinder. Taking inspiration from the delicate stems, leafs, and joints of plants and flowers, Eva’s goal with Mido was to create a typeface “with friendliness of the Egyptians but to eliminate the heaviness.”

St Marie Thin – Download

Sascha Timplan is a graphic and type designer based in Trier, Germany. Sascha wants to offer typefaces that are in some way unique and not blending in, but also classic typefaces. St Marie (thin version is for free) are glyphs with an elegant and playful character, there is also a @font-face variant that you can download.

Kontrapunkt – Download

Kontrapunkt is an independent brand and design agency, that also developed a new slab serif called, .. Kontrapunkt (Who could have thought of that, brilliant name!). The aim was to develop a distinct font, with regards to both the inidividual character and the overall image as such. The typeface has so far been developed in a light, light italic and bold version.

BodoniXT – Download

Bodoni is invariably stylish, original, and designed by Manfred Klein. Manfred Klein looks at type as an essential part of visual communication, and that theme unifies his work. It gives his typefaces a unique cachet.

Museo – Download

A well-designed Slab Serif made by Jos Buivenga, from the Dutch typefoundry exljbris. The use of Museo Slab has exploded in popularity, and with good reason – it’s a unique & usable typeface with character. Museo Slab 500 is a boxy and affectionate slab serif font.

Adelle Basic – Download

Adelle Bold and Bold Italic can be downloaded free of charge at TypeTogether’s website. While Adelle is conceived specifically for intensive editorial use, its personality and flexibility make it a real multiple-purpose typeface. The intermediate weights deliver a very legible and neutral look when used in text sizes.

Chunk – Download

Chunk (Five) is an ultra-bold slab serif typeface that is reminiscent of old American Western woodcuts, broadsides, and newspaper headlines. Used mainly for display, the fat block lettering is unreserved yet refined for contemporary use.

Hefty (regular) – Download

This particular font called “Hefty Regular” was actually made as a copy-cat of the “Hellenic Wide” font. I’ve tried to do some research and figure out its origin but I didn’t have a lot of luck.

AW Conqueror Slab - Download

AW Conqueror Slab draws inspiration from geometrical slab serifs of the 1930s, of which Rockwell is a perfect example.. This slab serif font is part of the Conqueror free family of fonts designed by award-winning type designer, Jean François Porchez. The font family was inspired by the 60-70’s spirit.

Nilland – Download

This slab serif font is by Manfred Klein. Manfred’s fonts are free for private, charity use and for commercial use. The family consists of 6 weights, regular, bold, extra bold, black, small caps and small caps bold, making this typeface very useful as a corporate typeface.

Conqueror Didot Light – Download

Inspired by the interpretations of Didot that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s.

Gentium – Download

Designed for a Master of Arts in Typeface Design at the University of Reading, UK, to create a legible typeface supporting a wide range of foreign alphabets.

Sorts Mill Goudy – Download

A ‘revival’ of Goudy Oldstyle and Italic, with features among which are small capitals (in the roman only), oldstyle and lining figures, superscripts and subscripts, fractions, ligatures, class-based kerning, case-sensitive forms, capital spacing. There is support for many languages that use latin script.

Fontin – Download

The Fontin is designed to be used at small sizes. The color is darkish, the spacing loose and the x-height tall.

Vera Sans – Download

One of a set of freely-distributable fonts commissioned by the Gnome Foundation.

Excite – Download

Excite is a neo-grotesque typeface named after an x-height that’s as tall as you can get without compromising the distinction between upper and lower case, helping to make it extremely readable both in print and on screen. It is modern and spacious, has short ascenders and descenders, and an airiness augmented by using both horizontal and vertical endings of open characters like C, S and 3. Unusually for a neo-grotesque, Excite has a clean, contemporary, single storey lowercase A. Other distinctive features include a hexagonal dot/period, and the dog-leg tail of the Q. To avoid confusion between similar characters, Excite uses features like horizontal bars on the capital i and a curved tail on the lowercase L. The Excite family consists of four fonts: regular, bold, italic and bold italic.

Hattrick SC – Download

A kind of hybrid between Serif and Sans Serif. It also has a touch of deconstruction within the design, but still pretty straight and “correct”. Originally released through GarageFonts as a 5-weight family (2000).

Anonymous – Download

A TrueType version of Anonymous 9, a freeware fixed-width bitmap font developed by Susan Lesch and David Lamkins as an alternative to Monaco.

Aller – Download

Created in 2008 for the Danish School of Media and Journalism, sponsored by the publisher Aller, and made available under a free licence.

Junction – Download

Inspired by my favorite humanist sans serif typefaces, such as Meta, Myriad, and Scala, Junction is where the best qualities of serif and sans serif typefaces come together. It has the hand drawn and human qualities of a serif, and still retains the clarity and efficiencies of a sans serif typeface. It combines the best of both worlds.

Petit Latin – Download

“At the end of this phase you should have a fully functioning app ready to be downloaded from iTunes.”

A Typical iPhone App Development Timeline

Architecture & Planning – 2.5-3 Weeks: During this phase of the project all facets of the app are thought out. Beyond a simple idea of what the app needs to do and how it needs to look, what other resources are needed? Does the App need to connect to an outside database? Push or Pull content? The entire app is mapped out from start to finish. The more that can be done in the planning phase in terms of mapping out content and functionality will make the rest of the development process go much smoother. We estimate that it should take 2.5 to 3 weeks for this phase, though the larger, more complicated the app, the more time it will take obviously.
At the end of this phase, you should have a mapped out architecture of the app, an app map if you will, as well as wire frames for the app.

Design Phase – 3 Weeks: The design phase is where Comps are created to show how the app will look. Color schemes are implemented, comp images are inserted and place holder text is generally used at the start of this phase with it being replaced by the actual content either at the end of this phase or during development. We work with our clients to understand their branding message and carry that through the app. During the design phase you need to be careful as having too many people involved in the design process can slow down the app’s production, especially when you begin Design by Committee. This phase should take roughly three weeks, but like I said, can be slowed down if timely feedback is not received by the client.

At the end of the Design Phase you should have full design Comps which will be developed during the next phase.

Development Phase – 4-8 Weeks:
This part of the project has your designs being turned over to the developers so that they can properly code the application. The various pieces are hooked together including navigation, user interaction, database integration, web services and eCommerce platforms. Any and all functionality is built in to the app, all coding is performed and pages are properly linked. Development time can vary significantly based upon the complexity of the app.

At the end of the development phase you should have the first version of your fully working app.

Testing Phase – 1-1.5 Weeks:
The testing phase is one of the most important parts of the projects. Some clients want to cut down on the testing phase or eliminate it altogether to save time, we HIGHLY discourage doing that. The testing phase ensures that the app works properly, all databases are connected, there are no broken links in the app, and everything works as was designed. If an app is pushed through to deployment and does not work it will be caught by Apple and rejected. Even worse, if the app does sneak through Apple’s approval process and does not work, a few poor reviews can really hurt an apps chance of success in the App Store. During testing, we test on any and all devices that the App will run through simulators and live devices, including the iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4 and soon to be iPhone 4S.

At the end of the testing phase, everyone should be confident that the app works as expected and has the highest chance of success in passing through Apple’s approval process.

Deployment Phase – 6-14 Days:
This is the point where the app is submitted to Apple and awaits approval. While approval times have greatly improved since the App Store was first launched, we generally tell our customers to expect anywhere from 6 to 14 days to have their app approved. It is possible to try to expedite your approval, but with roughly 500 apps being submitted on a daily basis, we see this rarely happen.

At the end of this phase you should have a fully functioning app ready to be downloaded from iTunes.

Planning is the Key to Success
This outline is what we see for the typical app development. One should expect roughly 2.5 to 3 months from start to finish to develop an iPhone application. Some apps may require more time, while others may be able to be pushed through the process a little faster. We were recently able to complete an app in under a month, however a lot of the design was completed and there was excellent communication between us and the client.

Keeping open communication between project managers and the client has allowed us to keep on track with development time lines and deliver apps on time or early in most cases.

Here endeth the lesson.

My recent webinar with Smart Company, I outlined the basics for assessing your business, practices and processes you can reduce your carbon footprint and improve companies sustainability. With many greener alternatives to basic day-to-day aspects of business available, you’ll find that becoming a more sustainable company will also drive change in processes, reduce costs and increase profitability.

If you’d like to know more visit the webinar, else here’s my presentation screens in a PDF.

Before you get too excited, jump right in and make a critical error. There’s one thing you need to do, that most don’t bother with: Disk Permissions.

Its quick, easy and here’s how.

Mac OSX: How to Repair Disk Permissions

1. Log in to your computer with the administrative account. Open the hard drive, go into the “Applications” folder and then open the “Utilities” folder. Now launch the Disc Utility application.
2. Select your main hard drive. You’ll probably see two options–one is the manufacturer’s name of the disc and the other name is what you’ve called it. Choose the name of your hard drive.
3. Click on “Verify Disc Permissions” and the computer will perform a diagnostic test. After a few minutes, the problems with disk permissions will be reported in the Disc Utility window. Click on “Repair Disc Permissions” to fix them.
4. Insert your Mac OS X installation disk and restart your computer. Hold down the “C” key on your keyboard to boot from the disk rather than your computer’s hard drive. Cancel the OS installation and open Disc Utility.
5. Click on “Verify” to have Disc Utility check your computer’s hardware. Notice that this option is only available when the program is run from the CD.
   Note: You can only test the hardware of a computer that isn’t running the program locally.
6. Use Disc Utility to try and repair any hardware errors that it detects. Usually fixing the permissions will be enough to maintain your computer.
7. Head to the Apple Store!

Ultimately they invoke action by a user, but they also create and set tone, a mood to the aesthetics of any website design. If you are in need of some button inspiration, these examples will definitely stir up some create ideas. A little egotistical of me I know, but I couldn’t help but ad one of my own that I recently completed… enjoy.

1. We analyse fonts on billboards.
2. We get annoyed when a free Photoshop brush you download isn’t created using a vector based shape layer.
3. Its far more interesting studying the paisley pattern on your boyfriend/girlfriend’s shirt than listen to what he/she has to say.
4. We use keyboard shortcuts blindfolded, but you can’t but couldn’t tell you what keys we’ve just pressed.
5. The occasional bolt upright nightmares are “Software related” when working too much.
6. Meals are interruptions.
7. We’ve learned that not to bother using the word “final” in any file name when saving.
8. A clean keyboard is next to godliness.
9. You’ve intentionally given up trying to explain your projects to non-designers.
10. Appreciation for CMYK and RGB being a similar a Mars and Venus.
11. We organise our desktop with 90 degree precision.
12. When we heard that Adobe was acquiring Macromedia, it was like a party design orgasm.
13. We can tell you what font is being used on a restaurant menu.
14. We’ve most likely photoshopped out a watermark for a comp or mock-up.
15. We $pay for a fonts.
16. It pains us, but we have slaughtered a great design concept because the client thinks he/she knows best. (everyone thinks they are a designer)
17. We layer and label our files regardless to whether its part of the deal.
18. We can copy ragged concert ticket so we can always go see it again with your friends.
19. The Spinning wheel of death in MAC OSX has be fondly named ‘Terrance’.
20. We can bookmark a page while on a fun night out on the town, without you noticing.
21. We intentionally overbid a project because we can sniff out a bad client from a mile away.
22. Designers have a knack to spot a terribly designed restaurant menu.
23. Our amazingly huge font collection, enables us to slow down even the fast, RAM jammed computer.
24. If we had a penny for every mouse click, we would have been a trillionaire 3 years ago.

So the next time you decide we are rattling on about something digital you may not be interested in remember, we’re the reason you love your iPhone so much.

A couple of months back, I read an article by one of the original guys from Clear Left. Andy Budd first appeared on my radar a few years ago when fellow UX and UI designers and good friends Matt Hamm and Ben Tollady told me of the Brighton studio.

As such I’ve grown to appreciate Andy’s opinion, regularly check out Clearleft’s projects, read his blog, and generally stalk him on Twitter, Instagram and such.

The article in question outlined some interesting points surrounding the trends and practices in SEO and this was my response:

I have to say, I’m in agreement with Andy’s article and applaud his stones for speaking so openly in a room of SEO ‘Specialists’.

Like most industries, it takes merely 1 to taint the many. SEO has always been a dirty word in my mind. My company doesn’t offer SEO parse, more W3C Standard solutions. Creating an effective solution for a, lets say for arguments sake a HR Company, we of course then mention ‘Human Resource/HR’ search google for the most search listings keywords etc, then use these results to (but not specifically) influence heading tags, keyword listing, descriptions and titles etc within the site where appropriate.
We do not however try to cheat search engines by using black hat tactics, create numerous twitter accounts, facebook pages and mail-outs friending everyone and hitting the ‘like’ button all over the place, this is what we generally fear pure SEO companies do to ensure they get there absorbent amounts money.

I’m not saying this is what all SEO companies do, only from my experience this is all I’ve attained from their services. Businesses that employ them largely do so because they don’t understand what is being done, and so long as results are accomplished they are happy. The far to regular ‘out or sight, out of mind’ ethic.

In short, if clients are better educated from the beginning, in turn invest in the right digital business to come up with a solution, the end result will work for search results and ‘SEO’ well oiled creation will take care of itself in the rankings.

Hopefully most that read/hear Andy discuss this issue, the better we as a digital community educate our clients to help rid ourselves of the charlatans.

Here, here Mr Budd.

These wonderful images of Melbourne stand out even before you find our the twist – Misho ‘iPhonographer’ Baranovic captured all of these moments using his iPhone.

Recently part of the Australian iPhoneography Exhibition as part of the Head On photo festival and seen walking the street with InstaMelb / Instameet back in March.

Misho beautiful imagery is creating quite a following, not only in Australia’s premier blogging circuit but also popping up in printed form and on fellow iPhone street photographers blogs and Greg Schmigel’s newsletter.

New Melbourne: Mobile Street Photography

Opening: 6pm Friday June 17
Exhibition runs: June 17 to July 01
Where: Matt Irwin Gallery (Scott Alley off Flinders Lane)
For more information email: newmelbourne@gmail.com

This exhibition ladies and gentlemen, is a must.

It’s enjoyed one of the most successfully launches ever for an iPhone app and is adding 130 000 users a week. The incredible thing is that it’s not even eight months old. Here’s what you should know about this hot new app.

1. It was originally called Burbn. Kevin Systrom, founder, CEO and ex-Google employee, created an app called Burbn before Instagram (the company is still called Burbn Inc). Burbn let people share photos, comment on streams, post videos and check in with friends. But Systrom and co-founder, Mike Krieger, never launched it. They decided to simplify the application instead, because they both liked photography and were concerned that “another check-in app” wouldn’t be unique enough.
2. The founders met their investors in a bar. Hunch.com arranged a drinks event in San Francisco, and his is where Instagram’s founders first made contact with the two venture capitalist firms, Andreessen Horowitz and Baseline Ventures, that would became the initial investors in Burbn Inc. Their seed funding? A mere US$500 000.
3. Its server crashed on launch day. Instagram didn’t expect such a huge amount of international interest and the online media excitedly posted stories about the new app the day it launched. The server went down a few hours later. Systrom said he “had never felt so sick”, but then Jack Dorsey told him, “Compared to the beginning of Twitter, you guys are doing just fine.”
4. It reached 500 000 users in under a month. And it took only three months to hit the one million users mark (that’s faster than Facebook). There was no marketing, no massive investment – first-round funding was US$7-million, nowhere near Color’s US$41-million – just word-of-mouth and the simple premise of fast, simple photo-sharing that looked cool. As Systrom says, “You need to explain what you do in 30 seconds or less because people move on to the next shiny object.”
5. Over 300 000 photos are uploaded every day. That’s far more than the 20 000 tweets a day Twitter had after its first six months. This fast-paced growth is not dropping off yet either. Not bad for a pair of 2006 Stanford graduates.
6. It’s available in 10 languages. One of the great advantages of Instagram as a kind of ‘photographic Twitter’ is that there is no language barrier – a Russian artist can follow a Japanese banker via the images he shares (the earthquake in Japan was extensively shared on Instagram). That was always one of the goals for Systrom and Krieger. They didn’t think cross-platform as much as across continents, bearing the international market in mind from the beginning.
7. It’s coming soon to Android. When exactly this will be announced is not yet clear, but the founders have said from the start that Instagram would eventually be available on Android phones and they are working on developing this.
8. You can create an RSS feed. Instagram allows you to create an RSS feed using hashtags – http://instagr.am/tags/[hashtag name]/feed/recent.rss. Brands have already started doing this in a variety of creative ways. Unfortunately there are no user RSS feeds (yet), so if you want everyone reading your blog or website to also see your Instagram shots, you’ll have to hashtag each image.
9. It’s based at the old Twitter offices. The Instagram team were originally working out of Dogpatch Labs, but soon needed their own space. When these historic offices in San Francisco’s SoMa area became available, they jumped at the chance to move in.
10. Profile statistics are available on Statigram. You can often judge the popularity of an app by how quickly it gives rise to analytical tools. Statigram provides detailed graphs and figures for your Instagram account. It gives monthly overviews and allows you to see which of your photos are most popular (based on comments and likes), which followers most frequently engage with you, and your most frequently used filters.
11. Printing your images on Printstagr.am. This is pretty damn awesome if I do say so myself. This website uses the Instagr.am API to access all the photos you have taken, allows you to pick and choose which photos you want to use (let’s face it, we all taken some pretty naff images) and print them out in a nice grid poster.

The greatest ideas are usually the simple ones has been proven yet again (firstly by dudes at Twitter) by Instagram. Numerous other photographic apps could have implemented the features it offers years ago (Flickr really missed a trick), but it took two guys going out on their own to see what the market really wanted and to be brave enough to ditch their original concept.