Nonimage Blog

For Video Friday this week comes a tale of the constant, epic battle between sales and tech support. As the original site says,

Sales Guy vs. Web Dude! A mashup of true and mostly-true stories from IT hell. If you’ve ever called tech support and wondered what the hell they are doing down there… well, this should answer some questions for you.

Watch it at The Website Is Down.

(via Relative Sanity)

Firefox 3 was released into the wild last week, and it has some really great improvements. However, the improvement I was most interested in was the new CSS support for kerning and ligatures in typography. Finally, better typography for the web. It seems to work pretty well, too. Hopefully Safari and Opera will catch up on these features too (I won’t hold my breath for Internet Explorer support).

OpenType has some great examples.

If you want to enable kerning and ligatures for browsers which support it (currently just FF3), here’s the syntax:

text-rendering: auto;
Default. Gecko (Firefox’s rendering engine) will make educated guesses about when to optimize for speed, legibility, and geometric precision while drawing text

text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;
Disables kerning and ligatures.

text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
Enables kerning and ligatures.

text-rendering: geometricPrecision;
Enables kerning.

I haven’t had nearly as much time as I would have liked lately to write here. This has been down to a variety of reasons, but work has been the biggest obstacle. As well as travelling the length and breadth of the UK to work directly with clients, I have just a lot on lately. So I thought I might introduce some of the finished projects I have been working on of late.

Edgar Prais (print, web, identity)

Eaglestone Landscape Design (print, web, identity)

Dead By Dawn film festival (print)

Hopefully I will be able to unveil a couple of larger projects I have been working on in the coming weeks, as they are completed and signed off.

As always, if you would like to discuss a forthcoming print, design or identity project, please gte in touch using the form on the right.

For a while now I have been thinking about how to better serve my clients when it comes to project management. One of the things I wanted to improve was my communication via Basecamp, my project management app of choice. The first thing I thought of was that when I start a new project with a new client, they get a quick explanation of Basecamp at our initial meeting, and then an email with their username and password and a link to the login page. I wanted to personalise the experience much more, to make the client feel at ease with the app, and to encourage them to use it. A quick search found that many people were already doing this, with varying degrees of intricacy.

I wanted something personal, yet professional. I also realised that the reason I use Basecamp is its simplicity. Even my mum could use it. Therefore, I decided not to explain how each feature worked, but rather encourage them to play around and get a feel for it themselves. Hopefully this makes clients jump right in, rather than seeing a lengthy explanation and immediately putting it in the ‘to-do later’ pile which may never get done.

From now on, new clients will find a single message posted in Basecamp when they first log in, called ‘Welcome (client)’.

I thought I would post my welcome message here, and encourage any suggestions that might improve it, and therefore improve the client experience. Feel free to use it for your welcome message in your own Basecamp account (mine is influenced by those linked above, after all).

Hi (client)

Welcome to the Nonimage Client Area (Basecamp).

We’ll use it to keep all our notes, files, drafts, feedback and to-do lists for your project in one place. This allows us to keep all aspects of your project organised, focussed and archived, accessible from any computer with an internet connection, by all involved. It will keep everyone up to date with progress on the project.

For now, feel free to have a look around and post a comment if you like. The Client Area is very simple to use, so just start using it in the way you think it should be used. Whenever you have some thoughts about the project, or something you’d like me to take a look at, just upload it here and I’ll comment as soon as I can. You can edit your contact information, and upload you photo (you don’t have to, it’s just a bit of fun and makes the project more personal for everyone). If you need more assistance, please get in touch and I can talk you through the features.

The Overview tab will show you a page of all the latest activity, from uploaded files to messages and comments, to To-Do items (new and completed).

As always, you can reach me on 0131 467 2616 if you need anything else.

I am looking forward to working with you on this project.

Andy Lobban

Please leave a comment if you have any thoughts on this process.