bv02 Creative Digest: Issue 1

Vol: 001 | Issue: 001

The bv02 creative digest is a compilation of thoughts, links, musings, and inspiration that has caught the eye of our creative team over the past week. A combined effort from Matt Davidson (New Media), Paul Wright (User Experience), Matt Ernst and Daniel Bianchi (Creative)

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bv02 project sneak peek

Our latest project in the design shop is a site for Gilmore Marketing. Lots of interaction, bright colours, bold fonts, parallax scrolling and a single page layered approach to content makes this a really fun project to work on.

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Industry news of the week

Happy Cog announces that after 5 years, they are redesigning their site by pulling their people off projects and going through the same procedure they go through with clients. The difference is that they are doing it all in a week and live tweeting the progress and photos. Follow #siteweek on Twitter and check out the kick-off post.

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UX news this week

Check out Mobile Web Best Practices for articles on strategy, user experience, visual design and development for mobile web experiences. Their resource list is particularly impressive.

Mark Boulton has made waves this week by challenging our traditional notions of “content first” saying that he’s, “Not so sure about this binary view of ‘content before design’ process. Almost every newspaper in the world is mostly a templated system. A system with design opportunities, but it’s not designed around the words. The words come later. The structure of the words come first.” Check out Boulton’s post “Structure First, Content Always”.

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Illustration of the week

The image of this week comes from Paris. This amazing image manipulation by Jean Yves Lemoigne makes you feel thirsty by only looking at it. Excellent execution of the melting effect and an impressive work with colour!

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Photo of the week

This photo of people skating on the canals of Amsterdam demonstrates how the cold weather had impacted some of Europe. Many boats docked along the sides of the canal have even been frozen into ice. Check out the other incredible photos in the collection.

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Video of the week

Inspriation of the week goes to alternative rock band, OK GO. Their latest video, which premiered during the SuperBowl, continues the trend of wacky, over-the-top, rube goldbergesque music videos. This video is actually a great case for corporate sponsorship as I feel the Chevy influence is subtle and doesnt take away from the overall video.

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Web-font picks of the week

Open Sans by Steve Matteson
I have used this font in a few projects already and it holds up remarkably well at different sizes and weights. Google fonts can be a hit or miss sometimes but this font has very clean lines and shapes within the lettering, in particular the ‘Q’ which is quite nice. Also, it is available for free through Google web fonts.

Urbana by Colombian designer César Puertas
Urbana is a font inspired by the city Bogota. You can just imagine the city that would inspire this type of lettering. Not a typical font you would use for a corporate site but has some great personality. Pairing it with the webkit CSS properties {background-clip:text} or {mask-image} could produce some amazing typography.  Available through TypeKit.

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Interesting website of the week

Websites From Hell is a great collection of the worlds worst websites

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