The Knowledge

Fluid Images

TechDept — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:06:02 +0000

I’ve always hated publishing. I don’t mean the industry, but the act. Hitting “print,” sending an email, pressing that “Publish” button on the CMS: at some point, you relinquish your ability to smooth down some of the sharper edges, fill in the holes of your argument, and just generally fix whatever’s broken. At some point, you just accept what’s on the page, tousle its hair a bit, and send it off into the world at large to be judged, poked, and prodded. But that doesn’t mean you stop thinking about the article, what you could’ve done differently, and what you wished you’d included.

To wit:

One of the really solid criticisms lobbied against my Fluid Grids article for ALA was that all of my examples were pretty text-heavy. As a result, they all more or less ignored the issue I raised at the end of the essay: that working with non-fixed layouts can be more difficult once you introduce fixed-width elements into them. By default, an image element that’s sized at, say, 500px doesn’t exactly play nicely with an container that can be as large as 800px, but as small as 100px. What’s a designer to do?

By Ethan Marcotte, unstoppablerobotninja.com

What next in Digital?

TechDept — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:17:26 +0000

What do experts from 11 companies think will be the next big thing(s) in digital? Read and listen to what they have to say in essays and short films (via the link below).

So, sexy digital is going all serious and proper. Once flirty and out there for anyone’s taking, digital is going around telling everyone that, nowadays, it’s more like data, don’t you know.
Digital: hot, spunky, appealing to young, forward-thinking, creative types. Data: crunchingly boring, appealing to geeks (but not sexy geeks). So what’s going on? Some of the answers can be found in the write-up (page 4) of the roundtable discussion hosted for the writers of the essays that follow, and in the collection of essays themselves.

By Suzanne Bidlake, June 28th 2010

50 Useful Tools and Resources For Web Designers

TechDept — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:59:20 +0000

50 useful tools and time-savers for web designers and developers.

Among other things, you will find recently released tools, useful reference sheets, articles and further resources. Such posts are prepared over months, each containing resources found, reviewed or bookmarked by the Smashing Editorial Team.

Visit the site

By Vitaly Friedman, 26 July 2010

Movie Mode app – Despicable Me

TechDept — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 11:10:32 +0000

Turn on Best Buy Movie Mode at the beginning of the movie to translate every hilarious word the Minions are saying during the 3D end credits of Despicable Me, and unlock even more exclusive content after the show. It’s the exciting new mobile app that syncs with the movie screen to give you a one-of-a-kind experience. Check out the TV spot.

By bestbuymoviemode

A teens-eye view of social media

TechDept — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:46:57 +0000

Seventeen year-old Becca Taylor, who spent her work experience
week with us, gives a personal perspective of social networking,
and how it affects her world.

The use of social media by teens has increased rapidly throughout the last 6 years. But why is social media the new hot topic?

Which Social Media sites?

For me, Facebook is the main site I tend to use, as well as my friends.

I think different social media sites are aimed at different age groups; Bebo aiming at a younger audience, as Bebo is a lot easier to use, while Twitter and Facebook are aimed at an older audience as the layout is much more sophisticated.

YouTube has a very high percentage of users, this website is well known around the world, it is easy to use and you can watch pretty much anything you want to.

I don’t really tend to use YouTube a lot, it isn’t something I’m interested in, I think a person’s personality influences the amount of time spent on YouTube as some people don’t enjoy watching pointless video clips.

Getting connected

Undoubtedly the use of mobile phones and computers is essential to today’s teenager, for me, the use of my mobile phone is important, teenagers want to socialise every day and having a mobile phone allows you to do this, whether you’re on the internet or simply just text messaging.

Really the use of text messaging is no longer needed, unless the person you’re contacting isn’t online.

These social sites are free to communicate; therefore it makes more sense to use these websites instead of spending money on credit to text or call.

Not only is it cheaper, but you know your friend is available to talk to if they are online, whereas with a mobile phone, you don’t, their phone could be switched off, have no signal or not with them.

Without communication each day with the people I enjoy talking to, would for me, be a big deal, and I’m sure most teenagers would agree.

People who don’t have Facebook may feel left out and excluded, for young teens, Facebook is a big conversation starter. But are people who haven’t got Facebook more secure than people who have? Is Facebook just a way of making people feel involved?

Ads and celebs

There is a lot of advertisement used on these social websites, for example on twitter, there are banners, encouraging people to ‘stalk’ celebrities.

However Facebook is more self-involved, there is only a small amount of advertising on each page, mainly advertising games for your own entertainment or promoting the use of Facebook on mobile phones. These adverts are shown on the right side of your profile, out of the way from your own information.

As a teenager myself, I believe this is a disadvantage for the companies that are being advertised, as people don’t pay much attention to them, they are small and insignificant.

Bebo, a page aimed at a younger age group, has a strange variety of adverts, such as ‘Capital One credit cards’ and ‘ cheap breakdown cover’, obviously this advert is not aimed at a young audience so children using the Bebo site will pay no attention.

MySpace is again, very involved in celebrities, most actors, actress’s, bands, solo artists and authors have their own MySpace page.

Before logging on to your MySpace this is obvious as there are a lot of banners and boxes advertising celebrity pages. I believe that these are noticed as they are large, bold and striking – this catches the viewer’s eye and encourages them to read the advertisement.

For these websites to advertise celebrities so much isn’t necessarily good, some people don’t enjoy hearing about celebrities, they don’t want to hear what colour their hair is that day, what they are shopping for or what time they sat down for dinner last night.

I believe this is why people prefer Facebook. Facebook lets you choose if you want to read about celebrities, you don’t get pointless celebrity trash shoved in your face.

Are social networks taking over?

In recent times there has been a small movement against the excessive use of social networks. Has social networking replaced traditional media? Do people log on to their Facebook page instead of flicking through channels on their TV? I really believe this is true, although Facebook advertises television programmes, people still tend to spend their time chatting to friends on the internet.

For me, I believe this is a disadvantage, the useful information shown on television, or in magazines, or in books are no longer noticed by teens, therefore they are jeopardising the opportunity to develop their intelligence and acquire knowledge.

Fears, parents and schools

People are starting to question how right it is to share intimate and private events with such a large number of individuals, many of them strangers.

Cyber bulling has also become a big issue; it can cause depression, self-harm and even suicide, this could be because of offensive websites made about an innocent person, mean comments passed on to an innocent person, posing as someone else or even posting insulting or threatening things on the web.

However, all this can be stopped, there is a lot of help and support to prevent cyber bulling but I believe that social media websites should be a lot more aware of cyber bullying, as they themselves don’t seem to do much to prevent it.

Some parents are worried about their child on the internet, so some have created their own profiles to check up on their children whenever they feel worried. But is this okay? Do children want their parents looking into their business? Do the parents want their children looking in to their business? I know I wouldn’t.

Schools also tend to have a problem with social networks, as they believe it distracts students from doing their work, but some schools believe that it enhances the education of students. As many student use their web pages to discuss work. For example, they could be finding out about missed work, finding out homework information or simply just discussing facts.

Global, local

Social networking is everywhere, but the popularity of sites varies from country to country. It is a global phenomenon and you can connect globally.

But surprisingly teens don’t. This may be because it is seen as dangerous to talk to people you don’t know. Most people from a young age are told not to talk to stranger.

The next big thing

Overall, it is obvious that social networking is becoming more and more popular, whether you like it or you don’t. I believe that the use of social websites could be educating depending on how you use it.
Advertisement on pages is obviously effective but I do think they should be relevant for each site.
I also believe that the use of these websites varies because of the different personalities teens have.
Social networking is fun and entertaining, not only that, it helps you to organise and share your interests.
From my perspective, it looks like social networking is the next big thing.

By Becca Taylor, July 2010

Open Innovators

TechDept — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:21:41 +0000

Open innovation is a new paradigm in which company boundaries are crossed, and collaboration and external inputs are key. In this approach, companies use both internal and external knowledge to fuel innovation, and both internal and external paths to commercialise new products and business models. Within this context, Open Innovators wants to bring new insights and best practices on open innovation, crowdsourcing, and co-creation - for business leaders as well as entrepreneurs.

Examples:

Innocentive - open innovation problem solving
TekScout - crowd sourcing R&D solutions
IdeaConnection – idea marketplace and problem solving
Yet2.com – IP market place
PRESANS (beta) - connect and solve R&D problems
Hypios - online problem solving
Innoget - research intermediary platform
One Billion Minds - online (social) challenges
NineSigma - technology problem solving

Open Innovators, 2010.

Stickybits

TechDept — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:09:32 +0000

Attach photos, videos, music, text, pdf’s, zip’s ect, to and barcode.

When someone scans it, they’ll see what you and everyone else attached to it.
Get notified when a barcode is scanned, has new attachments or even changes location!
Works with any barcode!

By Stickybits, 2010

10 Things CEOs Need to Know About Design

TechDept — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:12:01 +0000

10 Things CEOs Need to Know About Design

Visit site

10 Beautiful Social Media Infographics

TechDept — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:59:48 +0000

Infographics help communicate information in a digestible manner as they creatively present data in an understandable and engaging format. With social media growing at an ever increasing pace, there is now a wealth of data about how people interacting with one another on the web. Naturally, infographics have proven an excellent aid in expressing high volumes of social web information in a clear, visually appealing manner.

By Grace Smith, July 1 2010

7 FBML examples to rock your Facebook fan page.

TechDept — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:27:39 +0000

Facebook markup language or FBML for short is used in a variety of places within the social network. Anyone who has written any Facebook applications will already be pretty familiar with its tags, and will probably have used it to write data to walls, or share postings with others programmatically. If however you haven’t yet dipped your toe in the water of the Facebook API, or indeed haven’t actually needed to – there are some snippets of FBML which prove to be mighty useful when creating custom Facebook Fan Pages, and can easily and quickly out of the box be used with the FBML widget, which adds an extra much needed layer of customisation to an existing Facebook fan page. The static FBML widget can be added multiple times, and in multiple places (sidebar and tabs) to facilitate this. Once you’ve added it to your page, simply go to “edit page”, then under Applications click “edit” under Static FBML. This will give you the options you need to paste in your code.

By Web Distortion, March 22 2010