Website Design West Midlands

We recently completed a logo project for Crystal Safety Training. Their client base is a mix of medium to large private companies, plus some public organisations. We required a friendly but not too informal typeface that would not look too dangerous! The theme of safety wouldn’t be well advertised by some of the most modern curvey Sans typefaces, but we also didn’t want to go with something that has become too generic, like FF Meta. Read some more…

This is a first attempt at bringing some illustrator goodness to anyone wanting to see how some of those groovy web 2.0 icons are created. I’ve not spent much time creating tutorials in the past, and this one assumes you already have a basic grasp of how to draw shapes and apply colours and gradient fills in Illustrator so it doesn’t show the construction in agonising detail. It does, however, offer the full original Illustrator CS3 file here for download so you can take it apart and see how things were done. Read some more…

Just a quick post, to help any people who are trying to move their domains away from 1and1 internet. I have just had to do this again for one of my clients, and each time I have to dig up the information from google, so thought this time I would post the procedure here so other people might find it more easily. Read some more…

My clients will know that the last few months saw us take the big step to move away from our existing provider, which was based on shared hosting, to a new provider where we now run Virtual Private Servers and Dedicated servers.

Part of the fun of this is that you need to pay more attention to the management of the servers themselves as, unlike shared hosting, you are more in control of the daily housekeeping. Luckily, Linux gives us ample tools to run all of the automated tasks that we need to run in order to keep things ship shape. Read some more…

This review of Apex New Font from Village Type is our first blog post, so welcome if you haven’t been here before! I first came across Apex New from Village Type when I saw an NHS smoking prevention poster. I thought the typeface looked great, and worked well as a no-nonsense modern sans typeface which, like Meta from Erik Spiekermann, could be used in a broad range of corporate applications. I had to ask the guys on Typophile to help identify a scrap of the typeface I had managed to scan and post on the forums there, and thankfully someone helped me out. Read some more…