Paul Winter is a beauty photographer who creates exceptional still and moving images. Aespec had the challenge of creating a site that was engaging (thanks to JQuery) for visitors and prospective clients, able to run on both PCs and the iPhone (note the lack of Flash) and easy for the client to manage content (thanks to some WordPress magic).

Aespec where very pleased when asked to design a T-Shirt for Brighton based band My Device. Went down the robot route by accident, not sure how that happened or what influenced us?

Looks like comedians rather like Aespec. We recently built the new website for comedian Jen Brister, the brief was simple yet concise “I’d like to have something strong and bold, not frilly”. I feel that we hit the nail on the head as the first set of designs received glowing feedback “I really like this! It’s great and it’s really me”.

Inside Out Media are a consultancy firm that offers one on one career advice and direction for those within broadcasting, production, advertising, digital and related industries. The site, like many of ours, uses WordPress as a CMS and all the animation is handled by our favourite JavaScript library JQuery.

Our funniest client Zoe Lyons returns to the Edinburgh festival for the third year in a row. This year’s show “Miss Machismo” is a brand new hour of punchy comedy that explores amongst other things, arming the elderly and human soup. To coincide with Zoe’s new Edinburgh show, we have also given her site a bit of a spring clean.

Colour Contrast Checker

Colour Contrast Checker is a fantastic online tool that allows to specify a foreground and a background colour and determine if they provide enough of a contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen. Though it doesn’t automatically check you’re Photoshop or Fireworks visuals it does give you some fighting chance when having to design WCAG 2.0 contrast compliant sites.

Colour Oracle

Colour Oracle is a free tool that simulates deuteranopia, protanopia and tritanopia. By using a system-wide menu you can quickly simulate what colourblind people see. Also, as this is a system-wide tool it doesn’t matter what application you use for your designs.

The new version of the site now uses WordPress to manage all of the content and not just the blog. Seeing as we use WordPress on the majority of our projects now we thought it be best that we practice what we preach.

Flash intros

The glee visitors must feel when they arrive at a site only to be presented with a gauge saying ‘1% loaded’. At this point you have no idea what this 1% is, so you wait patiently. At 85% the anticipation is almost too much and you wish that your dual-bonded ISDN dial-up was just that bit faster. Then it happens. The screen flashes, some music starts (which you promptly turn off, if there is that option), some words swoosh around, then a logo fades in. What!? That’s it? Yes, that’s it.

Pop ups

Sounds obvious we know but for a while us designers thought it would be great to have all sorts of content popping out in to new windows just for the hell of it. Worst still, you visit a site and the second thing you’re presented with (when the onload kicks in) is an obnoxious pop up balbbing on about the latest offer, deal or way to leech your email address. Thanks to pop-up blockers this trend is well and truly over.

Window Resizing

Now, I would imagine that most visitors to a site would be pretty annoyed if it re-sized your browser window. Just because the designer thinks that their site looks better full screen, with no address bar or tool bar doesn’t mean we do.

Does it have to be legible?

One thing that many designers forgot is that people have to read the content of a website, so the last thing a visitor wants to be presented with is a page full of 7pt pixel fonts. To add insult to injury many of them considered a low contrast between body copy and background to be the height of sophistication. To summarise, illegible copy was, at one point, “in”.

The sound of websites

Being subjected to audio pollution is no fun, be it the “boom boom boom” blaring out of a 17 year old’s tricked out Peugot 206 or the muffled sound of a neighbours party that you weren’t invited to. Websites with unnecessary sounds are just as, if not more annoying.