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We’re very proud of our design capabilities here at dynamIt. We started mainly as a dev house, but quickly realized the value in having rock star designers on staff. All of the sites we design are custom and the critical aesthetic eye is invaluable in development of User Interfaces for our systems.

Our lead designer - Phil Franks - is multi-talented. He continually puts out stunning designs, wowing not only clients but everyone here in the office with his innovation and vision. In the last few months, he put one of his favorite talents (logo design) to use and saw some pretty spectacular results.

DataPortability is an organization that champions the “idea that individuals should have control over their data by determining who can use it and how it can be used.” The concept is important on the internet today as more and more information is stored and available on the web. All of the major players including Microsoft, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc. are on board and the technical best practices being developed will no doubt be a big part of standards in web for a long time.

Enter problem - DataPortability finds out that their logo happens to look a lot like the Fedora logo (read more about this here). Instead of dropping loads of cash and hiring some big firm to design a new logo [although they coulda shoulda come to dynamIt ] DP engaged in a concept called crowdsourcing and opened up a global contest for new a new logo. They utilized Flickr as the collection/viewing mechanism and things really took off. The contest was PR’d by popular blog/site TechCrunch . Nearly 500 submissions came in from around the world. The submission period was closed and the logos were reviewed by panel of judges that have these nice little companies in their titles:

* Malthe Sigurdsson, Brand director at Skype
* Fred Oliveira, Webreakstuff.com
* Tom Coates, Yahoo
* Ashley Hall, Yahoo
* Fiona McDougall, OneWorld Communications
* Michael Pick, Smashcut Media

Long story short - Phil’s design made the short list/final cut of 15 from the nearly 500 original submissions. Not too shabby huh? See Phil’s logo right below >>

The final phase was a public vote. While Phil’s logo wasn’t chosen in the end (and believe me we are not fans of the winner), we think that it is a tribute to his incredible talent that one of his concepts was selected as one of the top 15 (actually it was ranked #2 by the judges before the public got their hands on things). *Note: Strike 2 against DataPortability today as a French company has sent a second cease and desist letter claiming that the new logo is infringing on theirs. We’ll see how that turns out.

We look at the entire situation as a great opportunity to showcase the skills of a member of the dynamIt team. Also, I point out that this is another example of the go-get-’em attitude and initiative that we all take: not only are we working hard on client charges, but we pursue our passions individually as well.

one.

:: Nick ::

Most days you will find us in the office, sleeves rolled up, hunched over our desks, designing sweetness or coding away. We greatly enjoy the work that we do from day to day, but every now and then it is good to escape the typical work day and, well, just have fun. Last Thursday was one of those days. When the guys showed up in the morning we decided we were going to drop everything, drive down to Cincinnati, and catch the 12:35pm Reds game.

There is nothing quite like enjoying a hot dog and cold beer at the ballpark on a nice afternoon. On a personal level, the trip down to Cincinnati as well as the ballpark setting call to mind only the best of memories. We arrived in Cincinnati to find it sunny and about 75 degrees, a perfect day for baseball. We purchased tickets and made our way to the bleacher seats above the left field wall. Most of the game’s action took place in the first two innings as Houston jumped out to 3-1 lead only to find it tied after Reds’ at-bat in the second. In the fifth, the Astros added two more runs. The Reds would try to catch up, but never bring it any closer. The game ended with the score 5-3 in favor of the Astros.

Although the Reds could not pull it out, we certainly enjoyed the trip. After the game, it was back to Columbus to resume work as usual at dynamIt.

Every web developer should be well aware that if your e-mail address appears on your website in text, you should expect an increase in spam. To thwart spammers you will often see e-mail addresses placed in images to be displayed on the web. I used to do it this way myself, but recently I have shifted to a method that is much easier implement and should work just as well.

The solution: use JavaScript. By using a programming language like JavaScript to build a string and display it, evil spamming robots can scrub my site all they’d like and never find my e-mail address in the code.

<a href=”javascript:location.href = ‘ma’ + ‘i’ + ‘lto:b’ + ‘ob’ + ‘b’ + ‘y@’ + ‘d’ + ‘y’ + ‘na’ + ‘mi’ + ‘t.u’ + ’s’;”><script type=”text/javascript”>document.write(’b’ + ‘ob’ + ‘b’ + ‘y&’ + ‘#’ + ‘64;d’ + ‘y’ + ‘na’ + ‘mi’ + ‘t.u’ + ’s’);</script></a>

I have been shuffling this idea around my head for a while and even managed to convince some of the guys around the office that I, in fact, may have something here. Computer displays today are following the widescreen trend, you see less and less 4:3 aspect ratio and see more and more of 16:9. This is great for movie watching, but let’s be honest how often do you sit in front of your computer screen and watch an entire movie? This is why I am introducing the concept of “tallscreen,” that is, an aspect ratio of 9:16. It can be easily achieved by taking that existing widescreen LCD and flipping it on its side (then tweaking your display settings ever so slightly).

Personally, my everyday use of the computer consists of word processing, Internet browsing, e-mail/instant messaging, and listening to music, all of which are enhanced or unchanged by tallscreen. Websites are constructed to have only a vertical scrollbar; word processing is bounded by the width of a page, but not by the number of pages. All of this computer content is arranged vertically, so should it not make more sense if our screens were to accommodate more vertical space? Tallscreen does just that. Plus, with more advanced graphics card outputting higher screen resolutions, you are not giving up that much horizontal space. A very standard screen resolution is 1024×768, nearly all websites are designed for users of this resolution. My new, widescreen, laptop outputs at 1440×900. By switching to tallscreen, I am only 124 pixels off of this standard width, but I am nearly doubling its height.

Check out the screenshots below. Notice all of the dead space on the sides of when in widescreen mode. This dead space becomes usable when we convert to tallscreen.

Next time you setup an new LCD display, think tall.

Not much to say here. If you’re reading this you’ve already experienced the new face of dynamIt. We’ve struggled for over a year to come up with something appropriate in terms of aesthetic, organization and in the end… what exactly we wanted to say. We’ve been close a few times to taking a site to the web only to back off at the last moment and go in a different direction. We believe that this site is much more representative of who dynamIt is, who we’ve become, and where we have taken the firm (recently - London, Jordan, San Diego, Vegas). Take some time to explore the site. Let us know if you think we’ve made omissions or need additions. Thanks to all of our current clients. Looking forward to everything to come.

one.

:: Nick ::