Everyone at TheFrameworks would like to congratulate our Senior Partner Lawrence James and our Partner and Researcher Audrey on their wedding in Cancun on 24 November. “They make a great team in our US office in Detroit, and I am sure they’ll be a great team in life,” said MD Terry Brissenden.
Our latest event from the ‘in just 60 minutes’ series featured guest speaker Greg Dyke discussing ‘Our failing democracy – will the coalition last long enough to save it?’ The video above includes footage from this successful event.
In his four years as Director-General of the BBC, Greg Dyke started four new digital television channels, five new digital radio channels, opened two new BBC regions, launched the BBC’s interactive television services and helped create Freeview. Greg reversed the trend at the BBC, which took employees away from making programmes and made them into managers. In doing so he reduced administration costs dramatically from 24% of total income to 15%. In 2005 he became chairman of HIT and in 2006 he became chairman of Brentford Football Club.
TheFrameworks/Detroit has moved offices to:
TheFrameworks/Detroit
Suite 1000
755 W Big Beaver Road
Troy, MI 48084-4900
USA
We visited the Detroit Jazz Fest in September and what a great event, it was smoking hot.
The wailing Mambo Legends Orchestra had the audience dancing in the aisles on the Sunday night, deftly connecting the dots between Afro-Cuban popular music and bebop. The slick arrangements, strong vocals, gutsy percussion, shiny brass and reed sections made for a joyous noise – dig those screaming trumpets!
What a great way to end my summer… the jazz fest, in my opinion, was amazing! Stellar Music performances, awesome fireworks, we all had the best time. Can’t wait until next year. It put many smiles on the people of Detroit and the surrounding areas.
Yes, Detroit has a strong culture!
Increasingly principals that have long been the bread and butter of print design are being applied to Web design.
For some time now fonts other than Arial, Times New Roman and Verdana have been able to be used on the Web thanks to technologies such as sIFR and cufón (which we use for the primary navigation and Twitter feed at the top of this site), and now grids are increasingly being used to help structure Web pages.
For centuries grids have been the bread and butter of graphic designers and typographers throughout the world:
“The use of the grid as an ordering system is the expression of a certain mental attitude in as much as it shows that the designer conceives his work in terms that are constructive and oriented to the future… By arranging the surfaces and spaces in the form of a grid the designer is favourably placed to dispose his texts, photographs and diagrams in conformity with objective and functional criteria.”
— Josef Müller-Brockmann, Grid systems in graphic design
It may be because more print designers are becoming or influencing web designers, or simply that web designers have finally had enough of unstructured content and ad-hoc design elements that are increasingly present throughout today’s Web.
An increasing amount of resourses are becoming available for Web designers keen to indulge in the practice of using grid systems. A great place to start is at The Grid System, a resource in grid systems from downloadable grid templates to inspirational sites. Another is 960 Grid System which advocates the use of the popular 960 grid system (which we base most of our web designs on, see image above). 960 Gridder (pictured above) is a JavaScript website overlay tool that helps designers and developers check if a website falls within the grid and is great for checking for any inconsistencies in page layouts.
From my own experience, designing Web pages to a structured 960 grid certainly helps in organising and presenting information clearly and consistently. It also aids accessibility which is becoming increasingly important amid the frenzy of new Web developments that are appearing. HTML5 promises to standardise much of this new technology and together with good design practices, the World Wide Web can continue to grow in an orderly and visually pleasing manner, something that Müller-Brockmann would be proud of.
