We were recently introduced to PA State Representative Jesse White - who (along with a few colleagues in Harrisburg) were looking for way to gather voter input on the always complicated task of balancing the state budget.

In less than a week yourPAbudget.com was conceived, designed, programmed and launched. Check it out. And add your voice. Democracy FTW!

We have recently launched an effort to clean up our home neighborhood of Aspinwall - one logo at a time. The first two set to hit the streets in the next few weeks are for The Divinity Salon and Paul M. Bernstein & Associates. 

If you are in Aspinwall - and need a new logo - we invite you to Join the Revolution!

One of the common pitfalls of working in an "Online" environment is being around all of the distractions that you can happen upon. The Internet is a endless playground trying to grab your attention. That is one of the reasons we as a company exist. Clients want websites that grab the attention of their audience.

I spend lots of time using websites that take in the best parts of the internet, and display it all at once. Digg is one of my favorites. If something on Youtube, Flickr, Twitter, or any of the popular websites on the internet is worth of my attention, Digg usually gets it. And it comes with great commentary as well. Comments made on the site can be dugg as well, and the best ones make it to the top of the heap.

One of our more recent clients, Golf Pro Girls, has been getting upgrades to it's website via 400lb the past two weeks. As part of our services, we can look at your site, see what is working, and what could be improved. We take inspiration from all of the diversions we find ourselves and bring the best parts of it back to our clients. For example, the font color choice in the custom discussion boards that we built was low in contrast compared to the background. We changed it to a color that made the whole thing easier to read, and thus attracting more use.

When we launched the website, our client needed a way to view  and update customer data in a fast and easy way. We presented the data in a table format, and for the time being, it was great. But revisiting it, we have seen some great examples of data display, went back, and reworked the display from the ground up. Now viewing customer data is faster than ever.

Staying on Track

This old walkway is from the abandoned railroad bridge that dominates out part of Aspinwall. It has been out of use for a number of years, however the old structure above still remains largely intact.

400lb.basketball from nathan kress on Vimeo.

So, it finally showed up today in our mailbox. Published in Berlin, June of 1928, Die Neue Typographie by Jan Tschichold is commanding my undivided attention. Clean. Smart. Functional. Legible. Logical. Totally deprived of personality and ornament. 

Grids of course can help us all become better designers and thinkers alike. It keeps us defined, keeps us aligned and offers us plenty of unique layouts. When staring at a blank white computer screen, a grid can be a huge sigh of relief. For a lot of us it helps us begin to design or fine tune a work already in progress. When done right, a grid looks like these four examples from the masters like Herbert Bayer, El Lissitzky,Joseph Muller-Brockmann and Jan Tschichold. 

Sometimes however, a grid can be come extremely boring and start to look very much the same time after time. Sometimes their is a need for a more organic, less structured design approach.

Either way, it is time now to begin the first chapter of Die Neue Typographie.