I often browse the Internet on a daily basis, whether it’s to check out the latest cool gadgets or the best office pranks! But now, the Internet seems to be swamped with billions of websites, making it increasingly harder to find the right information. So, with an overwhelming number of different resources at the click of your mouse, the necessity of bite size information is becoming increasingly important.

When browsing the net users don’t want to feel swamped down or overwhelmed by an abundance of brightly coloured graphics or text heavy websites, SHOUTING numerous messages from multiple pages. They want to see clear, concise information with a good structure and some level of hierarchy. They want relevance!

When designing for web, it’s important to understand what the user would want to see… navigation should be self-explanatory and users shouldn’t be struggling to find the information they require, else they’re simply going to close the browser or click away to someone else’s site. You should consider how you would like the user to respond… i.e. do you want them to read THIS or maybe THIS!

Using intelligent design, useful headings (not generic words), supportive imagery and bite size chunks of information, you can capture and engage users in an effective and productive way, driving them ever deeper into your site, and thus adding value to your site, brand, etc.

Give your viewers a relaxed and enjoyable journey through your website, where they can absorb and process the information they see. Bite size chunks are they way forward and, from experience, they’re much easier to digest… unlike this trash below…

Too much to handle...?

A big well done to all who have worked on and brought into the digital realm howarths.nl

An exciting launch for We Love… who worked with Angela and Giel – Owners of Howarths Antiques and Interiors, Rotterdam – to develop their brand and website. A company of 17 years, Angela and Giel have built up one of the most personal and professional antiques companies in Holland.

The brief of modernising the on/offline presence of Howarths, attracting a new (younger) target audience, whilst not alienating their existing customer base was a nice challenge for us.

We Love… went on to create an elegant brand; a bold and beautifully cut font with regal colour palette. Shaking off the fuddy, dusty and aged stereotype of the antique industry and building an intelligent AJAX driven site that  harks back to the days of analogue – sorting through papers to find your ideal ‘piece’.

We Love… will be extending the professionalsim and solution to all future comms, even and not forgetting the personal and enigmatic hand written labels and receipts (hence the script font on the site).

With photography (a three day shoot that incorporated 3 locations and 160 product shots) from Amsterdam based John de Koning (kingly.nl). Many thank to him and his assistant for their hard work, professionalism and humour that brought about some of the great images on the site.

Many thanks again to the team, the client and Hans for making it a great one.

Over at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami they’ve just finished announcing an interface builder for the excellent Cappuccino web framework and it looks brilliant. We’ve been keeping a close eye on Cappuccino as its developed – especially the speed that it would allow rich apps to be rolled out.

It’s called Atlas and, of course, it’s built with Cappuccino – running in your browser. There are many templates, UI items and controls built in and it looks very easy to use. The best element is the great layout management, actually better than a lot of current UI builders (Interface Builder). Nothing explains it better than the beautifully narrated video, so click the link below:

Atlas video introduction

You can signup for updates and watch the video here – 280atlas.com – look out for a cool little Cappuccino app coming from planet We Love soon!

Our new printer turned up this week… which is nice… but we were all very amused when we saw the health and safety (packaging) icons that came printed on the plastic wrapper… Lovely illustration

So. DO NOT put a baby’s head in a bag nor one on yours… You have been warned.

Dynamically generated documents are almost required in modern web applications as an easy way to send content to all – from CSV and excel CRM data to graphs, reports and invoices. As the de facto electronic document standard Adobes PDF is well in the lead in easily distributable content. Unfortunately, creating pdf files is quite a difficult task if you do not have access to the server configuration to install a component or library (such as PDflib) – unless you download the quite excellent FPDF Class.

FPDF is the most tested method to create PDFs without using libraries, and is very easy to use to boot. The one drawback is obviously a slight performance decrease – though kept at very manageable levels if your pdf isn’t too complicated. For high performance pdf generation you’re almost definitely going to need PDFlib – but you probably won’t be working on a shared host anyway!

To start off, it can’t get much easier than this:

require('fpdf.php');

$pdf=new FPDF();
$pdf->AddPage();
$pdf->SetFont('Arial','B',16);
$pdf->Cell(40,10,'Hello World!');
$pdf->Output();

Really simple! You’ll be knocking out cells before you know it and there are many more features including headers, footers, tables(ish), images, fonts/colours/lines. This is how easy it is to add a header and footer, simply extend the fpdf class!

class PDF extends FPDF
{
//Page header
function Header()
{
    $this->Image('howarths-logo.png',50,10,50);
    $this->SetFont('Arial','B',15);
    $this->Cell(70);
    $this->Cell(20,20,'Title');
    $this->Ln(10);
}
}
$pdf=new PDF();
$pdf->AddPage();
$pdf->SetFont('Arial','B',16);
$pdf->Cell(40,10,'Hello World!');
$pdf->Output();

Notice the new class, extended from fpdf, is used to create the new pdf. The pages are added as before with the new header at the top of each of them! Much more can be found in the documentation here.

You can view a dynamically generated example from a brand new We Love creation, howarths.nl, here: Howarths product list

Happy pdf-ing!

Digital Gurus, London based digital recruitment agency has looked upon us as their agency of choice…

We Love… will be working with them to define their strategy and brand as well as designing and developing their online and offline comms.

We look forward to an extremely slick partnership of two very like minded companies.

Yes Yes Yes – At last my better half has agreed to let me buy a Charles Eames Lounge Chair (albeit a reproduction) – In white with a light walnut frame (blasphemous I know… but it just looks soooo good in those colours). Or perhaps I should get the anniversary (Billy Wilder designed) version which is all white…

The only problem – I can only have it for my birthday… which is still 3 months away and she said that the pretty girl doesn’t come with it

I’ll keep you posted.

… Since my last rant. Well I have been extremely busy… But I just couldn’t ignore this one. There I was looking for some good solid entertainment on a Saturday night. A little bit of intellectual amusement on the telebox before I had to bath and put to bed my angelic son.

I managed to escape the death grasp of cbeebies that has captured our one and only tv in the household (wait till you have kids!!) and pressed channel 3 to be engrossed by a totally new and original program, that not only challenges and rewards intelligence and morality but has lots and lots of coloured lights as well… Yes it can only be ‘The Colour of Money’…

A show that awards large sums of money to a deserving contestants who shouts STOP at the right time… Yes welcome to HELL.

Now where do I sign up…

Stop making other people’s blogs look ugly, clunky and impersonal. Get your Gravatar on.

A Globally Recognised Avatar. Basically it’s an avatar that follows you from site to site – wherever you leave a post or comment, this little puppy will follow. One could almost say it gravitates to you. But then that wouldn’t be technically correct, clever, nor funny

So if you’re fed up seeing all those non-descript, impersonal silhouettes on posts – go do something about it

Whilst browsing around online for some inspiration, I stumbled upon a rather retro image that looks scarily like our tech lead Gavin (he does look good for 31)… apparently according to this advert there’s only one thing that can come between Gav and his beer… he wont tell us what that is, but an inside source told us it has something to do with google analytics…