Elevator Up

Typographic To-Do List

juliajamieson — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 14:04:00 -0500

So that last blog post was about Elevator Up looking for a new designer. Yahoo, that’s me! Julia. Check me out on twitter @juliajamieson. Welcome to my very first blog post at Elevator Up:

Whether you’re a designer, developer, or a client, knowing basic principles and concepts of typography will only help you succeed and communicate better with others on your team.

Like most things, practice makes perfect. So, let’s say you’ve taken some type classes. You’ve studied the principles of design such as balance and harmony, and feel pretty good on how to achieve them. You’ve worked with teachers, bosses, and clients, on lots of projects.

But sometimes, somehow, you start a project and rather than starting at step one, you suddenly find yourself at step three. You think to yourself Holy sh*t. Where am I? What crap am I designing right now? Dare I say, you forgot what it was you were supposed to do. Well, this scenario might not be you at all, maybe you never forget anything and are perfect at all times. Good for you. But for the rest of us, there are times when it is really easy to forget step one, and right away dive into more complicated parts of a project.

Thus, here is my mighty list of typographic to-do’s to help us remember what comes first:

For references and further reading, see The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst and Making and Breaking the Grid by Timothy Samara.

New Designer Position Open

schaapy — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 01:28:06 -0400

We’re looking to add a designer to the Elevator Up team. If you or someone you know is a potential fit, shoot us an email at hello -at- elevatorup.com.

What we’re looking for:

As a designer, you’re anonymous to most of the world. People see your designs but not your name. This doesn’t bother you, nor should it. But somewhere, someone is looking at something amazing you designed and saying, “Who did this?” Your design is so good, complete strangers can’t handle the anonymity.

You’re a passionate, experienced artistic genius with enough talent to inspire a company to create a position just to hire you. We won’t, but only because we already have an open position. A killer portfolio is the main qualification, although having an opinion on using the word “killer” as an adjective might help. Being a Photoshop and Illustrator wizard is a more practical attribute you can flaunt.

You aren’t snooty. You aren’t intimidated. You believe one person’s knowledge of all things nerd can benefit another person’s obsession with sports and vice versa. You enjoy diverse conversations and eclectic teamwork. You’re excited about a job that differs from day to day and hour to hour.

Responsibilities:

Creating, editing, and designing UI interfaces for the web
Experience designing for consumer and social web products.
Being up to date, not afraid to learn new tools, techniques, and methods
Giving a damn about the user experience, and how it will look and operate
Creating, expanding, and understanding a good brand

What’s Required:

1-3 years of design experience
A sharp portfolio, most importantly a website
Being curious and having an eye for design, culture, and trends
Being resourceful, solving problems, and always ready for more
A proven background with graphic and web design, interaction design, user experience, and information architecture.
You can communicate and work in a team with ease

Bonus Points:

Mobile UI/UX work
CSS/HTML/Javascript or any motion/video work
Worked in a startup enviroment before
Enjoys a beer with the team from time to time

Talent. Experience. Desire. Passion. If you have exactly four of those things, introduce yourself.

Things I've Been Using Lately

trevordobias — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:30:06 -0400

Gimme Bar

I hate bookmarking stuff. I Click read later and never see it again. My delicious hasn’t been updated in years. Yet I’m constantly looking for ways to remember snippets from the internet. Gimme Bar is a service I think I once visualized, but never got the chance to use. If you’re a visual person, this is a must as it gives an overview of everything you’ve grabbed in a masonry styled architecture that you can quickly skim over. Whole websites can be screenshots contributing to the visual look while saving the link.

Plus it syncs to dropbox, something that is still pending for myself, but the option is there and I can’t wait to use it.

Pinterest users: sorry I can’t compare the two even though they seem to be within the same vein. However, so far having access to Dropbox really sells me on Gimme Bar, plus I’m getting used to the experience of saving with their service.

IFTTT

simply put it makes your services do the work for you. If This Then That is exactly what the title says, If this (action, time, weather, service, or whatever) then that (something from another service happens.)

One way I use it is that I have a tumblr tag I can use on any Flickr upload so it automatically creates a tumblr post of my artwork or photography with a link to the Flickr page. I also use it to text me when the weather is going to be below zero, and another when it’s 8:15am to make sure my ass is in gear in the morning.

Frankly I haven’t used this service enough. I hate logging into multiple services, uploading a photo multiple times or making sure everything is consistent throughout every social media. Highly recommended, more so for the heavy social media users.

(Really) Learning IA

trevordobias — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:26:05 -0400

Some new projects in the works at Elevator Up. Since we’ve moved primarily back to client work I’ve had the chance to switch over to following a (somewhat) traditional design process. It’s different from what I’ve been dealing with working over at Canvas and Downstream, where there’s no real end point for doing work, only benchmarks, versions, and new opportunities around the corner. Not that I prefer either more than the other I do think both are valuable experiences with different learning curves and things to watch out for.

A big thing that’s different with this current project for That The World May Know Ministries is that I’ve spearheaded the Information Architecture in the beginning. I’ve done IA both in my classes at college and at certain points in other projects at EU. However, I’ve never started from scratch which is both exciting and overwhelming consider it’s a site that boasts pages upon pages of content both presented in a myriad of different ways, and buried within the site. What I’ve found so far from this challenge (which I’m still learning from as I write this.)

Categorize: Simplify what you have. If there’s too much going on, see patterns or ways things can be consolidated in a educated manner. This might go without saying, but for me saying and doing can be two different things. Writing everything down in the form of a current sitemap allowed me to see what was going on, what didn’t work, and what can be moved into a more intelligent group. Color coding everything also helps.

Move On: “A hundred wagon loads of thoughts will not pay a single ounce of debt.” This was a little harder to grasp. You can easily spend another two weeks collecting, organizing, thinking, rethinking, and finding new elements that will play into the equation of a final, but at some point you need to move onto the next stage. It doesn’t always mean you’re done, but it helps to put what you’ve been spinning around in your head into a draft that in turn can help clarify what you’ve been thinking and quickly see if it still makes sense.

Let Go: This is one I had a harder time with. The first thing you create isn’t going to be the best, this even goes for IA. I think this was the hardest to realize as it’s one thing to see a design a know from experience and intuitiveness if it’s either getting there or not. I can honestly say I don’t have that skill for IA, and it doesn’t help that I have a hard time in general with being decisive. I think part of the problem is that creating an experience and in turn an IA can go some many directions that it finds itself between brainstorming and making a concrete plan. This is something I hope to work on more, it’s both frustrating and fascinating to me.

As far as design goes things are still partly up in the air, therefore I will only show a couple “dribble” shots.