I am so proud of her work. She was very good when she started to study Computer Animation at Full Sail. But seeing Camila’s work today, a couple of months away from graduation really blows me away!
If you or anyone you know needs an artist of this caliber, please let me know: I would be honored to put you in touch with her.
Have you ever wondered how to come up with a slick-looking color palette for your site? Maybe there’s some constraints that you gotta operate under, but you can still play with some elements… yet there’s so much room for screwing up and coming up with a very ugly-looking combination that screams for forgiveness.
Fear not! There is kuler from Adobe Labs, to help you non-designers (and even designers in a rush) to come up with great-looking color palettes to help you out of a color “hole”.
And if you are a Mac user, you can also get the kuler dashboard widget on your desktop.
A few days ago I finished reading Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers & Prospects into Leads, a great book by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus, from Closed Loop Marketing.
I had seen Lance talk at SES 2004 in Chicago and was super-impressed with his command of the topic, so I was super-happy to learn he had compiled his knowledge about the topic of ROI and Web Design into a book.
The guidelines offered by the book are intelligently broken down into: Landing Pages, Home Pages, Category Pages, Detail Pages, Forms and Checkout Process. The ordering is not casual as it is tied to the importance they have in the process of converting visitors.
Each chapter is analyzed from the standpoint of the goals for that particular section of the web site, the goals and questions a typical visitor has when visiting it, the metrics that should be tied to the section along with its unique issues and a few guidelines and examples to wrap it all up.
No matter your role: if you are involved in the decision making process surrounding a web site, you need to get a copy of this book.
Full Sail Online finally launched today. The project we’ve been working on for the past two years (me directly, since December 2006) finally launched today.
Oct. 1, the first ONLINE group of Entertainment Business Master’s of Science students at Full Sail is starting their classes. We designed and developed a world-class online education platform from the ground up to deliver the education.
It’s been a rough last few months, but the product is finally live! 
Read more about it here.
I don’t mean to get too controversial with this, but for a while I’ve been meaning to write about this.
I’ve been working with web and graphic designers for many years and in recent months I’ve seen this trend emerge: they just seem to highly dislike simply copying and pasting text from another place, to include in their designs. They would rather retype it.
This wouldn’t be much of a problem, except for the fact that copy that makes it to the desk of a designer has typically been proofread, so that opens up the door for unnecessary typos and grammatical errors… and they do happen!
I was wondering: am I alone in this or have any of you encountered this same situations?
Designers: anything to say in your defense?
Andreina did it again! She pulled off a real slick animated gif banner to help people link to TuDiabetes.com. Here it is!
If you want the code, here it is:
<a href=”http://tudiabetes.com/” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://avanceassociates.com/tudiabetes/tudiabetes_200x220_banner_members.gif” border=”0″ /></a>
I work with a Six Foot Giraffe… well, it’s not actually a six-foot tall giraffe, but rather an incredible artist who goes by the monicker Six Foot Giraffe. His name is Kyle Smith and he went to school for Digital Art and Design, here at Full Sail.
Now, he works as an Illustrator in our Publishing Team (the good people that put our Course Materials together). I just LOVE his style: it’s got a very raw and urban feel to it.
See what you think. Check out his work at SixFootGiraffe.com
This is funny… You can also view the Quicktime version of the promo here.
What’s even cooler is that Digital Kitchen, the design firm that put together this funny viral bit, does do all the work featured in it. Clever! 
This is the first banner I’ve ever designed.
If you see the first draft in Flickr, you can follow a little bit the evolution that I went through this afternoon to get here.
Andreina gave me two key pointers that made a huge difference:
1) Boxing (as in a button) the “Find Out How” call to action.
2) Putting something interesting in the background, to make it less “flat”.
I will be adding the banner to the Avance Associates site shortly…
In the meantime, you can see in this composition how it should be looking live once everything is finalized and in place.
