On Christmas Eve, it’s a time to spend with family and not on the computer, writing a blog post However, it’s also a time to show generousity of spirit. So, I decided to spend 20 minutes only on this post, to share my 2 favourite ever Xmas videos. Enjoy and share with loved ones, and I hope they make you smile! (more…)
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Archive for the ‘Things we found’ Category
A personal listing of online and offline tools – a guest post from Simon Fogg
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
“Who do you think will complete the task of prep-ing their pineapple first? The person with the pineapple slicer gadget or the one with the sharp knife?”.
So began one of my John Maxwell’s Million Leader Mandate leadership development training sessions a few years back. This is one of the most effective visual aids I have ever used. The pineapple gadget won this by an amazing margin. Clearly, a knife can be used to prep a pineapple but a tool specifically designed for the job can do it in a fraction of the time. (more…)
Hacking or Clever Marketing?
Tuesday, January 10th, 2012
This morning while working on a design I went to grab some ‘dummy text’ also known in our industry as Lorem Ipsum from our trusted friends www.lipsum.com. Lorem Ipsum is described on their site as ‘…simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.’
We use “Lorem ipsum” text in our designs as a placeholder – as a replacement for readable content. It’s written in a similar way to English, in terms of the length of words and sentences – and in a way, it mimics the way real English text looks. This way, clients can pay attention to the design to begin without being distracted by repetitive sentences or meaningful text. From this we can give clients the correct word counts to stick to. They can then follow the word count guides and provide “real” copy after.
12 Days of Christmas blogging bonanza
Friday, December 23rd, 2011
This year I set myself the challenge of of writing a blog post everyday this month. The posts are inspired by the “12 Days of Christmas” rhyme and have opened my eyes to all things Christmassy!
I chose to blog about different designers festive gifts from “brooches” to biscuits, cards to Christmas wraps, and along the way made a few new friends too!
What Mike Tompkins can teach us about business (and generally being great!)
Tuesday, May 31st, 2011
I recently came across via Twitter (a tweet from Rob Harrison @ThinkingFox – thanks Rob!) this amazing video by Mike Tomkins. He uses his voice and mouth to make sounds for music and has covered Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” – all acapella style. This video builds up and up and just gets better and better as it goes. It’s a great song anyway but he has done such a brilliant job I was inspired to blog about it.
Royal Wedding Cake Showcase
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011
As fans of cake, we started to notice a lot of resourceful cake makers who have created beautiful cakes and cupcakes to celebrate the Royal Wedding. And then, upon further investigation, we realised it’s not just about cake (who knew?).
Below are some examples:
Cakehole London
Cakehole London - British royal cake to celebrate Kate and Will's wedding
Cakehole London - British royal cake to celebrate Kate and Will's wedding
Uber cool social media icons by Tehkseven.net
Monday, March 28th, 2011
Tehkseven.net are a mobile theming community who contacted us recently to show us their set of 475 SVG icons.
The nice people over there thought that our readers could benefit from these and use them on their own blogs and websites. How nice of them!
So we thought it would be great to post a blog about the icons so that all our readers could take a look.
The icons come in 3 different sizes, .png and .SVG so that designers can edit them as they need to!
Hope you like them as much as we do here at Top Left Design.
Happy Holi – A Colourful Celebration
Sunday, March 20th, 2011
Holi paint
Today, March 20th, is ‘Holi’ – a spring religious festival celebrated by Hindus. Traditionally, Holi is celebrated by people throwing coloured powder and coloured water at each other – certainly a beautiful way to express yourself!
Rangapanchami occurs a few days later on a Panchami (fifth day of the full moon), marking the end of festivities involving colours.
Of course, we LOVE colours at Top Left Design!
Happy Holi today if you are celebrating!
The Drifters White Christmas Animation (which we love) – to make you smile
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
On the shortest day of the year it’s time for a short blog post!
We have featured this video as a link from our Xmas Newsletters for a few years running but we didnt this year – however, have no fear as this is on YouTube and is worth a watch – it will make you smile especially when that white reindeer sings at 1 minutes and 16 seconds into the video – “HeyIyiyiyi Am Dreaming of a White Chrismas!”. Love it!