Call me a bit of a nerd, but I have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of my new Pantone Metallic Chip book. It finally arrived today! Over 300 metallic colors to choose from, and I can’t wait to start using them!

Recently I attended the Alberta Magazines Conference in Calgary, Alberta. I decided at the last minute to enter one of my designs into the Showcase, and I’m glad I did because I received an Honourable Mention in the Best Feature Layout category!

The design will be featured, for a limited time, on the Alberta Magazines website, and can be seen below.

Violet Feature – Canadian Scrapbooker

Magazine: Canadian Scrapbooker
Feature: Colour Corner – Violet
Issue: Spring 2010

The world of websites has been changing rapidly since the dawn of the internet. We have grown from very basic HTML (how many of us had dorky GeoCities accounts with bright and gaudy blinkies all over the place?) to sophisticated and interactive visitor experiences. However, up until recently, one very important design feature remained undeveloped: font usage.

This frustrated creative types all over the world. We could create an absolutely stunning design, but be limited to just a small number of cross-browser recognized fonts, which basically flattened the design, however spectacular.

With the development of the @font-face tag, website design has become extraordinarily exciting. What does this mean? It means there are no longer limits on font use. Your company’s brand can truly be replicated online. Typography can now be translated beyond print medium and online artwork can come alive. I now find myself wanting to go back and redesign sites I have already completed in the past several years based on this new breakthrough. Finally designers everywhere are able to harness sheer creativity, and man does it feel good!

Developers: there is a great tutorial here explaining how to implement this wonderful feature.

Clients: ask your designer about this feature and how it can enhance the look, creativity and brand accuracy to your website.

Over the years I’ve come across many magazine advertisements I thought were clever, or gave me a giggle reading them. After recently cleaning out my old archives, I discovered I had scanned and saved two of these ads. I thought I’d share them with you.

This Club House popcorn seasoning ad was just so clever, at the time I first saw it I was mesmerized. I love the careful selection of popcorn kernels for their shapes, especially the one on the edge of the bowl leaning down to accept the seasoning container. Brilliant and fun!

This ad may not be quite so clever, but the connection to Motor Trend’s younger audience is unmistakable. I had to explain what the acronym meant to some of my family members, reiterating the WRX’s general age of interest.

Have you saved any advertisements that intrigued you?

Written by Andrew Degenhardt, Elan Communications

Google Apps offers an array of tools for managing your domain. The neat thing is that you can link up all the Google Apps to your domain so you can access them from your own custom subdomains, e.g.: docs.yourdomain.com, mail.yourdomain.com. The Google Apps you can use include Google mail, Google pages, Google Chat, Google Docs, and more.

Google Apps is separated into two service categories: Google Apps Standard and Google Apps Premium. Standard is free, and if you need the extra space for email and the other features that the Premium service offers, you can upgrade to Premium for a low price.

Google Apps is very easy to set up. Here is the web site to sign up for Standard Edition:

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

As you go through the setup, you’ll be asked for personal and business information, and you’ll be asked to confirm ownership of the domain. There are two ways to confirm ownership and they are both quite easy to do.

Once you confirm that you are the owner of the domain, it’s time to get your first Google App set up.

Email is always the first I start with. Here is a page on Google that gives you instructions on how to set up your domain to work with Google Mail:

http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=33352

Make sure you bookmark the login page for your Google Apps. It’s a good idea to do this until you get the subdomains working properly.

It’s a good idea to set up subdomains to point to each of your Google Apps, instead of using the default address, which is something like mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com or partnerpage.google.com/mail/yourdomain.com. If you want to do this for your domain, here is where you start:

In Google Apps, go to the Dashboard and then click on Email, then you will see Web Address and “Change URL”. Click there and the instructions are pretty easy to follow.

That’s it! Have fun using Google Apps!