After months of planning, designing, and development we are delighted to officially launch the new Graphic Mint brand and website or “GM 3.0″ as we like to call it around the office. We hope you love it! Let us know what you think?
Here are some noteworthy facts about our new, improved look and feel:
Continue reading
Traditionally, St. Patrick’s Day was an Irish religious holiday that honoured the patron saint that brought Christianity to pagan Ireland. In modern times, St Patrick’s Day has evolved to become the annual celebration of all things “Irish” becoming synonymous with parades, green pints, good craic (fun) and with people being very friendly to just about everyone.
The scope of this celebration has grown worldwide, in part because of the Irish diaspora rekindling connections to their roots, but also because of the increase in many other cultures embracing the celebrations of March the 17th to become “Irish for one day” (and hopefully for even longer).
Continue reading
Séamus Byrne talks to Idea Magazine about the foundations and benefits of user experience.
A few weeks before Christmas at Bill Buxton’s talk in Dublin, I met the lovely Martha Rotter from Idea Magazine who asked me if I would mind answering a few questions about UX for the upcoming “EXPERIENCE” issue of her publication Idea Magazine. I was absolutely delighted to reply “Yes” and now a couple of months later, my contribution is featured in their latest Issue 6 in the “Ask The Expert” section. Have a read, please share and like, and let me know what you think…
Toronto is Canada’s largest center for design, and was the IxDA community’s meeting point for its 6th annual Interaction conference and to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Interaction Design Association.
The Graphic Mint team had the pleasure of not only attending the conference and the festivities, but also sponsor the event by mentoring several aspects of the planning and design, while bridging knowledge from Interaction 12 to Interaction 13. We had a very enjoyable time at the Interaction 13 Conference in Toronto but are also looking forward for what Interaction 14 has to offer back again in Europe, this time in Amsterdam.
The theme of the Interaction 13 conference: Social Impact and Social Innovation was right up our alley, and very much in line with our company’s values and vision. The aim of the theme was to encourage Interaction Designers to think beyond the application, the product, and make an impact on the social fabric of community, organisation, and society.
Members of the Graphic Mint team have been continuously involved with various NGO’s nationally and internationally, including the IxDA since 2007. We are proud of our continued contributions to help make our communities, organisations and societies a bit more user-centred one step at a time.
Almost 3 years have passed since Ethan Marcotte coined the term Responsive Web Design (RWD) in 2010. He defined it as an approach to web design when a site is crafted to provide an optimal viewing experience—easier reading and simplified navigation with minimal resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices. So, how has this approach to design fared so far?
The most important holiday of the year, culturally and commercially speaking, is almost upon us. Months in anticipation, people from countries of the “so called” Western Civilization — Europe and its former colonies — start decorating their homes, businesses, streets, and well almost everything, with a wide range of Christmas related ornaments, spending huge amounts of money not just on gifts and food products but in the decorations themselves.
Continue reading
A few weeks ago we compared some of our favourite football crests from around the world. This time, we are going to do the same but with city logos! Usually an entity as big as a city has a lot of different logos, one that is aimed exclusively for tourism abroad, logos representing each of the various sports teams in the city, or commercial campaign logos (like the iconic I<3NY) among others. Historically speaking, cities usually have an official Coat of Arms that never changes. Sometimes it is used in the current goverment logo either in a stylised version or the original one, but this isn’t always the case. This time we are focusing specifically on current local government logos.
Ever wondered how a web designer starts designing a website? By picking out the colours or the different plug-ins or gadgets it’s going to feature? No!
Designers start by designing the basic structure of the website, ie. the Information Architecture and the Wireframes. The IA is a map that tells how many pages there will be on a site and how they are going to be organized. It’s usually just a series of squares representing each page joined by lines that indicate where a page links to.
Once the main structure is defined, it’s time to start defining the shape of each page or “bone.” This is done with a low-fidelity visual representation of a websites layout or interaction design flow called a wire-frame. Its main purpose is to show what content and elements are going to appear on each page and their approximate location.
Continue reading
Football is, without a doubt, the world’s most popular sport. Spanning every populated continent on Earth, almost every country has a professional or, at least, a semi professional football league. That means, yes, people get paid just to play this sport in front of other people. The people that watch and pay to see the games are called fans. They usually get attached and support a specific team, wether it represents their school, their city or their country. Sometimes fans will even support a team that doesn’t even represent their hometown, just because they have a number of very good players, or because they have a cool uniform and crest.
Continue reading
Do you think you have a brilliant idea that will make millions but just need a lot of money to fund it? And you just don’t have a clue about how to make someone invest on it? Crowd funding is here!
Entrepreneurs, and people looking for financial support for their new creative projects, have been using a new system to obtain these resources online. The concept of crowd funding began gaining popularity in 2010 supplementing, but not completely replacing, conventional funding methods provided by venture capital investors. Projects have raised over 10 million dollars using crowd funding, but how exactly do they work?
Continue reading