Let’s start with the disclaimer. I am not in favour of a single company, service, product, whatever, dominating the scene.

Now to the ‘but’.

But Google is a very good search engine. I don’t like the fact that it inflates my rankings if I search whilst logged on to my Google account, but I love the fact that this post will appear on Google almost immediately. I realise that part of that process is due to WordPress and its plugins, but quite simply it suits my needs and my customers’ too.

Sarah Treble’s New Website

Exeter’s Design Credo have recently created a website for Sarah Treble, the renowned wedding dress designer now based in the South West. Whilst Sarah already had a website it wasn’t performing well particularly with search engines,

“I can’t even find myself unless I put my name in.”

Well, we are both extremely pleased with the results. Almost overnight Sarah’s ranking for key search terms improved with key phrases such as “bespoke dresses devon” putting Sarah at position two on the front page of Google. Removing Devon from the search string “bespoke dresses” still delivers a respectable third page Google result.

Somewhat surprisingly (for me anyway) “treble” returns a position two result on the front page of Google.

So how do we know this?

Firstly we make an educated guess about what terms people might use to search. We then reverse search and see how we do.

However Google provides some pretty good free tools help to collect and analyse useful SEO data. These tools not unsurprisingly are known as Webmaster Tools.

What these tools do is to allow us to see what keywords people may be using to search for our site. Sometimes there are some surprises such as ‘treble’. More surprisingly the observant may have noticed that ‘trebble’ appears on the list and searching for ‘trebble’ Google prompts us for a miss-spell.

The webmaster tools goes beyond simple keyword analysis though. It enables us to check the site’s HTML and allows us to see whether the SEO aids such as meta descriptions and page titles are all correctly added.

This is all free, you can do it yourself, but at DesignCredo it is very much all part of the Website Design Package that we offer to our customers

Mr (Chuck) Chumley-Warner Talks Science

OK, sometimes you realise that you know even less than you thought you did and the weekend I extended my personal list by one.

We went to the Branscombe Air – Car show, ostensibly to see the cars and there were some goodies. But the planes stole the show, the Mustang and the Hunter in particular. Afterwards whilst mooching along the airfield en-masse it was time to examine the light aircraft accompanied by a friend (Martine) who had made many of the exhaust systems and at least one of the airframes (well a fair chunk of it).

As I said, the clue’s in the name

Anyway quite a few of these exhaust systems were hooked to Rotax powered Autogyros. Still affected by my Heli flight earlier this year I was a tad surprised to find that the main rotor on an autogyro isn’t actually powered when in flight. It gets better, contrary to popular imaginings this serves to make them rather safe particularly if you lose power.

The video explains it as indeed does this essay.

For now, I feel an burgeoning interest. However I am troubled by the name (Calidus) of the one below. I assume it is named after the Calidus Perregrine

its hunting dive, the stoop,[5] which involves soaring to a great height and then diving steeply at speeds commonly said to be over 320 km/h (200 mph), and hitting one wing of its prey so as not to harm itself on impact (wiki)

Looks great, I want a go.

Working on behalf of Yorkshire’s Techserv Cutting Systems, Exeter based Design Credo have created a brand for a range of newly developed machines.

More Than a Logo

The scope of the project extended beyond simple graphic design and logo design. Design Credo initially advised on product names creating a ‘brand-family’. Part of this advice extended to researching suitable domain names.

The rationale behind the logo design was to create a simple clear design that would communicate the accuracy and quality of the Techserv products. The logos were designed using simple geometric shapes with reference to the letters a&j, p&j, r&j.

Techserv have already commissioned Design Credo to photograph the first of these machines.

Communication is the word, yes communication. It all goes horribly wrong sometimes.

I am a slow speaker, I know I am but once many years ago this was really brought into focus when I was trying to teach a friend how to ride a drop handlebar bicycle. She fell off at the point that I had said “take your hands off the lower part of the handlebars” and never got to hear me say “slowly, one at a time and move them to the top of the bars”. She survived (we didn’t). The point was that the communication clearly failed.

Why Mining

Frequently I hear people say things like “I need a website” or “I need an A4 brochure”. Rather foolishly some might say, I usually engage in a bit of Why-Mining by asking “why?”

To aid communication the emphasis is on the why not the mining. Why-mining is an effective although slightly annoying tool. Quite simply people frequently tend to already hold many of the answers that they seek, they just need someone to stand in front of them and ask them “why?”

“I need a four page A4 brochure”
“Why?”
“Because my competitor has one”
“Why does it need to be A4?”
“Because thats what they always are?
“Why do you need four pages?”
“Dunno”

Eventually you will get to bedrock and even if this bedrock is “I don’t know”, that will be a good place to start.

The bottom line is that what we at DesignCredo are trying to find out is what is the customer’s story, the unique thing that they are trying to communicate to others.

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Exeter graphic design company Design Credo have created a simple clean and minimal design for Sarah Treble the bespoke and couture wedding dress company now located in Devon.

Sarah was looking for a development of her existing look and wanted to avoid the overly ornate ‘Nuptial Script’ look. The brand needs to be applied in a number of ways ranging from small dress labels to websites, and Design Credo are already involved in the creation of the latter due to ‘go live’ in the coming weeks.

The new brand uses different weights of Helvetica Extended. However the simplicity of a look like this can hide the depth of the process. Many other typefaces were considered before Helvetica was selected. Once the typeface was chosen considered thought was given to he weights, spacing of letters, words and objects within the group as well as the colour.

Ultimately though this look can be considered as ‘less is more’, the brand should in no way interfere with the beautiful design of Sarah Treble’s wedding dresses.

A few little design helpers here, the links will appear in my blogroll in the sidebar. These are fun but useful tools to make web design easier.

Color Scheme Designer

A neat website that lets you visualise potential colour schemes to a set of parameters; mono, triad, compliment, etc.

A simple interface, this site is probably quite useful for testing the ground with new customers.

Typetester

Again a really simple interface that will let you visualise how text will look on screen. A full range of settings (font, leading, line-spacing etc) makes this an incredibly useful little tool.

Web-Developers Handbook

Not as visually appealing as the previous two links but a great resource all the same.

Use it to drill down to required information or just browse through it over a coffee.

As promised some more images from an afternoon’s private view of the teo jakob shops in Bern.

Many thanks to Marion Vogler for her time and enthusiasm for her subject, impressive stuff.

If you didn’t go to Specsavers…you may have seen this

Eye-catching shop display seen in Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich. The clothing was made from large paper posters.

Sat in my hallway is a nice (old) Gazelle Reynolds framed road-bike. Elsewhere there is an even older Dawes Super-Galaxy, again Renyolds framed, this one with a Brooks saddle. There is also an old-school Diamondback BMX.

I like bikes, I like them a lot, preferably steel, or titanium, and they don’t need to be too new either. For me a simple bike is a thing of beauty that combines engineering, design and minimalism.

As a teacher I used to do a design lesson where I showed pupils pictures of things I liked the design of; Guzzis, Porsches, Minis, Trangia cookers… The common link was design. I knew I was getting through when a Year 9 girl saw the Cinelli track bike (shown) and said “that’s dead sexy that is”. She meant it, she was correct too.

I love going to London in part because of the cycling scene there. Twenty (plus) years ago, as a student, I was a cycle courier, I guess it was a relatively new thing then. At the time I rode a mix of bikes: Rory O’Brien, Holdsworth, Ellis-Briggs and latterly an early Ridgeback. Sadly in the first week I crashed the Ellis Briggs, I rode into the back of a Ford Granada stopped outside Kings Cross station. I ended up lying on the guy’s boot and can still remember the look of surprise as he looked in his rear view mirror, fortunately he had checked before diving away with me there. The frame needed re-building and I had the pleasure of using Tom Board who was at the time making Paris cycles, this honour made the accident almost worthwhile.

The London scene is vibrant and organic. Recently we have sat outside pubs in Islington and watched as cycle polo teams have returned en-masse riding a selection of unique machines. On one occasion I was almost tempted to pull the classic Bob Jackson from the pile to protect it from damage. There is a range of styles and approaches but, once again, steel is king, whether it is an original or a fixie, and, if it is adorned by leather and a bit of canvas then so much the better.

Sometimes it is difficult to tell the recreations from the re-builds not that this is an issue. There are a number of boutique dealers such as Tokyo Fixed in Soho where you are likely to find all manner of classic machinery.
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Search Engine Optimisation or SEO brings Beyoncé to Exeter? Yep if you’ve been following so far, “Beyoncé to help in light household duties” now seems to rank in the top three of a Googlé search.

Update – “Beyoncé Exeter” now position 2
Update – Now position 1

Further to this I am eagerly expecting people to fulfil my desires for a Leica M9 and a Colnago Mexico due to similarly high rankings for search strings.

So what’s this all about?

It started as a bit of a joke, I noticed that cigar smoking football players seemed to rank highly as search strings for The Design Credo WordPress blog (this is not a group that I have previously had an interest in). So checking it out, this was in fact true (by accident) as explained in my earlier post.
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