Archive for July, 2010

How to Create a Style Guide

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

How many times have you dispatched business cards to print and picked up yet another version of your corporate colour? Ever been delighted to see your advert in the latest newspaper and then caught that the crucial tag line is missing or your logo has been ruined.

There is only one way to prevent this from happening and that is to create a style guide. Not only will a style guide help you oversee the reproduction of your logo - it will also help you strengthen your brand recognition – which many argue is one of the strongest selling tools.

We have placed the below steps together for you as a starting point.

Step 1 : Mark the audience for your Style Guide. Is this for staff to put to work in-house or is this for suppliers and contractors to refer to?

Step 2 : Mark what your output uses are. This is important because you will require different logos and file formats for example, black and white publication adverts in comparison to vehicle graphics.

Step 3 : Define the tone for the copy and content required. For example you may wantcopy rules for printed content and then copy rules for website content.

Content rules cover all punctuation rules and how to attribute to the business and team.

Step 4 : Confirm you layout all the design templates so it is clear how and where the logo and branding sits on all the different pieces of collateral that may be reproduced.

Step 5 : Make certain to take into account any contributing logos or logos of business that are correlated with you. It’s also important that you deliver a copy of the layout to these companies to insure they agree with the layout of their logo as they too may have their own Style Guide and hierarchy layout rules.

Step 6 : Ensure that grammar, spelling and contact details are correct.

Step 7 : Make certain that when suppliers are using the Style Guide they understand~know~discern~apprehend} that a proof needs to be dispatched~sent~mailed~commissioned}to you to be confirmed as correct.

Make your Style Guide finished and as established as possible. Then have it saved in an email friendly file format and have a couple printed. Once this is done we strongly advise a training session – whereby your design studio arrives and trains your staff on how to put to work the Style Guide and most importantly your brand.

For graphic design Brisbane, logo design Brisbane and web design Brisbane, contact Bydaughters today. We help your brand build business.

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Projectors: LCD Verses DLP (The downfall of DLP technology)

Monday, July 19th, 2010

The most typical question asked when buying a new projector for the home, office, or classroom is: do I get an LCD projector or a DLP projector? LCD, short for ‘liquid crystal device’ and DLP, short for ‘digital light processing’ are the two top projector imaging technologies. With so many business brands and types available, it can be difficult for clients to choose between those technologies. Ultimately LCD projectors give better image quality and colour accuracy. The next part of this article will explain why DLP projectors struggle with bringing up a comparable level of image quality.

It’s like a set of blinds in your room covering your bedroom window. By twisting a rod you can make the shutters open or closed, according to whether you want to let light in or not. And this is exactly how an LCD projector functions. Each pixel works like a unique shutter on a set of blinds to either allow light through or to block it. DLP on the other hand is made up of millions of microscopic mirrors or ‘pixel elements’ as experts like to call them. Each pixel element operates to either reflect light or block it.

How the light source is processed from the point at which the projector switches on to when the image reaches your screen is vitally important for image quality, brightness and colour accuracy. LCD projectors shine white light from the lamp by splitting it into red, blue and green components, by three mirrors which direct the coloured light to 3 separate LCD panels. The 3 LCD panels cast the elements of the image by turning each pixel on and off. The pixels are then simultaneously processed in a glass prism to send the projector image. A point to realise about LCD projectors is that all three colours are delivered onto your screen all at once. The way a DLP projector works is totally different and even the way an image shows up is not the same. With DLP, white light from the lamp is sent through a turning colour wheel with transparent red, blue and green segments, at speeds up to 11,000 rpm/s. This approach to creating an image forms a sequence of red, blue and green light. The millions of micro mirrors described above reflect the coloured light on the pixels to create the image elements. The elements of the image are sent in sequence on the screen, one colour at a time. The viewer’s vision will then combine each coloured element of the image into a single complete image. Using LCD projectors, all colours are available all the time to deliver high brightness and great colour accuracy. In DLP, only one colour is available at a time, and so causing lower colour brightness and accuracy. Some DLP developers have added a white segment into the colour wheel to improve brightness generally, but this then detracts from colour accuracy.

I read in forums all the time that DLP offers a higher contrast ratio and therefore must be superior. For those who do not know, the contrast ratio is a measure of a display system defined as the ratio of the luminance of the brightest white to that of the darkest black that the machine is able to produce. DLP projectors do have high contrast specifications when compared to a majority of LCD projectors. At one glance, this seems to be a plus, however, in reality, the true black level is determined by the ambient light in the room when the projector is utilised. Do not be fooled by contrast specifications on websites and in brochures.

When the content you plan to bring to life needs moving images, DLP projection technology also creates image errors, or ‘artifacts’. The most commonplace artifact that a DLP projector shows with moving images is colour break up. Colour break up is inherent in DLP systems because moving images keep changing between the time red, blue and green colours are projected. LCD projectors do not have this characteristic because all colours are delivered at once. DLP designers have developed 3DLP solutions using 3 chips to fix the colour break up error, but the price of these projectors make them hardly practical for the large part of businesses and consumers.

Another difference between LCD and DLP is how they balance for the refractive qualities of light. Think back to high school science, and recall how the different colours of light refract varied amounts when directed through the same lens. The problem with DLP projectors is that they have the one same panel and the same lens to project Red, Blue and Green. All 3 colours are not the same and refract light differently. Most of the time with a DLP projector, some yellow colour will come through above and some blue will appear below an image containing something as simple as a lone black line. While being built LCD projectors can be set to take away these effects on the projected image, because each colour is projected on its own LCD panels.

The only veritable plus (excluding price) with deciding on a DLP projector is its overall smaller size and weight. However, this is only relevant in regard to transport and has to be traded off against the image superiority of LCD projectors. If overall picture quality is important to you, then the decision is simple. Go for an LCD projector! LCD projectors will consistently create bright, colourful images with fewer image mistakes. If you wish to know more about LCD technology in more detail, check out this spectacular resource website: Explore 3LCD. If you have any other questions, jump onto Projector Central and send me an email.

Jonathan King is the sales and marketing manager for Projector Central, Australia’s top online retailer for projectors. Brisbane-based, Projector Central has serviced Australia for 15 years. For data projectors in the Gold Coast and Interactive Whiteboards, contact Projector Central today.

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Yachting and Yacht Clubs

Friday, July 16th, 2010

As the Dutch found dominance in sea power during the 17th century, the early yacht had been a leisure craft used first by royalty and then by the burghers on the canals and the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Yacht racing was incidental, coming out of private games. English yachting started with King Charles II of England during his exile in the Low Countries. On his reaffirmation to the English monarchy in 1660, the city of Amsterdam presented him with a 20-metre (66-foot) pleasure boat with a beam (maximum width) of 5.6 m (18 feet), which he named Mary. Charles and his brother James, the duke of York (James II, sovereign 1685–88), built additional yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and the same way back, on a £100 wager. Yachting became classy with the rich and royalty, but after that time the trend did not last.

The first yacht club in the British Isles, the Water Club, was instigated at about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard organization, with great naval panoply and formality. The closest thing to racing was the “chase,” for which the “fleet” pursued an imaginary enemy. The club persisted, mostly as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, after joining with other clubs, it became known as the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).

Yacht racing was first seen in some ordered manner on the Thames about the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland funded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV ascended to sovereignty in 1820, it came to be known as the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded after a racing fight, to become the Royal Thames Yacht Club in 1830. The first English yacht organisation had been formed at Cowes on the Isle of Wight in 1815, and royal funding made the Solent - the strait between the mainland and the Isle of Wight - the perpetual setting of British yacht racing. The organisation at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, again at the ascension of George IV. All members were required to possess boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing races for large bids were held, and the society life was superlative. Eventually Royal Yachting Club boats grew in size to more than 350 tons.

In North America, yachting started with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and went on when the English held power. Sailing was largely for pleasure and found its high point in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which sailed on the Mediterranean Sea and set a benchmark of luxury and elegance for the later yachts in that area from the late 19th century. The first persisting American yacht society, the Detroit Boat Club, was started in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens instigated the New York Yacht Club while aboard his schooner Gimcrack.

Kinds of sailboats
Early sailing yachts were within the lines of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century through the latter half of the 19th century. The style of sizeable yachts was originally greatly put upon by the success of America, which was designed by George Steers for a group led by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) was named after its win at Cowes in 1851. Early yachts were not designed and built in a contemporary sense, with just a model being used. Not until the later half of the 19th century did what was known as naval architecture come about. Not until the 1920s did the employment of the research of aerodynamics do for the structure of sails and rigging what such study had previously done for hulls.

Because almost all sailboats had been individually built, there came a desire for handicapping boats previous to the one-design class boats were designed. Therefore, a rating rule was decreed, which ended up in the International Rule, accepted in 1906 and amended in 1919. In modern times, one of the rapidly blossoming areas in sailing is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are created to single specifications in length, beam, sail area, and other aspects (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing for these boats can be held on an even par with no handicapping at all. A prime example is the standard International America’s Cup Class taken on for participants in the 1992 America’s Cup race.

As long as yachting was an activity mostly for the nobility and the rich, money was no issue, and the size of boats grew, in both length and weight. The ascendancy and popularity of smaller craft came in the later half of the 19th century in the sailing of the Englishmen R.T. McMullen, a stockbroker, and E.F. Knight, a barrister and journalist. A voyage around the world (1895–98) captained single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray made plain the hardiness of smaller yachts. Thereafter in the 20th century, notably after World War II, smaller racing and recreational craft became commonplace, down to the dinghy, a favoured training boat, of 3.7 m. In the late 20th century, boats of less than 3 m were sailed single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean.

Kinds of power yachts
Following the decade 1840–50, during which steam started to take the place of sail power in market vessels, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were increasingly employed in pleasure yachts. Sizeable power yachts were furthered to a high degree, and long-distance travel became a preferred pastime of the rich. The first power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; these then made way to yachts powered by the completely submerged screw or propeller kind of propulsion. As in the case of naval and merchant vessels, auxiliaries carrying both sail and power were the yacht archetype for a number of years. By the second half of the 20th century, a lot of yachts were still auxiliaries, but the majority were exclusively power yachts containing gasoline or diesel engines.

From the last decade of the 19th century there was a rise in the design of bigger steam yachts. In particular within these was the Mayflower (1897) of 2,690 tons, containing triple-expansion engines, twin screws, and a compartmented iron hull, and was operated by a crew of more than 150. The Mayflower, commissioned by the United States Navy in 1898, was the official yacht of the president of the United States until 1929 and saw active service during World War II.

As larger and more reliable internal-combustion engines were developed, many large yachts started using them for power. The creation of the diesel engine, employing heavy oil for fuel, progressed for World War I. From the decade that followed, large power-yacht building flourished, reaching a climax in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. In that time the largest auxiliary yacht built was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.

The construction of large power craft declined from 1932, and the style from then was in preference of smaller, less expensive yachts. After World War II, a lot of small naval vessels were sold to private owners for conversion to yachts. At the late 20th century, yachting had become a widespread loved competition enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen personally manning and upkeeping their own small pleasure boats. The number of craft and owners has increased steadily, not only in the traditional areas along the seacoasts but also on inland waterways and lakes.

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