Vector Illustration…Found it!

For some time now I’ve noticed an increasing trend for the use of a very distinctive style of graphics across the major advertising media channels of television, print and web. I really liked this style, but unfortunatley I had no idea what this style was called, making further research a bit difficult. My Google guesswork didnt yeild anything exciting – Searching for line art, vector art and other not-quite-right phrases.

Happy to say that I discovered today, by chance that the style is referred to as ‘Vector Illustration’. I found some nice examples on N.Design Studio’s site, and 30 examples of vector illustration used as the foundation for website design on webdesignerwall.com.

Some more notable use of vector illustration comes from the Hed Kandi album covers and the Virgin Media TV adverts.

The most effective use of vector illustration has to be when it is blended with stencil art such as Banksy

Vector illustration is no new thing. Traditionally its been used, in the main for technical drawings. If you ‘ve ever had the pleasure (!?) of reparing your own car from instruction in a Haynes manual, you’ll know what I mean. Such images will in fact stay with me for the rest of my life, having spent many hours staring blankly at Haynes manuals, trying to work out what bit goes where!

The distinsgiushing difference between such dry, technical drawings and todays translation of ‘Vector Illustration’ is the use of highly contrasting vibrant colours and bold space-filling shapes. In my (humble) opinion, these two aspects make the style perfect for advertising media, where there is very limited time to catch the viewers attention, and get the message across.

Cuil Search Engine – Google Beater?

Touting itself as having 3 times as many pages indexed than Google, and 10 times as many as Microsoft, Cuil is a new search engine which looks to have the potential to provide some real competition for Google.

Having been ‘online’ for 14 years now (My modem’s smoking and I drink lots of Coffee) I’ve seen many, many search engines. These days I use Google most of the time, with the occasional search on Yahoo or MSN.

I didn’t really expect anything exciting from Cuil, having seen so many search engines although happy to say it does seem to offer a somewhat different user experience – First of all the results are layed out in a 3 column grid (which can be changed to 2 column) making good use of screen space. The next difference is an image for most results, which is actually quite a useful way of quickly deciding what result to click on – although I did notice at least two results with images that were totally unrelated to the page it referenced – one of which was a .deb file indexed from an FTP server, which had an image of a blonde female! Odd…Perhaps an out of date index? What else did I notice…well, its painfully slow to use right now, and I also spotted a result on page one of a search that also appeared on page 2.

Ok, its a new site, but for this to be a Google beater they really need to sort the teething problems out, and fast.

Virgin Media Upgrades

Virgin media today announced roll out of a 10mb (Large Broadband) upgrade for all current 4mb (Medium Broadband) customers at no additional cost.

Details of roll out locations and dates

Laptop for Sale

I am selling my Toshiba Satellite Pro 6050.

Its a Celeron 1.2ghz with 512mb ram and 20gb HDD

Interested? Check out the eBay listing

funkyzilla.com

Stuck for some Christmas present ideas? Check out www.funkyzilla.com – Certainly wont be to everyones taste, but I certainly managed to put a few ticks on my Christmas shopping list. (This isnt an ad by the way! I happened across this site by mistake, and thought they had some quite cool stuff!)

Stuck for something to do?

My latest website project is www.visitorworld.co.uk I plan to list as many tourist attractions in the UK as I can. Please have a look and leave me comments with anything you think needs adding, changing or removing! So far I’ve added attractions to Dorset and Hampshire, plus a few to some other locations.

Share Point 2007 Overview

Yesterday I attended a 3 hour Microsoft Seminar covering Share Point 2007. I was very impressed, the new set of features, architecture and flexibility all point to Share Point 2007 being a mature, high quality product when it is released late this year.

Heres my notes from the seminar, some what mixed up and only bullet points, but it’ll certainly give you an idea of what to expect!

Collaboration

· Enhanced user interface offering more consistency
· Security trimmed interface
· Recycle Bin allowing easy restoration of documents, user and administrator configurable
· Project tasks lists, allows creation of online Gantt charts
· RSS Support
· Sub-Sites, meaning user stays within main site, retaining the main navigation options
· Quick Launch bar customisable online (No need for FrontPage)
· Security now much more granular – can be set at folder or even document level
· Share Point detects the browsing device and renders the display accordingly (e.g. for mobile devices, PDAs etc)

User Profiles

· Data can be imported from various sources, including: AD, LDAP, LOB ? Specific properties can be drawn from different specific sources. Possible to return data from SP to source. This is out of the box functionality for Active Directory.
· Property level security
· Social networking – User profile matching
· Different views can be set-up, which will render different views of the contact, depending on permissions (e.g. Manager might see all details, where as a person in a different department may only see basic details). This is administrator and user configurable
· When viewing another persons profile, shared elements are listed, such as if you have the same manager, work flow membership, shared colleagues.
· Share point will monitor user emails, and detect subjects – It will then recommend people sending emails that seem to match.
· Free/Busy status displayed – This is driven direct from Exchange

Search Engine

· Consistency between share point services search and SP server
· Ranking engine re written, allowing administrators to rank given documents/folders higher than others (e.g.This could be used to ensure that policy documents appear higher in search results than for example social/fun related documents).
· Search results available via RSS
· Administrator configurable ?Best Bets? can be used to ensure that user gets specific document(s) when searching for given words/phrases. These appear in a separate panel to the search results. (Similar to Google AdSense)
· Where multiple instances of a document appear in search results, the duplicate results are collapsed by default, the user can then choose to see the duplicate matches.
· People Search:
· Results sorted by social distance ? Colleagues appear top in the list
· A distinct list of property values are listed next to the people search results. E.g. If 2 web developers were in the search results, the job title ?Web Developer? would appear as a link. Clicking this link will list only people with that job title.

Content Management

· Navigation & Info Architecture separate from branding/design
· Content routing, review and approval
· Publishing schedules
· WYSIWYG browser based editor with built in spell checker
· Word documents translated to HTML
· Pre defined/customisable templates
· Layout can be changed without re-authoring content
· Possible to create a duplicate document site, which can have different settings ? The two (or more) sites will sync with each other.
· Links from site to site are managed automatically. E.g. If you link to a document which is later moved, the link will be fixed

Record Management

· ?Record Repository Site Template? ? Stores records in relevant place based on file plan
· Information policies ? e.g. all documents should be kept for 7 years, and then deleted/archived. · Holds ? Possible to pause information policy rules
· Records can be added via SP, Exchange (Outlook), 3rd party apps
· 5-10 mil document limit
· Auditing ? Down to read access level
· Expiration policies ? E.g. 3 years after creation, automatically begin automatic review work flow

Business Processes

· Info Path Now browser based
· User creation of online forms inc digital signing

Business Intelligence

· BI ?Dashboards?
· Dynamic KPI?s driven from SQL server, Excel, SP ? Any ODBC or Web Service data source
· Excel work books
· SQL Reporting server
· Administrator configurable report definitions
· KPI?s setup with thresholds, which then compare to the data source and give a clear indication of performance

Mmmm….Crunchy

I can think of quite a few things other than a dead spider that I’d prefer to have dropped in front of me whilst eating my Breakfast of toast with ‘Crunchy’ Peanut butter.

My Cat doesn’t agree with this, as I discovered at 7:15am today.

Another sign of the times

‘The Telephone Book’ arrived this morning…it sat on the door step until I arrived home from work, at which point I removed the cellophane wrapper, and dumped the book into the recycling bin.

I simply dont need a telephone directory any more, with online resources like Yell

CPU Fans must be worn at all times

BLINK! My PC just shut down unexpectedly…no warning, just powered off, leaving only the power LED lit…Hmmm….Ahhh, yes I ‘borrowed’ the CPU fan earlier.

So, I just spend 2-3 painful minutes trying to put the CPU fan on, and plug the fan into the motherboard, whilst avoiding the scorchio heat sink.

No damage done though…