The Melbourne Writers Festival starts today with a campaign that dramatises how various writing styles collide, from genre to genre. With great use of typography styles and fonts to suit each genre, combine with colours and sounds this is a simple piece of work with a high quality impact.

A very cool new ad due to be released this Sunday on TV has been posted on You Tube. ANZ have been doing some great advertising lately with the bowl cut kid spelling Mortgage wrong, the ATM casting and the Security  ad featuring the terminator style hand - the chase is engaging, funny and connects. If I had seen our business banking manager earlier this year on the streets, I probably would have done the same...

I filmed a keynote presentation for a client by Ron Baker earlier today that turned my mind inside out in terms of they way I've perceived the measurement of productivity and efficiency when it comes to design services and the way that it is billed to clients. It turns out, that there are alternatives to the time based model which is measured by effectiveness, summed up by the Verasage Institute as; Profitability...

This one is to show you the difference in symptoms between colds and flu (4mins) http://tinyurl.com/coldandflusymptoms This one shows how NOT to transmit your cold or flu http://tinyurl.com/avoidingswineflu I suggest everyone gets tissues and a bottle or 2 of antibacterial gel to wipe down phones, keyboards, desks 2 or 3 times a day.  Viruses are persistent little critters - wash you hands after you sneeze...

As well as being a neat freak, I also have a compulsion to be organised. Searching the net this week I have found a great little application for all Mac users that will make those little day-to-day tasks easier to manage. Anxiety (http://anxietyapp.com/) is a free application that adds a simple yet effective check box list to the toolbar of OSX. Items can be added and marked off in a matter of seconds, and...

I'm going to show you how to use dynamic variable names in php. It's quite simple, just put your variable name in between {} symbols. // declare prefix. In a loop this would probably be a number. $prefix = "pfx";   // build your variable ${"varname_{$prefix}"} = "success";   //This would output "success" echo $varname_pfx; Simple isn't it....

Recently I was playing around with scaling background images and had issues with how the scaling behaved and image quality.  When scaling an image in proportion you want to make sure that the image container is centered to the movie clip it belongs to. My example below is the scaling code within a stage listener which will re size the background image according to the stage width & height. Stage.align...

Love a good take away coffee but feeling guilty of the disposable coffee cups? Get a keep cup! It's designed to barista standards and comes in two different sizes. It's so good looking, I'm seriously considering taking up coffee drinking again!

Designers tend to pride themselves on their ability to name a random font, but every now and then a font will come along that can stump even the best know-it-all. Well fear no more, as myfonts.com has brought out an iPhone app that will save your reputation – WhatTheFont. WhatTheFont allows you to take a photo of any font, whether it be in a magazine or a web graphic, upload the image to the MyFonts server...

One of the handy built in features of OS X (Leopard) is Quick Look. It has built in plug-ins to view PDF files, images etc. without needing to open the application. That's fine if your only using the apps that Apple ships it with, or makes - but everything else needs a plug-in. I was disappointed that such a neat feature couldn't be put to better use for times when you don't really want to open the inDesign...