Just when you thought you had a good layout you stumble on one of those 'ultra trendy' sites that just seems to "work". You look at it and wonder how their site has such a balanced feel to it and why can't I do that too...!

 

Lucky for us "non graphic designers" there are a few techniques that you can use to give the feeling of 'balance' to your graphics and text. One of these techniques revolves around a mathematical ratio called the fibonnaci sequence - actually it was know to mathematicians from India first but I'm not going to quibble.

 

The first part of the sequence is 1,1,2,3,5,8 etc etc (this is like taking a number eg 1+1 = 2 then 2+1 = 3 then 3+2 = 5 and so on). This sequence can be applied to how you layout graphics and text. You can do it all in Powerpoint or you favourite graphics program.

 

Draw a square 8 by 8 (could be inches or cm) - it is the ratio that is important. Now put a 5 by 5 square next to it. Follow that up with a 3 by 3 , a 2 by 2 and a further two 1 by 1 squares - see the layout below. Once you have your template you can use it to position your photos / illustrations and text in a mathematically balanced way. When selecting your photos make sure you "crop" them to a near perfect square (it doesnt matter what size the crop actually is ... you can re-size the crop to suit your ratio later). Place you text segments (headlines and body text) into using the template as indicated.

 

What about the web? 

As this is a mathematical ratio you can use the same concept on the web - just substitute the numbers for '000's of pixels - eg 8 by 8 becomes 800 by 800 pixels, 5 by 5 becomes 500 by 500 pixels. Simple eh?

 

I picked some clipart from the microsoft office site and have padded the text with the lorem ipsum text.

 

The possibilities are quite varied and could make a difference to how your customer's percieve you and your Office Live Small Business site.

 

Have a go and see if it makes a difference!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My wife had taken some short video clips of a dancing event that she attended and asked if I could get it up on the web so that other members of the group could see what had been going on. I've never uploaded to YouTube in my life, although had been an consumer of some of the millions of videos posted there. Getting it into a format suitable for YouTube was a different story. My original files (4 different clips) ranged from 120 to nearly 900 Mb and my assumption was that they were just going to take forever to load and that no one would ever have the time to see them on anything other than a hyperfast optical broadband connection (eg 20 Mb per sec or more). I rummaged through some old Windows XP magazines (I have in my filing cabinet of useful computer geek stuff) and came across Windows Movie Maker. Wow I had so forgotten about that package. After a quick couple of very small trials and figuring out optimum delivery sizes for the web I knocked up a quick set of the 4 clips and posted them on my YouYube account. An e-mail came back within a couple of hours from one of the organisers thanking us for our marketing efforts!

  

I took the option to customize the video player for my own blog colours - hence the purple borders - take down the video size to 50% of the original and drop it into my blog space using the embed video feature. So easy - I can see more opportunities comming up already...

 

So here goes - "Scottish Country Dancing"  (in England)  - Viewers looking at this blog in OLSB ( may not see the video ) need to click this link click here

 

       

 

 Reading St. Andrew's Scottish Dancing Society