Hello Bar is a Javascript snippet that lets you put a discreet and nicely styled call to action right across the top of your website. You could use it to:

• Point visitors to your latest blog post
• Notify them of a sale in your online shop
• Tell people about your Facebook page

All you need to do is sign-up, create your Hello bar with a simple editor and then drop the styled Javascript snippet into your web page.

Hello Bar comes with powerful stats tracking which allows you to monitor your bar’s performance and it works in popular blogging platforns like WordPress and Tumblr.

All in all it’s a really useful tool for quickly telling your visitors what you want them to do.

Creative collective Dorothy have produced 100 of these fantastic ‘road map’ litho prints made up of song titles including Highway to Hell, Penny Lane, Itchycoo Park and Heartbreak Hotel. A simple idea beautifully executed.

Last year Beep Industries produced the wonderful POPA, a big red button for the iPhone camera. How do they follow that? With Mixa, a wonderfully retro styled USB cassette. It looks for all the world like one of those super little things that folks of a certain age used to record the Top 40 with. Thankfully though it comes without yards of unravelling audio tape! A beautiful piece of product design.

Over the last few years Tumblr has become a really popular blogging platform for all kinds of users. Part of its appeal is the gorgeous selection of themes available for it. Just lately we discovered an absolute beauty called “Inspire Well”. It’s a flexible grid-based layout ideal for currating inspiration, sharing your creations, and documenting life. Although it carries a $49 price tag it’s well worth it if you’re looking to quickly set up a blog that looks and feels impressive.

Sometimes a blog is just so stylishly presented and beautifully written that it really stands out above the noise. That can certainly be said of Ashley Sutcliffe’s Blog – Live Like The Boy. Ashley is an interior stylist and designer whose blog is about the consciousness of style in our lives. Ashley works in a design and consultation capacity, helping and advising on all aspects of design.

Finally this week we came across these incredible paper cut maps by Famile Summerbelle. The detail is absolutely amazing. Maps of Paris, San Fransisco and New York are available from their online shop and here’s a cool little video that shows how the New York map was produced. Lovely work!

We’d like to thank you all for your continued support and wish you all a merry Christmas and a very happy and prosperous new year.

Love John and Al xx

Google Fonts allows you to use different typefaces on your website. If you’re on a budget it’s a great alternative to Typekit or any of the other paid services. It’s very easy to implement and there’s a great selection of optimised typefaces available.

Dropbox is essentially a folder that lives on your computer and in the ‘cloud’. Any document you put in Dropbox is accessible on any computer that it’s been installed on. You can also share files and folders remotely with other users.

Mailchimp’s Inbox Inspector is a really useful service that tests your HTML email templates in a range of email clients. It’s incredibly useful if you’re coding your templates from scratch. It will also tell you if your templates will get past popular spam filters.

Subtle Patterns is a website full of beautifully subtle patterns and textures that you can download and use in your digital projects. You can get each pattern separately or download all of them together as a Photoshop pattern file.

Perch the tiny cms now sports some fantastic new features like a site search facility, e-commerce support and the ability to automatically build web forms.

We started from scratch and took the ‘mobile first’ approach, designing for the smallest screen resolutions and working our way up. The re-designed site should now feel a lot nicer to use on a smartphone or tablet computer, and of course it still looks great on a Desktop PC.

The re-design has been a really interesting process and using smaller resolutions as a starting point makes you look at the process in a completely different way. It helps you focus more on the economics of space and makes you think very, very carefully about user experience.

New to the concept of responsive web design and mobile first design? Here are two really interesting and well-written articles to get you started.

• Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte
• Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski

I intend to write a more detailed post on the re-design in the new year but for now another mince pie!

Apple’s tiny box of tricks does so many incredible things but personally I’ve always wanted an iPhone solely for the camera. I already own a Canon DSLR and a Panasonic Lumix and they’re terrific, but there was just something really appealing about being able to take a photo, process it and share it all from one pocket-sized device.

When I got the iPhone I immediately downloaded a few camera apps that I liked the look of and off I went on my travels. The iPhone rekindled my love of photography. No filters, no tripod, no lenses and no camera case. Where I’d subconsciously set myself rules in the past, the iPhone had helped me break free of them. It felt like photography re-invented. Suddenly I wasn’t worried about blown highlights or white balance anymore. It was really liberating and great fun.

A month ago I looked through the hundred or so shots I’d taken and I found myself seeing a natural flow to the images. It wasn’t something I’d planned but I had a collection of serene images full of shadows, reflections, natural shapes and ramshackled buildings. Using Blurb’s Bookify I made a small book called “There’s a place”. It’s my year of wandering around with the iPhone and snapping anything that I liked the look of.

To give all the images in the book a bit of consistency I shot all the photos using the basic camera app, loaded them into Camera + and processed them with the Contessa effect, to give a sepia feel, and the Clarity scene setting, to bring out the detail.

“There’s a place” is available to buy in softback and hardback formats. There’s also an ebook version for the iPhone and iPad which costs just £2.71. Any money I receive from sales of the book will be going to KidsCan, a cancer charity based at the University of Salford. If you’re stuck for a Christmas present why not give it a whirl!

This week I attended my first Creative Coffee Morning at Rhode Island in Stockport. The network is run by Stockport Council’s Economic Development Team and brings together local creative businesses for a chinwag and a coffee.

There are some exceptionally talented people in and around Stockport. The delegates included a diverse mix of photographers, television companies, web designers and an environmental artist.

It was a very interesting morning and it gave me a real insight into how other businesses work, the challenges they’re facing and their ideas and aspirations for the future.

It’s an event I’ll be attending regularly and I’m sure I’ll make some new friends through it. The coffee was really rather good as well!

If you’re a creative business based in Stockport email Kate Ruddick for more information.

Avanti are a Manchester based software company who produce accounts software for Windows. They came to us looking for an elegant and striking brand identity and a website that would help sell their accounts packages.

From early discussions we decided to create a ‘type only’ logo set in a timeless typeface. We eventually settled on Gill Sans, which is elegant and thanks to its structure also quite contemporary. The colour palette for the website includes charcoals, greens, blacks and oranges to give a modern feel that’s easy on the eye.

We did a lot of research and work on the home page, spending time thinking carefully about what potential users would want to see on there. From the home page you can download a free version of the software, see the benefits it delivers, find out what existing users are saying and get a quick overview of the company.

Bringing these elements together with e-commerce integration has given Avanti an affordable, professional and elegant platform from which they can confidently sell their software.

Thanks to the lack of wi-fi and our nine-month-old daughter Hannah we were able to leave the Internet and social media behind for a week and go exploring with our cameras, stopping for the occasional pint of local ale!

Yorkshire villages, particularly those off the beaten track are fantastic places full of quirky charm and character. We saw some wonderful things on our travels like this old post box and weather vane.

On a short walk by the river we stumbled across an old, abandoned Morris Minor. Being fans of classic cars we thought it’d be interesting to create a little visual study of it using just the iPhone and a superb new black and white processing app we’ve discovered called Noir. The iPhone is great for capturing these little details particularly as it’s very well equipped in the Macro department!

This incredible time-lapse video is the result of almost one and a half years work. Alex, an amateur Astronomer spent 31 hours taking a series of still images on the Southern Ocean Coast in Australia, he then combined them into this stunning video sequence. Ocean Sky was awarded the overall winner prize at Starmus astrophotography competition.

Designer Howard Wakefield was recently commissioned to create a cover for Clash magazine that celebrated 30 years of New Order. Howard chose to use the iconic album sleeves created by Peter Saville and reduced each one down to nine squares and their basic colour elements in an attempt to find out how iconic and recognizable the sleeves actually were. The first one we spotted was True Faith.

The Tate in Liverpool is currently hosting an exhibition dedicated to the astonishing work of Belgian Surrealist, Rene Magritte. The ‘Pleasure Principle’ runs from 24th June to 16th October and features the artist’s drawings, collages, examples of Magritte’s early commercial work and rarely seen photographs and films.

In life it’s nearly always the simple ideas that capture people’s imagination and Dear Photograph is a wonderful example. People take a picture of a picture from the past in the present day. The results are emotive, beautiful and at times heartbreaking. Our favourite was the elderly couple on the bench.

Finishing this week’s Friday Five we found this wonderful ‘Field Guide to Typestaches’ poster created by Tor Weeks. Personally if I could choose one to have as a moustache I think I’d go for the very decorative, Mr. Filosofia, although it would certainly take a steady hand to sculpt! The poster is available to purchase at Old Tom Foolery.