The iPad is changing the way we consume media, in the first week alone sales of over 500,000 units cemented the fact that Apple have successfully launched a new device. The iPad is an great email device, and the built-in Mail app is such a dream to use that it makes you never want to open Gmail or a web based email site again. But what does this mean for designers and agencies?

For this article, we’ve created a fictitious email newsletter design, that we will use to illustrate our comments.

Firstly, it means there is yet another standard to design to (boo!), however it really is a glorious standard. Mail on iPad uses the same rendering engine as on Mac OS X, which means it can have video content, use nice CSS styles, and you don’t need to worry about the restrictions that some lesser mail apps are bound to. However we still need to remember our PC reading counterparts, more on that later.

Secondly, and more importantly is format. The iPad operates in both portrait and landscape modes. At first consideration, you might think this is a problem…

“Am I going to to have to design an EDM that fits a wide screen AND a narrow screen?”

Thankfully no. In Landscape mode the iPad shows a list of your emails down the left hand side, so you are left with a square viewable window, not the traditional wide and short viewable area that most people are used to in Outlook or similar desktop email client.

What dimensions should I design to for iPad email newsletters?

The Last Advertising Agency On Earth from FITC is a short film about what the future of advertising might look like.

We found this to be an amusing bit of commentary on the advertising industry and where it is going . It’s Channel4/BBC documentary style is well executed and it is thought provoking enough to create some interesting discussion. Also interesting to note the kind of comments and commenters on the Vimeo page is quite different from what you expect from your typical YouTube video comments.

I spend a lot of my day trawling the net looking for resources to help with my designing. Unique (and free) font’s are often difficult to find though, last week I came across Greyscale Basic, a beautiful thin san serif font with a postively futuristic feel to it. Best of all… it’s free.

Grab your copy and maybe leave a little donation for the creator.

As mobile phones become more and more popular as browsers, we’ve noticed a trend of companies porting their sites over to the iPhone size format. This week we’re focusing on the best in fashion on the little browser.

Dolce & Gabbana

Dolce & Gabbana’s trademark strong use of imagery looks great on the iPhone’s vibrant screen, and the rich media content makes the site fun to browse even on the smaller screen.

http://www.dolcegabbana.mobi

Abercrombie

Abercrombie’s functional and stylish online store looks great on the small screen and functions more like an app than a website.

http://abercrombie.digby.com/shops/web/abercrombie

Diesel

Diesel’s controversial look and feel translates perfectly to a mobile device, and allows online shopping as well.

http://m.diesel.com

H&M

H&M have used simple lines and bold colours to make their moble website easy to navigate and the photography style they’ve used in their collections is really cute.

http://www.hm.com/us/mobile

Zara

Zara have gone for a very slick and ’shiny’ look and feel which oozes class and style. Images look crisp on a small screen.

http://www.zara.com/mobi/webjqtouch/index.php

Australian Infront have a great little interview with Rone of Everfresh Studio. Everfresh has gained great notoriety in the city of Melbourne with a large collection of public paintings and even the National Gallery of Australia has acquired some of their work. They are legends within the graffiti scene – and you’ve no doubt come across some of their commercial work, with Phibs’ work for Absolute Vodka and Meggs pieces for Stussy. They are putting the legitimate graffiti scene on the map with great credibility and talent. A large task, especially in a city where there is a war fought over graffiti, where on one side the Government trying to eradicate the city of graffiti and then you have The National Trust listing some graffiti covered alleyways as heritage sites.

Everfresh Studio

Rainer from our sales team has been interviewed on the website iPhone User Guide for his opinion on top apps for tech savvy people working in sales, or I prefer to label as ‘Road Warriors’. Check out his recommendations.

Everyone loves to pretty up their desktops with nice pretty wallpapers. There are lots of wallpapers out there. Many of them are horribly horribly ugly. Here are a few links that may brighten up your day.

The Desktop Wallpaper Project by Kitsune Noir lots of pretty wallpapers here for many screen sizes.

Smashing Magazine Wallpaper Calendar Easter Edition there are 80 really nice looking ones here, all of them have calendars too which is a nice extra.

Make your own abstract wallpaper, with the webapp called Flame. It’s really easy and quite fun, bring out your creative side.

With stiff competition in Melbourne on Friday we we happy to see our team on the finalist list once again. This time for Best Export Achievement at the 16th AIMIA awards. Our entry for Traction, our world leading relationship marketing platform, was up against strong competition. While we didn’t grab the winning slot we picked up the Highly Commended award, one of few handed out on the night.

So Traction has again been recognised for it’s international success, working with brands such as Cadbury, Unilever and Diageo across multiple regions to build better relationships with their customers.
AIMIA award winners

Congrats to Aura Interactive for their well deserved win, to Change2 for their win in education and learning,  to our trusted friend Sally Mills for her overall recognition and to all the other winners and finalists. Nice work all round

The video making the case for the new product and service, Square Up, is fantastic. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s new project. It’s a little device that plugs into your iPhone, and through their online service allows you to easily swipe and accept credit cards. The product sounds promising.

What impresses us, is how well executed the video is. It’s pretty engaging considering they are explaining a pretty dry, albeit simple, process. And viewers are left with a complete understanding of the product and service offered, whilst feeling they just watched something quite cute and entertaining.

This is how more businesses should be leveraging video to get their message online.

What is all the buzz?

Buzz is the latest attempt at breaking into the global social networking market by tech giants Google. The service, which was launched a few days ago, pitches the search engine specialist in direct competition with social network giants Facebook and Twitter.

Why is it important?

Firstly, it’s launched by Google. Whenever they murmur anything about any new product, people sit up and listen. More importantly, they have launched the product attached to Gmail. If you have Gmail, then you already have Google Buzz. With and estimated 38million+ users and counting, it’s a massive user base to start with.

So what’s cool about it?

Firstly, location based posts. Load up Buzz on a appropriate mobile device (iPhone, Blackberry, Android Platform) and it will automatically grab your location via GPS and try and marry it to a location via Google Maps. For example one of our first Buzz updates was from the Cafe down the street, it asked us if this was where we were and asked if we wanted to post that detail. Nice.

The other side of this, is that you can see what people are saying in Google buzz in your local area.

We can see some interesting future uses for this, and some potential problems – but easily the way fo the future. It’s worth noting that the location based updates are something specific to Buzz, Facebook and Twitter cannot do this without using third party apps and services.

The other interesting thing is that Buzz is designed to pull your social media updates from other sites, such as Twitter, Flickr and your Blog and update your Buzz with it. However it does not publish your Buzz updates back to those sites. Essentially it is an attempt at being the catch-all consolidator for all your online social interactions, or you may say, your online ‘buzz’.

It’s “a Google approach to sharing,” said Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz.

It’s clearly being labelled as a ‘twitter-killer’ by the headlines. Easy to call it that, but that’s missing the point a bit. Twitter is all about a super simple and minimal way of sharing social commentary mainly in the form of text. Buzz on the other hand is trying to simplify and automate sharing a whole load of different types of things: videos, photos, and more—in this regard, it’s more like Facebook posts or even quick-blogging services like Tumblr or Posterous.