At Miniboom, we’ll:

• Set up RSS feeds on your Web site including easy to use sign-up forms for your clients.
• Customize the layout of your newsletter and feeds.
• Set up your feedburner account and show you how to use it so you can stay on top of your daily output!

Happy designing!

Download the AI file
Download the EPS file

Illuminated texts, long used in documents from Medieval manuscripts up to present times as an added design element. I love using text as a design element and there is no better design element to choose from than an Illuminated Letter.

Illuminated manuscripts, as they were first seen in Medieval times, were often in Church manuscripts. Many of these “illuminations”, or drawings, were adorned with leaves, animals and figures from the stories that the manuscript sought to tell. These drawings twined around the page in various colored inks and gold paint. Today, however, we very often only use the first letter illumination, called a “Drop Cap”, or a large first letter – either with adornment or without – as a design element.

There are already “Drop cap” fonts to download, such as Burton Illuminated Letters. Check out this Web site to download Burton. But it’s way more fun to build your own!

To make your own illuminated letters in Adobe Illustrator. I recommend using classic styling – I’ve chosen a burgundy background with gold embossed letters with leaf details.

First, start with a good font. I’ve chosen Bergamo Standard, a classic-looking serif with slightly elongated lines and a rounder look. You want a font size large enough to take the place of an image, somewhere between 60-100 point is good in this case. You can make the background size based on that. I would leave a good cushion on all sides for embellishment!

For the gold embossed letters. I always make my palette first. Make a box and then fill it with a gradient you can use as an inkdropper for later – saves a ton of time. To make the gradient, choose a 45° linear gradient and fill it with varying hues of orange yellow and brown to get the gold effect. A good combination is light yellow #FFF42E; mid-orange #FFA300; and dark orange-brown D88000. Make two of your first letters. Color one white and bring to the front. The second one, put a 2 pixel stroke on and then under the ‘Text’ menu, choose ‘outline stroke’, this will turn your letter into a shape. Inkdropper your gold palette and now you have a gold letter. Place your white letter on top of this so that you have a gold outline and voià, you have a gold-embossed letter!

Next, start building your Illumination! You can choose Celtic braid or filigree and leaves or make your own design. Me, I started with a series of simple swirls that I then inkdroppered gold and embellished with leaves. But, feel free to invent your own! I’ve included some vector graphics below to get you started. Happy designing!

Download Illustrator and EPS Zip file

Well, never fear, I have beat you to it. Here are some free, really free, leaf vector graphics. Take them, change them, incorporate them into your own designs, change the color, change the size. In short, They’re Yours! Do what you want with them! Enjoy!

These ones I took from a collection of pictures, modified using Illustrator’s wonderful “Live Paint” option. I’ll put a tutorial up on how to use “Live Paint” and “Live Trace” options soon if you’re new to Illustrator. But these were made for my wonderful tutorial on Illuminated Letters following shortly. Check it out here!

Happy designing!

Free Leaf Downloads

Download the AI and EPS files

Good logo design is one of the key ways you establish yourself as unique in the marketplace. Logo designs should therefore be powerful, but not overly complex, and make an almost instantaneous and memorable impact. Our custom logo design packages give you a choice of unique and genuinely original logo ideas from designers with multiple initial variants, unlimited revisions and a full suite of high resolution and low resolution EPS, Web and JPG files for use in print and online applications. We can even create associated stationery packages and business cards that will maximize the impact of your chosen logo design.

We have worked with a variety of businesses, from law offices to a children’s dance troupe, creating unique designs that encapsulate your philosophy and aesthetic. And at Miniboom, you’ll always get that personalized touch, modern sleek and to your specifications.

Custom Logos will make your business stand out.

• Multiple designs ensure you’ll to get a design you’ll love.
• Designers from a company you can trust.
• Logo concepts in just one week.

100% satisfaction guaranteed, how do we know? Because we’ll work until you get it!

Because of the wealth of content and the different areas of the site, frequent consults toward the beginning of the development process were crucial, and beneficial.

At Miniboom we believe that getting the site up and running is only the first step; the real work is in maintenance, updating, and the periodic ‘design face-lift’. After we have your site up, we commit to staying on hand (for varying lengths of time, contact us!), in order to ensure that the site is stable, that content and SEO stay updated, and to upgrade the occasional new CMS release.

With The Cotocon Group, as with all the sites we develop, we registered the site with Google Analytics, Bing, Yahoo, Alexa and Compete. We monitor keyword use, and constantly update our tags and keywords to reflect, and capitalize upon, visitor trends. All this insures that the site is highly visible, search-able, and indexed with most search engines.

At Miniboom, we delight in multi-language support, and Djemba.net was the perfect opportunity to develop this site in French and English.

We are particularly enthusiastic about CSS and Web Standards at Miniboom, and achieving XHTML valid code is our goal with every site. This means that your site should look and feel the same between different browsers (like Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox), but also between different OSs (such as Windows, Linux, OSX, Iphone OS, etc).

We invite you to contact us with any inquiries about the multitude ways to display music tracks…we keep up with audio developments so that your tracks are elegantly displayed and easy to play.

Another concern in Mary Panzer’s site was finding the right typeface to legibly, yet decoratively, display the important texts which accompany each book and photo. Typography is consistently a concern at Miniboom, especially given the special psychology behind legibility, kerning, and line height. It’s a process.

For this site, we needed only minimal social networking (Facebook, Twitter, an RSS feed), since we wanted to keep the focus on the scholarly work in the site, which would not be updated quite as much as other kinds of sites.

Within a week, Mr. Bäumler received the first designs. After a few revisions, we were able to settle on this colorful design. After each revision, Mr. Bäumler was notified. No revision took more than a day or two at most.

The design now graces the Common Ground Web site along with a full logo identity package including letterhead and businesscards, indispensible in the modern business world. There are also unlimited sizes, variations, resolutions and formats to choose from. In addition, Miniboom promises to provide any other additional format upon request for a period of up to two years.

The design was made in Adobe Illustrator, a combination of free-drawing and modifying already existing vector graphics. The font used in the design is ITC book, narrow and black – the “Chanel” font. The font was then stretched modified under the direction of the designer and in accordance with the overall design of the aforementioned materials.

Mr. Zezza’s site is a modified WordPress theme, allowing for the photographer to update his/her portfolio as that new gig may be just around the corner, it is important to have control over one’s public artistic presentation. The minimalist design let’s the photos speak for themselves. The site also uses no Flash, allowing it to be viewed on all smart devices including iPhones. It’s in cases like these that it pays to work with Miniboom where we always take Web standards seriously.

Mr. Zezza contacted Miniboom to make a good portfolio site. After intitial consultations, work from the ground to the World Wide Web took about two weeks with revisions and editing. Even after the initial set-up of the site, Miniboom continues to work with Mr. Zezza, helping him create the Web-based face to express his sense of style and flair.