Wishing you all a Merry Christmas from all at Sugar Creative Studio.

Allan Haley, Montype Imaging’s director of words and letters said:

“It’s time once again to focus on fantastic web design that takes advantage of the benefits of Web fonts, such as enhanced creativity and improved brand consistency,”

“Our inaugural contest attracted an impressive response — a significant achievement for a competition based on technology that’s still in its infancy. With the tremendous adoption of Web fonts in just the past year, we anticipate showcasing an even a broader range of exceptional work in 2011.”

Almost 200 entries were submitted to the competition in 2010, all of which received many thousands of votes between them.

To qualify for the awards sites must be built using Web font technology but these can be from any provider or solution, providing the page or site uses fonts that are rendered via the @font-face CSS rule. The eligible designs will be put on display at www.webfontawards.com, and visitors to the site will be able to rate entries based on different criteria. At the end of the judging period, the entry with the most votes will collect the Community Choice award. A judging panel will then decide on the winner of the Judge’s Choice award.

Professionals in graphic design from Cardiff and elswhere can find out more about the awards on www.webfontawards.com.

Chrome’s increase in popularity could be explained by high web page rendering speeds, as well as improved security, built in web development tools, and more recently a national television advertising campaign in the UK.

Lars Bak, Chrome’s creator said:

“Speed is a fundamental part of it, but it’s also about the minimal design and the way it handles security.

“If you as a user try a web page and it feels snappy, it’s really hard to go back (to a previous browser). It has shown that people spend more time interacting with the web.

“Of course it gets harder to make substantial gains, but it’s all healthy competition.

“From the beginning we wanted everybody to be fast, and now all browsers are fast.”

Google’s next step is the launch of its new hardware range – Chromebooks, a range of web optimised laptops which imitate the web browser’s lightweight ideals by offering a device with minimal on board storage capacity; no activities involving music, documents, creativity or web design in Cardiff or elsewhere will take place on the machine, users will instead work with their files via cloud storage provided by Google.

The app began its life in 2008 in Sweden as a service to render image editing tools that run solely via a web browser, and has been proven to be a highly popular service. The app’s most impressive feature is its ability to work with Adobe Photoshop files, which makes it feasible for use by professionals in graphic design from Cardiff and beyond, or by photographers. This aspect of compatibility was one of the essential foundations of Autodesk’s offer the the app.

Samir Hanna, vice president of consumer products for Autodesk, sad:

“Lots of people – not just creative professionals – want to express themselves visually,

“Combining image editing capabilities with sketching capabilities provides new avenues for rich visual expression. We also intend to marry the Pixlr team’s web development experience with our expertise in mobile app development to help people everywhere be creative on the devices of their choice.”

The deal will see the founders of Pixlr join Autodesk, and the service will be paired with Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro Desktop software. Sketchbook Pro users will be given the capability to read from or write to several new image formats, of which Pixlr’s PXD format will be included. Pixlr itself will see an uprgrade which allows it compatibilty with files create by Sketchbook. The app will also still remain free to use.

The app, entitled myPantone, allows professionals in graphic design access to over 13,000 of Pantone’s colours, to create palettes of colour that can be shared via email, as Pantone Colour Chips or as Adobe Creative suite compatible swatch files. For example, a person involved with graphic design in Cardiff could create several colour templates for a client in America, and have them approved within minutes.

Every swatch of colour includes LAB, HTML, and sRGB values, whilst users are also able to cross check colours against those from differing libraries to enable them to find, for example, the Pantone Plus colour which matches most closely a Pantone Fashion + Home colour.
Pantone’s technology licensing vice president, Andy Hatkoff, said:

“We continue to see a fundamental shift in the way designers work and smart phones are increasingly acting as portable colour studios.

“Since myPantone’s release [for the iPhone], our Facebook community has been passionate about telling us the features they would like to see in future versions, including CMYK values and display calibration for more accurate colour representation on screen.

“And, as the smart phone market continues to expand, requests for an Android version of myPantone could not be ignored.”

The app is priced at $7.99 and can be downloaded from Android Market, and is compatible with versions of Android from 2.2 onwards.

Demand for HTML5 web developers from Cardiff and beyond has also risen, with the number of employment opportunities available on the site rising by 34%. Flash work fell by 10%, possibly due to the high demand for HTML5, and Apple’s ongoing disputes with the makers of Flash, Adobe.

The current growth in areas of new technology demonstrates that businesses today are moving to benefit from the advantages of fresh opportunities online, suggested the CEO of Freelancer.com, Matt Barrie:

“Online work continues to boom and we’ve set the pace for an explosive year. We had an amazing Q1 as more and more people kicked off the new year by building new businesses or bettering their current business using online freelancers.”

Other areas of growth included ipad, with an 11% increase, and as businesses increased their presence online through SEO and social media, demand for developers of Facebook fan pages increased by 8%.

Despite the growth, there were also some predictable declines in popularity of blackberry coding skills despite the new playbook tablet being launched, and also falls in demand for coders of windows based operating systems.

Designers can select from a range of vintage wood types and art images, select paper, mix ink and colours, and then hand-crank a virtual letterpress, producing graphic designs that can be used for posters, prints, invitations, books and more. The finished designs can be shared via posting to popular social media sites, as well as emailing. Professionals in graphic design from Cardiff to Cape Town can have some fun replicating the old methods.

Mary Austin, Board President and Co-founder of San Francisco Center for the Book, said of the app:

“As someone very familiar with letterpress, I was amazed and thrilled to see the creators took time to accurately and respectfully integrate the traditional tools and processes into the user experience. It’s also a fun and playful introduction to the art of letterpress and typography.”

The app comes with 13 pre-installed images vintage wooden typefaces, plenty of custom inks, art cuts, and paper stock, with more content due to be added in future updates.

LetterMpress is now available from Apple’s app store, and more information and a video demo is also available on the LetterMpress website.

22 year old student Laura Prately commented:

“The idea is that when someone is about to pour themselves a drink, the bottle will remind them that they might have been planning to drive later on and give them a moment to pause for thought and reflect on the consequences of their actions.

“It is a striking visual prompt that forces the consumer to think responsibly about the choices they make.”

Each bottle has has a grave message attached that warns of the consequences of drink driving. For example, the message on the vodka bottle reads:

“I’m only going down the road. A large proportion of all drink drive crashes occur within three miles at the start of the journey. Don’t fuel a fatality.”

Laura, who hails from Reading, Berkshire, also worked on the designs with fellow student Agi Haines, also 22. He added:

“Our starting point was the warnings you see on cigarette packets. We wanted to create something equally powerful to warn people not to drink and drive.

“It’s something we both feel very strongly about. Even though, thankfully, neither of us have had friends or family involved in accidents resulting from drinking, it is an issue that, as students, we are very aware of.”

These innovative ideas highlight the fact that the current standards of work by UK students of graphic design, from Cardiff to London are still going from strength to strength, and providing a stable platform for future growth in the industry.