Contrary to the way things look right now, this blog is not dead! Ian has been hard at work on a project for a client & further refining resources_controller. He’ll have lots of news on that & other plugins once the job is done.

I, on the other hand, have far fewer excuses. While I’ve also been hard at work on a project for other clients & working on our business development & marketing, Finally, I’ve been working on the design for this blog, which will be implemented once we switch our blog engine. Work for ourselves, as so many designers can recognise, comes well after our clients’.

ArDes creative director & partner Ray Drainville will be interviewed on Radio Sheffield this morning at about 11 am about relations between South Yorkshire & the United States.

A US ex-pat living in Sheffield, Ray has been interviewed many times on the radio commenting on US–UK relations. This started back in the 2000 US Presidential election debacle when, at the end of a completely sleepless night, Ray had to explain the electoral college to the interviewer. His commentary continued throughout the next six weeks as the election eventually found itself in the Supreme Court & its sorry conclusion. Ray was also interviewed many times before the 2004 US Presidential election, which saw George W. Bush placed back in power after beating the hapless John Kerry.

Memorably, Ray was also interviewed on 11 September 2001 during the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York & the Pentagon in Washington. Being on the radio & commenting on these horrible events leant an air of unreality to the whole day, which wasn’t helped by the fact that Ray had only seen the attacks first on the televisions in the Radio Sheffield building.

Today’s interview is sparked by the building of a replica of the Brooklyn Bridge in Sheffield, a commemoration of the UK’s long (& Ray would say troubled) relationship with the US.

Edit: Name changed from “Argument from Design” to “ArDes”

Our congratulations go out to Ian White, ArDes’s lead programmer, who got married to Tessa Mae Peasgood on Wednesday! We wish them the absolute best.

Edit: Name changed from “Argument from Design” to “ArDes”.

Raja Sandhu has written a FAQ regarding the development of logo — or, more accurately, corporate identity — design.

It’s good to see someone else taking a rational approach to design — or, at least, as rational approach as one can take. Many, if not all of Raja’s comments reflect our own experience of corporate identity design. In fact Raja’s comments can be expanded to cover graphic design in general. A good read!

So Ian’s been extolling the virtues of the Mac text editor TextMate for some time now. I’ve been dubious, because I’m a long-time BBEdit user — I’m a big fan of BBEdit’s HTML palette. But in a brief session, Ian showed me how easy it was to added “snippets” of code for long-standing quirks: for instance, “curly quotes” and other typographic titbits.

So he sold me on the application, and I’m making a switch to TextMate. The creation of bundles of typographic and/or frequently-used (X)HTML will make my life a lot easier. If you’re a TextMate user, you may be interested in the bundle we’ve got available online. They may be very helpful.