Your presentation plays back OK on your PC, but now that you have burnt it on to CD the video/audio clips no longer play. 

When you import video or audio clips into PowerPoint it just creates links from your presentation to the video/audio files. It is really important that when you burn your presentation to CD-ROM that you also burn the video/audio files on to the CD as well and that their relative postion to your PowerPoint file remains unchanged, otherwise the PowerPoint file will look for the video/audio files in the wrong place.

The easiest way to achieve this is prior to creating your presentation collect together in one folder all the video and audio files you are going to use. Then create your PowerPoint presentation in the same folder. 

When you come to burn the presentation to CD-ROM, burn the folder’s complete contents on to the CD, in that way your PowerPoint presentation will retain its relative position to your media clips and hence will know where to find them.

Some people think it is easier to be creative when you have a blank canvas but personally I find it helps channel my energies to have a client who can give me parameters for their website, clues as to what they are looking for.

Artists seem to be good at laying down the bare bones of what they would like their site to look like and how they want to structure it. Perhaps artists share a method of working things out before they start creative projects that is able to translate across different media, who knows?

When I met Fiona she knew lots of the parameters for her website, had done lots of research into other site along similar lines and had some fantastic close-up photos of her hand-made wedding invitation cards to use on the site. It was obvious that Fiona loves texture and colour so this seemed to point the way to the design for her site.

The information on the site was fairly limited and the photos would take up most of the space on the screen so I made up a page consisting of oblongs surrounded by white keylines to create a kind of gallery across the screen to fit in as many images as possible. The resulting site is probably the most textured that I have ever made and immediately visually reflects the product Fiona makes.

On this site every page features a different colour and texture from one of Fiona’s cards and this helps Fiona to get across her message that every card is unique and can be personalised to match the colour, style and even the fabric of the bridal dress.

To see the site for yourself please click here.

This post is written by Charlotte Lamb, designer for I to Eye

When I start designing a website all I have is the information from the client, perhaps a logo or a colour and a few words about what they would prefer their site to look like and the kind of customers they want to reach. I always try to combine all the things the client wants and their target audience into the design so that the site will look attractive, be easy to navigate and respond to the need for lots of text, lots of pictures or sometimes a bit of both. At the beginning anything is possible and that can be an exciting place to start.

With the Niall Catlin site I had a really fab modern logo to start with, strong colours (black and orange) and a description that the site needed to look modern and clean and have a list of the plumbing and heating services provided displayed on the first page. The site design evolved through playing with the logo shapes filled with montaged photos onto a cleaner line of boxed photos to help describe visually the areas they work in.

I think the final site looks great when browsed, very clean and simple but with plenty of space on the pages to describe the services Niall Catlin Plumbing and Heating provide and some of their excellent testimonials taken from the Check a Trade website. Visit the new Niall Catlin site by clicking here.

If you would like I to Eye to design your website or take a look at your website and redesign it then why not contact us? If you would like to see other sites we have designed for clients click here to visit our gallery page.

Posted by Charlotte Lamb, designer at I to Eye

Today I am going to introduce you to one of my favourite minimalist designs, as far as websites can ever be minimalist with all those buttons…

The owners of a new business: Basingstoke Apartment Services, came to see us at I to Eye with some specific ideas about the kind of clean and simple site they really wanted.  It is easy for sites with a lot of content such as photographs of properties and their interiors to become cluttered and difficult to navigate. Basingstoke Apartment Service also had lots of other information they needed to include for landlords as well as tenants and it became clear they needed something that would allow all this information to be easily read by site visitors.

The top part of the site acts as a sort of compressed navigation and corporate information banner as it neatly includes the contact numbers as well as all the navigation buttons alongside the logo.

It was important to get some photographs on the pages to relieve the intended white space and I designed a simple grid that allowed photographs of the local area to be included as well as the strapline for the company. The text for all the pages re-uses the red, grey and black theme that the company logo suggested to me when I saw it.  A grey keyline helps to draw the eye down the page as well as defining the edge of the site pages. Each page is bookended by the red footer that carries the text version of all the links.

The site is now updated regularly with new properties and the design allows the company to present a corporate image unified with all their paperwork and advertising to customers.

Visit the site by clicking here.