Fabre Weblog

New website launch for funky Soho bar

2008-03-02T21:22:00.003Z

After a few minor setbacks last year, The Enclave (a new London-based bar-lounge and club) finally opened its doors to the socialites of Soho in February... Fabre are proud to reveal the new website design for The Enclave, which we hope reflects the stylish ambiance of the venue.

http://www.enclavesoho.com/

BBC Raw Talent at HumberFest

2007-08-01T20:29:00.000+01:00

As part of the HumberFest 2007 events, I've recently completed a flyer to promote the BBC Raw Talent day which took place earlier in July... And here's the result: grunge, loud, Humber scene, moody, 'nuff said!

Sailin' away on the crest of a wave...

2007-06-20T16:08:00.000+01:00

... it's like magic!

No, I haven't been immersing my ears in the delights of the Electric Light Orchestra (as much as I'd like to), however I have finished designing the new web site for top table magician Rob James. My client wanted a face-lift for his site along with a graphical identity, and seamless CMS functioning, in this case a Wordpress blog.

His new site features a score of gallery images of the man in action as well as an interesting profile of previous work, so why not check it out sometime and get in touch if you like it!

Squirrel loves the warm MacBook

2007-03-21T00:04:00.000Z

Some people either love their pets too much or love their Mac too much - can't decide which... Can you?

Stop me and buy one... or two...

2007-03-19T16:00:00.000Z

After designing their corpirate identity and logo quite some time ago (founder Adam has been run off his feet I'm sure), buyonetoo.com has finally found its way out into the world wide 'tinterweb, marketing itself as "the community buying site". Their web site wasn't designed by me personally, however I'm sure you'll agree it is clean and easy to navigate, please check them out if you haven't already http://www.buyonetoo.com/

Time for t-shirts

2007-03-13T16:46:00.000Z

Without wanting to announce any shameless plugs, I'm pleased to shamlessly plug my good friends new online t-shirt store 'Visual Candy'! Please check out their goods and get yourself kitted out with sometyhing cool, or funny, or both. Just in time for summer...

Be the envy of your friends... wow that girl or guy you're trying to pull... but more importantly make old ladies shake their heads and tut disapprovingly.

You'll find an array of t-shirts covering retro, funny, rude, and plain stupid slogans and designs... I won't list any of the rude ones here because small people may be reading this, however this particular tee happens to be my fave...

In the words of owners Dean and Janine "the t-shirt is more than an inexpensive way of keeping your nipples warm!" - and so say all of us. Buy them. Now.

Banner blindness

2007-01-05T20:34:00.000Z

Following this interesting experiment by those nice people at Etre, my curiosity was sparked enough to delve further. Their experiment assessed the navigational behavior of users viewing large ecommerce web sites, such as Virgin Megastores.

Through the use of Etre's eye tracking services, it can be clearly seen that users really weren't paying any attention to the all-important promotional areas of the site, as demonstrated below. See how the "DVDs from £4.99" banner is completely ignored.

I personally believe this reinforces Jakob Nielsen's theory of 'banner blindness' published 8 years ago as part of his 'Top 10 New Mistakes of Web Design'. Nielsen's theory stipulates that "selective attention is very powerful, and Web users have learned to stop paying attention to any ads that get in the way of their goal-driven navigation.

Unfortunately, users also ignore legitimate design elements that look like prevalent forms of advertising. After all, when you ignore something, you don't study it in detail to find out what it is. Therefore, it is best to avoid any designs that look like advertisements. The exact implications of this guideline will vary with new forms of ads; currently follow these rules:

Banner blindness means that users never fixate their eyes on anything that looks like a banner ad due to shape or position on the page.

Animation avoidance makes users ignore areas with blinking or flashing text or other aggressive animations.

Pop-up purges mean that users close pop-up windoids before they have even fully rendered; sometimes with great viciousness (a sort of getting-back-at-GeoCities triumph)."

To summarise, "classified ads work because as far as users are concerned, they are content, not advertising: people actively seek out the classifieds when they are looking to buy. This explains the success of eBay, etc. The superiority of Web classifieds portends dire times ahead for traditional printed newspapers, as their most lucrative income source continues to migrate online.

Search engine ads work because search engines are the one type of website that people visit with the explicit goal of finding someplace else to go. Thus, if users see an ad for what they're looking for, there is a high probability that they'll click that ad. Advertisers can satisfy a user's immediate needs because they target ads based on the user's query terms. (This also explains why ads on search engine homepages don't work: it's impossible to target the ad to the user's current quest until the server knows what that quest is.)"

Lessons to be learned!

Having said that, I'm still going to keep my graphical banner for Firefox (see right). After all, it's free, and you'll be a much better interweb person for downloading it.

Design Psychology

2007-01-04T15:43:00.000Z

An excellent article from Stylegala covering insights into the purpose and effect of physical elements, design, and layout of web pages ...and why clients should let designers handle design.

Strictly for Apple geeks only...

2007-01-04T14:56:00.000Z

Presenting 'The 1984 Playset'... and so the randomness begins.

IE7: Busted!

2007-01-04T12:13:00.000Z

In the months leading up to launch of the long-awaited Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft had advised businesses to test their websites with beta versions of IE7.

Why? Because updates made to Internet Explorer's rendering engine meant that they couldn't guarantee that sites that worked perfectly in IE6 would perform similarly in IE7.

The bottom line - these chaps compared all of the FTSE 100 sites in both IE6 and IE7, and 13 of these sites are 'broken' in IE7. Furthermore, some serious presentation problems with the sites of a number of major UK retailers. Here are the results (brace yourself)...

Based on this, and taken with a generous pinch of salt, you could argue that some 12.7 million sites are now broken due to IE7's inability to handle standards-complaint HTML and CSS.... Therefore, that's more work for us designers and developers then, isn't it? ;-)

New year, new site!

2007-01-02T11:12:00.000Z

Happy new year!
'tis the season to be dieting, so you'll see that our site has lost a bit of weight already. By 'weight', I mean lack of tables and bloated code of course ("tenuous link", I hear you shout?). That's right, the new Fabre site is now entirely CSS-based and completely tables-free, as all 'good' sites should be.

Why?
I've decided to give the site a bit of an overhaul to make it more accessible, standards-compliant, and readable. As always, there are still a few bugs to be worked out, which I will no doubt have a rant about in a future blog (grrrrr, Internet Explorer). Two words of wisdom to any IE users out there: Download Firefox.

Feel free to comment on the evolved look, I hope you like it!

Hello there!

2006-12-15T10:14:00.000Z

Welcome to my very first blog post. The thoughts, rants, and news here will mostly be related to design and my personal experience as a designer. I'll also be referencing the people, places, and ideas that influence me and how I think and work, as well as plenty of random nonsense to boot.

So here's to the start of something new for 2007.

Happy Christmas and all that jazz, now let me figure out how this damn thing works ;-)