Blogs by Sarah Graveling

My first website was built over 10 years ago… I was in the final year of my Graphic Information Design degree. Google hadn’t surfaced yet and buying something online was very far from my mind, I’d only just received my first email address.  There wasn’t anybody to teach you how to work on the internet [...]

I should imagine that most web designers acknowledge the greatness of some of the major players. The Guardian for making an astonishing amount of content accessible and user-friendly. The BBC for encouraging users to tailor make the content. The lucky designers that work on Nike that don’t seem to have the same accessibility constraints that [...]

I like celebrity gossip.
I LOVE a pop/rock biography, read the celebrity pages in the daily newspapers on the tube and regularly buy cheap celeb magazines for long train journeys (excuse). But, there is a line. I stopped buying heat after they wrote an appalling story about Jordan’s son Harvey weight gain (she took Heat [...]

Well, there are websites and there are websites…
There is shopping. After buying a very expensive dress and never wearing it I’ve banned myself from www.netaporter.com, they just make it all FAR too easy, but as many others I probably spend the most from Amazon.
Some websites are life changing… I’ve got in contact with lost [...]

Like many designers I have phases of favourite fonts. I can see through the past work I’ve done what font era I was in. These phases are not a fickle love, but many months when the font is used as much as possible.

My first love (and I’m talking the 90’s) was a font called Blur. [...]

Up until recently we have always used Fahrner Image Replacement (FIR) technique on our sites because this is great for when stylesheets are turned off. This is important as our focus is on SEO and to make our sites accessible for screen readers.
However, as a recent accessibility study showed if you use this technique then [...]

I’ve found my solution to my PowerPoint headache. Keynote! Well, not exactly a solution as being the only fulltime mac user in the office, my colleagues seem rather reluctant to drag themselves away from PowerPoint and use Keynote. So obviously not a practical solution and will still have to overcome my PowerPoint phobia, but what [...]

It’s clumsy and very hard to make content look pretty. Generally, the use of drop shadows and fading photographs or photographic backgrounds wouldn’t normally be appreciated on the web or print, but for some reason these pet hates are frequently used in powerpoint.
However, I have also come to realise that unfortunately there is just [...]

This is a reoccurring question that is often discussed amongst web designers, especially when interviewing for new designers at Tamar. Tamar is relatively unique in that we have always employed web designers that can build their websites as well as design them, as other agencies tend to split the two disciplines.
Naturally everyone is different and [...]

We’ve recently opened an office in Shanghai and are in the process of introducing Chinese translations to our branding, website etc. I wanted to do some research first to get some tips on how we should approach this.
Fonts
Ideally you should not have more than 30 characters on one line.
There are three traditional Chinese typefaces Song, [...]