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It is professional development day, so I'll clean out my mailbox of all those references to sites and services that will help make you a better worker bee. We'll start with The Hyper, a twice monthly newsletter aimed at publishing and media professionals.
The dispatch is chock full of inside industry info and tech and marketing tips. It will help you stay on top of the latest trends in new media business, the newest ideas, and the most recent failures. To subscribe, or peruse the archives go to www.methodfive.com/hyper.
In new media and need to network? Join AIMs, the Association of Internet Marketing and Sales. The mandate of the group is to bring together decision makers in the Internet business in Canada. If your in the Southern Ontario area you can attend the monthly meetings where big industry players present their ideas and solutions, or you can wander over to the site at www.aimscanada.com and check out job postings and other resources.
Another useful professional site is the Internet Professional Publishers Association, (www.ippa.org). The IPPA hosts a mailing list that circulates the membership's views on new media design issues, tips and tricks. To subscribe send an E-mail to subscribe@ippa.org.
Finally, all web designers struggle with creating content that will appear the same in all browsers, but are constantly thwarted by Netscape and Microsoft as they fail to adhere to standards — and continue to have their corporate playground fight.
Well enough people are ticked off that some of them have decided to fight back: Enter the Web Standards Organization whose mission is to “stop the fragmentation of the web, by persuading the browser makers that common standards are in everyone's best interest”. The site exposes the machinations of the browser fight, and proposes and demands solutions from the two titans.
Here is a Spanish commercial site for a Mercedes Benz mini van. This site, developed by Icon Medialab of Madrid, initially seems like a typical brochure-ware site, but when you start to click around you encounter some very slick interfaces, pop-up demonstrations, gorgeously subtle art, and seamlessly integrated interactives.
Clever use of mouse over scripting, and a dead simple and elegant presentation make this site accomplish it's goals engagingly. All this and it is also lean and modem friendly as well.
I want to buy this sport utility vehicle, and I don't speak a lick of Spanish.
Net Notables appears several times a year in Applied Arts, Canada's premiere graphic design magazine
