December 2011 Newsletter
Welcome to the December edition of the fusionbureau newsletter. If you're receiving this, it's either because you've had some kind of direct contact with a fusionbureau staff member and you're someone we'd like to keep in touch with, or you signed up through our web site.
In this edition:
- Using 'mood boards' to set creative direction
- Google+ Company Pages - the how and why
- LinkedIn starts a Japanese version
- The move from Flash to HTML gathers pace
- New fusionbureau web site
Using 'Mood Boards' To Set Creative Direction
Translating an idea in one person's head into a shared creative direction can be a difficult task. Mood boards are a collection of text, photographs and sketches that serve as a visual tool to quickly inform others of the overall 'feel' (or 'flow') that a designer is trying to achieve.
As you'd expect with the rising level of interaction and collaboration now possible on the web, some interesting tools have appeared that allow designers and clients to collaborate and explore the creative direction for a project.
Here are a few interesting ones if you'd like to try them out.
Google+ Company Pages - The How And Why
Google recently announced the ability to create Company/Organisational pages on their brand new social network Google+.
At the moment there are still a few limitations. Only one person can be an admin for a page and there are no custom urls yet (like plus.google.com/yourcompany) which also means there can be multiple pages with the same name.
Google+ has only been open to the public since September 21st, but already has more than 60 million members. Although the jury is out as to whether it will directly challenge facebook, given Google's enormous clout in the search space, it's worth thinking about creating a page for your company.
LinkedIn Starts A Japanese Version
Coming more than eight years after the launch, LinkedIn has finally launched a Japanese localisation of the popular business networking site. Digital Garage (the company behind the successful localisation and launch of Twitter in Japan) originally planned to help produce a Japanese version in 2007, although that never came to fruition.
At present, Facebook is the leader in business networking in Japan. It will be interesting to see if those who already use Facebook for business networking will see the advantage in the specialist business networking site.
The Move From Flash To HTML5 Gathers Pace
With Adobe's recent announcement that they would be ending support for mobile Flash, the future for Flash is looking bleak.
To help speed the transition from Flash to HTML5, Google labs has released a Flash to HTML5 convertor that takes a .swf file as input and outputs HTML5 and Javascript.
The move away from the buggy, processor intensive Flash towards HTML5 is being driven by the growth in mobile devices such as Apple's iPad 2.
If you have a site in Flash that you would like updated to HTML5, contact us for a chat about the options.
New fusionbureau Web Site
fusionbureau has a shiny new web site. If you're interested in finding a little more about what we do or browsing some of our past projects do as the link below says.
Message From fusionbureau
We wish all our clients, associates, collaborators and friends a happy and safe end to what has been a unique 2011.
See you on the other side and as always, feel free to contact us about your web or design projects.
email: tokyo@fusionbureau.com
Also, please follow us on the social network of your choice.
