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Nominating a Web Design Agency

Choosing a graphic design agency is like choosing a restaurant. Bigger is not necessarily better. If you need something quick and dirty to fill a hole, the golden arches are fine but you wouldn’t take a client there for dinner ;-) In order to get what you need from your agency, you need access to the real talent behind the scenes – in the same way you need the Michelin Starred chef to prepare your meal. Graphic design, even on the web, is an art not a science. Good design is not done on an industrial scale, it is about the talent of individuals (in small teams) and how they can channel that to deliver creative and professional artwork that fulfills your brief. The problem for you is that you cannot specifically "measure" the quality of an agency’s visual design capabilities. You can only look at what they do and see if you like it – not the most scientific of approaches - but what else can you do? In the first instance, you must try to think of it from your client's
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What is Adobe CQ and Adobe AEM

Adobe CQ (formerly Day Communique) is Adobe's Enterprise Level Web Content Management System. Recently, it re-branded to become Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to reflect its ever expanding universe of functionality and features. Some of the world's biggest brands use AEM to deliver web content to audiences of millions. It really has become the weapon of choice for anyone who's anyone on the the web. Why is it so popular? That's actually hard to say. There are a lot of things it does really, really well but it is very expensive to run. The software licence alone can run into 6 figures annually. That's hard to swallow when other competing technologies offer almost everything AEM does for a tenth of the price. But still, AEM continues to take over the world, one website at a time. On the positive side, it comes with a great set of features out of the box and, with a little tinkering, can deliver an engaging website in a very short space of time. The built-in compon
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Responsive Web Design: Media Queries are not enough

Responsive web design is very much the buzz word in web design today. Like so many of its contemporaries, it's made the uneasy transition from in-industry term to general web-marketing parlance and, in so doing, it's true meaning has been somewhat diluted. It always intrigues me when complex web development terminology finds its way into marketing and planning meetings. Sometimes, a client will even drop the term into a brief. My previous favourite (which was prolific around 6 or 8 years ago) was "Web 2.0". Only the people who didn't really understand it would ever say it and heaven forbid you should scratch the surface and ask what they actually knew about it! It's easy to see why "Responsive Web Design" has followed Web 2.0 down that road. It's a very accessible term which uses everyday words that belie the hidden complexities and it is these complexities that drove me to write this piece. Media Queries Media Queries are great in theory
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