[00:00:10.030] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:10.520] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:10.900] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:13.000] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from the Creative Tinker.

[00:00:15.190] - Gordon
And welcome to This Week with Taylor and Gordon, a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses in the last seven days. Thank you for joining us again. It's been a busy week and as you can see for both of us, the hair is getting longer. It's getting to the point when we actually need to go and get it cut. But currently it's not possible. And the only option is sort of a buzz cut all the way over, which gives you just, you know, no style at all, really. So we're both waiting. So at some point soon, you will see us with hair that's very different to what it is at the moment. Before we get into our topics this week, is there anything that's been of interest in the last seven days from your point of view?

[00:01:05.260] - Taylor
I've been talking with lots of people and kind of coming up with new ways to do things and looking into new software this week as well.

[00:01:15.800] - Gordon
Okay. And I've received my booklets. We spoke about this. Was it the last episode? Yeah. Last week. We talked about this last week and it's actually arrived. So this is the fully printed version. It's on nice glossy paper and the back is all lovely and designed. It looks it looks really good. I'm really pleased with it. So I am now ready to give these out to people once I'm able to get back to work again. So that will be nice.

[00:01:47.680] - Taylor
Yeah, definitely.

[00:01:48.910] - Gordon
So let's talk about the topics for the week. What would you like to talk about?

[00:01:52.870] - Taylor
My topic for this week is I got a new parcel arrival, I would say parcel. It was more two massive boxes. I bought a standing desk.

[00:02:05.080] - Gordon
So for those who don't know what it is, it's a desk that's a lot higher, which you can work at by standing at it. Sort of makes sense.

[00:02:12.940] - Taylor
Yes. It's a motorised desk. It can go from sitting to standing. And it's really good for not only just changing up your position. So if you're sitting down for a long time, or you work a computer for a long time. It's not good to be sitting down the entire time.

[00:02:28.780] - Gordon
It's not good for your posture is it?

[00:02:30.580] - Taylor
And so it's good for not only giving you a bit of a boost of energy, but also kind of stretching your muscles and giving yourself a different position to be in so that you don't get cramp or you don't get a bad back or whatever. And yeah, it's working really well. I really like it.

[00:02:47.050] - Gordon
And were you finding that it was because of your Apple rings that weren't being completed. There's the reason for you wanting this?

[00:02:55.510] - Taylor
Yeah, it was partly to do with that, but it kind of kept reminding me. But also I used to take my laptop downstairs and work in the kitchen purely because it was a different...

[00:03:06.430] - Gordon
Height working surface.

[00:03:07.190] - Taylor
Yeah. So I would work standing up and I really enjoyed it because it was different. It gave me energy. It was a different position that, you know, I could stand up, move around where I'm thinking of things like that that I couldn't otherwise do when you're sitting at a desk. And so I've been wanting to kind of get one for a long time. But it's always kind of, they're expensive, and I wasn't sure which one to go for, whether I go for a motorised one or a kind of crank one they do at IKEA and a couple of other people do crank versions.

[00:03:35.050] - Gordon
So that's like a hand crank one, like a manual one. That sounds like a lot of hard work because I'm guessing that you would need to actually lift it based on whatever's on the desk at the time. Yeah, the weight would be an issue. So in fact, that would help you with your exercise.

[00:03:51.280] - Taylor
It would. However, I feel like now I've used it for for a bit. I think if it wasn't motorised, I wouldn't use it as much because

[00:03:59.260] - Gordon
It would just stay in one position.

[00:04:00.580] - Taylor
It would be that "oh I've got to move the desk up" whereas with this it's holding a button down. It would just raise up for me or lower it down. And I use a kind of time, it's called 'timeout' and it basically reminds me every 15 minutes, take a ten second stretch, every hour to switch positions from standing to sitting or vice versa. And then every two hours it tells me to take a five minute break.

[00:04:23.840] - Gordon
Let's have a quick stretch now shall we? Good. So interestingly, your table arrived in two different packages.

[00:04:34.750] - Taylor
Yes.

[00:04:35.440] - Gordon
So it came with the same courier, but it came as two completely separate packages. And these were, I have to say, enormous packages. One came in the morning and the other came sort of late afternoon, early evening, didn't it?

[00:04:52.630] - Taylor
Yeah. I mean, I upgraded the size of my desk as well. So I used to have 120 by 60 centimetres, which is, you know, it's a fairly big desk. And I upgraded to 140 by 70, which was, you know, even bigger. And it was. Yeah. Just absolutely huge.

[00:05:10.330] - Gordon
But weirdly, you've actually got a bit more space now.

[00:05:12.640] - Taylor
Yes, I've got more space for my wrist to be able to rest on. I've got about actually 10 centimetres kind of in deep wise so I've got 10 centimetres more towards me

[00:05:23.410] - Gordon
From the front to the back of the desk. Mm hmm. So with everything moved back to where it is, you've now got more room in the front of you to rest your wrists on the desk so that when you're typing your your arm isn't getting quite so fatigued because being like this is not good.

[00:05:40.270] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:05:42.550] - Gordon
So that that's actually going to give you a better posture.

[00:05:45.760] - Taylor
Yeah. And also enjoy it for when I have meetings. I find it's a lot better to have meetings standing up because you know, you're a lot more awake, you can be a lot more vocal, which is why people stand up when they sing. Not that I sing on on my meetings, but, you know, it's that same type of...

[00:06:03.100] - Gordon
But it gives you the opportunity in the future to sing if you wanted to.

[00:06:06.170] - Taylor
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's lots of great benefits. And I think mine was around the 300 pound mark which is kind of mid entry like.

[00:06:16.720] - Gordon
Well for a motorised it's a lot more expensive than a manual I would guess.

[00:06:19.630] - Taylor
Yeah, it's about 100 or 150 pounds more, so for a conventional crank, however, it's kind of the lower end of the motorised and they can go from 500 upwards to a thousand.

[00:06:32.140] - Gordon
So taking aside the benefits in health of having a desk that you can move and change the height of. Two things. One is, do you find that when you're standing and you're working, everything appears different because obviously the view around the room is going to be a different height. So does it feel different? When you're doing it like that?

[00:06:53.650] - Taylor
I think for me, because my, I have three screens, I have two, one laptop screen my monitor and then I have a TV, which I have an Apple TV on to watch kind of YouTube or kind of any videos to help me with my work. That kind of blocks out most of my room and most of my vision because it's so wide, it pretty much covers my entire vision because I've got my wall on my left and then I've got my screen in front of a screen on my right to kind of actually see much of the rest of the room, whether I'm sitting down or standing up anyway. But I do find that I'm able to get my camera up to my eye level when I stand up because the desk is further down and the camera's on the laptop. The laptop is at a lower height than my head.

[00:07:40.300] - Gordon
So it's looking up at you, rather than across at you.

[00:07:43.570] - Taylor
So when I stand up, this actually fixes the issue because I can put the laptop screen at the same height as my eyes, basically.

[00:07:51.340] - Gordon
And that's a good point. We film 'This Week With' with a camera that is sort of just about eye level so that we're looking along to the camera. If you look at films, you'll see that if the camera is lower down and it looks up, it gives you more of a sinister look. So you'll find that sort of lots of baddies are filmed looking up at you. And if you've got a camera that's too high looking down, well you look a lot smaller than you actually are and to be honest, I don't need to be any smaller than I already am. So that's why we've kept it on this level, which is the most flattering angle to be to be videoed at. So the second thing I was going to say to you is when you got it and you installed it, everything went swimmingly, did it?

[00:08:40.630] - Taylor
So I had the motor which I had to reset. So I put it up and then I went to put it down and then that worked fine. But then when I tried to put it up again, it wouldn't go up, but it would only go down. And this basically was easily fixed by holding down the down arrow button for five seconds, which basically reset the whole system. And it worked absolutely fine, which which was really good.

[00:09:06.560] - Gordon
It was a bit of a pain, though, wasn't it? Because you put a chest of drawers for storage underneath the desk and by lowering it for five seconds, it would have gone down and hit the table so you had to move all those out to be able to go down.

[00:09:20.800] - Taylor
But apart from that. Yeah.

[00:09:22.240] - Gordon
But it's working well,

[00:09:23.200] - Taylor
Yeah, I love it.

[00:09:24.100] - Gordon
Good. Maybe we'll check back in with you in sort of six months or so and see how you're faring with it then.

[00:09:30.730] - Taylor
Yeah, definitely.

[00:09:31.570] - Gordon
Cool. So this week's topic for me is Mood Board. Now, this is something that I have not personally done myself, but it's something I know about because I did research it and decided it wasn't something that I wanted to do for myself. But I thought it important to talk about it because it may be right for you and you never know. It might be right for I don't know, do you do mood boards?

[00:10:02.200] - Taylor
I go through and find similar examples of websites.

[00:10:07.820] - Gordon
OK, so it's a digital moodboard. OK, so for those who don't know what I'm talking about, a mood board is primarily for sort of products rather than, you know, digital work like we do. It's for products. So you would have a mood board, which would be a physical board, normally a cork board. So you can pin things to it. And if you're let's take, for example, someone who's creating some costumes. OK, so a mood board for a costume would be sort of the style of the outfit, whatever the outfit is, different examples of styles that sort of fit within the era that you're looking at. So the sort of the time frame you're looking at, if it's going to be a Victorian costume, for example, then obviously you want lots of reference material with Victorian costumes. But it also includes things like textures and fabrics and colours. That's a really important one colour, but also a mood board can have things that give you the feeling of what you're looking for. So taking this from costumes and moving over to what we do, which is sort of websites and design, our mood boards could be a collection of styles. Is it going to be a very corporate, you know, with one colour and white and, you know, one type face black and white photos? I mean, that's a very specific type of website and a very specific style. Or is it going to be sort of vibrant and fun and colourful? And how's the typeface going to be? What sort of typefaces are you looking for? If, for example, Times New Roman, which is the one you normally see in newspapers, that's a very common typeface in newspapers, Times New Roman, which has the the serifs on it. So it's got the little curly bits at the end of letters. That's what a serif is. And a sans serif is one without those little tiny bits on the end - Ariel, for example, is a sans serif. Helvetica is probably the most common name and those times, New Roman and something like Ariel or Helvetica or, you know, taking it even further, there are cursive fonts which look like handwriting. You know, that sort of typeface gives a very different look and feel to a website or a piece of design. So having a sort of an example of the sort of style of typeface that someone is looking for is a really good indication of what sort of site it's going to be. What else can you think of that might go in a digital mood board? Style of images as well.

[00:13:18.400] - Taylor
Functionality.

[00:13:19.780] - Gordon
So functionality. Yes, but yes. So how is the functionality going to look? Because a mood board is a lot about the look and the feel of things. But yeah, the functionality, you know, are you going to have something fun in there or is it going to be sort of like a calculator type tool that you're going to have in there?Yeah, that sort of thing. Colours is a really important thing because seeing colours together doesn't necessarily translate well to a website once, if you just if you just did it, being able to see the colours on their own and together, see how they work together, can allow you to tweak them and possibly even change one or two of the colours out completely before you get to the design stage.

[00:14:11.380] - Taylor
Font weights?

[00:14:12.640] - Gordon
Font weights. Yeah, really important. So having a really bold and thick typeface for a header would work really well, but, you know, probably would be horrible as body text. You don't want a thick, heavy typeface for your body. You want something. that's a lot easier to read.

[00:14:33.100] - Taylor
There's, I saw something and there was two ways, the two best ways to show how kind of hierarchy in a design. The first one is by using font weights. And the second one is using kind of gradients of colours. So that would mean maybe using a bold colour for the heading, but then using, you know, a black for a sub-heading, but then using a grey for the body text, which is a way of differentiating the most important information to not. A good example, is if you look at any pretty much any Web app on the Internet, you'll see they use kind of grey for very less important buttons or information, but then they'll use black or colours for important and obviously use font weights to distinguish rather than using for example a table and using borders. Yeah, you know, they'd rather used font weight and colours to do that instead of a border.

[00:15:31.420] - Gordon
Yeah. And another way of categorising important information would be spacing as well. So for example, a title would have, you know, potentially lots of space around it, whereas a subtitle would have, you know, just a little bit of space and then body text will be very close together. And that's another variation.

[00:15:52.060] - Taylor
Imagery.

[00:15:53.050] - Gordon
Imagery, yes. So the style of the imagery do you have, if you have pictures or photos on your site or your design, are they going to be a certain colour palette, for example, you know, all the Instagram filters, all of those are a particular style and each one gives you a feeling of something, you know, maybe sort of sepia type photo will give you a feeling of old fashioned, which could be perfect if your design is for, you know, like an old fashioned sweetshop, for example, you know, that might be just perfect for that sort of design to give it that feel. Having something really modern doesn't go at all with the subject matter.

[00:16:37.350] - Taylor
Yeah. So graphics. So like SVGs, like custom, like line art and things like that. Different icon styles.

[00:16:45.670] - Gordon
Yes. Again, because, because you want to try and get all your imagery into a cohesive unit so they look like they belong together, not, you know, grabbed from different places and some illustrations, some photos, you know, you want them to look like they were created, especially for that purpose, even if they haven't, you know, and, you know, stock photography, you know what style photography, what angle is your are your photos being taken from? Are you're going to have and sort of similar lighting. There's there's a lot of things that can be decided upon by the customer and, along with the designer, to give you a really good look and feel for how you want the site to appear. And that's before you even get to the design stage, before you even find out what the design is going to look like, because all of these mood board items are going to influence the final product, and as I said, it's not something I've actually done myself, mainly because my mood board is sort of in my head. I sort of build a mood board in my head based on my discussions with the client or if it's something I'm doing for myself, I'll have a good idea myself what I want. So my mood board is going to be here and I will be remembering it, having made the decisions that we've just discussed. But it might be worth doing a mood board, a digital mood board, and just to get everything for visual people, you know, they say there's people who learn or can see things visually better than they can if they were to read something. And, you know, life is moving along and things are changing and video is becoming really important. One of the reasons we decided to video our podcast and not just talk into microphones is because some people like to watch and see what's going on and see the hand gestures that we're doing and the way that we're, our facial expressions are sort of making a point that you are now picking up on which you won't get if you're listening to the podcast so there you go, it's a good reason to go watch the video.

[00:19:07.390] - Taylor
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I guess, used to do that as well. However, I found that it's very difficult because of the amount of projects I work on, I'm jumping between lots and lots of different projects that if I don't write things I need to do down, if I don't have some sort of reference to be able to go back to, it will have been forgotten. Which is why I make sure I write all of the kind of links that clients send me and content clients send me and all that. And I make sure I store it all away and make sure I create kind of like, you know, mood boards. They're not, you know, very technical advance. They're normally screenshots of websites that clients have sent me. And then I will go away and try and find others that are similar to what they want, same with functionality, because it's very easy to if they said, I want this functionality from a certain website, but they don't like the style at all, just screen shoting that, at least I know I need to get it in that kind of format, because, as you know, there's lots of different ways to present something. You know, even though same functionality there's lots of different ways to present it, which can also really help when coming to the design stage.

[00:20:18.760] - Gordon
And as a customer, if you want to get the best result from a designer, for example, I mean, this this applies to lots of things. But because web designers and we do graphic design, this is sort of our area of expertise. So if you want to get the best out of your designer, create your own mood board, find things you like, put them all together. So when you go to the designer and say, look, this is what I want, and you give them all of these samples and ideas that you've got, it's going to give you a much better result in a lot quicker time as well, because you've got, the designer's got something to base it on.

[00:21:01.480] - Taylor
Exactly.

[00:21:02.830] - Gordon
So I think that's all I need to say about that. One piece of software that I think you got a while back was, was it colour board? Yeah. So I don't know anything about it, but there is software available to do that. And, you know, I'm a big, big fan of Evernote, which I don't think I've talked about.

[00:21:23.470] - Taylor
No you have we spent probably a whole episode on it.

[00:21:26.410] - Gordon
Did we?

[00:21:26.410] - Taylor
Yeah

[00:21:27.550] - Gordon
It's amazing. When you get to this number of episodes, you forget all the things you have talked about, but things do move on and there have been updates. So Evernote is something you could put your digital mood boards on. In fact, that's what I sometimes do for some of my own projects.

[00:21:42.400] - Taylor
If you want to find that, you can do a search on our website for Evernote and it should come up and that will tell you we've done a topic on it.

[00:21:50.050] - Gordon
There you go and it'll also tell you if our search system works properly.

[00:21:55.300] - Taylor
Need to go and check that actually to make sure.

[00:21:56.140]
Yeah, we'd best do that before we, before anyone else does. So thank you so much for joining us. That's all we have for you this week. If you have enjoyed this, then we can be found on Facebook and YouTube, links are on the screen.

[00:22:12.550] - Taylor
You can also go to our website and you can search for Evernote and also other topics that we might have spoken about. If you do a search and it's not there, please let us know and if it's something you're interested in, we're happy to talk about it because, you know, we have a big knowledge of, you know, a bank of knowledge, really, that, it's sometimes hard. We only talk about things that we might find interesting or, you know, we have found out whereas you know, there's lots of information that we do know that, you know, other people might not know that we we don't know that isn't common, I guess.

[00:22:45.500] - Gordon
Yeah. So if there's something that you're interested in finding out more about. Let us know, and if we do, in fact, know about it, we will most definitely make an episode for you. So there you go, thank you for joining us if you're here live. Thank you for joining us live. And if you're watching a re-watch, then please leave comments on the YouTube or underneath on the Facebook. Perfect. Until next week, my name is Gordon. I'm from Drayson Design

[00:23:14.780] - Taylor
and I'm Taylor from the The Creative Tinker.

[00:23:17.540] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:23:17.980] - Taylor
Bye.

This Week's Topics

Show Notes