Testimonial from Healthway Medical

On the night prior to our annual corporate retreat, we were in a mad rush to meet deadlines and to close some projects. One of the projects which TILT was working on was a series of advertisements to be inserted in various media such as The Expat, Motherhood, Young Parents as well as Straits Times.

As we left the office at about 10.30pm after the project had been completed, we were pleasantly surprised to receive an email from our client.

Thanks again! I am very impressed by TILT’s work ethics and positive attitude as always. Glad to have your team as our working partner. Cheers!
Dr Noel Yeo
Business Manager (Paediatrics/Special Projects)
Healthway Medical Group Pte Ltd

Once again, these are the small gestures by our clients to reaffirm our service standards as well as our claims for Design Matters. Thank you Healthway Medical Group!

55 and beyond!

TILT was awarded a stock photography project by Central Provident Fund Board (CPF) in September 2009 as they wanted to revamp their website and to update their stock photograph library. One of the themes which was to be captured was to show active aging.

As part of our value-add service to CPF, we actually approached our past client, Bottle Tree Park, to check if they can allow CPF to conduct the shoot in their vicinity at no cost. Not only did Bottle Tree Park Management agree, they also assisted to liaise with their other vendors in this venue of choice such that we can showcase the talents playing paintball, playing remote control car and much more!

On the day of the shoot, boy were we surprised! The talents (all actually above age 55 years old) were full of energy! These talents are actual real employees in CPF and they throughly enjoyed the sessions of paintball, playing remote control car, doing wet market shopping and walking through the park with passion and joy! One particular pair of talents (they are actually brothers and sisters) enjoyed the walk through the park so much that they were smiling from cheek to cheek all the time. Who said people beyond 55 years old do not know how to have fun?

Naturally, the shoot went well and we were pleasantly surprised when after the project ended, we received a note of thanks from the client, CPF Board. Thank you, CPF Board!

The team from TILT is very creative and efficient. The photos were very well taken. Great job! Thanks for making our photography project a success.
- Annabelle Goh, Senior Executive, Member Education, CPF Board

To view some of the photographs taken, you may visit our Facebook page.

H-TWO-O Ultimate Photography Challenge Merit Winner

H-TWO-O Ultimate Photography Challenge 2009 was organised to celebrate the essence of Sports and to harness the unity, camaraderie, strength, endurance and feeling of achievement.

TILT, with our speciality in Sports Photography, took part in the competition and won a Merit Award (Open Category). Due to the sensitive nature of most of the sporting events, where we were the official photographers, such as

Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon 2007 – 2009

WaterFest 2007 – 2008

Aviva 70.3 Ironman 2007 – 2008

Institute-Varsity-Polytechnic Games 2008 / 2009 Season 2

Photographs taken during these events were not submitted. As such, we submitted a photograph taken during the Singapore Paintball Novice Series 2009. Below is our entry.

To read more about our previous post, click here.

The Lion Story

15th August 2009 was a special day. Not only was it a day where One World – One Day – One Photo : Saturday August 15th 2009 is happening, it is also the day where The Lion Story was performing at Esplanade Outdoor Theatre.

One World – One Day – One Photo : Saturday August 15th 2009 is a project that hopes to gather contributors from ALL OVER THE WORLD in a visual celebration of the world we live in. The countries which have signed up to date are Denmark, South Africa, USA, Canada, Trinidad & Tobago, Hong Kong, Croatia, Australia, UK, Latvia, Singapore, New Zealand, Taiwan, Faroe Islands, Chile, Iceland, Sweden, Egypt, Russia, China, Turkey, France, Japan, Tunisia, Norway, Israel, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Netherlands, Finland, Bahrain, Azerbaijan, Greece, Belgium and Barbados.

From TILT’s perspective, we felt that it was apt to let the world hear about the lion’s story (Singapura is also known as the lion city) and with that, we submitted a photograph of a local band, The Lion Story, who was performing that night at Esplanade Outdoor Theatre. The Lion Story is a local band that had beneffitted from NOISE Singapore’s The Apprenticeship Programme. We hope the photograph do make the mark to be published in the photography book so that the world can hear the lion roar.

We all sat down together to check out the pics TILT shot, and we were really amazed at the quality and expression in the pictures you’ve captured! Thanks so much mannn! You’re awesome!
Amin
The Lion Story

Below is the photograph that was submitted and we hope the world loves the photograph taken as much as The Lion Story does.

The First Youth Olympic Games

The Singapore Youth Olympic Games Organising Committee (SYOGOC) has produced a brochure to publicise about the First Youth Olympic Games.

In their process of designing the brochure, they realised that they do not have a strong cover photograph which they can use. At the point of time, TILT was working on a project for SYOGOC. The project was to take stock photographs of the 26 National Sports Associations for publicity purposes. SYOGOC, then approached us and asked if we can assist in taking a good brochure cover photograph. Through our communication to them, we understood the requirements which they have and we immediately went about sourcing for talents and venue to take the photograph required. Through our clientele contacts, we managed to contact Republic Polytechnic to assist in this area and within 2 hours, we have the talents and venue secured. Very quickly, we reverted back to SYOGOC and informed them about the art direction as well as the confirmation of talents and venue.

Within 24hours, the photograph was taken and we emailed over to SYOGOC. Below is the response from SYOGOC.

Wow. I really like what I see.

Ellen NG
Senior Executive, Publications
Communications and Public Relations Division
Singapore Youth Olympic Games Organising Committee

In all our projects, we always seek to value add to our clients. The end result of a project is very much our baby as much as theirs and we are glad that we have played a part in assisting SYOGOC in producing their brochure.

To view the full brochure, please click here.

What is Professionalism?

This is a great opportunity for anyone wanting to try their hand at sports journalism or photography.
What we need:
People who are able to attend weeknight matches and can either:
• Take photographs of the action,
• Write up short articles on the games, or
• Do both writing and taking pictures.
You don’t need to be a professional, but an interest in sports and a good level of English certainly helps! Photographers will preferably have a digital SLR camera, but a good quality compact digital camera should also do the trick in most cases.

What was written above is an excerpt of a note which TILT came across in Facebook. This is a project which TILT is aware of and is currently pitching for it as well. Frankly, the content came across as a shock to us. The company is a pretty reputable company and yet, the content comes across as ….

Professionalism of a company? You decide for yourself.

The Last Hurray

TILT received an early christmas present from Singapore Sports Council today when SSC awarded the “SPORTON!” Creative Campaign to us.

The project is to promote the “SPORTON!” website to the youths such that it can become THE Sports Portal for the Youths. This is a project which TILT holds dear. In fact, we had spent numerous hours brainstorming and talking to the youths on what kind of creatives will capture their attention. Through our research, we had understood what the youths are looking out for. Through our brainstorming session, we had come up with a strategic plan to create an win-win situation for all parties through our Ambassador programme.

With a thorough evaluation which SSC conducted, TILT went through 2 rounds of presentation and when we received the phone call today informing us about the good news, all our staff literally jumped for joy! This piece of news had reaffirmed our position in the sports and education industry for TILT

This truly is the last hurray for the year!

On behalf of TILT, we thank all our readers a Merry Christmas and we hope that your Christmas celebration will be as sweet as ours too!

Design Matters: Let your fingers do the walking

Yellow Pages, in our opinion, tried to draw the gap between the 2 media, print design and web design, to be much closer. Though we cannot confirm this, from TILT’s perspective, “Let your fingers do the walking” was the tagline which Yellow Pages developed to bridge the gap.

Some may argue that of course, the tagline itself is very apt as they are encouraging the end users to browse the hardcopy Yellow Pages. We argue that they try to bridge this gap simply because of the fundamental difference between print design and web design and we say that Yellow Pages understands that!

Print design is about letting your eyes walk over the information, selectively looking at key messages and using spatial justaposition of every element on that page / product to enhance and further explain themselves. Just remember, the very last time a brochure / poster caught your attention, was it a case where your eyes had “walked” to the information? Or was it your hands?

Web design functions by letting the hands walk to the information. This can be achieved either through scrolling or clicking. This relationship of information release is part of the interaction with the human body. Do you remember the details of a webpage? More often than not, you will find yourself bookmarking a webpage so that you can “walk” back to that page one day when you need the information.

If you understand this key difference, you will understand why TILT has an alternative view to “Let your fingers do the walking!”

Design Matters: Designing for a web design compared to a print design

After we had shared on our previous experience in the fundamental difference between a website design and a print design, in this issue of design matters, we will be touching on the difference in designing for these 2 very different media.

First and foremost, you will need to understand their differences. We will touch on 2 of the key areas that differs between website design and print design can be compared in some major areas.

Types of media

Audience

Types of Media
As simple as it may sound, TILT decided not to leave any tables unturn and just elaborate a little bit more on the above.

As a print designer, projects which you will handle can be:

Magazine advertisements

Product design and packaging

Corporate Identity and stationaries

Brochures, reports, posters and banners

While as a web designer, projects which you will handle can be:

Standard HTML websites

Flash websites

Electronic Newsletters

Electronic Direct Mailers

The softwares which you use will be fundamentally different as well. As a print designer, you will realised you are constantly opening up Adobe Indesign, Adobe Illustrator, Freehand and of course Adobe Photoshop. As a web designer, the softwares are largely Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop. Some may use text pad, note pad, sharepoint designer or perhaps even microsoft frontpage.

Audience
Typically, when you attend a project design brief, you will find yourself asking your client, “Who is the target audience?”. This is where you will find that the difference begins.

In print design, the marketing message is the king! Faced with a very limited area, it is important for you to capture your audience in the shortest amount of time for the message to stay for the longest period. Of course, physical property such as texture, shape (remember when we mentioned form in our previous post), will assist you in achieving your goal. However, on the web, you need to try to keep your audience within your website for the longest possible time. You find that you constantly tease your audience with snippets of content to get them to navigate them around. Animation, navigation, sound and interactivity all play a part in this area. The key difference? You have unlimited number of pages to play with!

The fact is that anything that is a great print design is likely to be a lousy web design. Understanding the limitation and playing to the strength will allow you to come up with better design.

“Know the rules, then break them!”

Sounds familiar?

Design Matters: Web Design vs Print Design

In this next edition of design matters, TILT will be touching briefly on the difference between web design and print design. In fact, we decided to write this post also due to a very recent incident that happened to us.

Very often, there are companies who had requested for a print media design to follow that of a web design or vice versa. Though this can be done to a large extent, companies need to be aware of 1 simple point. For print media design, permanence and stability can be achieved with ease. However, this simply cannot be done on the web.

The Web Design World Is Just Different from the Print Design Media
With CSS, it is possible to get very precise layout. However, no matter how precise the web design layout is, it can never be as precise as print design. This is something that is, unfortunately, a fact which companies need to accept.

The web design can follow the print design by breaking the grid, having specific layout, font and other design elements. But are the tradeoffs worth it? Have you considered the download speed and maintenance issues?

It looks different!
In addition, in the web design world, it is so easy to build a web page and test it on your browser and you get it looking exactly the way you want it to be. However, the moment you test it on a different browser, it looks different. Not to mention about moving it on to another platform. It can look differently again!

At times, we hear from clients that they have staff who view the web site using a specific browser and it does not show up properly. Upon checking, very often, we realise that these users typically belong to 0.5% of the world’s web browser users. Is it worth then to make a perfectly working site look that way just to cater to that 0.5% and then risk ruining it for the remaining 99.5%? Simple mathematics. You decide.

VersionCue!
In print, it is very easy to export under another file name or overwrite the original file. So long as you path the fonts, the end user will definitely see the file as it is. However, for web, it is dependent on cache as well. Especially if you are working on CSS, it caches longer on the servers and it can take a long time to be cleared for you to see the updated version.

In fact, recently, one of our clients insisted that we had not made any of the changes simply because they cannot see the changes. They even went to the extent of copying out the source codes and sending it to us to show us that the source codes are wrong. We explained politely to them that if you are viewing the wrong page on the server, naturally, the source codes which you extract will definitely be wrong. Time is what is needed by you. Give it a bit of time and the right web site will show up soon. The end result was that 4 hours later, the client called us to ask us to make more minor changes and they said that they finally can see the updated changes and reminded us not to take so long to make the new changes. We politely informed them that since our last email correspondence with them, we had not worked on the website and the fact that they can view the website correctly now is simply due to the cache being cleared.

This few key differences between print design and web design is something which TILT seek for all companies to understand. If you can understand the difference and optimise it such that your workflow can be better, we are sure you can have a good relationship with your design company and your web design can then be truly optimise to be like a print design.

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