Gilmore Design Group :: Design InSight March 2006

	*March 2006*

Happy St. Patrick's Day!
This month, we've devoted our newsletter to showing you everything you need to know about email. We'll also take a look at the final part of our three part series on balance.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please send them to info@gilmoredesigngroup.com. You can also view past issues of the Design InSight newsletter at www.gilmoredesigngroup.com/company_newsletters.html.


www.readysetsell.com

Ready Set Sell Brochure

Client:	Ready Set Sell

Projects:

	Website Design & Development
	Website Maintenance
	Brochure Design
	PowerPoint Design

Objective: To create a consistent brand message across multiple elements that show a professional and engaging brand.

Solution: The website design & development was the jumping off point to start defining the overall "look and feel" of the Ready Set Sell brand. By using a strong color palette with photo elements we were able to create a unique and exciting look and feel for the company.

The brochure and PowerPoint presentation then re-iterated this look and feel to create a consistent and cohesive overall look.

Ready Set Sell is a perfect example of our partnership with a wonderful client who is easy to work with and trusts us to create top quality designs for her for all of their projects. We value their business and appreciate and always try to live up to their trust in us.

Testimonial
"Christine is the most organized and professional person I have ever worked with. She followed through on every detail - even the smallest. Several times during the website design process she pointed out ways for me to save money or redesign something to work better. The whole experience was fantastic."

- Sharon Wong, Ready Set Sell, Inc.

Balance
(Borrowed from digital-web.com and www.typography-1st.com/typo/prnc-des.shtml)

Part Three: Asymmetrical Balance
Asymmetrical (or informal) balance occurs when the weight of a composition is not evenly distributed around a central axis. Asymmetrical balance many times involves arranging of objects of differing size so that they balance one another with their visual weights. Often there is one dominant form that is offset by many smaller forms set within the white (negatie) space. The white space opposing must then act as a counter-balancing force. One of the major advantages of an asymmetrical layout is that it allows for the more dynamic use of white space. In general, asymmetrical compositions tend to have a greater sense of visual tension.

	Asymmetry

The attraction of asymmetrical balance to artists is its lack of a formula. This allows greater freedom which lends itself to more creative compositions. The difficulty lies in its lack of organization. This must be overcome by careful placement of objects and the use of other organizational devices (like the Gestalt principles).

The POP3 Server
(Borrowed from howstuffworks)

In the simplest implementations of POP3, the server maintains a collection of text files -- one for each e-mail account. When a message arrives, the POP3 server simply appends it to the bottom of the recipient's file.

When you check your e-mail, your e-mail client connects to the POP3 server using port 110. The POP3 server requires an account name and a password. Once you have logged in, the POP3 server opens your text file and allows you to access it. Like the SMTP server, the POP3 server understands a very simple set of text commands.

Your e-mail client connects to the POP3 server and issues a series of commands to bring copies of your e-mail messages to your local machine. Generally, it will then delete the messages from the server (unless you've told the e-mail client not to).

You can see that the POP3 server simply acts as an interface between the e-mail client and the text file containing your messages. And again, you can see that the POP3 server is extremely simple! You can connect to it through telnet at port 110 and issue the commands yourself if you would like to!

Question:
E-mail - What is it and how does it really work?

Answer:
(Borrowed from howstuffworks)

Have you ever wondered how e-mail gets from your desktop to a friend halfway around the world? What is a POP3 server, and how does it hold your mail? The answers may surprise you, because it turns out that e-mail is an incredibly simple system at its core. In this article, we'll take a look at e-mail and how it works.

An E-mail Message
An e-mail message has always been nothing more than a simple text message -- a piece of text sent to a recipient. In the beginning and even today, e-mail messages tend to be short pieces of text, although the ability to add attachments now makes many e-mail messages quite long. Even with attachments, however, e-mail messages continue to be text messages.

The E-mail System
Given that you have an e-mail client on your machine (like Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, or Pegasus), you are ready to send and receive e-mail. All that you need is an e-mail server for the client to connect to.

We know that machines on the Internet can run software applications that act as servers . There are Web servers, FTP servers, telnet servers and e-mail servers running on millions of machines on the Internet right now. These applications run all the time on the server machine and they listen to specific ports, waiting for people or programs to attach to the port.

For the vast majority of people right now, the e-mail system consists of two different servers running on a server machine. One is called the SMTP server, where SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The SMTP server handles outgoing mail. The other is either a POP3 server or an IMAP server, both of which handle incoming mail. POP stands for Post Office Protocol, and IMAP stands for Internet Mail Access Protocol. A typical e-mail server looks like this...