Being a digital agency, Nascom follows this philosophy and practices it in its projects. By bringing Jaffe to Belgium, Nascom wishes to further develop and publicize this way of thinking.

In order to support the victims of the earthquake in Haiti, Jaffe auctioned himself as a keynote speaker for this charity. Nascom didn’t miss this chance and decided this auction was an efficient as well as fun way to support charity.

Jaffe will visit Belgium on April 28th 2010. Nascom wants to make this both a valuable and memorable experience for everyone working in marketing and communication.

About Joseph Jaffe

Besides being an accomplished speaker, Jaffe is the author of two bestsellers and has a popular blog and podcast, all while running his marketing company (Crayon) in New York which has recently been bought by Powered. In February 2010, Jaffe launches his new book “Flip the Funnel”, in which he gives an idiosyncratic view on marketing and sales.

More on Joseph Jaffe on his blog: http://www.jaffejuice.com

About Nascom

Nascom is a young and dynamic digital agency and specialist on 4 platforms: Web, Mobile, Desktop & Touch. 75 enthusiastic employees give their best every single day.

Want to know more about Nascom? Visit http://www.nascom.be

Radio 1212 intents to inform, create awareness and call their listeners to action. Moreover, Radio 1212 wants to be a platform for various kinds of initiatives people are undertaking to support Haiti. That’s why a website is brought to life: www.radio1212.be

On the website, you can’t only find information on the charity, but also listen or watch Friday’s broadcast live via webcam. More important, however, is the fact that the website is a forum for all actions people are undertaking. Via radio1212.be you can tell the world what you are doing for Haiti. The website is mainly formed with user generated content. You can also follow Radio 1212 on Facebook and Twitter.

This isn’t the first cooperation of this kind though. Earlier, Nascom already developed websites for De Rode Loper, JOE fm and Q-music.

About Radio 1212

Radio 1212 is a common charity event of JOE fm, MNM, Radio 2, Studio Brussel and Q-music in benefit of the victims of the earthquake in Haiti.

Radio 1212, Friday 22^nd January 2010, from 8am till 8pm on Groenplaats in Antwerp. For more information: www.radio1212.be

What’s up with that? It’s no conspiracy, no diversion manoeuvre, no statement,… just our guys preparing for Nascom’s tacky Moustache Day. And, they’re taking it very seriously! Indeed, growing a full beard is a good way to start, as it keeps your mo-ptions open.

The idea arose at Nascom’s Christmas party, when one of our family members got a fake moustache as a Christmas present. For one day, on the 15th of January 2010, the Nascom guys will gather as one. United in moustache appreciation. Some will be lauded for their tachetacular attempts, some may be patted on the back and told: “Well done son, you make your family proud”, while others may be chastised for not honoring their colleagues with a fellow mo. ;)

To be continued…

Curious to see yourself with a tacky moustache? Visit www.unshave.me

You can view the presentation on YouTube.
NL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVEQq-dFkw8&feature=player_embedded
FR: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u21OS-2X1c&feature=player_embedded

And do visit the website again.

Last Monday Jan and I went to a workshop by Dan Cederholm & Ethan Marcotte in London @ Wallacespace.

A whole day of advanced HTML/CSS

it was amazing as we talked about:

Flexible grid design
Smart color and typography for the web
“Progressive enrichment”: Advanced CSS that works today
Reevaluating past methods and best practices
Bulletproof CSS techniques and testing
What are Microformats and why should you use them

Pictures

… was great. Together with 500 students, and another 400 designers Bram and I spent 2 days of inspiration and admiration at de Single in Antwerp, a congress of Graphic Design, organized by St. Lucas, Art school in Antwerp. Some of the greatest Designers of our time shared a stage with new talent, showcasing their work and passions.

J.P. Van Bendegem, a Philosopher, broke the ice and brought us from A to B with his lecture about logic. After this journey, we experienced that imagination brings you anywhere else.

Many of the speakers definitely belong to the happy few… Assigned to do work for the music industry, museums, governmental organizations, … etc. This category involves Mevis & Van Deursen, Annelys De Vet, Renaud Huberlant.

Some of the speakers get great assignments, just by mentioning their name, like Stefan Seigmeister, (who can close his agency for one sabbatical year without losing customers!) , Giorgio Olivero (todo.to.it – rolled into graphic design by  doing squat party flyers and is now developing graphical software for every assignment he gets), Storm Thorgerson (who made the most beautiful album covers for Pink Floyd, Muse, Mars Volta, Genesis, …), …

Stefan Sagmeister showed us the relevance between happiness and design. Especially as a designer you have to stay very happy. Only then you can bring good Graphical value to the market. When you start feeling like you’re doing a job, more than you’re answering to your calling… it’s time to close down the company, and get out for a year.

John L. Walters is privileged with his own Graphical magazine ‘Eye’ in which he and his crew can go wild.

When David Shirley was discovered, he was not aware of the fact that his scribblings, based on found stuff like shopping lists, droodles, road directions, …,  were of any graphic value. Publishers and the audience thought differently. So don’t be surprised when you run across one of his conceptual child drawings in graphical literature… and maybe even tattooed on your girlfriend’s hip!

What we heard many times, is how people love to design together. John Wilker (Karlssonwilker inc), Erik Kessels (Kesselskramer) and Gaetan&Roeben, … all swore to duo-designing. Great we’d all say, but then raised the question how they manage to spend 3 months designing a couple of record sleeves for a Jazz ensemble… do they get paid for these 3 months???

The people from Adbusters (who have lasted for  a long time already) have become a bit stuck in their Anarchistic design which, according to me, includes too many American flags and McDonald’s-like signs.

Beside all these rock solid design icons,  were these newbies, who could teach some of the others a thing or two about ‘how to make a 60 minute presentation   worth while staying awake for’. Under the flag of YONN (Young Ones – National Neographic) Gaetan&Roeben gave us a preview of what they work on while waiting for their real assignments, after graduation last year. They asked some big shots (Ed Fella, people from Eboy, Georgia Athanasopolou, …) to give them a mission to go for. This resulted in some great experiments, which can be followed on http://gaetanroeben.wordpress.com.

Siggi Eggertson demonstrated a nice vector, gridbased illustrations and animations. Despite of the fact that he’s only 25, he already became quite famous, partly with his roller coaster font.

Beside students, there was also a teacher of mine, presenting a project on which he worked ever since I was studying at St. Lucas (that’s already 9 years ago!). Together with some of his (ex-) students, Lucas Nijs created a code-based graphic amplifier. Nodebox is a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D images and animation using Python programming. Aaaargh, I hear the designers among you moan. But the 2.0 version gives us designers the opportunity to work with prefixed assets such as copy, grids, displacement-filters, … All these settings are represented by nodes, and these can interact with each other in many different ways. The results are astonishing and the creative ideas everybody had during the presentation filled the theatre with a humming buzz.

Last but not least I want to mention a project from Erik Kessels (KesselsKramers | KesselsKramers Publishing). This evokes his first assignment when he worked in his own studio. He got the request to do a campaign for a hotel in Amsterdam, The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel. This was not the sort of fancy hotel for which he could go wild in corporate typography. This lousy budget hotel had nothing which could be used to promote the business. Therefore he decided to highlight all shortcomings of the budget hotel as being eco-friendly advantages. The advertising campaign took the direction of a spoof campaign, with baseline “accidentally eco-friendly”. The result (online / offline advertising, tv ads, …) hit the target audience like a bomb, and the bookings of the hotel ran like a train: mission accomplished.

This example proves Erik’s statement: A good idea can live in any medium.

Completely exhausted after 2 days of following lectures from 10 am till 8 pm, and a taste of coffee which lasted for the whole weekend, we returned home… impregnated with a creative mind.

All this is realized by Hugo Puttaert (Vision and Factory), and a whole crew of St. Lucas teachers and students.

We donated our piggy bank to two charitable projects:

Plan België:

We help support children in less fortunate parts of Cambodia, Togo, El Salvador and Burkina Faso by financing their ‘right to exist’. The money we donated will be used for basic health issues, school funds, school desks, mosquito nets, and to help start up a children’s radio station.

Mobile school:

The rest of our money went to ‘Mobile School vzw’. A few years ago, a guy from Limburg came up with the excellent idea to create a mobile school. This ‘school on wheels’ brings education closer to kids living on the streets of South-America. From street corners, these schools reach kids who would not get the chance to get an education under normal circumstances. This initiative offers them the chance to a better future.

Design downgrading

I use the awesome program TopStyle to write CSS. This has the option (in preferences) to select to write Mobile CSS, so you have the limited available CSS properties you can choose from, and they are very, very limited.
In Mobile CSS:
line-height doesn’t work,
display only block or inline,
position is not known, etc. …

Microsoft

Sure, they also have Mobile devices, which, of course, use Internet Explorer as a standard browser.  So if you have to support these devices, do not point to the CSS with @import, because as you probably know, all IE’s have trouble reading CSS via @import if you only specify one media.
So use <link> instead.

Testing

Okay, that brings us to the most difficult task, how to test mobile sites without coughing up so much money to buy all the different devices, and if you would, how much are you willing to pay to do page-refresh and  to consume bandwidth?
Opera claims you can simulate a mobile device in a desktop version by pressing shift+F11 …. Not!

After spending a lot of time searching for phone simulators, I came up with only 3  easy to install and working phone-simulators:

1.Iphone
2.Pre (palm)
3.Blackberry

I also found a Windows Mobile Internet Explorer 6 simulator, I dare you to get this one working without having all those (3 big ones) side-programs this program relies on.
It helps if you have people around to help you to connect to your test-server by Wifi, so testing for Nokia and similar devices was possible.

You should pay attention to …

1) Writing Standards W3c’s XHTML , (that’s for sure) and choosing the right Doctype according to your needs. There are 3 Doctypes to choose from:

1.XHTML MP 1.0 – supports beside XHTML basic, forms (partially), presentation (partially) and CSS
2.XHTML MP 1.1 – supports scripts: ECMAScript Mobile Profile (ESMP)
3.XHTML MP 1.2 – full support for forms and you can use the <object> element

2) Writing semantic XHTML, if in some weird situation the CSS is not loaded.

3) Your design is fluid, no pixel-perfect designs. Believe me, what’s looking great on Iphone or Blackberry, looks broken on a smaller device. You could solve this problem by writing device specific CSS, so like browser sniffing (like back in the old days, browser sniffing during the browser-wars), but there are so many different devices, you can never cover them all!!

Don’t go wild

If you are a designer, this part is for you: it’s advised to not use floats (elements next to each other), or limit them as much as possible (less is more).
You could solve this problem by bringing yourself down to the level of table-lay-outer, but believe me, this approach, thank God, won’t work.

So if you are about to design a mobile site, or the designer has to make a mobile version of a site: Don’t go wild.

Do any of you already have experience with Mobile device XHTML and CSS?

In a constant effort to keep up with the latest Internet memes, Jasper, Robby and myself created KanyeThis.com where you can have Kanye interrupt another site to say you have the best site of all time! Fun times.

Check out Mashable’s top 10 Kanye parodies list for some more laughs. :)