For this week only. We are giving away 3 FREE months of advertising.
That's four months of advertising for $40 [or £20].
There's only ONE catch. We will only give those extra 3 months away when 20 people have bought a Square.
4 months on GoSquared- that's about 300,000 unique visitors, and around 3 million page views.
Spread the word! Tell everyone you know!
We have had a busy week of GoSquared updates.
Time for a good old fashioned liquidicity classic: What you can do with type, and a little imagination.
Above, the same phrase has been copied over and over, with the point size changed. Colours have then been applied, with gradients flowing from left to right to merge the phrases together. The phrase that stands out does so due to its sharp change in colour.
Here, a single word or phrase is duplicated many times and rotated by varying degrees. Using a larger letter-form as a template, the smaller individual words are placed inside to form the same shape. The larger letter is then removed to leave the individual words on top of the repetitive background. Groups of words can be moved and rotated to speed up the process.
Above, the letters form the composition based upon colour. Each letter has been converted to a vector path and filled with a single colour. The opacity of each letter has been altered to allow colours to interact.
Here, a path has been drawn out with a vector pen tool, and the text then forced to follow the path. This creates a fluid shape when the path is curved, and works best when multiple colours are employed.
Letters can be replaced by symbols. When every symbol is the same shape, they can be differentiated only by colour. Choosing colours to represent letters and other characters can lead to a very intriguing pattern. The brain still tries to make sense of the pattern as it understands the recognised metaphors or paragraph indents and ragged lines.
This is just annoying. The meaning of the word has been removed by striking through each line of text with a block of colour. The viewer is drawn in by the confusion and then frustration at not being able to work out what the text is trying to convey, while being stimulated by the pattern of colour and form.
Here, the individual letter and word spacing [kerning and tracking], and the space in between lines [leading] has been taken to extreme levels. The words and meaning of the text become less important than the textural effect.
So, there's a few examples of extreme text effects. Got any of your own you'd like to show? Drop us a comment below.
You might also like: 165 Vector Icons in 5 Colours, 77 Vector Buttons, 50 Ways to Become a Better Designer
Comments are good.
Response to the work of one party is great. For that party.
It's time to start responding to one another. To allow everyone's comments to be searchable. To allow people to show their opinions directly to one another.
It's time to Discuss.
GoSquared Discuss. Powered by Vanilla.
If you are a member of GoSquared you will already have access to Discuss and can start commenting right away. If not, simply join GoSquared for free. You will gain personalized access to monitor your Squares, keep track of liquidicity, and now discuss with a community of talented designers.
Go Squared feature time!
These guys at Hell Yeah Dude are doing a fantastic job and we want to introduce you all to their site.
Promoting their new site as well as they physically can, Patrick and co. are giving away a FREE copy of Leopard!
Check these guys out and support both Go Squared and Hell Yeah Dude
Spread the word.
We have worked to improve perhaps the most important page of the whole site*. About GoSquared.
We have improved not only the appearance, but the amount of information and that relevance of information to our newest users.
For example, at the bottom of the page, we have a list of the price of a Square for a day, week, month, and year.
Simple enough.
Now, where are you? America? Those prices will be showing in Dollars. Now, come visit us over here in the UK. Sure enough, those prices are now in Pounds Sterling. Wherever you are in the world, we show you up to the minute prices converted to the relevant currency. Yet another reason to buy a Square.
We have also provided you with some more information on where Squares are actually located on various pages on GoSquared, as well as how we cope with traffic, and linked you to where you can contact us for more info.
* Most important page, other than, of course, the wonderful, mind-blowing, ground-shaking, earth-shattering GoSquared Homepage.
Treat yourself to a personalized iPod. Black and white are out. Every colour under the sun is in.
Image from VASAVA: WAD Magazine Illustration
Since yesterday, we thought we had better get a move on with something iPhone related - to justify our purchase in some way.
We ain't no domain squatters!
So here is an early release of GoSquared for iPhone. Obviously, you need an iPhone or iPod Touch to experience this as it should be. Unfortunately, us poor UK residents are still anxiously awaiting November 9th for our iPhones [anyone else going to Regent Street, let us know!]
From what we could tell, using Safari 3, and iPhoney, we have at least managed to get GoSquared fit for viewing on an iPhone sized screen. I guess, proportionately, we spent most of the time on those icons. Squares is still very early in the development stage, but we do intend to develop /squares into a very cool little online application. We have also included an about page just to inform people of GoSquared if they really have no clue as to what we are all about.
We are pleased to have liquidicity entirely redesigned for iPhone, so check it out if you have time.
I will repeat, this is still in the very early development stages, so give us your feedback [especially those of you with iPhones!]
Thanks,
The GoSquared Team.
We saw earlier today that Apple had launched a useful new area of the ADC Site to help us developers make great stuff for the iPhone.
We then realised they hadn't bought the domain name iPhoneDevCenter.com, so we went ahead and bought it [as you do].
Now we're debating whether to merely sell it on, or actually do something productive with it [on top of everything else we're doing at the moment].
At the moment you'll notice that it just redirects back to this post.
What say you, loyal readers of liquidicity?
We are still looking forward to the launch of the iPhone over in the UK. Maybe then we can actually start to join in on all the iPhone craziness.
To signify the changes we're making to GoSquared, the new homepage has just gone live.
You will notice we have moved to a wider layout, after a good long debate between ourselves. We questioned the problems this could cause to some users if their screens were not large enough. So we carried out some research, and concluded that only 0.88% of visitors viewing GoSquared on their desktop had screens below 1024 pixels wide. The new homepage fits nicely on all screens including and above 1024 pixels wide.
We have also included a little personalization for our loyal members: when you sign in you are now greeted on the homepage. A lot of people were struggling to find the Control Panel to monitor their Squares, so you can now go directly to your Control Panel with one click [this only shows when you are logged in].
All in all, we hope you like the new home of GoSquared, and we look forward to bringing you more goodies soon!
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