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Until the late 20th century, the graphic-design medium had been based on handicraft processes: layouts being stylised by hand to visualize an idea; type was specified and ordered from a typesetter; and type proofs and photostats of images were assembled into position on heavy paper or board for photographic copying and platemaking. During the 1980s and early ’90s, however, rapid changes in digital computer hardware and software radically changed graphic design.

Software for Apple’s 1984 Macintosh pc, such as the MacPaint programme created by computer programmer Bill Atkinson and graphic designer Susan Kare, had a majorly revolutionary human interface. Tool icons controlled by a mouse or graphics tablet enabled designers and artists to use computer graphics in an intuitive manner. The Postscript™ page-description language from Adobe Systems, Inc., enabled pages of type and graphics to be assembled into graphic designs on-screen. By the mid-1990s, the development of design from drafting-table activity to an on-screen computer action was essentially complete.

Digital computers allowed typesetting tools to be placed into the homes of individual designers, and thus a period of experimentation began in the creation of new and unusual type-faces and page layouts. Type and images were layered, fragmented, and disfigured; type columns were overlapped and run at very long or short line lengths, and the sizes, weights, and fonts were often changed within single headlines, columns, and words. Much of this research happened in design training at art schools and universities. American designer David Carson, art director of Beach Culture magazine in 1989-91, Surfer in 1991-92, and Ray Gun magazine in 1992-96, caught the imagination of a youthful audience by taking this kind of experimental approach into graphic design.

Fast changes in onscreen software also enabled designers to make elements transparent; to stretch, scale, and bend them; to layer type and images in space; and to blend imagery into complex montages. For example, in a United States postage stamp from 1998, designers Ethel Kessler and Greg Berger digitally montaged John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Frederick Law Olmsted with a photograph of New York’s Central Park, a site plan, and botanical art to commemorate the landscape architect. Together, these images evoke a rich expression of Olmsted’s life and work.

The electronic change in graphic design was shortly followed by general public access to the Internet. A completely new operation of graphic design activity developed in the mid-1990s when Internet commerce became a fast growing sector of the world-wide economy, causing companies and businesses to scramble to establish websites. Designing a website involves the layout of screens of information rather than of physical pages, but approaches to the use of type, images, and colour are similar to those used for print. Web design, however, requires a host of new things to consider, including designing for navigation through the site and for using hypertext links to be taken to additional information. An example of strong web design is the Herman Miller for the Home Web site, designed by BBK Studio in 1998. These designers created a strong visual identity, effective navigation, and informational clarity. Attributes that contributed to the effectiveness of this website included a pleasing colour palette, an informative use of pictures of products, and a scrolling montage of products.

Because of the universal effectiveness and reach of the internet, the graphic-design business is becoming increasingly global in scope. Additionally, the merging of motion graphics, animation, video feeds, and music into Web-site design has brought about the merging of traditional print and broadcast media. As kinetic media expand from motion pictures and basic television to scores of cable-television channels, video games, and animated Web sites, motion graphics are becoming an increasingly important area of graphic design.

In the 21st century, graphic design is widespread; it is the main component of the complex print and electronic information systems. It permeates modern society, bringing information, product identification, entertainment, and persuasive messages. The ongoing advance of technology has dramatically changed the way graphic designs are created and distributed to a mass market. However, the fundamental role of the graphic designer, giving expressive form and clarity of content to communicative messages, remains the same.

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Marketing a law firm is essentially based on promoting the lawyer as the product, so your biography is a necessary element to promoting your services. This article offers 5 tips to make sure you get your biography absolutely right.

Developing a biography, which markets lawyers on websites or in printed material is often given very little consideration and can appear to have been completed in little time. Worse still is the bio that a lawyer has not been involved in writing and another worker has had to scrape together from a CV.

If this rings a bell regarding your firm or your bio then you have a serious flaw in your marketing strategy. You must be aware that marketing of lawyers, especially those in repeat business areas of law, is based on the principle that the lawyer is the product. That is why the staff page of a law firm web-site is usually the page most visited after the home or landing page. If you charge an hourly rate for your time, you are the ‘product’, and any prospective clients want to have a good concept of what they are buying!

It’s true that some companies base their marketing on a general sales pitch, or branding in a specific area of law, but generally, the success of a marketing strategy will be due to whether the client believes they are getting good value when they buy the services of the individual that is doing their work. So, hopefully having convinced you of the importance of a well-crafted biography, here are five tips for putting one together:

Essential Tips for creating a compelling Law Firm Bio

Provide all the relevant information
It’s perplexing how many law firm web-sites have bios of their team that do not include relevant information. And this doesn’t mean which law school they attended. Be sure you begin the bio with a full name, your position within the company, the type of work you excel in, and any other firm responsibilities. It’s important to remember that you’re not writing this for other lawyers to read.

As a lawyer I was pretty pleased the day I was admitted to the Supreme Court in my state. But frankly, most clients don’t have a clue what this means. So remember to include info that may be relevant to your client, not just facts that will impress other lawyers. By all means mention qualifications, positions on legal committees and the like, but unless it’s something your clients will understand and consider important, then leave it to the end of the bio. It may help to involve a third party. Have someone outside the legal industry read your bio and offer some feedback.

Your client is looking for a solution
As hard as it may be for your ego to accept, the client is not engrossed in you as individual. They are looking for a solicitor they believe can best solve their problem or most successfully undertake their project. So you need to provide information that will convince them you’re the perfect professional for the job. In printed documents you should aim to include actual examples of how you’ve helped people, but online bios are often very short. So try to use phrases such as: “More than ten years experience in”, “Recognised within the X business community for assisting with”, “A certified specialist in the area of”, or “Successfully negotiated more than 200 rural property contracts”.

Connect with the real world, not just the legal world
If your company or practice provides services that are based in a particular city or region you can improve your marketing efforts by demonstrating a connection to that community. Being considered a “local” by prospective clients or demonstrating a connection with the region’s major industry eg. ” from a family with a long involvement in the coal mining industry”, encourages a connection with the client.

Add a little personality
Don’t be afraid to inject a little personal to your biography. And this doesn’t have to be the usual “Married with 2.5 children”. By all means include personal information if it helps with point number 4 above, but more importantly, you should think about how you practice and the type of “client experience” you provide. Are you a ” fiercely determined approach”, a “collaborative practitioner focussed on keeping costs down” or a “down to earth, with a knack for easing clients concerns”. Finding a genuine point of difference in how you practice communicates that you are a real person with a real personality” and not the same as the numerous other lawyers out there busily marketing themselves.

John Gray is a practising lawyer and the Senior Marketer at John Gray Marketing, an Australian specialist law firm and legal marketing consultancy. If you are interested in law firm marketing, legal marketing and marketing for lawyers, contact John Gray today.

Whether a painting reaches completion by purposeful application or was implemented directly by a hit-or-miss alla prima method (in which medium are applied in a single application) was once largely decided by the ideals and familiar techniques of its cultural tradition. For instance, the medieval European illuminator’s painstaking procedure, by which a detailed linear pattern was gradually enriched with gold leaf and precious materials, was contemporary with the Sung Chinese Zen practice of immediate, calligraphic brush painting, after a peaceful time of spiritual self-preparation. Later has decided the technique and working formula most suited to his desired outcome and temperament. In France in the 1880s, for instance, Seurat might be working in his studio on drawings, tone studies, and colour schemes in preparation for a large composition at the same time that, outdoors, Monet was endeavouring to capture the effects of afternoon light and atmosphere, while Cézanne analyzed the structure of the mountain Sainte-Victoire with deliberated brush strokes, laid as irrevocably as mosaic tesserae (small pieces, such as marble or tile).

The type of communication established between artist and patron, the location and subject matter of a painting commission, and the physical properties of the medium used may also dictate working procedure. Peter Paul Rubens, for example, followed the business-like 17th-century custom of submitting a small oil sketch, or modella, for his patron’s approval before creating a large-scale commission. Distinctive problems peculiar to mural painting, such as spectator eye level and the scale, style, and function of a building interior, had first to be solved in preliminary drawings and occasionally by using wax dolls or scale models of the interior. Scale working realizations are crucial to the speed and precision of execution needed by quick-drying mediums, such as buon’ fresco (see below Fresco) on wet plaster, and acrylic resin on canvas. The drawings traditionally are covered with a grid of squares, or “squared-up,” for enlarging on the surface of the support. Some modern painters prefer to outline the enlargement of a sketch projected directly onto the support by epidiascope (a projector for images of both opaque and transparent objects). In Renaissance painters’ workshops, student assistants not only ground and mixed the pigments and prepared the supports and painting surfaces but often laid in the outlines and broad masses of the painting from the master’s design and studies.

The distinctive properties of its medium or the atmospheric conditions of a site may themselves preserve a painting. The wax solvent binder of encaustic paintings (in which after application, the paint is fixed by heat [see below Mediums], for example) both keeps the intensity and tonality of the original colours and protects the surface from damp. And, while prehistoric rock paintings and buon’ frescoes are preserved by natural chemical action, the tempera pigments thought to be mixed only with water on numerous ancient Egyptian murals are protected by the very dry atmosphere and unvarying temperature of the tombs. It has, however, been customary to varnish oil paintings, both to protect the surface against damage by soiling and handling and to restore the tonality lost when some darker pigments dry out into a higher key. Unfortunately, varnish will darken and yellow with time into the sometimes disastrously imitated “Old Masters’ mellow patina.” Once revered, this amber-gravy film is now usually removed to reveal colours in their original intensity. Glass started to replace varnish towards the end of the 19th century, when painters wished to retain the fresh, luminous finish of pigments applied directly to a pure white ground. The air-conditioning and temperature-control systems of modern museums make both varnishing and glazing unnecessary, except for older and more fragile exhibits.

The frames surrounding early altarpieces, icons, and cassone panels (painted panels on the chest used for a bride’s household linen) were often structural parts of the support. With the establishment of portable easel pictures, heavy frames not only provided some protection against theft and damage but were also considered an aesthetic enhancement to a painting, and frame making became a specialized craft. Gilded gesso moldings (made of plaster of paris and sizing that forms the surface for low relief) in exuberant presentations of fruit and flowers certainly seem almost an extension of the restless, exuberant design of a Baroque or Rococo painting. A bulky frame also provided a proscenium (in a theatre, the area between the orchestra and the curtain) in which the picture was separated from its immediate surroundings, thus adding to the window view illusion intended by the artist. Deep, ornate frames are unsuitable for many modern paintings, where the artist’s intention is for his creation to appear to advance toward the spectator rather than be viewed by him as if through a wall aperture. In contemporary Minimalist paintings, no effects of spatial illusionism are wanted; and, in order to emphasize the physical shape of the support itself and to emphasise its flatness, these abstract, geometrical designs are often displayed without frames or are only edged with thin protective strips of wood or metal.

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For the majority of people travelling overseas is a fantastic experience, a rite of passage or a well-deserved reward for hard work. Unfortunately there are instances in which outings have not gone to plan and travellers are involved in accidents that result in injury, hospitalisation or even death. Each year, Australian Consular Offices handle over 25,000 cases involving Australians in difficulty overseas including 1,200 hospitalisations, 900 deaths and 50 evacuations for medical purposes.

In these instances, where individuals have not protected themselves with travel insurance, such personal misfortunes are exacerbated by long-term financial burdens. Hospitalisation, medical evacuations and the return of a deceased’s remains to their home country can become very costly. Where travellers are not covered by insurance they are personally liable for covering any incurred medical and associated expenses. In some cases, individuals and families have been forced to sell off assets including their homes, in order to ensure the safety and wellbeing of their loved ones.

Kinds of travel insurance include coverage for trip cancellation/interruption, medical insurance, baggage loss/delay, flight delay/cancellation and travel document protection. Whether you vacation overseas all the time, sporadically or are planning a once-in-a-lifetime trip, travel insurance is imperative. The cost of travel insurance is dependent on the type of coverrequired, the age of the policy holder, travel destination, how long you are intending to stay and any pre-existing medical conditions. It is important to obtain the right form of travel insurance to suit your individual requirements and it is imperative that you fully divulge any factors that may impact your insurance otherwise you may not be covered in the event of illness or injury.

Like other insurance policies there are the standard general exclusions on most types of travel insurance and these can include acts of civil unrest, self-inflicted injury, loss/theft of unattended baggage, loss/theft of cash and pre-existing medical conditions. Some insurance policies may even invalidated where injuries are sustained as a result of being under the influence of drugs or alcohol or being part of “dangerous or extreme activity” such as surfing, snowboarding, rock climbing, parachuting and underwater activities involving the use of artificial breathing apparatus so travellers should scan the fine print of their policy to ensure that their insurance is right for them.

The consequences of not purchasing travel insurance far outweigh the costs associated with purchasing a policy. The public consensus is that is you can’t afford travel insurance then you can’t afford to travel. It is also imperative that you are insured for the entire period you will be abroad and not allow your insurance to expire before your return home.

If you’re looking for affordable travel insurance for peace of mind on your next holiday, TravelOnline in partnership with QBE Insurance will keep you safe and sound. TravelOnline and QBE are Australian travel insurance specialists.

Currently, Yamaha Motorcycles is well-known for building some of the most popular motorcycles around the world. However, unfamiliar to the general public, Yamaha has been around for quite some time now, not just as a motorcycle manufacturer, but in other industries as well. They did, however, excel in creating motorcycles, thus becoming distinguished in that field.

Through the years, Yamaha has built many different types of motorcycles. Although they started out creating air-cooled, 2-stroke, single cylinder motorbikes, they became well known for creating the DT-1, the revolutionary first ever trail bike. The trail bike success pushed Yamaha to create their own dirt bike, which then developed positively.

The best thing about the motocross bikes that Yamaha makes is that you can be sure of quality in every single bike. They are lightweight, without compromising the essential strength and durability necessary. Their stock tyres can often offer more grip than other market parts, something that is not available in most off-road bikes.

These bikes are ideal for off-road trails and adventures, and one short run on an off-road track will guarantee to prove the endurance that you will surely depend on with this wonderful pastime.

Motocross is a serious extreme sport that anyone should think about carefully before beginning. Obviously, any activity that involves a person racing a two-wheeled contraption with an engine propelling it to various heightened speeds can be extremely dangerous. By purchasing a Yamaha motorcycle which you can rely on for safety and dependability, you also lower the risk levels a notch! Whether you want to ride on road or tracks, Yamaha motorcycles can give you what you need, when you need it. They are rugged bikes that can withstand years of use without any problems.

The traditions and spirit of a particular era in painting has usually been reflected in many of its other visual arts. The ideas and aspirations of ancient cultures, of the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical periods of Western art and, more recently, of the 19th-century Art Nouveau and Secessionist movements were shown in a large amount of the architecture, interior design, furniture, textiles, ceramics, dress design, and crafts, as well as in the fine arts, of their times. Following the Industrial Revolution, with the reduced requirement of hand-craftmanship and the absence of direct communication between the fine craftsman and larger society, general society, idealistic efforts to unite the arts and crafts in service to the community were made by William Morris in Victorian England and by the Bauhaus in 20th-century Germany. Although their aims were not fully successful, their influences, like those of the short-lived de Stijl and Constructivist movements, have been huge, particularly in architectural, furniture, and typographic design.

Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were innovative painters, sculptors, and architects. Although no artists have since excelled in so wide a range of creative forms, leading 20th-century painters expressed their thoughts in many other mediums. In graphic design, for example, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Raoul Dufy printed posters and illustrated books; André Derain, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Mikhail Larionov, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Hockney designed for the stage; Joan Miró, Georges Braque, and Chagall worked in ceramics; Braque and Salvador Dalí designed jewelry; and Dalí, Hans Richter, and Andy Warhol made films. Many of these, with other modern painters, have also been sculptors and printmakers and have designed for fabrics, tapestries, mosaics, and stained glass, while there are very few mediums of the visual arts that Pablo Picasso did not work in and revitalize.

In turn, painters have been stimulated by the visuals, techniques, and design of other visual mediums. One of these earliest influences was quite possibly from theatre, where the ancient Greeks are thought to have been the first to employ the illusions of optical perspective. The application or reappraisal of design techniques and imagery from art-forms and processes of other cultures has been an important stimulus to the development of more recent forms of Western painting, whether or not their traditional significance have been fully understood. The influence of Japanese woodcut prints on Synthetism and the Nabis, for example, and of African sculpture on Cubism, and the German Expressionists helping to create visual vocabularies and syntax with which to express new visions and ideas. The creation of photography and film introduced artists to new aspects of nature, while eventually prompting others to abandon representational painting altogether. Painters of everyday life, such as Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Vuillard, and Bonnard, used the design innovations of camera cutoffs, close-ups, and unconventional viewpoints so as to give the spectator the sensation of sharing an intimate picture space with the figures and objects in the painting.

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