Freelance Graphic Designer London

Designing for the digital grapevine

Web 2.0 in design and marketing

This is an image I made to try to explain the digital grapevine: A network of users that interact to answer questions, solve problems and have fun or the trend in the use of the internet and web design that enhances creativity, information sharing and collaboration among users that has been referred to as “Web 2.0″. The best description of this that I have read is from Stephen Fry:

… an idea in people’s heads rather than a reality … an idea that the reciprocity between user and provider is what’s emphasised. In other words, genuine interactivity, if you like, simply because people can upload as well as download.

The internet is now a teenager – it’s been 14 years since Marc Andreessen’s release of the Netscape Navigator browser in 1994. Now the technology has evolved to web-based communities such as social-networking sites, wikis and blogs.

I intend to harness the benefit of this trend both for myself and my clients as I see it as an important approach to both design and marketing at the moment.

How I made the image

I was very suprised I couldn’t find a sample series of binary numbers on the net quickly, so here are mine.

0010010101110101011010010100110000001100000011001000010110100110000
100011001000101010011001100001001010111011010110110011000011001000101
100100100110011011010011000101001000001101101011011011011101110010001
011011101011101110101000100101100000011000110111011101110100000100010
000011101011011110100101010100101011110110110101010010001100100011001
0001100011110110111010010001000100000110101101010111010111100

These numbers were put in the OCR-A font. This font is used for a variety of purposes including the ISBN labels on books. After scrolling through Blend Modes in the Layers palette in Photoshop, I hit upon Soft Light and Overlay as ones that seemed to work.