How to Create a Style Guide

July 30, 2010 by Rachel Banks · Leave a Comment
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How many times have you mailed business cards to print and received yet another version of your corporate colour? Ever been thrilled to see your advert in the latest newspaper and then caught that the crucial tag line is gone or your logo has been wrecked.

There is only one way to prevent this from happening and that is to create a style guide. Not only will a style guide aid you steer the reproduction of your logo - it will also help you sustain your brand recognition – which many argue is one of the strongest selling tools.

We have placed the below steps together for you as a starting point.

Step 1 : Mark the audience for your Style Guide. Is this for staff to work in-house or is this for suppliers and contractors to refer to?

Step 2 : Mark what your output uses are. This is important because you will want different logos and file formats for example, black and white publication adverts in comparison to vehicle graphics.

Step 3 : Define the tone for the copy and content required. For example you may requirecopy rules for printed content and then copy rules for website content.

Content rules cover all punctuation rules and how to specify to the business and team.

Step 4 : Insure you layout all the design templates so it is clear how and where the logo and branding lies on all the different pieces of collateral that may be repeated.

Step 5 : Make sure to include any contributing logos or logos of business that are associated with you. It’s also important that you send a copy of the layout to these companies to insure they agree with the layout of their logo as they too may have their own Style Guide and hierarchy layout rules.

Step 6 : Confirm that grammar, spelling and contact details are correct.

Step 7 : Confirm that when suppliers are using the Style Guide they understand that a proof needs to be dispatchedto you to be affirmed as correct.

Get your Style Guide completed and as established as possible. Then have it saved in an email friendly file format and have a couple printed. Once this is done we strongly advocate a training session – whereby your design studio comes in and trains your staff on how to put to work the Style Guide and most importantly your brand.

For graphic design Brisbane, logo design Brisbane and web design Brisbane, contact Bydaughters today. We help your brand build business.

Projectors: LCD Verses DLP (The downfall of DLP technology)

July 19, 2010 by Rachel Banks · Leave a Comment
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The most common question customers ask when buying a new projector for the home, office, or classroom is: would I buy an LCD projector or a DLP projector? LCD, an acronym for ‘liquid crystal device’ and DLP, an acronym for ‘digital light processing’ are the two top projector imaging technologies. With so many brands and types available, it can be overwhelming for customers to decide between both technologies. The fact is that LCD projectors provide far better image quality and colour accuracy. The next paragraph will tell you why DLP projectors struggle with creating an equal rate of image quality.

It’s like a set of blinds in your home over your bedroom window. By pulling a rod you can turn the shutters open or closed, depending on if you want to let light in or not. This is exactly how an LCD projector works. Each pixel operates like an individual shutter on a set of blinds to either allow light through or to block it. DLP on the other hand is created of millions of microscopic mirrors or ‘pixel elements’ as pros like to call them. Each pixel element functions to either reflect light or block it.

How the light source is processed from the time the projector is switched on to when the content reaches your screen is absolutely important for image quality, brightness and colour accuracy. LCD projectors shine white light from the lamp by cutting it into red, blue and green components, by three mirrors which transfer the coloured light to 3 separate LCD panels. The 3 LCD panels form the elements of the image by processing each pixel on and off. The pixels are then meshed in a glass prism to create the projector image. A point to remember about LCD projectors is that all three colours are delivered onto your screen all at the same time. The way a DLP projector operates is vastly different and even how an image appears is not the same. With DLP, white light from the lamp is processed through a spinning colour wheel with transparent red, blue and green segments, at speeds up to 11,000 rpm/s. This way of projecting an image creates a sequence of red, blue and green light. The millions of micro mirrors mentioned above reflect the coloured light on the pixels to create the image elements. The elements of the image are projected in sequence on the screen, one colour at a time. The viewer’s eye will then put together each coloured element of the image into a single complete image. Using LCD projectors, all colours are available all the time to offer high brightness and spectacular colour accuracy. In DLP, only one colour is available at a time, and so resulting in lower colour brightness and accuracy. Some DLP manufacturers have put a white segment for the colour wheel to improve brightness overall, but this also detracts from colour accuracy.

I hear in forums all the time that DLP has a higher contrast ratio and as such must be superior. For those who are uncertain, the contrast ratio is a measure of a display system defined as the ratio of the luminance of the brightest white to that of the darkest black that the technology is able to produce. DLP projectors do have high contrast specifications compared to a majority of LCD projectors. Initially, this must be an advantage, however, in real life, the true black level is determined by the ambient light in the room in which the projector is being utilised. Do not be duped by contrast specifications on websites and in brochures.

When the content you are trying to bring to life has moving images, DLP projection technology also has image imperfections, or ‘artifacts’. The most typical artifact that a DLP projector shows with moving images is colour break up. Colour break up is incontrovertible in DLP systems because moving images change up between the time red, blue and green colours are displayed. LCD projectors do not have this characteristic because every colour is projected simultaneously. DLP developers have developed 3DLP solutions using 3 chips to resolve the colour break up error, but the price of these projectors make them hardly practical for the majority of businesses and consumers.

Another point of difference between LCD and DLP is how they make up for the refractive qualities of light. Take yourself back to high school science, and they taught you how the various colours of light refract different amounts when shone through the same lens. The problem with DLP projectors is that they utilise the one same panel and the same lens to project Red, Blue and Green. All 3 colours are not the same and refract light in a different way. Usually with a DLP projector, some yellow colour will be projected above and a superfluous blue will appear below an image of something as simple as a lone black line. In manufacturing LCD projectors can be adjusted to reduce these effects on the projected image, because each colour is directed on separate LCD panels.

The isolated actual benefit (excluding price) with picking a DLP projector is its smaller total size and weight. However, this is only relevant with regard to mobility and has to be traded off against the image superiority of LCD projectors. If the result of the picture quality is crucial to you, then the decision is a no-brainer. Choose an LCD projector! LCD projectors will definitely show bright, colourful images with fewer image mistakes. If you need to know more about LCD technology in more detail, see this fabulous resource website: Explore 3LCD. If you have any other questions, get onto Projector Central and send me an email.

Jonathan King is the sales and marketing manager of Projector Central, Australia’s leading online retailer for projectors. Brisbane based, Projector Central has been servicing Australia for 15 years. For data projectors in Brisbane and Interactive Whiteboards, contact Projector Central today.

Yachting and Yacht Clubs

July 16, 2010 by Rachel Banks · Leave a Comment
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As the Dutch came to preeminence in sea power during the 17th century, the early yacht became a leisure craft used first by royalty and then by the burghers for the canals as well as the protected and unprotected waters of the Low Countries. Racing yachts was incidental, arising as private matches. English yachting originated with King Charles II of England during his exile in the Low Countries. On his return to the English monarchy in 1660, the city of Amsterdam gave him a 20-metre (66-foot) leisure boat with a beam (maximum width) of 5.6 m (18 feet), which he then named Mary. Charles and his brother James, the duke of York (James II, sovereign 1685–88), ordered for additional yachts and in 1662 raced two of them from the Thames, from Greenwich, to Gravesend, and the same way back, on a £100 bet. Yachting became classy among the wealthy and nobility, but after that period the fashion did not last.

The first yacht club in the British Isles, the Water Club, was formed around about 1720 at Cork, Ire., as a cruising and unofficial coast guard organization, and held great naval panoply and formality. The closest thing to racing was the “chase,” for which the “fleet” pursued a fictional enemy. The club endured, largely as a social club, until 1765, and in 1828, when joining with other groups, it became the Cork Yacht Club (later the Royal Cork Yacht Club).

Yacht racing was seen in some ordered fashion on the Thames around the mid-18th century. The duke of Cumberland funded the Cumberland Fleet for Thames racing in 1775. When George IV rose to the throne in 1820, it came to be named the Fleet to His Majesty’s Coronation Sailing Society. The Thames Yacht Club seceded after a racing fight, to become the Royal Thames Yacht Club in 1830. The first English yacht organisation had been initiated at Cowes on the Isle of Wight in 1815, and royal sponsorship made the Solent - the strait between the mainland and the Isle of Wight - the perpetual site of British yacht racing. The club at Cowes became the Royal Yachting Club, also at the rise of George IV. Each member was required to own boats of at least 20 tons (20,321 kg). Sailing races for high stakes were held, and the club life was splendid. Ultimately Royal Yachting Club boats were raised in size to over 350 tons.

In North America, yachting was first accomplished with the Dutch in New York in the 17th century and went on when the English had control. Sailing was mostly for leisure and reached its apogee in George Crowinshield’s Cleopatra’s Barge (1815), which sailed on the Mediterranean Sea and created a minimum of luxury and elegance for the later yachts in the area from the late 19th century. The first continuing American yacht organisation, the Detroit Boat Club, was instigated in 1839. In 1844, John C. Stevens instigated the New York Yacht Club while aboard his schooner Gimcrack.

Kinds of sailboats
Early sailing yachts were within the lines of such naval craft as brigantines, schooners, and cutters from the 17th century until the second half of the 19th century. The design of sizeable yachts was first largely put upon by the victory of America, which was created by George Steers for a group started by John C. Stevens, and it was the boat for which the America’s Cup (q.v.) had its namesake after its victory at Cowes in 1851. The first yachts were not designed and built in the modern sense, with just a model being used. Not until the latter half of the 19th century did what was called naval architecture come into being. Not until the 1920s did the application of the study of aerodynamics do for the structure of sails and rigging what such study had done earlier for hulls.

Because nearly all sailboats had to be individually manufactured, there was a desire for handicapping boats as this was previous to the one-design class boats were designed. Hence, a rating rule was created, which is found in the International Rule, taken on in 1906 and edited in 1919. Today, one of the rapidly growing areas in the field of sailing is that of one-design class boats. All boats in a one-design class are manufactured to single requirements in length, beam, sail area, and other elements (for an example of a two-person sailboat, see illustration). Racing between these boats can be had on an even keel with no handicapping required. A great example is the generic International America’s Cup Class adopted for participants in the 1992 America’s Cup race.

For the time that yachting was an activity largely for the royal and the rich, money was no problem, and the size of boats grew, in both length and weight. The promotion and desire of smaller boats came in the latter half of the 19th century in the sailing of the Englishmen R.T. McMullen, a stockbroker, and E.F. Knight, a barrister and journalist. A journey around the world (1895–98) led single-handedly by the naturalized American captain Joshua Slocum in the 11.3-metre Spray demonstrated the seaworthiness of smaller boats. Thereafter in the 20th century, for the larger part after World War II, smaller racing and leisure craft became more common, down to the dinghy, a popular training boat, of 3.7 m. In the late 20th century, craft of less than 3 m were sailed single-handedly across the Atlantic Ocean.

Kinds of power yachts
After the decade 1840–50, at which point steam began to emulate sail power in market boats, the steam engine, and later the internal-combustion engine, were increasingly used in pleasure craft. Large power yachts were progressed to a high degree, and long-distance sailing became a favourite activity of the wealthy. The first power yachts were paddle-wheel boats; those then made way to yachts powered by the wholly submerged screw or propeller kind of propulsion. As in the case of naval and merchant boats, auxiliaries possessing both sail and power were the yacht archetype for several years. By the later half of the 20th century, a lot of yachts were still auxiliaries, but the majority were solely power yachts containing gasoline or diesel engines.

In the last decade of the 19th century there was a rise in the design of bigger steam yachts. In particular within these was the Mayflower (1897) of 2,690 tons, that had triple-expansion engines, twin screws, and a compartmented iron hull, and was manned by a crew of more than 150. The Mayflower, bought by the United States Navy in 1898, was the official yacht of the president of the United States until 1929 and gave active service during World War II.

As bigger and better quality internal-combustion engines were developed, many big craft started using them for power. The establishment of the diesel engine, using heavy oil for fuel, was furthered during World War I. From the decade that followed, bigger power-yacht building flourished, climaxing in the Orion (1930) at 3,097 tons. In that point the best auxiliary yacht built was the four-masted, steel, barque-rigged Sea Cloud (1931) of 2,323 tons.

The manufacture of larger power craft lessened from 1932, and the fashion thereafter was for smaller, less pricey boats. After World War II, a lot of small naval craft were sold to private owners for conversion to yachts. By the late 20th century, yachting is a globally loved activity enjoyed by thousands of yachtsmen individually owning and maintaining their own small leisure yachts. The popularity of craft and owners is increasing steadily, not only in the traditional places on the seacoasts but also on inland waterways and lakes.

Looking for boat transport Gold Coast ? Talk to Elite Yacht Services. We do great work at competitive prices.

Proportional, Progressive, and Regressive taxes

July 8, 2010 by Rachel Banks · Leave a Comment
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Taxes can be distinguished by the effect they have on the allocation of income and wealth. A proportional tax is a tax that impinges the same relative onus on all taxpayers—i.e., in the case where tax liability and income increase in relative levels. A progressive tax is characterizable by a more than proportional rise in the tax liability in regard to the rise in income, and a regressive tax is characterizable by a less than proportional growth in the relative onus. Ergo, progressive taxes are thought of as taking away the lack of equality in income distribution, but regressive taxes can result in increasing these inequalities.

The taxes that are generally thought to be progressive include individual income taxes and estate taxes. Income taxes that are initially progressive, however, could become less so in the upper-income demographic—particularly if a taxpayer is allowed to lower his tax base by claiming deductions or by removing certain income components from his taxable income. Proportional tax rates if applied to lower-income demographics will also be more progressive if exemptions of a personal nature are declared.

Income measured over a given year may not absolutely provide the best measure of taxpaying ability. For example, transitory increases in income might be saved, and within temporary declines in income a taxpayer might choose to finance consumption by decreasing savings. Thus, if taxation is held in comparison along with “permanent income,” it should be less regressive (or more progressive) than when held in comparison with annual income.

Sales taxes and excises (save those on luxuries) tend to be regressive, because the dissemination of personal income consumed or spent on specific goods declines as the rate of personal income increases. Poll taxes (also termed head taxes), calculated as a fixed amount per capita, patently are regressive.

It is not easy to term corporate income taxes and taxes on business as progressive, regressive, or proportionate, principally because of a lack of certainty surrounding the ability of businesses to shift their tax expenses (see below Shifting and incidence). This difficulty of deciding who bears the tax burden rests crucially on whether a national or a subnational (that is, provincial or state) tax is being decided.

In regarding the economic purpose of taxation, it is necessary to distinguish between various ideas of tax rates. The statutory rates include those nominated in the law; often these are marginal rates, but for some cases they are median rates. Marginal income tax rates denote the fraction of incremental income demanded by taxation when income increases by one dollar. Therefore, if tax burden increases by 45 cents when income rises by one dollar, the marginal tax rate is 45 percent. Income tax laws often contain graduated marginal rates—i.e., rates that rise as income rises. Careful analysis of marginal tax rates need to consider provisions in addition to the formal statutory rate structure. If, for example, a particular tax credit (reduction in tax) lessens by 20 cents for each one-dollar rise in income, the marginal rate is 20 percentage points higher than indicated in the statutory rates. Since marginal rates signify how after-tax income moves in response to changes in before-tax income, they are the important ones for assessing incentive effects of taxation. It is even more complicated to nominate the marginal effective tax rate applied to income from business and capital, since it may be dependant on considerations including the structure of depreciation allowances, the deductibility of interest, and the provisions for inflation adjustment. A basic economic theorem holds that the marginal effective tax rate in income from capital is nil under a consumption-based tax.

Average income tax rates signify the percentage of total income that is paid in taxation. The pattern of average rates is the one that is important for considering the distributional equity of taxation. Under a progressive income tax the average income tax rate increases with income. Average income tax rates commonly rise with income, both because personal allowances are permitted for the taxpayer and dependents and because marginal tax rates are graduated; on the flip side, preferential treatment of income received for the most part by high-income households can swamp these effects, producing regressivity, as shown by average tax rates that decrease as income increases.

For MYOB Brisbane expert advice, contact Stone Consulting today. Stone Consulting also runs MYOB training in Brisbane.

July 7, 2010 by Rachel Banks · Leave a Comment
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Tangalooma Island Resort Holiday: One of the Best Holiday Destination in Australia

July 1, 2010 by Rachel Banks · Leave a Comment
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beach-front-21-300x225Tangalooma Island Resort is a paradise situated in Tangalooma, Queensland in Australia. It was originally a whaling station and was changed into an island vacation hotspot because of its rare flora and fauna and its stunning views. Couples or families seeking a great getaway destination would definitely cherish a Tangalooma Island Resort holiday.

This paradise is situated on the west side of Moreton Island, near Moreton Bay. It is reknowned for its rare white beaches and having been a whale reserve since the year the whaling station was closed down, the year 1962.

When having a Tangalooma Island Resort holiday, you can expect to be attended to by friendly and accommodating staff whilst at the same time being left breathless by the glorious white sand beaches. You can also take part in a wide range of activities from wreck diving to feeding and playing with the dolphins. You cannot help but totally cherish every moment of your time away.

Tangalooma has a tiny population of 300, but its tourism has allowed this small township to thrive and keep the visual and majestic glory of the island. At least 3500 visitors enjoy the resort weekly, and even more through peak seasons. The local government has also created a Centre for Marine Education and Conservation, to tell and train the local population and tourists of the necessity of upkeeping the marine life in the area. The centre employs marine biologists to offer information awareness drives and programs, which is part of the nature tour package for holidaymakers.

During a Tangalooma Island Resort vacation, everyone cannot help but cherish their vacation as they have about eighty activities to choose from - but perchance the highlight of your holiday would be the possibility to see the beauty of nature. Travellers can go sight-seeing and feel the majestic sunrise and sunset by the beach, or play with the dolphins that live around the resort.

Want to visit Tangalooma Island? For Tangalooma Island accommodation or Moreton Island accommodation, check out Moreton View.