This site allows potential tenants to look through the historical tenancy of a property to determine the treatment of previous tenants by the landlord, as well as obtain information about the living conditions in the property (such as inconsiderate neighbours, barking dogs, foul odours and traffic noises).

Even applicants who were unsuccessful or did not sign a lease can contribute. With false advertising, price baiting and rental auctioning - a lot of information can be determined about the attitude of a landlord, even before a lease is signed.

Design

The Rent Reviews Australia website is exceptionally bare, and this was done intentionally.

The lack of complicated scripts and images reduce load times considerably, and allow the website to perform even under heavy traffic loads.

The design was inspired by the simplicity of the Google search engine, with only a search bar presented on the homepage.

Technology

Rent Reviews is powered by the CakePHP framework and hosted on a high performance Apache server (for heavy traffic load).

The bulk of development time went into the intelligence behind the property search engine. Even with a single textfield, the search is powerful enough to determine the country, suburb and street of the entered address (even if entered in many different formats).

The scoring mechanism is also dynamic, allowing Morrissey Exchange to add, remove, modify or change the order of survey questions and their respected score weight.

As Rent Reviews Australia was designed to be operated completely anonymously, users do not need to register or login to contribute. As a result, review and comment moderation was very important to keep spammers and SEO technicians from abusing the open nature of the site. We have created a moderation facility for Morrissey Exchange’s Rent Reviews operators, that are able to remove spam from the site. The authentication technology is based around CakePHP’s impressive Authentication component.

Users also have the ability to “report” inappropriate or spam reviews, that are later verified by a Rent Reviews operator.

Summary

The Rent Reviews project has been an exciting development venture. The folks at Morrissey Exchange have been upfront about empowering tenants, tenancy associations and good landlords. The choice to open the site up entirely to anonymous submissions was done to encourage tenants to speak freely about their experiences.

Although the site looks very basic, the technology behind it is powerful. With users from all over the world, we look forward to seeing thousands of new reviews on the Rent Reviews platform, and thank Morrissey Exchange for the opportunity.

Fortunately our clients have more sense than to plaster their logo over a design project - however we do sympathise with thousands of other designers out there.

Whether you are a graphic designer, or a potential client - this video will definitely give you a chuckle.

The article covers topics pertaining to logo designs such as:

Logo Design Concepts

The importance of brainstorming, viewing the logo designs of a client’s competitors.

Hand-sketching Logo Concepts

Sketching designs on paper is a much more fluid process. Hand-sketching logo design concepts allows designers to quickly determine which designs work, and which do not.

End Requirements for Logo Printing

As a logo can be used in a wide variety of mediums, such as online, billboards, banners and stationery - it is important that the design of the logo is tweaked to fit its requirements.

Use Illustrator for Logo Design

Although Photoshop is the tool of choice for most designers, Adobe Illustrator allows designers to create logos in vector formats - allowing the logo to be scaled without pixelation.

The KISS principle

A logo design should be kept simple enough so that its message is clear even at small sizes. For example, Gina mentions that as a guide, he creates a favicon at 16×16 pixels to determine whether the logo design still looks correct.

Examine the Logo Design at different sizes

To determine whether the logo design appears correctly, print it and examine it at differing sizes. (This includes shrinking it down.)

For a complete (and more comprehensive) list of Gino’s design principles, you can find his article here.

Where have I seen that font before?

The only font missing from the article is the infamous Comic Sans. During our logo design process, we are often drawn to a small subset of elegant fonts. As thousands of other designers use a similar set of fonts for their designs, we will eventually reach a point when modern fonts will be on such lists.

Trajan - The Movie Font

The article also links to a video that highlights “The Movie Font” - Trajan. This font has been heavily used in the film industry, and is featured on trailers, starting credits, posters, and DVD covers. It is truly amazing how many titles have been released with identical font use.

It’s an amusing article, and you will recognise all of these fonts at glance. Definitely worth a read. You can find the article here.

We want to welcome you all to the new design of the “Design Shed” website. As with all design work, the new layout was a combination of hard-work, good design principles and inspiration from the world’s best designers.

Inspiration

• Smashing Magazine’s Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples

Smashing Magazine Excerpt

• Apple Store’s Horizontal Navbars

Apple Store Navigation

Technology

In a future post, we will describe the process of integrating Wordpress and CakePHP - while keeping both platforms completely functional in PHP.