Welcome to Constellation Design Desktop Publishing and Web Design services

Making the Web a Little More Green

Your host and principal coding monkey

A couple of months ago, Constellation Design invested in a technological upgrade for its website hosting offerings, switching to more reliable servers with a more extensive capacity, as well as adding a control panel package that provides more features and options for each client’s website and e-mail service. Even better: These new servers are 36% more efficient than the old ones and are powered by clean energy.

Internet servers use a great deal of electricity, and a good sized server farm might account for annual carbon emmissions equivalent to burning over 5,000 barrels of oil. Our new server contract, however, uses wind-generated electricity to power and cool the servers and purchases Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) for any power needs that cannot be immediately met by the wind farm.

When you host your website and e-mail with one of Constellation Design’s hosting packages—the $30 Red Dwarf, $50 Main Sequence, or $80 Blue Giant, detailed here—not only are you getting a better price than you would with other hosts, you’re also contributing to the fight against global warming.

For more information on RECs, or to sign yourself or your business up for REC carbon offsets, direct your web browser to www.3degreesinc.com/products/recs/ today.

Presidential Branding

As with every election cycle, the 2008 Presidential campaign involved a great many graphic elements in its candidate mailers, advertisements, buttons, banners, websites, etc. Campaign logos serve as more than mere labels—they’re brands designed to make statements unto themselves and appeal to particular aspects of voters’ natures.

For the most part, these brands were well-conceived and well-produced designs, but the eventual winner’s logo stood head and shoulders above the rest in both visual appeal and visceral effectiveness. The Obama “O” doubles as a sunrise over a horizon, evoking the President-Elect’s theme of hope; its circular shape promotes inclusiveness, reminding voters of his unifying “not a red America or a blue America, but the United States of America” rhetoric; and capitalizes, so to speak, on the uncommon initial being a simple and ready identifier. Simply a brilliant design that served the campaign extremely well.

Other logos were effective in more limited ways, while yet others had serious flaws. John McCain’s logo evoked his military background with a single star with gold tails, effectively promoting his courtship of veterans and defense-minded voters but offering little else in the way of visual appeal; its resemblance to a Marine recruitment ad accomplished its intent but probably boxed in any potential appeal to the masses. Logos for Hillary Clinton and Chris Dodd were solid and classic without much in the way of frills, but each appealed to different sensibilities: Clinton’s relied on her first name alone and a jaunty flag-like banner, implying a familiarity and celebration, while Dodd’s used the strong, elegant all-caps typeface evocative of strength beneath a more understated, calm and steady banner. Both Mitt Romney and Bill Richardson relied on stylish variants of classic images, Romney with an eagle in motion and Richardson with a clever star and stripes. John Edwards used a hint of green alongside the traditional red, white, and blue to convey environmental credibility. Fred Thompson put his face on his bumper stickers, relying on his TV celebrity. Dennis Kucinich used a clever flag-variant that resembles an Internet RSS feed icon, clearly reaching out to the tech-savvy. Tom Vilsack went for boldness, trying to use his uncommon initial as a marker, but “V”s are hard-edged and sharp, making for a whole different reaction than the round “O” of Obama; plus, pop-culture interferes—his logo makes me think of V for Vendetta, not “Victory with Vilsack.”

But the worst of the season’s logos had to belong to pre-VP Joe Biden. the understated, blue-on-white “BIDEN” in caps directly atop a small star and “President ‘08”—with an open single-quote instead of the apropriate apostrophe—and no breathing room between the lines of type, all enclosed in a bold frame, evoked nothing so much as sitting in traffic and looking at a licence plate with bad punctuation.