« April 2003 Entries »

Great Output With Crap Input

It all started when I worked for a large retailer in the entertainment industry years back. They had the right to use movie posters, box–art, and generally copyrighted material for the purposes of promotion. However, they didn’t have access to source material. Solution? Go and steal from the web.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (2) | posted to Design

Poor Planning

Long lauded in the list of benefits in living in Canada is the so–called “free healthcare” we enjoy. Any dissertation on how ‘free’ or even ‘useful’ it currently is will be left as an exercise for the reader, but here’s why I bring it up.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (3) | posted to Usability/IA

Slashdot Sucks More

It’s been bothering me all day, because I can’t figure out a good way to say this without coming across as a total usability geek obsessing over the least little thing. Whatever, here goes.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (9) | posted to Usability/IA

Vancouver Photos

It never hurts to have plenty of digital photos kicking around that you’ve taken yourself. Sure, they’re nothing professional, but at least you don’t have to worry about licensing.

It was a good weekend to be outside, so I made the most of it — I cleared my 64MB Compact Flash card and went for a 2+ hour walk around town.

Unfortunately I didn’t get as many photos as I wanted because I filled the card at about 100 shots. But there were some great ones which should come in handy in the future. Here are some.

Comments Closed (2) | posted to Ephemeral

Rip–off… or inspiration?

Wow, I never made the connection before. Those guys ripped me off!

Ha, no, not really. In fact I’m pretty sure the current incarnation of their site (which I find far less attractive than the last) pre–dates my latest redesign by a few months.

Still, it makes me wonder if my emboldened choice of a bright red over baby blue colour scheme was subconsciously affected by their site. Inspiration can comes from odd spots sometimes. Shortly after I launched this redesign I noticed the pale blue bar of Irish Spring Sport juxtaposed on the bathroom light shining through my maroon plastic shower curtain matched up my new colour scheme perfectly. I suppose it could be argued that was equal an influence on my palette selection.

Comments Closed (1) | posted to mezzoblue

Centering Absolutely Positioned CSS

When it comes to absolute positioning, you are stuck aligning everything to the left or right of the browser. There is no way to align from a center axis.

I was faced with that a few days back, and it turns out it’s entirely possible, actually, given a bit of monkey work. Here’s my solution, which holds up in everything I’ve checked it in so far.

It strikes me that there’s a simpler way to do it, but the example I’m working with hasn’t duplicated when simplified. I’ll update if I manage to get it.

update: IE5-friendly example added.

Comments Closed (4) | posted to CSS

Visual Design

It’s been lamented that most of the people using CSS for design are the people who shouldn’t be designing in the first place. I have a theory about why the real designers aren’t jumping in.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (25) | posted to CSS

Losing Thought

Of a particularly aggravating nature is the inability to recollect the brilliant idea for a post you had the night before as you fell asleep.

I could use one of these. Even one of these would do for my purposes.

When’s Movable Type’s neural interface due out, again?

Comments Closed (5) | posted to Content

The Persistence of Brand

How well do you know your brands?

I can’t get A D E F N O R Y. I blame it on my being Canadian, and not exposed to American brands on a daily basis.

(although I KNOW what E O and R are from, they’re at the back of my mind, and I just can’t pull out the rest of the logotype to make the connection)

4/20 update — it’s been solved, thanks to the help of Dale, rhapsodie, and swimunderground.

Comments Closed (5) | posted to The Industry

Hardware Engineering

I find it pretty easy to take for granted the amazing feats computer engineers pull off these days, mainly because they’re too small to be visible. It often helps my understanding to have an analogy on a larger scale.

For example, according to this article, a new portable storage device for digital cameras / MP3 players has improved efficiency by shrinking the space between the reader and the media. Their analogy is that this increased shrinkage is akin to a Boeing 747 flying a millimeter above the earth’s surface.

Think about the control here. A device moving quickly enough to read data is so amazingly close to the actual media that the slightest deviation would be enough to cause the two to collide and probably destroy them both. But instead, the technique is reliable enough to allow for consistent data storage.

A 747 flying a millimeter above the ground. Now that’s pretty amazing.

Comments Closed (0) | posted to Technology

XHTML 2.0

Yeah, everyone’s talking about XHTML 2.0 this week, but it’s such a non–issue.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (0) | posted to HTML/XHTML

The Redneck Connection

So Chimera recently rebranded as Camino.

Now Phoenix (the Mozilla derivative) is getting a name change too, and will become Firebird, and the mail client is being renamed Thunderbird.

So where’s the next stop? Internet Explorer becoming Camaro? Netscape 8 being released as Mustang?

(added) Hah, here’s the definitive list.

Comments Closed (1) | posted to Browsers

Validation Through Validating

It says a lot about CSS–based design when you run your first check on a complete draft, and it comes out as valid XHTML, CSS, and hits Section 508 accessibility guidelines without any changes needed. It’s also rather gratifying when only a few slight revisions are needed to get a triple–A from Bobby.

It is, however, a pain in the ass that adding a simple link to an accessibility validator will break your XHTML. I find it excessively picky that “url=myurl&content=” can’t simply be copied and pasted into an href. Instead you must re–format that to “url=myurl&content=”.

Comments Closed (5) | posted to Web Standards

Mozilla Background Transparency Bug

I’m having a rather difficult time believing I’m the first one to encounter this, but some pretty deep Googling and searching of the Bugzilla database isn’t turning up any prior mention of it.

When using a transparent GIF as a background image in an absolutely–positioned div, Mozilla does some pretty radical colour shifting. I’ve had this happen on more than one occasion, but I only looked into it a little further today.

update (4/14): — it’s been brought to my attention that this bug has been fixed by Mozilla v1.4. Great news for future releases, but Netscape 7 is still buggered unfortunately.

Comments Closed (6) | posted to Browsers

Bad Marketing Strategy?

This is rather odd. I had a message waiting for me this morning to call a guy named Michael. I hadn’t heard a thing about the project he referenced in well over 6 months, and I had no idea who the guy was, or what his company did. But, hey, it was in association with a past job so I figured he must have a reason for wanting to talk to me.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (4) | posted to The Industry

Canonical URLs and Unexpected Consequences

Building a web site using paths (/about/) instead of filenames (/about.php) for sub–pages: a good idea.

Carelessly uploading a minor change to your ‘About’ page which is also called default.asp into the root of your web server thus replacing your home page with your grinning mug and making you look like an arrogant bastard: not so good an idea.

phew. I think only a couple of people caught that.

Comments Closed (0) | posted to mezzoblue

Table-less Design

The bottom line: transitional, table–based layouts work, and will continue to, no matter how ugly a solution they seem. The table tag isn’t going anywhere due to the continuing (valid) need for tabular data, and let’s face it, we’ve long worked out the bugs in table–based design. We’re only beginning to knock off the bugs of the more popular CSS configurations.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (10) | posted to CSS

Forward Compatibility

There was a good intro to this post at one point in time, but thanks to a Safari caching bug when using Movable Type and comment spam, it’s long gone. Hopefully the rest of this will make sense without the introduction. Oh well.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (6) | posted to CSS

Cereal-based Entertainment

I don’t eat breakfast cereal. Or at least, I don’t anymore. I grew up with Rice Krispies and Cheerios, like any other kid, but I’ve long tired of it. In conversation this week I was reminded of my all–time favorite breakfast cereal, Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I had to have some, it was that simple.

So I was in the grocery store this afternoon, visting the cereal aisle for the first time in how long. And you know what they’ve started doing while I wasn’t looking? There were DVDs on the front of almost every box. The one I picked up, for example, contained “Reflections of Olympic Gold”, Episode 3.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (5) | posted to Publishing

Weblogs vs. Old Media

A guy conducting a research study on weblogs e–mailed me this week. He wanted to discuss potential commercial applications. It wasn’t a question I really had much interest in, since I’d rather not see weblogging become a corporate thing. But I guess it’s as inevitable as the .com rush so I’ll likely have to grin and bear it.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (6) | posted to Publishing

Target Resolution

I was asked just recently why I chose to design this site for screen resolutions greater than 800x600. I was wondering when I’d get called on this.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (4) | posted to HTML/XHTML

Journalistic Integrity

Considering the spin jobs performed by the modern media to appease advertisers, I find the L.A. Times’ moral high–road a bit strained.

However, journalism is about reporting the facts, not making them up, and I’m forced to agree with their decision to dismiss photographer Brian Walski for digitally manipulating a front page photo.

It’s a minor change to adjust composition, but any editing of news imagery is deplorable. ‘Breaking news’ should not be edited for the sake of a portfolio.

Comments Closed (3) | posted to Publishing

Hack HotBot, Part IV

Part four of the on–going series. I fully expect there to be a part five when the finalists are announced, sometime in mid–May.

Two days early, I’ve finally finished my entries, or at least gone as far as I’ll go. Many frustrations were encountered along the way, some having to do with browser incompatibilities, but most pertaining to the quirks of the original source material. As has been perviously mentioned on this site, it wasn’t very friendly.

Nevertheless, I’ve come up with a couple of what I think are pretty strong skins. Dying to see them? I didn’t think so. Here they are anyway, you heartless bastard.

There are only two days left in the contest. If you’d like to use the CSS as a base and whip up a last-minute entry, feel free. I may have already solved some big headaches you’d otherwise struggle with. However, please use your own images. This is about creativity, after all.

Comments Closed (1) | posted to Design