« November 2005 Entries »

Curve Precision

Word of the day: bezier. As in, the curve. Er, even more specifically: the vector path-shaping tool built into software like Illustrator and Freehand.

Though I still swear by Photoshop for site mockups and graphics work, I’m not exactly uncomfortable in Illustrator either. I’ve been spending more time in it lately, thanks to some work that demands it. (Yes, Fireworks is good too, if you’re okay with the UI. I tried, but I’m not.) What I’m finding most interesting is the shaping of curves, and how your eye can pick up even the most minor of differences and imperfections.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (16) | posted to Design, Imagery

5Q

New today: 5 Questions, in which I square off with Dave Kellam for a set of 5 questions completely unrelated to anything I do around these parts. Previous rounds include interesting people like Michael Heilemann, Khoi Vinh, and Naz Hamid… but the real star of Kellam’s 5Q series has to be the unique design work he puts into each interview, which incorporates elements from the respective interviewee’s corpus of public work.

comments off | posted to Ephemeral, mezzoblue

CS2

I made the decision a while ago that I’d be skipping the upgrade to Adobe’s CS2 suite. It just didn’t look like it had enough new to entice me. Or at least, enough to justify the price tag.

But the little things that don’t make it into the initial marketing push are adding up. Case in point, Smart Objects:

…now you can place a photo in Photoshop and make it a “Smart Object”, just select the layer of the photo and go to the “Layer menu” and choose “group into New Smart Object”.

When you do this it is linked to the embedded high-resolution original. So now when you resize it’s still crystal clear even if you scale it a dozen times.

On one hand, it’s great to have that ability in Photoshop, and I’d be using it all the time. On the other hand, it’s about time. Illustrator and InDesign have done it for ages, with the “Place” command. It’s more an obvious catch-up feature than anything new, which is indicative of my overall problem with this recent upgrade: it feels more like a functionality service pack than a must-have set of new features.

I think I’ll continue holding off for CS3, which ought to be around a year from now given a roughly 18 month release cycle. By then, with the new features it offers, we might be approaching something resembling a must-have upgrade.

Comments Closed (42) | posted to Technology

Push Firefox, Make Cash

Good news: Google will now pay you $1 every time you successfully refer someone to download and install Firefox (a version pre-loaded with the Google toolbar, of course). US-only for now, it seems.

Firefox has seen an amazing adoption rate, but it has been slowing down. This is a huge boost. Combine the cries of frustrated web designers and developers over the past few years, the plethora of anti-IE sites by designers for end users, the reach of people building web sites who are thoroughly and utterly sick of supporting IE6, and the lure of cash. Any bets on how many percentage points Firefox is about to jump?

Somehow this flew under my radar last week, but I don’t see many people talking about it. It seems pretty important. Google has the pockets for this (scamming aside), and given the past year or so of rumbling in their direction from Microsoft, the motivation as well.

Comments Closed (46) | posted to The Industry, Web Standards

Pizza and Passats

A few things I’ve enjoyed this week:

Pizza Flyers: The Height of Good Graphic Design?

An objective look at what constitutes design in the world of pizza flyers. Great points, but there are always exceptions. A western Canadian pizza chain, Panago, tried the counterpoint in the late 90’s: modernist, sparsely filled masterpieces of flyers. You know what? They’re still at it, years later.

The new Passat

A series of tiny, self-contained films about the ‘120 not-so standard features’. Clever, and sometimes goofy, visual puns.

A List Apart issue 205

You’ve seen it no doubt, but man, has ALA seen a renaissance of quality lately or what?

Ambigrams

Visual problem solving taken to a whole new level. (via)

RoundCube and TurboDbAdmin

Great free web-based GUIs that leave SquirrelMail and PHPMyAdmin in the dust.

Learning from the Web

Adam Bosworth of Google explains some of the lessons his company (and others) have learned from the web.

Comments Closed (15) | posted to Flash, Reflective, Server-Side

IE7 Conditional Comments

In mid October, the IE Blog urged developers to stop using CSS hacks to workaround IE’s problems, and start relying on Microsoft’s proprietary conditional comments. I was mostly fine with the new syntax, and it seemed practical enough considering that IE7 is looking to address most of the reasons you’d hack in the first place.

But in the comments it became clear that some of you have discovered non-trivial problems in working with conditional comments — for instance, they don’t work in a one-PC, multiple-IE testing environment, and XSL doesn’t peacefully co-exist with them. So when I heard certain WaSP members would be meeting with the IE team, I compiled a few direct questions for them to pose. Without further commentary of my own, here are replies from Chris Wilson and Brian Goldfarb of Microsoft, as transcribed by Molly Holzschlag.

Continue Reading… | Comments Closed (54) | posted to CSS, Web Standards

Million Bucks

I’m fascinated with the Million Dollar Home Page. This guy got the idea to sell pixels for a dollar each, in blocks of a hundred, to get him through college. The advertisers get an ad spot for 5 years, and “a piece of internet history.” Silly and gimmicky, but that’s exactly why it worked, and to date he has pulled in an unbelievable half million dollars.

But, geez, the quality of advertisers sure does say a lot about the type of company that buys into high exposure, flash-in-the-pan marketing like this. Online casinos and pharmacies, marketing courses, and various bottom-rung web hosts and domain registrars: in other words, classic popup window and spam fodder. There must be a connection between the perceived value of running an ad on a site like this and the quality of the products being hawked.

Though you could probably learn quite a bit about effective web advertising by studying the various ads to see what techniques grab your attention, considering they’re all static images fighting only each other for eyeballs.

Comments Closed (27) | posted to Usability/IA

CSS Reboot

Happy November, it’s CSS Reboot day. With over 300 participants, there’s a whole lot of fresh pixel goodness to look through. (Some of the sites seem a bit slow, likely due to the traffic.)

As with any project of this sort, people of all different backgrounds and skill levels have contributed. There are a few token efforts, and some feel strangely inspired by others, but overall the bar has been set rather high for this round.

Some of the cream of the crop:

Personal Development

Trevor Delamorandiere’s business site. Nice colours, inspired portfolio.

Lucid Crew

A design team from the southern States, rocking the grunge look and the Scriptaculous library. (Check the portfolio)

Cafe Lisa

I liked the last version, and I love the new look. Although you can put me down as undecided whether the fixed frame works or not, it’s good to experiment and a personal site like this is the ideal place for it.

Vivified

Bastiaan Terhorst’s portfolio site. The grid layout and inventive blog format are complemented by strong photographs and a distinct visual style. Great work, probably my favourite of the bunch.

e-Velocity

Great colour scheme from this design and development studio from Ontario.

Ribic.org

There’s just something about Slovenian designer Mitja Ribic’s personal site. Strange layout, odd animated GIF annotation, but it all kind of works. I think.

And plenty more I didn’t have time to go through. Great effort, all.

Comments Closed (17) | posted to CSS, Reflective