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Office of Government Commerce (UK) unveils hilarious new logo

April 26, 2008 at 03:59 PM

The new OGC logo has quite the different look if you see it from the side. Whoops!

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Posted in Design & Funny

Creative examples and ideas for website footers

April 21, 2008 at 04:17 PM

Some great thoughts and examples of website footers. Some interesting new ideas for what content to put down there and how it should look.

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Posted in Design & Development & Web

404 error page gallery

November 08, 2007 at 08:17 PM

Great examples of 404 error pages (page not found) that look good and some great ideas on functionality as well.

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Posted in Design

Install multiple versions of IE on your PC

May 29, 2007 at 07:30 AM

Unfortunately it worked terribly for me, tons of JavaScript errors and sites didn't display CSS remotely like they should. Hopefully it works better for you. (via)

Posted in Design & Development

A List Apart advice on selling your ideas and projects

May 20, 2007 at 09:53 PM

Great advice on how to pitch your idea or project to the decision makers in your organization. Lessons on taking criticism, being succinct, and knowing your audience.

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Posted in Business & Design

CSS Float Theory: Things You Should Know

May 13, 2007 at 09:38 PM

Everything you've ever wanted to know about the CSS concept of floats.

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Posted in Design & Development

Navigation Matrix Reloaded

April 03, 2007 at 09:02 PM

Had to scour the Interweb for this link yesterday for a friend, can't believe I didn't have it saved in my del.icio.us links or anywhere on this site. Great write up on a very useful design/CSS topic to create good looking and complicated list-based navigation.

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Posted in Design

Logo design from LogoStick

March 22, 2007 at 02:45 PM

One of the many pretty decent online logo design tools, and they've got a great looking site as well. Not really any reason for your business, no matter how small, to have an ugly ass logo you did yourself in Microsoft Word.

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Posted in Business & Design

IE sucks... hack to fix z-index/select bugs

March 13, 2007 at 10:34 PM

A CSS-only solution to the Internet Explorer bug that puts absolutely positioned elements behind select boxes.

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Posted in Design & Development & Web

Browser testing CSS and JavaScript

March 04, 2007 at 09:28 AM

Some good thoughts from Roger Johansson on browser testing for CSS and JavaScript. Working at a PC-centric employer I don't test the more obscure Mac browsers and I focus on PC Firefox but otherwise my habits are very similar.

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Posted in Design & Development

Adobe Kuler

January 05, 2007 at 11:41 PM
orangeongray.gif

Color color schemer tool from Adobe called kuler. You can use the tool to create your own color theme using the color wheel or even better browse popular and highly rated themes. I thought the Orange on Gray color scheme above was especially nice.

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Posted in Design

Cheating Color

January 04, 2007 at 06:35 PM

Some quick tips from Jason Santa Maria on using color and slight variations to achieve the right optical value. Useful information for making a color look the same with varying contrasting colors and amounts.

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Posted in Design

Gridding the 960

January 03, 2007 at 09:42 PM

Helpful tool from Cameron Moll for designing for sites for 1024px resolution. The image has a background image grid, pixel ruler, and column divisions for a 960px-width layout. Could be very handy.

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Posted in Design & Development

sIFR 3 beta available

December 19, 2006 at 03:26 PM

Lots of needed new features (leading, kerning, and opacity) and easier to implement. I'll have to check it out soon.

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Posted in Design & Development

Ajax loading gif generator

December 12, 2006 at 04:52 PM

Quick, simple, and attractive way to create loading animation gifs for your site. Pick a color and pick a style and you're done.

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Posted in Design & Development | 1 Comments

CSS-Based Forms: Modern Solutions

November 11, 2006 at 03:16 PM

Great set of links and screenshots to some Web 2.0 solutions to web input forms.

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Posted in Design & Development & Digg

Display a Google calendar on your site

June 16, 2006 at 08:36 PM

As expected, Google has created a very easy way for you to add a Google calendar to your website. Fill in a few quick fields and then grab the HTML (it's an iframe) and drop it into your site, takes 30 seconds.

I'll be messing with it soon to add my UT sports calendar to my Longhorn sports blog.

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Posted in Design

Fire your Boss! The Successful Home Freelancer's Guide

April 11, 2006 at 11:53 AM

I absolutely love my current job but you never know what the future holds. I can definitely see myself setting out on my own in the distant future or possibly starting up my own firm at some point. (via Lifehacker)

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Posted in Business & Design

Six WordPress themes

March 25, 2006 at 11:42 PM
Emire screenshot

Six really good WordPress themes from If..Else, I particularly like "Emire." Some great looking designs that don't look too much like templates and would work well for a variety of different weblogs. Great use of dark, deep colors.

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Posted in Design

Navigation tabs with CSS and DOMscripting

March 01, 2006 at 10:18 PM

Looks pretty easy to use and implement, definitely useful for later.

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Posted in Design

Building your own web2.0 layout

February 10, 2006 at 10:17 PM

Funny, true, and actually kind of useful how-to on building a web2.0 website. I want to go with something much brighter for this site when/if I get around to a redesign.

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Posted in Design

Sweet titles

February 05, 2006 at 07:57 PM

Just added here on this site. Looks pretty good and was easy to implement. Now I've got to start adding good title attributes to links again.

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Posted in Design

The Holy Grail of CSS layouts

January 31, 2006 at 07:03 PM

Three columns with a fixed-width sidebar for your navigation and another on the right. Add a liquid center and make them all equal heights and you've got the Holy Grail off CSS-only layouts.

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Posted in Design

Scalable logos

January 30, 2006 at 10:39 PM

Uses Flash to scale a logo when you change the font size in the browser.

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Posted in Design

Bubble tooltips

January 27, 2006 at 06:47 PM

A very nice and standards-based way to use only CSS and JavaScript to add fancy tooltips to your site's links. (Example page.)

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Posted in Design

Apple's iWeb is no bueno

January 16, 2006 at 08:00 PM

Considering how much better Dreamweaver 8's XHTML and CSS support has gotten over the last few year's Apple's new iWeb sure does output some nasty code.

<div class="paragraph Body">

Yikes.

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Posted in Design

Search engines and canonical URLs

January 12, 2006 at 08:48 PM

I just added the two rules to my .htaccess file, hopefully it won't screw anything up.

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Posted in Design | 2 Comments

Refresh Dallas launches

November 01, 2005 at 09:22 PM

First meeting of new local Dallas community of web designers and developers is November 10th in Plano. It's right down the road so I'll be there.

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Posted in Design & Development

20 great and free fonts

October 22, 2005 at 11:11 AM

Some very good looking ones on there.

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Posted in Design

CSS Specificity Wars

October 12, 2005 at 09:57 PM

Great, funny, and easy to follow explanation of how the specificity of ID's, classes, and elements affect your CSS.

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Posted in Design

CSS 2.1 selectors, Part 1

October 02, 2005 at 07:40 PM

Roger Johannsson explains the basics of selectors plus the universal, type, id, and class selectors. I'd love to be able to use the attribute or child selectors but IE doesn't support them, my fingers are crossed for IE 7.

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Posted in Design

Originality in Logo Design

September 15, 2005 at 08:29 PM

Complete and blatant rip-offs, accidental rip-offs, too similar inspirations are all getting more and more common in logo design.

I really need to spend some time working and creating a true logo for seven22 and fore here too.

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Posted in Design

Mike Davidson's MT 3.2 impressions

August 27, 2005 at 07:58 PM

Mike's initial impressions of the upgrades and a few things he's still waiting for either Six Apart or some plug-in writer to take care of.

Sure is nice to know that someone like Mike has Anil and the rest of the crew's ear.

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Posted in Design | 1 Comments

A List Apart 4.0

August 23, 2005 at 08:22 PM

New everything, front-end, back-end, design. Back-end CMS was by Brian Alvey of Weblogs, Inc., I had no idea he was involved at all with web standards and design.

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Posted in Design

About going solo

August 06, 2005 at 10:47 PM

Advice for anyone with thoughts/dreams of becoming a freelance web designer.

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Posted in Design

Design In-Flight closes shop

July 11, 2005 at 09:12 PM

I was a DIF subscriber and enjoyed the first 2 issues a lot. I never took the time to sit down and read the latest two though, I need to.

(via Authentic Boredom)

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Posted in Design

Preload :hover images in CSS

June 22, 2005 at 10:08 AM

Something I'll have to take advantage of since fixing this site's menu with PNGs is proving to be a pain in the butt.

a,
a:hover,
a:focus { background: url(image_hover.gif); }
a:link { background: url(image_default.gif); }

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Posted in Design

TexasSports.com using SlideShowPro

June 21, 2005 at 10:38 AM

Was looking for photos of last night's Texas game and saw that TexasSports.com is using SlideShowPro for their galleries now. I wonder when that happened. They have a separate slideshow set up for each sport, and then each slideshow contains multiple galleries.

Pretty cool implementation.

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Posted in Design & Photos & Sports

Hide CSS with @import

June 15, 2005 at 10:45 PM

Table listing all the different rules to use @import to hide CSS from certain browsers.

(via CSS Beauty)

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Posted in Design

Logo trends of 2005

June 08, 2005 at 03:56 PM

LogoLounge looks at all of this year's trends in logo design.

I must touch up/finish/redo seven22's logo ASAP.

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Posted in Design

Design for non-designers

May 18, 2005 at 04:08 PM

Haven't read it yet, just linking so I remember to. Will edit this after that.

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Posted in Design

Transparent custom corners and borders

May 18, 2005 at 11:57 AM

Create a resizable box with rounded (or any shape) corners, custom borders, and a transparent shadow without having to use extra divs. Very slick and something I'm sure to put to use sometime.

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Posted in Design

Columns & Grids

May 13, 2005 at 04:13 PM

Dave Shea discusses our options as designers when setting up our layouts with columns.

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Posted in Design | 1 Comments

The all new And All That Malarkey

May 11, 2005 at 09:28 AM

Malarkey redesigns. I absolutely love the way he aggregated so much content into the home page without making it busy or confusing. Plus it of course looks fantastic.

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Posted in Design

Web design trends

May 11, 2005 at 08:38 AM

I like the plastic look and think it'll make sense for finalizing the design for the seven22.com logo and site design.

Update: Unfortunately, John has taken down his excellent site and therfore this link no longer works. (7/14/2005)

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Posted in Design

MeasureIt - Firefox ruler extension

May 02, 2005 at 03:33 PM

Draw a ruler across any webpage to check the width, height, or alignment of page elements in pixels.

(via JoshuaInk)

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Posted in Design | 2 Comments

Adobe to acquire Macromedia?

April 18, 2005 at 09:18 AM

Hopefully this is just an internal April Fool's joke that we're just now stumbling onto. It's sort of like if Microsoft bought Apple, not good at all.

For the love of God I hope they don't scrap Fireworks. I prefer it about 100 times to Photoshop.

(via everyone)

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Posted in Design & Tech | 2 Comments

Creating a Site Design Plan

April 14, 2005 at 04:31 PM

A write-up geared more to the solo web designer working with small clients.

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Posted in Design

More on freelance design rates

April 13, 2005 at 09:31 AM

Good info about how much freelance designers are charging per job and per hour. Looks like I'm definitely on the low end, but that's understandable since I'm still just starting out.

All the rates are in British pounds, so keep in mind £1 is roughly $1.89 US right now.

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Posted in Design

ColorCombos.com

April 08, 2005 at 10:25 AM

A web color combinations tool and library for web designers. Very cool resource for coming up with color schemes.

(via SimpleBits)

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Posted in Design

More Nifty Corners

April 06, 2005 at 12:57 PM

Very cool, add rounded corners to objects without any images, just CSS and Javascript.

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Posted in Design

Tackling payment for projects

April 05, 2005 at 10:47 AM

John Oxton discusses payment policies for design projects. How do you make sure they pay up in a timely matter and how to limit feature creep.

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Posted in Design

April edition of And all that Malarkey

March 31, 2005 at 06:46 PM

Very nice temporary redesign by Andy Clarke. I love the old movie poster imagery he uses a lot. Looks great with the color scheme.

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Posted in Design

The non-typographer’s guide to practical typeface selection

March 25, 2005 at 10:55 PM

Very good follow up to Cameron's typeface discussion during Design Eye.

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Posted in Design

The 10 Commandments of Freelancing

March 25, 2005 at 03:29 PM

A list from Starting Your Career as a Freelance Illustrator or Graphic Designer of some very important things to remember if you're a freelance designer, probably the most important to me is number ten:

Thou shalt never miss a deadline! Be late with a job and chances are, that a particular art director will never call you again.

I've got a lot of work to do tonight to be ready for my meeting tomorrow. I think Christina and I will be able to handle it, and I'll stay up all night if I need to.

Definitely a book I'll check into soon.

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Posted in Design

Dave Shea's SxSW Panel Notes

March 17, 2005 at 03:42 PM

Notes and slides from More Hi-Fi Design with CSS as well as the Web Design 2010 I couldn't attend because I went to a great panel on typography.

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Posted in Design

How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams

March 17, 2005 at 10:46 AM

Includes a PDF of the presentation that I wasn't able to attend because the room was packed eventhough I got there 10 minutes early.

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Posted in Design

Finished site from Design Eye for Idea Guy

March 16, 2005 at 09:40 AM

I can't believe Dirk's not gonna use it, I wonder if anyone would notice if I did. :-)

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Posted in Design

Design Eye for the Idea Guy

March 14, 2005 at 04:42 PM

From the SXSWi presentation.

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Posted in Design

How to bluff your way in CSS

March 13, 2005 at 10:04 AM

Very funny panel from Andy Budd and Jeremy Keith.

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Posted in Design | 1 Comments

Zeldman keynote

March 13, 2005 at 10:01 AM

Slides from Jeffrey Zeldman's keynote at .

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Posted in Design

Airbag logo contest winner

March 09, 2005 at 01:19 PM

The winner of Ledger Paper logo contest over at Airbag contest has been announced and I have to say I really like the new logo as well as the runner ups. The original contest announcement sparked a lot of pretentious discussion about the value of design.

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Posted in Design

Screen Grab Confab, vol. III

March 03, 2005 at 09:12 AM

Wow, all these people are so much better than me. There is some seriously awesome looking stuff going on there.

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Posted in Design

Automation will kill us all

February 09, 2005 at 08:59 AM
logoyes seven22 logo

Why should we hire designers when we can just use automated programs to make our own logos?

Because the stuff they make blows.

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Posted in Design

Decorate Malarkey's studio

February 08, 2005 at 03:13 PM

Some really funny stuff in the comments.

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Posted in Design & Funny

Use the Unsharp Mask filter

February 08, 2005 at 03:09 PM

Good tip that I will now use often. Keeps image detail high when resizing a large image to a smaller size.

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Posted in Design

Justwatchthesky redesigns/reinvents

February 06, 2005 at 04:10 PM

One of Christina and mine's favorite sites has redesigned. Not only has Ryan changed the look, but he's also going to turn the site from weblog into portfolio. Sounds like he's still be blogging from somewhere new soon though.

In the meantime, check out this slideshow of his puppy Gabby.

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Posted in Design

How To Build a Successful Freelance Web Design Business

February 04, 2005 at 02:59 PM

Something I'm very interested in. He's got a book on the same subject coming out soon that sounds good too.

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Posted in Design

The Biggest Web Design Mistakes of 2004

February 03, 2005 at 08:58 AM

Lots of crap to avoid in 2005 that unfortunately too many people didn't in 2004.

(via Authentic Boredom)

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Posted in Design

Six Apart Redesign Coming

January 31, 2005 at 10:01 AM

It seems Six Apart is about to release a redesign on us. Looks pretty cool from the tiny preview Mena let us see. Looks much nicer and less like the weblog that it is. The interesting part to me is that the whole thing is MT powered and they're going to write up case studies on how they did it. I really need to get down and so some PHP work on this site, could really make some stuff work much more smoothly.

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Posted in Design

Listamatic

January 28, 2005 at 01:26 PM

I found this before but lost it, now Cameron has reminded me again.

Great set of sample menus using unordered lists, includes the needed HTML and CSS.

(via Authentic Boredom)

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Posted in Design

Scrivs sold the CSSVault

January 24, 2005 at 03:36 PM

Scrivs sold the CSSVault for $XX,XXX, I hope things over there stay as it's a hell of a CSS-based design resource. I imagine he got out a good time though, as Stylegala, CSS Beauty, and unmatched <style> are all good sites with the exact same concept.

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Posted in Design

Untold Mysteries of CSS

January 21, 2005 at 03:42 PM

Saw this when it was originally posted, but never got around to reading it or linking to it. Some basic, but not widely known, info on universal selectors, !important, and multiple classes on one element.

(via CSS Beauty)

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Posted in Design

456 Berea Street

January 20, 2005 at 11:06 AM
456 Bereat Street

456 Berea Street is Roger Johansson's personal site. It's one of the better sites out there for tips and actual code on how to do cool things with web standards and CSS. His article on inverted tabs is the source of inspiration for my tabbed menu in V3 of this site.

Just a great source of information and discussion.

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Posted in Blogroll & Design

Basecamp Project Management

January 19, 2005 at 03:30 PM
Basecamp logo

An amazing piece of software. I have heard people (including the creators) talking about Basecamp for a long time now, but I had never noticed there was a free version before. The free version only lets you manage one project at a time, but otherwise it's the full blown app.

Basecamp lets you track a project's major milestons, create to-do lists, send messages, share files, and pretty much everything else you could think of. You even get a unique URL where everyone related to the project can interact and work together.

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Posted in Design & Development & Tech

Stop Design photo galleries

January 18, 2005 at 12:35 PM

Pretty damn cool way to do photo galleries. The technical info on how he used iPhoto, Photon, and Movable Type to create them is in this post.

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Posted in Design & Photos

Getting Unstuck

January 17, 2005 at 02:28 PM

Four tips for getting yourself out of a design jam.

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Posted in Design

Does sIFR suck?

January 13, 2005 at 09:11 PM

I think it's pretty damn cool personally, but obviously I don't know a damn thing. He's actually saying that Flash sucks and text on the Web still sucks, despite the issue or two sIFR solves.

Good discussion follows in the comments.

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Posted in Design

Turning a list into a navigation bar

January 10, 2005 at 11:12 AM

Nice write up of how to take an unordered list and turn it into a navigation bar. Pretty simple but there is some stuff in there that's also pretty easy to forget.

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Posted in Design

26 steps to 15k a day

January 02, 2005 at 07:26 PM

Some great tips on building traffic. As always, content is king.

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Posted in Design

Beware of Opening Links in a New Window

January 02, 2005 at 06:40 PM

I've gotten away from the practice lately, for one target ="blank" takes time to type and for another it's not valid in XHTML Strict.

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Posted in Design | 2 Comments

How and when to use sIFR

December 28, 2004 at 01:13 PM

Great article on scalable Inman Flash Replacement.

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Posted in Design

Google AdSense

December 27, 2004 at 11:14 AM
Google AdSense

I'm sure you've noticed the ads here on this site, they're powered by Google's AdSense. It's a simple and unobtrusive way for me to earn enough money to pay to maintain this site. Even with my limited readership, I've earned about $50 in the last three months, more than enough to pay the entire year's costs. Wonderful tool for webmasters, I can't imagine how much more popular sites bring in.

Simple request for Google's team though, how bout coming up with an actual logo so I don't have to make my own?

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Posted in Design

stock.xchng

December 22, 2004 at 11:52 AM
stock.xchng logo

Instead of paying for stock photography (some sites charge hundreds of dollars for a photo), stock.xchng lets you upload and download photos for free. Pretty damn useful and cool.

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Posted in Design

Zeldman goes postal

December 21, 2004 at 02:06 PM

I've never had issues with the USPS site, probably because I've never tried to actually purchase anything.

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Posted in Design & Funny

Comment spam load issue

December 16, 2004 at 09:14 AM

Jay Allen from MT and of MT-Blacklist lore comments on the escalating comment spam issues. He discusses a couple of major bugs that cause excess server loads even on set ups with proper comment spam prevention measures in place. Sounds like a patch should be available soon.

Update: Looks like a new pre-beta version of MT-Blacklist is available that fixes a major bug and some minor ones.

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Posted in Design

The copyright year dance

December 15, 2004 at 11:49 AM

It's that time of year again. Last minute Christmas shopping? No, no. Time to update the copyright notice on all your webpages. Blake includes several different functions to automate the damn process. This is just my first year change since I've been using MovableType, but I can't believe I never thought to put <$MTDate format="%Y"$> in my footers. Must do it now. Bye...

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Posted in Design

Photo Fade-ins, vol. II

December 14, 2004 at 02:01 PM

Update to the javascript photo slideshow, no flash required.

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Posted in Design

NFL helmet prototypes

December 14, 2004 at 12:58 PM

Some pretty cool looking stuff here, unfortunately on a lot of them he doesn't know if they were actual prototypes considered by the teams. Still cool. (via Authentic Boredome - Linkage)

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Posted in Design & Sports

Float layouts

December 13, 2004 at 08:41 AM

Great article on floating elements with CSS. Covers basic concepts all the way to advanced usage issues.

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Posted in Design

The alt and title attributes

December 08, 2004 at 12:23 PM

Discussion of the ways the alt and title attributes should be used and how browsers should display them.

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Posted in Design

Accessibility: On a shoe-string

December 03, 2004 at 02:57 PM

More good ways to use the Web Developer Toolbar from Chris Pedrick. I already use it pretty extensively when working on a site, but I had never thought about using the Disable Colors or Disable Images items.

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Posted in Design

ADxMenu

December 03, 2004 at 02:11 PM

Wow, some really cool completely CSS menus. The Netymology one is really nice, too bad IE screws it up.

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Posted in Design

Designer Christmas Cards 2004

December 03, 2004 at 12:10 PM

I didn't think about this, but I guess it makes sense that a lot of designers make their own Christmas cards. Some really cool ones so far. Maybe this would be something I could work on, give me a little practice on something with a mission and obvious themes.

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Posted in Design

Web stock

December 01, 2004 at 09:34 PM

Dave on web designers' stock photography needs versus what stock providers offer. Mentions a couple sources I had never heard of.

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Posted in Design

Desk Grab Confab

December 01, 2004 at 02:25 PM

A bunch of sweet looking workspaces. Mine blows, I hate my desk and it's too small. I think I might look at buying a second simple desk of the same height as my current one. Then I can set them next to each other and be all set. (via Authentic Boredom)

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Posted in Design

Traffic building tips

November 29, 2004 at 06:49 PM

I think I do most of this stuff, but I good definitely do a better job of updating with quality content more often. The focused content will be tough since this is a personal site, but with my design site I should do a better job of that too. Here's a summary of their tips:

  1. Good content
  2. Focused content
  3. Get featured
  4. Keep them coming back
  5. Keep it Fresh
  6. Keep it clean (Your code that is)
  7. Submit to Yahoo! and DMOZ
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Posted in Design

SlideShow on the Way

November 29, 2004 at 02:38 PM

Very interesting stuff. I'm still considering options on Matt's site for displaying tons of photos. This may be one good way. Hmmm...

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Posted in Design

Don't delete weblogs!

November 29, 2004 at 01:15 PM

I thought it was an MT-related issue or possibly something I screwed up, but as Greg over at Airbag was told it's actually an MT-Blacklist issue. Apparently Jay agrees and hopefully he will fix whatever the problem is soon.

Both MovableType and MT-Blacklist are great pieces of software that I would prefer to keep being able to use.

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Posted in Design

Bright Corner is hiring

November 19, 2004 at 02:40 PM

Holy crap! There's actually a really awesome looking web design, etc. company right in Plano. And they're hiring! I'm not at all qualified (yet), but it looks interesting and seems like they type of place I might want to work at someday. If you are qualified, check out their soon to be redesigned site.

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Posted in Design

Invasion of the Body Switchers

November 19, 2004 at 10:47 AM

An alternative method based upon the original Style Switcher. The main upgrade is that it enables independent switching of different media types, meaning you can set up multiple screen and multiple print stylesheets and control them separately.

Seems pretty cool but the old method still looks more useful for me. I'll have to look into it a little more.

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Posted in Design

sorttable: Make all your tables sortable

November 19, 2004 at 09:54 AM

JavaScript function that allows you to sort table data simple and easily. (via 5411)

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Posted in Design

Onload image fades without Flash

November 18, 2004 at 04:09 PM

I've really got to find a way to create easy to update and maintain galleries for the sites I'm working on. Here's one possible option, we'll see...

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Posted in Design

Scrivs on the MSN Search beta

November 12, 2004 at 11:42 AM

I've seen several posts mention the new MSN Search beta that was released yesterday, this is the first to actually critique the design on it's visual elements and not just on technical issues. He particularly dislikes the buttons, which I had noticed too. The text seems to be too low in the button, or as he says the text is just too big or the button is too small.

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Posted in Design

Looking Around the Corner at CSS3

November 12, 2004 at 11:21 AM

Pretty cool example of what can already be done in CSS3 if you have a good browser. I think his examples of what you can do with substring matching attribute selectors and the opacity property are particularly cool.

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Posted in Design

Easier worn effect

November 11, 2004 at 09:37 AM

Set of brushes for Photoshop to make the "Wicked Worn Effect" a lot easier. (via Authentic Boredom)

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Posted in Design

Meeting a User's Emotional Needs

November 02, 2004 at 09:40 AM

Another excellent article from DKR on how to meet all of a user’s needs and satisfy the goals of the business at the same time. He's a great designer but really seems to have a firm grasp of the business side of things as well.

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Posted in Design

CSS rollovers with PNG support for IE

November 01, 2004 at 09:01 AM

That's a long title, not too much new on the rollover front but good tips on how to use tranparent PNG's and get them to work correctly in IE.

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Posted in Design

Author Highlighting in MT

October 26, 2004 at 08:55 AM

Absolutely great help with something I've been planning on implementing here when I get the rest of the comment styling set up. It allows me to easily highlight my own comments so they'll stand out from all of the other ones on an entry. You know... because I'm more important than you.

Dave Shea also adds a helpful comment where he suggests instead of basing it on name, I can use the email field to store a password. Clever.

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Posted in Design

Why link to index.php?

October 21, 2004 at 01:32 PM

Good discussion on proper home page linking practices. (via 5411)

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Posted in Design

Document titles and blips

October 19, 2004 at 01:51 PM

Good stuff from both The Man in Blue and 456 Berea Street on titling your webpages. Before I had used BrianBehrend.com - Page but as someone pointed out, Windows then adds another - before the browser name. I like » a little better and will be using that from now on.

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Posted in Design

The Weekly Standards Audio Show

October 18, 2004 at 03:08 PM
weeklystds.png

An weekly "radio" show from Adam Howell of The Weekly Standards and The Daily Standards. Good site and the radio show was pretty cool too. It'll be something I probably try to catch everytime, it's better than sports radio bitching about the Cowboys losing.

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Posted in Design

CSS negotiation

October 16, 2004 at 09:56 PM

Good source of tricks to push certain CSS to certain browsers. It'll definitely be needed to make this site not look like crap in IE.

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Posted in Design

Navigation Matrix Reloaded

October 14, 2004 at 04:03 PM

Wow, that's cool. I don't have plans for tabs on Matt's site, but this seems like something I might want to consider when I finally create 722WebDesign.

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Mike Industries

October 13, 2004 at 10:42 AM
MikeIndustries.com - Mike Davidson's personal weblog

MikeIndustries.com is the homepage of web designer extraordinaire Mike Davidson. Web designer probably isn't the best term, his current job title is "Sr. Assoc. Art Director & Manager of Media Product Development". You might not recognize his name but if you check out his portfolio, you most definitely have seen his work. The guy redesigned the ESPN.com homepage for crying out loud and most of the other stuff on the site too, so you can pretty much say he's got my ideal job. Sports and web design, I'd be a happy man.

I've only been reading his weblog for a short time now but it's already become one of the first sites I check in the morning. He only updates a couple times a week but his posts are always coherent, interesting thoughts (unlike a certain other site). The site is definitely of interest to anyone who likes sports and/or web design.

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Posted in Blogroll & Design

Mezzoblue

October 13, 2004 at 10:36 AM
Dave Shea's Mezzoblue

Mezzoblue is the personal site for Canadian web designer Dave Shea. A great source for ideas on CSS and design in general. A great example of what can be accomplished with a little CSS and a lot of creativity. Both new and more advanced web developers should definitely check it out. Dave is also the creator of the CSS Zen Garden.

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Posted in Blogroll & Design

Scrivs on Independent Thought

October 05, 2004 at 11:59 AM

Long read on the design/weblog community. Pretty good read as usual.

Main point is don't just accept everything someone says because of who they are in the community, and then don't just post comments like You're so awesome!" so that people will visit your site. If you have an interesting point to make, whether it's positive or negative than feel free to comment. "It sucks" is just as bad, "I hate it because..." is much more helpful.

The best way to get repeat visitors is to have quality content, something I'll have more time to work on when (if?) I ever get done with this redesign.

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Movies.com redesigns

October 01, 2004 at 09:10 PM

I only realized Movies.com was a Disney property a couple of months ago when I noticed that my ESPN Motion worked with their version of Motion (now called Cinequiz). It looks pretty good, nothing too major aesthetically. The major change comes in the conversion to a CSS and standards based design.

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color synthAxis

September 24, 2004 at 09:28 AM

A pretty advanced web-based color picking tool. So advanced that right now I really don't know what I'm doing with it, I need to read the manual more thoroughly. Definitely pretty cool and even just refreshing the page a bunch of time comes up with some nice looking color combinations.

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sIFR: Scalable Inman Flash Replacement

September 11, 2004 at 10:58 AM

A relatively easy way to deliver rich typography on webpages using Flash rather than HTML/CSS.

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JAlbum: Free web photo album software

September 11, 2004 at 10:53 AM

JAlbum seems to be pretty cool and looks like it's pretty easy to use. It has some cool templates too, you can even make you own.

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D. Keith Robinson: Web design details

July 29, 2004 at 10:48 AM

A nice detailed list of details that are important to consider when building sites. Unlike Cameron Moll's advice that I posted on a couple days ago, all of these definitely pertain to web development.

Most of the items in the list are simple and straight-forward, but stuff you're liable to forget if it's not a habit.

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Eight things I wish I’d known when I started

July 26, 2004 at 10:45 AM

Excellent advice on being a designer from Cameron Moll, most of which apply to all forms of design including web. Several thoughts should be very helpful to me as I try to figure out exactly how the hell I'm gonna pull this stuff off. Fortunately for me I already am pretty good about doing his number one thing, focusing on all details large and small.

Every element added to a design, whether print or web, decreases the importance of every other element already on the page.
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Embedding Flash While Supporting Standards

May 25, 2004 at 12:27 PM

Flash is great, unfortunately putting any of it in your site will immediately cause your XHTML to cease validating. Apparently about 80% of the code Flash MX creates for putting the movie into your webpages is not compliant. This is the "Satay Method" from A List Apart, which allows you to get functional as well as valid Flash in all browsers.

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Color schemes

May 14, 2004 at 12:24 PM

Dave Shea on style and color theory. I need a lot of help with this kind of stuff, being completely unartistic. He mentions three techniques for choosing colors: technical, matching (ie. taking the colors from a photo), and just old fashioned intuition. Intuition would be a very bad choice for me, I think I'll stick with matching when I start my redesign.

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MTPhotoGallery

April 30, 2004 at 12:20 PM

MovableType plugin that allows you to display a gallery of images in a folder. Definitely an interesting option, but I'm not sure it'll be the way I go for my site. The required file naming conventions kind of throws a wrench on things.

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