Ramblings
February 9, 2008
Perhapanauts Website
Just a little announcement that the site I built for my friend Craig's comic book went live this week: Check out The Perhapanauts.
November 2, 2007
Mac OS X Web Color Picker
This is more of a note to self: Hex Color Picker is a useful tool that adds a web color picker to the Mac's built-in color pickers. The best feature is the magnifying glass which lets you choose any color on the screen to get the hex value (very useful to find the color on a web page).
October 1, 2007
Hidden Elements in Logos
Uni Watch is a blog all about sports uniforms, and often has some interesting articles. (It's where I learned about baseball's "futuristic" uniforms...glad I missed those games.) Anyway, there's a pretty good one about hidden elements in sports logos (inspired by a discussion of the FedEx logo's negative space arrow). In it they mention the Hartford Whalers "HW" (a fantastic logo, IMO) and also schooled me about the "MB" in the old Milwaukee Brewers glove logo.Speaking of logos, on a trip last week I noticed at the airport that Northwest Airlines has changed their logo, which I think is a shame. The old one combined the N and W into a simple, single element: what looks like an italicized N becomes a W with the arrow in the top left -- which, of course, is pointing northwest. The new logo just makes me think of this NWA...
March 6, 2007
Hollister Thomas Photography
A new site I built is now live: Hollister Thomas Photography. The original designer sort of disappeared so I took his initial rough design, finished the details, and built the site. It was a lot of fun to do, especially adding the Lightbox 2.0 slideshow and the page load/fade-in code (which I needed to do because of the way the content is centered on the page). And Hollister's photos are great, too!
Labels: design, personal, photography
January 16, 2007
New Design
Well, unless you're reading this in an RSS reader it's pretty obvious that I launched this site's new design. Nothing earth-shattering, just a (slight) improvement over the last minimalist/unfinished black & white version. There might be some weirdness while I work out the kinks, but hopefully it's nothing too major.
Labels: design
October 4, 2006
New Ugly Design
The design of this site has been pretty much the same since I bought the domain in 2000, when I hastily put the site up to help with a job search. I've been wanting to redesign for years, and lately wanted to add new features and switch over to PHP. Anyway, I finally decided to do it even though the design is clearly not done. But at least I'm finally moving forward with the site and will fix it up in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, please excuse my appearance and forgive any (temporarily) broken links.
In the meantime, please excuse my appearance and forgive any (temporarily) broken links.
Labels: design
March 18, 2006
February 28, 2006
The ugliness of MySpace
I feel exactly the same as Matt at A Whole Lotta Nothing regarding askew baseball hats and MySpace:
I always secretly hoped I'd never grow old and unhip, but every few months I'm reminded that the world is passing me by.
It all started with the askew hats. Two or three years ago I was walking down the street and saw some guys wearing baseball caps with the bills pointed off at crazy angles, like their hat was making a left turn but their head hadn't caught up. Every time I see a kid with his hat all akimbo I want to grab his arms, smack him in the face, and straighten his hat out. It's irrational, I know, but drives me crazy in a "get the hell off my lawn you crazy kids!" sort of way.
The online equivalent of this is of course, MySpace... Apple has made the iPod the most popular music player on earth, but it's clean as a whistle. How could the same people love their super sleek music player and also love the gaudy oversaturated flashing/pulsating monstrosity of their MySpace profile?
Labels: design
June 10, 2005
Enhancing photos with High Pass
Enhance your photos by using the High Pass Filter (Veerle's blog)
This is a good tip for sharpening photos in Photoshop: rather than use the Sharepen More filter (my filter of choice), use High Pass on a duplicate layer of the photo, changing the Layer Mode of the duplicated layer to Overlay, Soft Light or Hard Light.
This is a great idea if you really need fine control over the amount of sharpening going on in different areas of a photo: you can simply erase parts of the High Pass layer to change the amount of sharpening.
This is a good tip for sharpening photos in Photoshop: rather than use the Sharepen More filter (my filter of choice), use High Pass on a duplicate layer of the photo, changing the Layer Mode of the duplicated layer to Overlay, Soft Light or Hard Light.
This is a great idea if you really need fine control over the amount of sharpening going on in different areas of a photo: you can simply erase parts of the High Pass layer to change the amount of sharpening.
Labels: design
May 5, 2005
Yahoo! Shopping Gift Finder
The product manager for Yahoo's Gift Finder writes about it:
I want to take this time to discuss the Gift Finder we created along side a great Y! partner, ChoiceStream out of Cambridge, Mass. The gift finder was built as a collaboration between Yahoo! Shopping, the Yahoo! Personalization team, and ChoiceStream. It was one of the better collaborations I've been involved with and I feel lucky to be the Product Manager for this feature...Read the whole entry here...
[W]e set out to make a simple, comfortable gift-giving tool that can be used to provide recommendations for products, product categories, brands, and even stores. At the very least it's a valuable brainstorming tool that does the work of weeding out millions of products. At best, it hits the nail on the head for a quick and easy gift giving experience. It's unique to the web by its breadth and depth and its ease-of-use -- we're very proud of it.
Labels: design
April 27, 2005
Yahoo Gift Finder
ChoiceStream (my employer) has launched its latest product: Yahoo Shopping's gift finder. Check it out if you need to buy a gift for someone...
Labels: design
March 15, 2005
Portfolio updates
A couple additions to the Portfolio section:
- Turtle Soup: MySQL and PHP development for this teen-based cooking site
- Racks For All: some quick design help to improve the home page and main products page
Labels: design
March 4, 2005
Typography humor
Typography joke for the day (from here):
Comic Sans walks into a bar and asks for a beer. Says the bartender: "Sorry, we don't serve your type here."I think that joke is up there with the photo of someone writing "Watch your kerning" next to graffiti in a design school's bathroom. But then again, I'm a geek...
Labels: design
January 31, 2005
Website updates
Just a quick rundown on some updates to websites I'm involved with:
- ToBits: site I designed and helped develop for a business that converts CDs and videotapes to digital format
- eWire: Brian contributed a bunch of new photos and articles from several flatland jams he went to in 2004
- Barbara Peavey: new original oils and Giclee reproductions added to the site
- Hofmann Joinery: two new custom furniture pieces added
Labels: design
January 12, 2005
sIFR
Just to try it out, I implemented sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) for titles on iPod411.com. What this does is replace plain HTML text with a small Flash control, so text is displayed in the font I want (Futura Book, in this case) and appears smooth (even if you don't have your font smoothing feature on). Overall I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
Labels: design
November 22, 2004
DESIGNER.SITE.CHKLST
August 31, 2004
The Anatomy of an Icon
The Anatomy of an Icon (SimpleBits)
Since releasing some icons of my own, I've received quite a few messages asking "how do you create an icon?" Well, I can't tell you how to create an icon -- but I can tell you the steps I take to create an icon.This is a useful mini-tutorial if you're a designer who needs to create icons. I've already successfully used the tips, and I want to make sure I have this page somewhere in my site so I can search for it later...
Labels: design
March 5, 2004
barbarapeavey.com
I made some minor updates to my mother-in-law's website, barbarapeavey.com. I kept the basic design, but gave it a slightly more modern look (since the original design was done in '01 and looked it). I also cleaned up the HTML & CSS a lot -- I'm on a no-table kick now that I know how easy it is to build and maintain a site with such simple code.
So if you're interested in oil paintings of Nantucket and other New England coastal landscapes, check it out...
Labels: design
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