Thoughts, ideas and notes on the discipline of design as applied to new media.
In 2000, while in my senior year of college, I somehow managed to secure my first paid commission. This is probably standard fare for graphic design students, but I was an Electrical Engineering major, and the concept was truly novel. You mean people would pay me for something I was … more
[Quick guide written for internal DD9 use, published for the good of mankind.] This is a rough guide, since I don’t have a specific project to test it on. When we get there, I’d like to test it out myself to improve this document. That said… 1) Download and Install … more
Does anybody think this revenue model will work?
Below is a quick screencast illustrating the two methods for adding a PDF link to a WordPress Post or Page. If you’d prefer a non-video explanation or an additional resource, you can download this screenshot, which includes similar instructions to those covered in the video.
What started off as a grand thesis, though apathy and time constraints, became a nice little list of concepts and standards to evaluate a the quality, caliber and effectiveness of a logo design. Logo Design Considerations Visual Balance Make and break the grid A Hook Optical illusion, Visual trick Graphic … more
Interesting bug today: A client’s web form takes file uploads and forwards them as email attachments. Script works great for .doc files, but .docx files end up as mysterious attachments with filenames like ATT00010.txt, whose content starts with this: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document; name=”filename.docx” Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=”filename.docx” Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 This “header” is followed … more
After installing Internet Explorer 9, I began cross-browser testing the DesignDivine sites. IE9 destroyed the layouts of at least a half of our websites with no discernible or obvious patterns. Large content areas were missing from new and old sites alike. Each of these sites was compatible with IE6, IE7, … more
One of our clients wanted two sites—two URLs, two designs, two sets of content—on a single WordPress install. They wanted to be able to log into a single admin area to manage both sites, and to be able to make posts of certain categories show up on both sites, while … more
We just launched a new site for one of our clients, and one small improvement we made was replacing all the old and ugly (and not especially SEO-friendly) URLs like /cand_jobs.shtml with shiny new ones like /jobs. The catch here is that Google’s existing index refers to all the old … more
I started my graphic and web design career by way of photography. I shot for my own clients, worked as a studio coordinator for photographers I respected, and assisted on as many gigs as possible, everything from small editorial shoots to national advertising campaigns. Here are the three most important … more
WordPress automatic updates are awesome. When they work, they’re as easy as a click of a button. When they fail, however, you’re left either reconciling yourself to an eternity of manual updates, or troubleshooting your host–a process that routinely takes much longer than applying the update manually would’ve. In this … more
My name is Alex and I’m a a reality TV addict. Hi, Alex. I admit my guilty pleasure and embrace it. My favorite show is Project Runway, because it neatly sidesteps most of the Real World-esque drama and focuses on the creative process. Truth be told, I’m probably more of … more
A VPS is the standard upgrade when conventional shared hosting won’t meet your needs. The catch, and most hosts try not to make this clear, is that you’re then on the hook for all configuration, upgrades, and maintenance. And as an added bonus, many hosts offer default VPS installs configured … more
It will be interesting to see how design, particularly website design, evolves over the next ten years. Couple of hopes/requests/wishlist items: Get CMS systems to play nicely with custom databases & custom applications Figure out way of unifying user login/accounts across multiple website applications Clean URLs system for customs sites … more
Compared to WordPress’s automated self-updates, Drupal’s update process is something of a chore. This chore isn’t made any easier by Drupal’s documentation (also here), which at the time of writing takes up nine pages, is self-contradictory, unnecessarily time-consuming and somewhat paranoid. And it never offers a canonical pragmatic checklist. After … more
After three months of monitoring the OfficeEvolution website traffic and user behaviors, we decided to redesign their landing page to reduce the bounce rate. The new layout features a set of six custom service icons, a new service map graphic, and a restructured code formatting for SEO improvements.
We just wrapped up the photo shoot for the new precision van graphic. We are now done with the project, and awaiting the final product from the printers. concept sketches mock-ups photography layout design prep for press We worked with DotFotDot photography to get this shot, and sent the files to … more
There are no great solutions to any of these problems/limitations yet, just a series of hacks and work arounds … CSS issues Multi-column layouts in CSS Vertically-centered content in CSS Active Links tag Cross-browser compatibility issues Rounded corners Embedded fonts Rotated text PNG image files CSS Vertical Collapsing Margins Table … more
From Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 – awesome package InContext CMS – great way to upgrade static sites to allow for basics client CMS Spry Datasets – fast way to create a mini-database. tragically, not readable by search engines Flash FLV player – quickly stream most media From others WordPress – fast, simple, powerful … more
As most web designers know, there is a debate raging over the use of HTML Tables (ie. table, tr, td, etc.) in the construction of web page layouts. The main issue is that CSS offers no simple (and supported) solution for the creation of basic, vertically flexible, columns. In fact, … more
