Finding Great Design in Unlikely Places
March 16th, 2009The US Department of Agriculture, while certainly very important, is not something I would consider to be a source of great design, but low and behold, their signage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire is spectacular! Good balance, colors, and an awesome shape that evokes the mountains ahead of you.
This is great inspiration for me for an upcoming design project. I didn’t have my camera with me as I was zooming past the signs, so here are two Flickr photos for your viewing pleasure.
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Great case study on a Providence designer & inovator
March 5th, 2009Fantastic read on Providence-based John Caserta, courtesy of Jewelboxing.
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From the Attic
February 24th, 2009In my slow migration from Magnolia to Delicious, I’ve dug up some links I’d completely forgot about. Kind of like finding neat stuff in your attic. Here’s some of my old treasures. Hope you enjoy.
Colorblind Web page filter
A great way to test your site for potential problem areas with color contrast and color use with important page elements. Something I quite often forget to be diligent with. Plus, it’s just kind of cool to see your work this way. Makes you stop and think.
ASCII Art Made easy
How retro. Convert an image to ASCII art. Your milage may vary, but this is just neato. I really should make something with this for an email signature.
Five Second Test
I first ran into this one at An Event Apart in Chicago. Test what people really see on your Web site in five seconds. That’s it.
Innerfade with JQuery
A really elegant way to quickly do image fades with JQuery, with pretty good markup to boot.
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Top Five Web Design Tools I Can’t Live Without
January 26th, 2009Inspired by Adam Darowski’s Top 10 CSS tricks, here are my top five design tools I can’t live without. Hope you find it useful!
5. Firebug
Great for resolving problems in the DOM, Firebug lets you tinker in realtime under the hood and figure out what is actually going on. Not perfect, and prone to sometimes head scratching behavior, but still a great resource.
4. Parallels / Multiple Versions of IE
Not exactly a true design tool, but an extremely useful setup for anyone who wrestles with Internet Explorer’s hair-pulling interpretations of CSS. Traditionally a thorny issue – how to test multiple versions of IE, without having multiple Windows computers or Windows virtual machines running for each version, this wonderful bit of hackery makes it simple. Hopefully this will be updated when IE 8 comes around…
3. Web Developer Toolbar / HTML Tidy Firefox plugins
These two are a bit of a gimme, but still worth mentioning if you still for some reason haven’t tried them out. Great for quickly figuring out exactly what you’ve missed with your markup and CSS.
2. Art Director’s Toolkit
If it were only for it’s eye dropper tool, Code Line’s Art Director’s Toolkit would still be indispensable. It’s eye dropper grabs color values for anything on screen and provides both RGB and most importantly, hex values, creates easy cut and paste of those values to the design app of your choice, and even lets you store colors in a handy pull-out drawer for use later, or in compiling a color palate of multiple swatches.
Add to that a full library of Pantone colors, color blend tools, an on screen ruler (great for measuring CSS layout issues) and a great tool for measuring out page layouts, and you have a tool that becomes indispensable once you start using it. It’s small, lightweight, and a truly elegant Mac application that every designer should check out.
1. Everyone Else.
This is rather corny, but Web design does not happen in a vacuum, nor is it anything like as mature as other mediums, such as print or video, film or television. As such, if we don’t constantly absorb everything that is being done around us (while still being careful to judge it’s respective merits), we fall behind. With that said, anyone who does not rely on a good RSS aggregator, bookmarking tools, note taking software and the like is missing out. That, or your head is just able to hold more information than mine can. If so kudos to you, if not, try Magnolia, NetNewsWire and Evernote.
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Amazing Photographs from an Amazing Week.
January 24th, 2009Regardless of your political point-of-view, it’s been an amazing week for photography from our nation’s capital. Here’s some of my favorites from the inauguration of number 44.
1,474 Megapixel image of the Inaugural address
Obama’s People: A photo essay by Nadav Kander
Behind the Scenes: Time Magazine
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Objectified Trailer is out!
January 5th, 2009Check out the new trailer for Objectified: A Documentary by Gary Hustwit, director of Helvetica.
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Olympic Posters
January 5th, 2009I finally got around to watching Chariots of Fire for the first time last night, and one thing that stopped me dead in my tracks (besides the fantastic costume design) was the 1924 Paris Olympics poster. Fantastic! Awesome bold composition and great design that holds up just fine today. I then found this great archive of all the Olympic posters – worth a look.
Paris 1924
Tags: olympics, print
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Nifty Eye Candy with FlowPlayer
December 1st, 2008I was looking for an easy way to replicate Apple’s great movie trailer overlay effect about a month ago, and low and behold someone has now done it with my new favorite video tool: Flow Player and Jquery. Check it out.
Tags: design, links
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Putting the O in Obama
November 21st, 2008Great interview with the Obama ’08 logo designer
Tags: design, politics
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Designers solve all our problems
November 20th, 2008Interesting article from the WSJ
Tags: design, workplace
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