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Archive for 2005


GreenOrlando Launches

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005

GreenOrlandoRecently, I have had the honor be a part of and help develop a couple of great, local, grassroots projects, GreenOrlando.com and GreenBrevard.com. GreenOrlando is more than a website, an eMagazine or a blog. So many people work for the benefit of the community, more than most people are aware of. Our goal is to tell your story, to pull together all the amazing things that goes on and thereby reveal how unique Florida really is. Imagined and built by Giant3, The GreenOrlando site gathers relevant stories, interviews and spotlights sorted by categories, each addressing a particular community. By doing so, we paint a big picture of the diverse landscape that is Central Florida.

CSS Based Magazine-Style Techniques and Tricks

Wednesday, June 15th, 2005

CSS based Magazine-style Techniques and TricksMagazines are a continual source of inspiration for website design, yet many of the techniques used in magazine layouts are nary to be found on the web.

http://www.mandarindesign.com has a nice compilation of css tricks, magazine style pullquotes and even CSS based opacity/transparency.

CSS in 60 – Take 2

Thursday, May 26th, 2005

CSS in 60Another installment of CSS in 60. Where you can see a website based on xhtml and css being built from scratch in about 60 seconds or less. A screenshot was taken anytime css changes were made that significantly alters the layout. A days worth of work compressed for your viewing pleasure. This is just another example of how CSS can be used to achieve a pixel-perfect rendition of what was mocked up in a graphics program. Click read more to view the animated GIF (412Kb).

The state of PNG transparency

Thursday, May 26th, 2005

What is PNG? What browsers support the format? I thought IE didn’t have PNG support? Is it transparent or not? How can I make IE display PNG’s full transparency capabilities? These are all valid questions that arise when using the PNG format. For those that aren’t familiar with PNG (portable network graphics) it is a lossless compression that offers far greater quality and smaller filesize than the ever-so-common and proprietary GIF format. “Better quality and a smaller file! What more could I ask for?” you’re asking yourself. Well, PNG’s also allow designers real transparency. How well does your browser render them? Take a look at these images and compare the last 2 with the first, which is a GIF.

WordPress Identity Progression

Thursday, May 19th, 2005

Wordpress logo progressYesterday’s WordPress IRC meetup covered many topics. One of particular note, is the progress of their logo building and identity-forming process. After recieving input from the WP community over the last couple of weeks, Matt announced the final design choice during yesterday’s meet. Now that the vectors are in place, its time to give some color to the black and white logo. I’m guessing blue will be the obvious choice.

Birth and evolution of an illustrated character: Penny Arcade

Monday, May 16th, 2005

The Birth and evolution of an illustrated character - part two: Penny ArcadePenny Arcade is probably one of the most respected, copied and successful web-comics of late. Mike Krahulik (Gabe), and Jerry Holkins (Tyco) are the co-creators behind Penny Arcade. Their unabashed opinions are hurled with ferocious might on a daily basis as they openly attack their enemies with a salvos of biting humor and coarse language typically found on HBO or fervent internet bulletin boards. As all comic characters are prone to, Penny Arcade’s characters have undergone years worth of fine-tuning and their appearances have changed, subtly. This article attempts to trace the PA timeline and study the evolution of the Tycho and Gabe characters from internet doodles – to web mavens.

Flash is always better with zombies

Friday, May 13th, 2005

Bum Lee's Deanimator, a great flash gameBum Lee’s website is chock full of great art. Besides being a talented illustrator, Lee also features a fine body of animations and shorts. I love the hard contrasting style he adopts in many of his animations. Its got a very euro-feel to it. He even has a Flash game. We all love those. Throw in some zombies and very smooth animtions and you have Deanimator. An online game and parody of Herbert West: Reanimator, serial short stories by H.P. Lovecraft.

Cpu-hungry Flash banners and the designers who love them

Wednesday, May 11th, 2005

Catagory: FlashApparently this site’s flash banner consumes alot of cpu cycles and might turn some people off. I work hard on my Flash and do all I can to ensure viewers have a positive experience on this site. I cannot overcome bias against Flash, I can only present and package it in a way that will hopefully reach the most people. To this end I have added a control set to the header to control the animation. The icons in the top-right of the banner will now let you can stop play, skip and return to other animations. This both serves as a platform to display animations and allows users to stop the animation, should it become annoying. To free up more cpu I have set the wmode properties of the flash from Transparent to Opaque, as research shows transparency also increases the cpu usage. Other optimizations include trimming file sizes down another 12kb. All things considered I have managed to bring the cpu consumption down from ~24-28% to ~13-22% when a user stops the animation.

AJAX & Flash

Wednesday, May 11th, 2005

Catagory: FlashAJAX allows you to create pages that are dynamic without having to reload the page. Now this functionality if available though Flash. Christian Cantrell and Mike Chambers posted a proof of concept on MXNA that shows Flash & AJAX integration, and two-way Flash / JavaScript communication.

Help! Help! I’ve been sIFRized!

Wednesday, May 11th, 2005

sIFR: Scalable Inman Flash ReplacementFonts have always been a major concern in webdesign, or rather, the lack of fonts. To remedy this, I have recently installed sIFR: Scalable Inman Flash Replacement for all headlines. sIFR replaces all H1′s, H2′s etc with a flash rendition of the text. Naturally you can select any font you have on your computer – giving designers complete typographic control over their headlines. Not to be used as a text replacement for websites, so designers still don’t have 100% control over type – but its very nice and degrades well for non-Flash or Javascript enabled browsers.