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Designers, do your part - Print Green!

Tuesday, January 31st, 2006

Hopper Press - Print Greener!Designers do not produce alot of waste, nor do they manufacture large amounts of goods. But even designers should have a conscious eye on how they impact the environment. How so? By printing greener.

http://hopperpress.com is project I have had the honor of working on in collaboration with All-Star Printing and Longbow Strategic Group. The Hopper Press project will hopefully serve as resource for printeries looking to green their processes, and for designers looking for green presses to run their jobs on. But why?

IE’s Conditional Comment

Monday, August 8th, 2005

Anti-IE bannerA reader recently asked how to reproduce the Anti-IE banner that is only visible to those viewing this site in Internet Explorer. The banner is made using an image, some css, and a nifty little piece of markup that lets developers target IE viewers without the use of javascript or any other scripting. Say hello to the conditional comment, brought to you by Microsoft.

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.

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.

Css-based design in 60 seconds

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005

At my day job I have a new site to create for a client. Being that it is a straight html, brochure-style website - I decided to put my css / xhtml skills to use and usher the website into the 21st century. I screencapped the process at regular intervals and wove them together in a fancy animated gif you can view here. See how a boring, black & white, html page becomes tranformed into a colorful, pleasant website.

5 tips for good logos: Tip #2: Color need not apply

Thursday, April 28th, 2005

Tip #2: Color need not applyColor is not the answer. When designing your logo dont get hung up on color. While color is important, a good logo starts in black and white. The test of a good logo is stripping it of all its embellishments and color and resulting with a logo that is just as recognizable as before. Before you start trying Pantone after Pantone looking for the magic color that will “look right”, try reducing your logo to just black and white.