Designers, do your part - Print Green!
Tuesday, January 31st, 2006
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?
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?
Read more (213 words, 1 image, estimated 51 s reading time)
A 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.
Recently, I have had the honor be a part of and help develop a couple of great, local, grassroots projects, 
Magazines 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. 
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Another 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).
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.
Apparently 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.
Color 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.