Category: Design

Posts on graphic and web design.

  • Open Letter to Microsoft

    Dear Microsoft,

    Last year, you introduced Windows Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) upon the world. Designers everywhere celebrated the fact that you had finally stepped up to the standards plate. IE7 isn’t perfect, but it’s much better than what we had to work with.

    Pretty soon, Outlook 2007 will be moved out of beta. One might assume that it, like it’s predecessors, would use IE for rendering HTML emails. (I know that I had.) But you know what? It doesn’t. It uses Word 2007 instead.

    I know, I know. There will be lots of people out there that say HTML emails suck, and they’d be right. It’s probably safe to say that most spam email is of the HTML variety. But that shouldn’t be a problem for you, Microsoft, because IE7 should take care of any security issues that might arise, right?

    HTML emails are a fact of life. Introducing another rendering engine to the mix makes life difficult for businesses like the one I work for. Email marketing is not our primary focus, but a lot of our customers want to stay in touch with their customers via email newsletters.

    I shouldn’t have to worry about basic CSS stuff being supported in Outlook – stuff like background images, floats, stylized unordered lists, positioning, etc. should just work – but now I do.

    Word 2007 is a word processor. Despite the fact that HTML can be generated from documents created within it, doesn’t make it a logical choice for rendering HTML – that is what Internet Explorer is for. Furthermore, this decision puts my confidence in IE7 in serious jeopardy: If you won’t even use it, why should I or anyone else for that matter?

    It’s probably too late, but I hope you’ll reconsider this decision.

  • Photoshop CS3 can be tested cross-platform

    I am so glad I started reading John Nack’s blog. Early this morning he confirmed that the Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta can, in fact, be tested on both Macs and PCs by the same user.

    In response to very popular demand (to the tune of 150+ requests on the Labs CS3 forum), I’m happy to say that Adobe is now making it possible for Windows customers of Photoshop CS2 to get a Mac CS3 beta serial number, and vice versa. To request a number, you can send mail to photoshopcs3beta@adobe.com and include your CS2 serial number.

  • Photoshop CS3 Beta mini-SDK Released

    Photoshop CS3 Beta SDK

    From the blog of John Nack:

    It’s critical that Adobe help developers get up to speed in updating their plug-ins to run natively on Intel-based Macs, so we’ve posted a Photoshop CS3 mini-SDK that contains the needed info. The SDK, along with the CS and CS2 versions, is a free download once you fill out a simple form.

  • Screenshots of NEW Photoshop CS3 Beta

    Sorry Mac guys, I’ve only installed this on my PC laptop. The new interface is sweet. Device Central is going to be an awesome development tool to have at a designer’s disposal.

    read more | digg story

    Wow, the post made it to the homepage!

    And it’s had nearly 700 diggs. The other metric that blows me away is 25,735 views of the screenshots.

  • New WP Tiger Admin 3.0 Released

    The WordPress Tiger Admin plugin has been updated to version 3.0. It’s been completely redesigned, and has much better compatibility with the newest WordPress features. I’ve been using this plugin for quite some time now, and this latest release is phenomenal.

    read more | digg story

  • Change is afoot

    I’m going to begin the process of migrating the site over to Sandbox in a couple of days. Right now, I’m using something loosely based on Qwilm!, but I want something a little more standardized, with better semantic markup as the basis for my site.

  • Ripple

    It started with a simple post on Digg – “New Apple.com Design Coming”. (It has 1253 diggs as of right now.) A user reportedly found a design on someone’s site and posted it to Digg.com saying: “I found this image from desudesu.com. ‘It’s design test for Fantasy Interactive for the next generation of apple.com site’ says the caption. It looks quite great to me.”

    I caught it early, under Upcoming Stories,  before it even made it to the homepage. I posted the first comment:

    Looks nice, but I’m going to have to call BS. A “design test” doesn’t mean, “this is the new design for apple.com”. They probably asked the guy to submit a concept for a site he’d love to redesign.
    Sorry, no digg.

    All’s well and fine, right?

    Enter Kyle Neal of Warpspire.com. I subscribe to his feed (mainly because I’m interested in his work on Hemingway), and noticed a post from him within an hour: Spotting a fake: “New apple design”. Evidently, someone else noticed it too, because the story got Dugg. (Since yesterday, his post has received 1100 diggs.) Some of that traffic ended up bleeding over to my site because I had posted in the comments.

    I mention all of this, because yesterday I had double the amount of traffic (102 unique visitors) to my site than my previous high (56 visitors). (Yeah, I realize those aren’t real impressive numbers.) When you consider that my site doesn’t get a lot of traffic at all (maybe 30-35 unique visitors a day), this spike is pretty significant. People are always looking for ways to drive more traffic to their site, but sometimes all it takes is to get involved in a discussion. I’m sure Kyle’s site experienced a lot more traffic than that… but it’s interesting that the Digg effect rippled over to my own site to some extent.

    I use this site mainly for testing. I blog from time to time (fairly irregularly, I might add). But I’ve been able to boost my Google PageRank to a PR4 by continually gettting in on the discussion, whether it’s on Digg, Warpspire or any other number of sites. So if you’re looking for a good, legitimate way to drive traffic to your site, get involved, say something worthwhile, and people will take note.

  • Interactive News

    The Augusta Chronicle This won’t be big news for people outside of the Augusta area, but I just noticed that if you are a registered user of the Augusta Chronicle website, you can comment on articles.This might make me visit their site more often. I know that newspapers have struggled with retaining subscribers as more and more people start to get their news online, and it’s going to take more innovation like this in order to grab eyes.

    I tend get my news from CNN.com, Google News, Digg, and a hundred other places. I usually avoid the local paper – partly because I don’t care too much for local news and partly because there hasn’t been any real reason for me to keep coming back to the Chronicle website.

    Now, if only they’d consider doing a daily digital delivery (via PDF or something)… I might subscribe to the paper all week long. (Right now, I only get Sunday papers delivered to me.) It would save trees…

  • Tinkering

    I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago (or has it been longer?), but I’ve been tinkering with some new design directions for a while now. I’ve put some basic changes in places for now… but more will be on the way.

    One of the areas where I’ve been trying to pay close attention to is the custom options available to templates in WordPress. There are lots of customization possibilities available… and I have started to explore alternate formats for Single Entries, Pages, and more.

    It’s been several months since I migrated the site to WordPress from Blogger, and I haven’t looked back. As a matter of fact, I’ve started recommending the software to clients… One installation we recently launched is a new site for First Baptist Church of Augusta. It’s an evolving project, which is why I hadn’t formally announced its launch until now… but the site has been live for over a month now. WordPress’ flexibility and extensibility make it an ideal platform for blogging or as a CMS…

    Anyway… that’s all for now. Move along now, there’s nothing to see here. ;)

  • Add IAB Ad Sizes to Photoshop CS2 Defaults

    I’ve been working on banner ads for a client for several weeks now and found the following modification to Photoshop CS2 to be a HUGE timesaver. You can use this tip to create any sort of page size defaults, if you wish!Obviously, this tip is for the Windows version of Photoshop…

    1. Go to: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Required
    2. Open: Default New Doc Sizes.txt
    3. Add the following somewhere in the file:
      ; Standard IAB web banner sizes"Button 1"			120	90	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"Button 2"			120	60	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"Full Banner"			468	68	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"Half Banner"			234	60	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"Half Page Ad"			300	600	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"Large Rectangle"		336	280	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"Leaderboard"			728	90	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"Medium Rectangle"		300	250	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"Micro Bar"			88	31	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"Rectangle"			180	150	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"Skyscraper"			120	600	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"Square Button"			125	125	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"Square Pop-Up"			250	250	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"Vertical Banner"		120	240	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"Vertical Rectangle"		240	400	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"Wide Skyscraper"		160	600	pixels		screen dpi RGB 8 1.0"separator"
    4. Restart Photoshop CS2.

    Now, when you want to create a new document, you’ll have all of the IAB standard sizes at your disposal.