A really cool trick that would make your XHTML code light and "pretty": Simple Rounded Corner CSS Boxes by Ryan Thrash.
If you're not in the mood to read narration of how this trick came into existance, scroll down until you see the sample box and the code that's responsible for it.
Since I've been playing around with Illustrator a lot these days, I figured I'd try designing using that application since I could do more with shapes there.
I'm pretty pleased with what I came up with. I definitely need to learn more how to use multiple shapes to create the shape that I want.
This is for a project pitch to redesign a company site for comtronics systems .
One of the hardest things to deal with, as designers, is receiving negative feedback. This is particularly true after we have spent so much time and effort on the project.
I experienced this recently with the development of my portfolio site. I was trying to add a "personal touch" to my site while experimenting with new things that I try out in flash. I started playing around with the blend mode and came up with what you see here which I thought was really cool. In my mind this was a good addition to my portfolio site as a background/ambient visual noise that has a life of its own (I use basic random function to control the movement of the bars).
After spending few hours adding it … then tweaking… and tweaking till late at night, the next day I asked for feedback from few people in my life.
What I received was not what I wanted to hear. I was hoping that they would tell me how cool the background is. Nope. What I gathered was:
So no more background animation for the time being until I can figure out how to make it work without causing the problems above.
Being wrong is never fun, but it's part of growth. Negative feedback can be very helpful because it makes we see our project from a different perspective. No matter where it came from, whether from our friend or enemy, it can be used to improve our project.
The first thing that we need to do is to let our emotion subside so we can detach ourselves from the project at hand and see it objectively. Then we can analyze what our critics say without being defensive and use the feedback to build up our project.
The best way to turn our critics into our advocates is to show them that we acknowledge their feedback (even partially) because that would create a sense of ownership in them.
Here's a PowerPoint cover design that I did for Microsoft internal presentation.
This design uses style that follows Microsoft corporate brand guideline with the horizontal elements and warm yet professional feel.
I personally feel that this design is a bit too busy although I like how the photos make the design feel more human.
"How do you reconcile the left and right sides of your brain?" I was asked that question in a conversation with a manager of UE from Yahoo recently.
My answer to that question was that I see the technology component as an art medium. Doing actionscript or CSS is like mixing and applying paint to a canvas. One needs to know what media/technology to use (i.e. DHTML vs flash or oil paint vs acrylics) and how to use it to manifest what s/he has in mind.
Couple days ag, my brother, an seasoned programmer, reviewed the actionscript that is used in my portfolio site.
One of his questions was "Is this code reusable?"
The answer to that question is some parts are reusable, like the code for ease fx and the movie loader, but they haven't been packaged nicely to be dropped into a new project without any customization.
Aside from realization of what I could do to improve the code that I have, the biggest thing I realized from that conversation is that I need to start putting that into practice, not just stop at the thought "oh, cool idea!"
The nest step is to reuse the code in my current portfolio for my new portfolio, which instead of being a new site, will be an evolution of the current one. Next version will not be version 4 any longer. It will be 3.1.
Footnoted.org , one of the first sites that I've ever created, has been awarded by TIME as one of the 50 coolest websites.
Michelle Leder, the financial reporter who runs the show, deserves this recognition for all the works that she's put in.
This site has very interesting information regarding various companies' footnotes which could easily get buried under other information (often times intentionally) but could be a great indicator of the way the companies are run. In other words, hard to find information served in easy to diggest form.
I was looking for a grunge looking font for a project and came across this site.
Totally free and it has tons of fonts with thumbnails. It also has a very cool feature to type in your own text and have it displayed in different sizes so you can see if it fits your need before you download.