Okay, so I finished developing the commercial side of openacircle.com, and now in the aftermath I can finally update my blog. In this project I got to utilize some cool little CSS tricks, like image pop ups (without using javascript) and figuring out how to include a footer that would adjust to a bleeding background. Anyway, it's here! If you would like to visit, and register, go to openacircle.com.

The site Vuelive, was a site I both designed and developed 4 months ago. I will post a link to it when I have it running on my server. The original site url has been removed.  I am also currently developing a redesigned site, OpenACircle.com, which I will share with you when it launches early September.

You can see my work featured in the Design Spotlight feature of istock.com here:  www.istockphoto.com

David Carson and William Caslon are two significant typographers in history, similar in their aims to break from the conservative and popular molds of their time, yet different in their approach to legibility. Some would argue that David Carson is not a typographer, for he did not design a typeface but rather relied on the deconstruction of Émigré fonts, intuitively infusing them into abstraction that was to be more interpreted and admired than read. For this same reason, and the fact that he received no formal design education, leads some to argue that he is also not a true graphic designer. In his early 20's, Carson did receive a degree in Sociology and became a high school teacher teaching Sociology, Psychology, and Economics in Grants Pass, Oregon. It wasn't until he attended a two week design course for high school students that he graphically designed anything, and the term was unknown to him until he was 26. The course led him to quit teaching and enroll in the San Diego State University design program. Less than a month later, he transferred to the Ashland College of Commercial Art in Oregon on the suggestion and financial funding of his grandmother. During his schooling ...

Omni magazine was kind of like Wired, but nostalgically different. I was never a die-hard science fact or fiction fan, but something about reading Omni, back when it was still alive, was like watching A&E today – ghost hunters, mystery medicine, stardust in our atoms. Today we don’t have much, print-wise, to compare, unless you want to count the hokey magazines at the bottom of the magazine racks, purposefully placed so we may forget their existence. Omni was different because it always legitimately analyzed science, even weird pseudoscience. Today, I read Wired magazine, mainly because it’s a great source of design inspiration, but also for its interesting articles. In some ways, like Omni magazine, Wired writes about technology with a contagious zest, always honest, always in the nexus, and without constraints. It’s Wired’s passion that gets it often compared to Omni magazine. While Wired magazine writes about technological gadgets and hacks, in some respects they are also authoring hacks into a cultural lifestyle, just as Omni once wrote hacks into human knowledge. In the world of magazines, genre is a definitive factor that can make or break a publication. An ill-defined genre can swallow a whole publication and a unique genre ...

If you are going to (god forbid) use tables to layout your site, remember to give every tag <td>, <tr>, and <table> a set width. This ensures nothing will blow out of whack in Safari.

". . . buggy computer - a club that began in 1945 when engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark II System. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found"." - Simson Garfunkel - Wired Magazine 11.08.05 " History's Worst Software Bugs"

Dojo is a new pragmatic language specifically geared toward building intuitive widgets. In a world where widgets function as the essential vertebrae in many of a backbone of web applications, we as web designers/developers will probably encounter this language at least once in our careers. And for the UI designer, a lot of UI's today are being composed of these java-like widgets. Thankfully, the designer will only have to familiarize themselves with the dojo css and not have to write widgets - leave that to dojo-skilled programmers. Although dojo css is different from html css, it is still very similiar. For instance you can use the popular css sliding door method to create tabbed menus. It will only have to be adjusted a little to the context of dojo css in order to work, but the effect is the same. In dojo, you will have a div typically called your header in which you can place a menu containing div. In our example, we will call this class "tabHeader". We will give the class the following details: .tabHeader { float: left; width: 729px; margin-top:22px; font-size:xx%; line-height:normal; } In the css sliding door method, the tabbed menu is a magical dance of background images overlapping at the appropriate moments contained ...

It's late October 2008 and the most exciting election is almost here. It's exciting because for the first time in American history a black man is not only running for presidency, but may have a really good shot at winning office. If he doesn't, we will have our first female Vice President. These are possibilities that we, in the past, had only hoped our children might witness. We are fortunate to witness them in our own lifetimes. In terms of candidacy, times are revolutionary, financially, the nation is heading for the worst of times. What will this mean to designers? Despite Obama's and McCain's promise of counteractive proposals consisting of either tax cuts, tax breaks, and/or government sponsored health care, we as designers, will have to step up, gather our strengths, and smack them down on the desks of prospective employers. Even if it comes across as a bit ballsy, we will be forced to prove how indispensable we truly are. The market is going to get even more competitive. Anything that can be freelanced will be freelanced. Anything that can be contracted, will be contracted. Small or large, businesses will struggle, and in their desperate gasps for air, they will ...