This is a design I’ve been messing with. Still a draft and lots left to do . . . but definitely coming along. It’s pretty grungy. I started with an image of Uptown Charlotte, used PS Black and White tool to get just the right mix of black and white, then pulled it into illustrator for vectorization (Yeah, I know it’s called tracing, but I like my word better). After that it was just a mix of brushes, filters and blending modes.
Still a work in progress, but this is my wallpaper at the moment.
Since Mozilla has been dropping release candidates of FF3 I’ve been trying to download them. One of the most troublesome things, though, has been the constant crashing of my browser WHENEVER I’ve tried to log into access my GoDaddy.com account. Without fail, it would crash every time.
I had some spare time this morning before work and set out to see if I couldn’t whip this problem. I’ve only ever used a couple of add-ons for FF, so I disabled all of those; still crashing.
Then I hit the plug-in section of the add on manager (things like QT, java, DivX etc) - disabled ALL of those and (wouldn’t you know) logged in perfectly . . . quickly isolating this problems.
I started down the list enabling the plugins from A-Z. Everything was working fine . . . DivX wasn’t causing problems, Java wasn’t causing problems, QT wasn’t causing problems. So, when I was about halfway through the list . . . I decided to browse through the remaining items to see if there was anything that intuitively could be causing this problem.
At the very bottom of my list . . . Silverlight. Microsoft Silverlight. Once I re-enabled this plugin, GoDaddy.com was broken . . . so, even though it is cross platform, for now I will go back to being Silverlight-less. I guess that’s OK, since I’ve already checked out the Hard Rock Memorabilia site and the NBC Olympics site. That about covers all of them doesn’t it???
I mentioned some time ago (actually, just my last post) that I was working on a website for http://www.tracey-johnson.com. Well, after a few last tweaks that were required, the website is now live! It’s working much better, much more quickly, and more more standards-compliant-y than the old version.
Check it out. The cards, by the way if you’ve never seen them, are absolutely stunning and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to purchase a few!
About a year ago, I was contacted by a small business operator who had a website. I’m not sure who had developed the site in the past, but the technology was obviously dated and it was time for a remake. Stuff just didn’t work . . . elements were drastically out of place, links were being occluded by other elements. And everything was static.
Now she is a collage artist so the appearance of her website was of critical importance. In terms of concept, her site was great. It was funky, very artistic and definitely fit what she was trying to do.
Her site was not doing her justice.
After a few months she decided it was time to move forward with some suggestions that I had made during that initial contact. My task was to essentially preserve the overall look and feel of her site but completely rewrite the supporting code - translating her once cumbersome code to dynamic, standards-compliant code.
We’re 95% done and I’m excited to be able to give you a quick peek.
There are some great new tools out there that allow you to edit photos directly on the web. You don’t need to install software or anything like that. You just use your browser. I’ve been using these in various training sessions and they seem to be getting great reviews.
The first is called Picnik (http://www.picnik.com). It’s a really fun, intuitive and powerful interface that allows you to do more than just touch up photos. It’s got some neat effects built in, and all kinds of goodies to really make some neat projects out of your photos.
The other new tools is Photoshop Express (http://www.photoshop.com/express) by Adobe. This one has been coming for a long time so it’s been exciting to get in there and play around a little. It, too, is very powerful. Not as many fun things to do as in picnik, but very powerful and the UI is just beautiful.
Give them a shot - obviously much cheaper (aka free) than going out and buying expensive photo editing software. Hopefully, people will find these things useful and really put them to some good use.
This is a design I’ve been messing with. Still a draft and lots left to do . . . but definitely coming along. It’s pretty grungy. I started with an image of Uptown Charlotte, used PS Black and White tool to get just the right mix of black and white, then pulled it into illustrator for vectorization (Yeah, I know it’s called tracing, but I like my word better). After that it was just a mix of brushes, filters and blending modes.
