Logorama (I asked ListofNow to suggest a post title for me…I’m sorry)
I love logos. They're pretty. I love the constraints that a designer is given to work with and seeing how creative people can be. They look easy, but they actually need to accomplish a lot. They need to be readable. They need to communicate a feeling or an idea. They need to be unique and memorable. I think they're fabulous little things.
I've been working on my own logo for a little while now as one of the first steps in designing a portfolio site. It's usually a better idea to spend a lot of time on the logo before jumping into actually making a website because the logo needs to work with the rest of the site and can inform other thematic or color-specific choices. It's one of those pieces that's worth spending extra time on and making sure it's right before going too far forward.
The reason I'm thinking about logos this Sunday is because I sat down at my elderly laptop with a cup of coffee and put on some excellent music to check out my feedly page (which for anyone that subscribes to feeds, I HIGHLY recommend. It's a much more pleasant way of reading your feeds than Google Reader or other similar readers). I came across a Smashing Magazine article titled "Design a Print-Ready Promotional Ad Using Photoshop and Illustrator". It mentioned BrandsoftheWorld.com as a place that print designers can go to find vector-based (easily editable) logos of tons of major corporations. It eliminates a lot of emails and phone calls trying to track down high-quality logos.
It's an awesome place to go to just check out some logos and then, if you're so inclined, you can download them and work with them yourself. Eeeexceeellent.
I particularly enjoyed this recently uploaded logo:
Diaspora: The Anti-Facebook?
Oh my goodness, what is Facebook thinking!? It's so disappointing to see the company so blatantly focus on revenue instead of the users. I'm not going to repost every good article I've read about its disregard for privacy issues, its terrible user interface, or the highly questionable behaviors of its current CEO because there are plenty of well-documented articles out there. Facebook and Zuckerberg are the talk of the town, at least in the computer world, and its mostly negative.
A few months ago I watched a video online of Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, being interviewed and he mentioned that he strongly believed that in due time, Facebook would eventually succumb to an open-source social networking application.
It seems that we may be seeing the beginning of this. Fueled by a high state of disenchantment with Facebook, a small group of young motivated guys (still in college) are getting a lot of attention and a lot of verbal and financial backing for a decentralized, open-source social network. They're starting this at the right time. They've named it Diaspora and it hasn't even been programmed yet, but they're off to a good start having raked in several thousands of dollars in less than two weeks. They have vowed to spend all summer staring at their computer screens hacking this project out. I'm excited for them and hope it spawns some awesome alternative to Facebook.
Get A Web Design Job: Accomplished.
A few weeks ago I posted a blog about my ideal work environment. I ended it by saying "If I blog it, it will happen." Well, it happened, so there ya go.
Well, it didn't EXACTLY happen as I blogged it. There is not a a workout room (unless a nerf basketball hoop suctioned to a dry erase board counts). There's no pool. There is not a rooftop patio, although there is a collection jar for a "retractable rooftop" which seems to have roughly $5-$10 in it at any given time. It also doesn't have a Mexican restaurant with great happy hours and I'm completely shocked because really, what office doesn't have at least that these days???
I got a job at a web design company that specializes in search engine optimization (SEO). I've been there approximately a month and have already learned a few very useful things and put into practice a lot of tools and lessons that I haven't used in quite a while. I also have a longer list of things I want to learn better and brush up on, which is a good thing. So, all in all, I stand by that statement.
"If you blog it, it will happen." (Or perhaps the real lesson is, "If you clearly define what you want, it helps you know what to look for and how to communicate that, which also improves your chances of getting what you want.")
I hope you are looking forward to exciting articles about search engine optimization. Don't laugh, I'm being serious.
Things to Consider When Creating Your Online Portfolio
Nearly every creative person I know has or wants an online portfolio to showcase their work. Web designers, photographers, painters, set designers, writers, event planners...almost everyone is using the Internet to display their work .
I'm taking a course that is meant to help students define and market themselves, and today's class brought up a lot of great things to think about when creating an online portfolio. These are taken largely from notes I took during class, so it is a combination of stuff the teacher said or wrote on the screen and my own thoughts as I went.
Things to consider when creating your online portfolio:
- Your interface should not interfere with your work. There is a reason that art galleries have simple, plain white walls. People aren't there to check out the gallery's stunning vintage wallpaper and fancy woodwork; they are there to check out the art on display. Visitors to your portfolio aren't there listen to your background music or to watch a three-minute Flash intro. They want to see your work, so let them!
- It should be easy to update. The number one way to keep a closet organized is to make sure everything is easy to take out and easy to put away. If you have to move the stand-up fan and then the tool box and lift up the guitar before you can put your folded blanket away, you're just going to put the blanket on top of the fan. Whatever is easiest almost always wins in the end. The same rule applies to your portfolio for the same reason. If it isn't easy to update, you probably won't do it often and you probably won't spend enough time making sure it looks right.
- Be aware that most visitors spend a surprisingly brief amount of time at your site. Either make your navigation load and display quickly so that visitors can browse as much of your content as fast as possible, or make sure your content is engaging enough that they will willingly linger around your site.
- Know how professional you need to be. Who do you want to hire you? Your portfolio design needs to speak the language of the industries that you want to attract. A portfolio for a web designer who builds sites for rock bands will probably have a much different feeling than a designer who builds sites for law firms. What kind of client are you interested in? Research and compare portfolios of people doing the kind of work you want to be doing.
- Be as truthful as possible in communicating your skills and what you've contributed to projects. There really is nothing to gain from lying. Clients are going to know if you can't do something and it will piss them off if you waste their time and money (and your own). There's nothing wrong with saying something was a collaborative effort; tell them specifically what you contributed and sometimes it will be a match and sometimes it won't be. Also, if you worked on something that a client chose not to go with, it's perfectly fine to show it. Your value comes in the work you did and your ability to explain your choices, not necessarily what a client chose in the end.
- Start Now. While you should always be striving for perfection, you should never wait for it. (Here's a secret: Perfection doesn't actually exist.) If you're challenging yourself, learning and growing, then you will always be thinking of another way you can improve your work. You will probably constantly look back at your previous work and hate it because you can think of a dozen ways it could be better. That's how it should be. Don't let the desire for perfection immobilize you. Know when it is good enough and put it out there. Redesigns/revisions/etc can and always will happen.
- Show the human element. This is meant literally. Create an about section. Write up a short bio. Give a brief history of the company. Put up a picture. Introduce yourself in some way. There are a million ways to do it, but there needs to be a human at the other end of that portfolio. The work is the most important part, but clients don't want to work with a complete stranger.
Any other thoughts or suggestions?
Wish List: The perfect office
An article posted on the ReadWriteStart channel called From Co-Working to Cubicles: Where are you Working? got me to daydreaming about my ideal work environment.
I'd repost some pictures of awesome offices like the Twitter office, but the images are copyright protected, so a link will have to suffice.
Here goes:
- I want to be able to take my office with me. I don't think humans are best suited to repeatedly sit in the same spot of the same room every single day. How often do people start looking for a new job just because it's time? To me, that means, "I can't take looking at that Ansel Adams photo one more time. This place is starting to kill my soul." I mean, if you REALLY think about it, it's sort of strange that we live in the same place every day. Don't misunderstand me; I love the concept of home. It's comfortable, safe, etc...but isn't it just a little bizarre to think about the fact that most people have a certain small area of the world that they reserve as their own? Is that natural? I'm digressing. The point is, I'd love to wake up and say, "Wow, I have a lot of work to do, but I am so sick of being in the house" and I'd be able to go to a coffeehouse or on a nice day, a park or an outside patio.
- Portability is ideal, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't want a home office. I do want a place that is reserved for me to work in that I can rely on to be quiet, comfortable, and where I can store my equipment, projects, and supplies safely. My ideal home office will be organized, but not too organized. I will have a specific place for all of my papers and things, and it will be clean, but not sterile. I will have inspiring things hung up on my wall (not kitten posters with motivational quotes. More like artsy travel posters of the imaginary planets from Serenity. There's a small chance I might already have those.) I will have a lot of plants. I will have a comfy couch, a spacious desk and a beautiful desktop computer. There will be a coffee pot really near by and I will have a favorite mug. My office will be stocked with great pens.
OK, so that's really about it. Now, if I do not work from home and instead work in an office with real life co-workers, here is my ideal scenario:
- It will be near my house so that commuting will not be a major part of every day of my work week and the parking will be easy.
- The building will make genuine efforts to be eco-friendly.
- There will be lots of huge windows overlooking a pleasant landscape (a skyline, forest, ocean...that sort of thing). My desk will be positioned right next to a window.
- Lots of plants
- Good lighting, none of that fluorescent stuff.
- An open floor-plan and high-ceilings.
- It will have some color to it.
- There will be a coffeepot really near by.
- Oh, there will also be a workout room, a pool, a rooftop patio, and a really good Mexican restaurant with great happy hours. Hush now; this is my dream.
So that's my dream folks. If I blog it, it will happen.
Onward towards Gzip! How a little compression can save the day.
There come a few times in a budding web designer's life when they discover something very useful and incredibly helpful and they wonder, "Why on earth did nobody tell me about this before!?" And, being the collaborative souls that they are, they think, "I will share the news with all of the others so that they too will reap the benefits of this new knowledge!"
It is then that the cold truth rises to the surface. The fact is, this news is completely geeky and the topic is completely, assuredly boring to just about everyone except our inspired little geek.
Well, lucky for me I have a blog for this sort of thing. It may not interest my loved ones and does not merit an "I made a new post!" announcement on my various social networking sites, but I know that I have an audience out there. Somewhere out in the vast hinterland of the Internet, a lone shivering geek must also be asking, "Is there another way to make my web site faster!?!?!?"
And like me, they shun the easy non-standards solutions of image maps. Like me, they have read and re-read countless articles on how to optimize photos for the web. And like me, they felt there just must be something else out there. Something warm and fuzzy, like a tiny piece of code.
Today on my journeys, I learned a few new things on topics whose keywords involve GZip, htaccess, Live HTTP Headers, and YSlow. Don't go away! Now's where it gets exciting!
Just about every web developer uses Firefox add-ons, especially the Web Developer Toolbar. There are two others that are particularly useful when trying to increase the loading speed of a site and for some silly reason, I never used them until today: Yslow analyzes a site's performance based on Yahoo's rules for web performance and Live HTTP Headers displays the live communications between your browser and a site's server.
I used YSlow to analyze one of my sites. I got an "A" in everything except GZip compression. Huh? I did some reading and discovered that I might need to configure my server to output GZip compression. To check this, I scanned the dialog between my browser and the server using Live HTTP Headers. I saw that my browser sent this request: "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate."
This is the browser telling the server, "FYI, I accept compressed files if you have any."
The server ignored that request, meaning that it was not set-up to Gzip my content. Bah!
I have a shared-hosting plan and never realized that I have access to certain server set-up options. Web hosts who put dozens of clients' sites on one server would be insane to allow everyone access to the server's config file. I thought I'd just have to send them a message if I needed something on the server changed. It turns out that individual accounts may have access to certain set-up options by using an .htaccess file (hypertext access).
First, locate the file. I signed into CPanel, went to the file manager, clicked on a little check box to allow me to view hidden files, and then went into my home directory. There it was, ".htaccess". I clicked on it to edit it and added code from BetterExplained to configure the server to allow compression output.
# compress all text & html:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml
# Or, compress certain file types by extension:
<Files *.html>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</Files>
I saved the file.
I then reloaded my site and behold! The load time was four times faster! My work here is done.
For great reading, check out these articles:
- BetterExplained: "How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression"
- Yahoo! Developer Network: "Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site"
Real-Time with PubSubHubbub…Geshundheit!
"An overview of PubSubHubbub, a simple, open, web-hook-based pubsub protocol & open source reference implementation. Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick demonstrate what PubSubHubbub is and how it works. For more information, visit pubsubhubbub.googlecode.com" --The Google Code Channel on Youtube.
(Random completely irrelevant side note: I know that Brad Fitzpatrick works at Google. Is it safe to assume that some of these shots are inside the Googleplex? And what ever happened to computer nerds looking nerdy?)
Zuckerberg: Privacy is so last year.
Up until now, I've steered clear of making any judgments concerning Mark Zuckerberg so-called boy-genius creator of Facebook. The entire time he was in charge of Facebook, his mantra was always, "User privacy is sacred!"
It is the foundation of Facebook. It is what set it apart from Friendster. It is why I was happy to defend Facebook against a few of my Friendster-loyalist friends. They could disagree about aesthetics and cool features (remember those diagrams showing you how many friends-away a person is connected to you by?). But I always fell back on the fact that I loved how much control I had over my privacy settings. I could block strangers from getting almost anything. I could show my mom my pictures but not my wall. It was the clear winner.
In public statements, he is now singing a different tune touting ridiculous arguments supporting the idea that basically, it is the natural evolution of our tech-centric times that we are simply going to have to adjust to less privacy and more openness.
One of my favorite social media sites, ReadWriteWeb wrote a great article that argues that in this case, users aren't choosing to be less private. They are being told that they want less privacy. ReadWriteWeb's: "Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over"
I predict Facebook is about to alienate a lot of people and it's only a matter of time before an open-source social networking tool changes the playing field. In short, they're digging their own grave. Mark: Stop drinking the Kool-Aid. Do yourself a favor and separate yourself from this debacle before you become the Microsoft of Social Networking.
Kinetic Wave Sculptures by Reuben Margolin
Maker Profile - Kinetic Wave Sculptures on MAKE: television from make magazine on Vimeo.
Artist Reuben Margolan shows us where he finds his inspiration and how he experiments with his ideas to create wave scultpures.
I love so much about this: how making things has been a part of his life since he was a child, how he takes one thing about the world that he finds beautiful or fascinating and then uses his art to experiment and explore that, the way he notices and loves things in every day life that are easily missed.
How To Size Text the Web Standards Way
This blog entry covers:
- Why it is important to use relative text sizing units (ems and percentages)
- Why NOT to use pixel units
- Why NOT to use point units
- Why NOT to use keywords
- Helpful resources
When designing web pages, you might think that choosing a font size should be amongst the easiest and quickest decisions a web designer makes: simply choose a readable pixel size and move on right? Well, that is one way to do it...but it certainly isn't the most thoughtful, adaptable and accessible. It is, for several reasons, bad practice and anyone designing a website should seriously consider getting acquainted with the relative way of sizing text. It takes more work, but it's a more efficient method that produces better results across multiple browsers and devices and allows your content to be accessible by a wider audience.
Pixels are not the only way to size text. The units available to web designers for sizing text are pixels, points, percentages, ems, and even keywords.
So which should you use?
Ems and percentages are considered the desirable units for sizing fonts using CSS because they avoid the pitfalls of pixel and point sizing (explained below), are re-sizable in all browsers that support resizing, AND are relative to a user's font size preferences.
Yeah, well, computer screens display in pixels. I love pixels. Why shouldn't I design in pixels?:
That would be lovely if everyone used the same browser, the same monitor and if we all had the same vision. We, however, don't live in that world and good design keeps functionality at the forefront. A well-designed website will allow text resizing and will do its best to look the same across different browsers, platforms, devices, etc. The proper text sizing tool in the web designer's arsenal is not the pixel, it is the em (with a little help from the %).
When it comes to text (and line-heights), our usual friend The Pixel, ignores user preferences and doesn't re-size in Internet Explorer. This makes pixel-defined text sizes a bad idea when considering accessibility issues and we must consider accessibility issues. Accessibility to equal information and services is not only a human rights issue (which is reason enough), but also about making sure your code can be adaptable to a variety of devices and applications.
The resizing issue can't be underestimated. Internet Explorer stills claims the largest audience and small text is a very real problem for countless users.
Another drawback, albeit one that I am guessing is not an issue for the majority of websites, is an inconsistency amongst browsers on how to handle non-integer pixel values (i.e. some can handle 12.5 px, while others can not). This matters if pixel-perfect sizing is desired on every major browser. I doubt designers regularly (if ever) code non-integer pixel units for text sizes, but it can accidentally happen when a pixel value is applied to a parent and a percentage or em to its child.
Ok, what about points?:
No! Don't do it! Points were not designed for screen-based design. They are a great desktop publishing unit, but not a great web design unit. When being converted to pixels, the math is extremely inconsistent amongst different browsers. It's a confusing explanation best left at: don't use points for text sizing unless you are writing a print-media style sheet.
Hm, well, that leaves keywords?:
No again and I find them too confusing to explain very well, but they offer up the same issues as points regarding consistency and control problems. For a detailed explanation by someone much better at explaining these than me, feel free to read this concise explanation.
Helpful Resources:
The Em Calculator: Converts pixel sizes into em sizes
A List Apart article: Explains how to use ems and percentages to size text using CSS