Example 1: Modular

Roger Johannson http://www.456bereastreet.com

/*
456 Berea Street Main style sheet
Copyright 2006 Roger Johansson
Last edit: 2007-01-27
*/

/*
=Colours
Dark green headings (Main articles): 8A8E27
Light green headings (Home page sections): 828368
Green headings (Secondary): 578A1C
Green border colour: b6c8b0
Links: AE4F0C
Link hover: D03900
Heading link border: cfcfa0
Beige background colour: f1efe7
Light green background colour: f4f6e0
*/

Example 2: two colors

Jonathan Snook http://www.snook.ca

/*

#036 - dark blue
#C60 - orange
*/

Example 3: Theme based
Dave Shea http://www.mezzoblue.com

/*
-- -- -- -- -- -- --
mezzoblue v6 colour CSS file
'Fountain' style

Colour scheme: Peering – — – — – — –
*/

Will this not so old fad gain following, or will it water down completely? Only the future will tell.

update: the discussion has now been extended to copyright notices, humorous side notes, and other forms of personalizing a style sheet. I am not interested in style sheets that make them more readable e.g. dividing a style sheet into sections for easier maintenance.

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My business is managing perception
My service is strategic imagination
My passion is brand identity

Book Info

Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands, 2nd Edition by Alina Wheeler

• ISBN: 978-0-471-74684-3
• Book details: Hardcover, 288 pages
• Publisher: Whiley
• Release date: April 2006
• Buy? Amazon UK | Amazon US

Summary

The book is divided in three main sections: Perception, Process and Practice. In Perception, Wheeler unfolds the difference between brands and brand identity, who creates brand identities and importantly why invest in them and most important how can we make them effective. Wheeler points out that we have to see the full picture of branding ahead …

design excellence is a given, but

… there are more intrinsic criteria to pursue. And each one of these critiria get discussed in detail. Interesting to note is the complete review on brand marks and the chapter on naming and taglines.

Brands are dissected, analyzed, compared and get discussed throughout the entire book. And that is where it gets interesting. What I would call brand identities and their subliminal messages.

The second part of the book Process tries to answer the following question:

“Why does it take so long?” and addresses collaboration and decision making.

Designing brand identity is a multiphased process where research, strategy, design, creative solutions are logical steps to follow. Very interesting is how visual design (eg color, typography, language) get discussed related to business standards, positioning, strategy and marketing. Every phase is explained from start to finish with colorful diagrams, insightful quotes and points from real-world people.

The last part of the book Practise is packed with case studies. Memorable is the case study the Island of the Bahamas brand which goes amazingly well on T-shirts, websites, posters, coffee-cups and anything else really.
Further we see examples of Amazon.com, FedEx, Superman (!!) and many other brands that tell their stories.

Who should read the book?

Not only designers will benefit from reading this book, but also business men, advertisers or anyone related to the process of branding. You can best define this book as a workbook, a guide. The book could improve your skills to communicate brand identity with clients.

Criticism

Wheeler is no graphic designer. She gained insight and experience through working with design teams. The book is no design book. This book is no showcase of the best brands of all times. The load of information can look daunting at first.

Conclusion

The author has both an authoritative and engaging voice. I do believe the book is very readable and a lot of thought went into balancing the content, and the real-world examples and quotes support the theoretical outlines very well. The book has been researched very meticulously. Information is detailed and accurate. The book’s content is accessible and easier to digest, in contrast to most business talk that tends to be very abstract to follow and overly boring. You could read this book from start to finish in one go but you could also pick up any random chapter in the book as well.

Sidenote

To design the look and feel of a website, a corporate logo or a T-shirt to promote your blog & business on a web conference are inherently part of brand identity.

Matt Davies, graphic designer and branding enthusiast already brought to fadtastic his insight about branding in these well-written branding related articles: What’s so super about supermarket logos and the revived Mc Donald’s brand. I hope I have sparkled your intrest in branding as well with doing this book review.

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Book Info

• Character design for mobile devices

• Written by NFGMan, published by RotoVision
  ISBN-10: 2940361126 ISBN-13: 978-2940361120. 192 pages
• Order? From RotoVision

Summary

Including you get a entire historical overview of portable game devices from the last decades (since the 1980s!) like Nintendo, GameBoy, Playstation, Atari and the more obscure and forgotten ones. This book is in the first place a tribute to all these memorable game characters that came into the lives of millions of gamers. Does anyone remember Mario Bros jumping up and down, Sonic from Sega running at full speed? You will find the complete history of these characters right in this book. Since these characters needed to fight, run, or find treasures — sprites where developed for these animated characters.

You see a lot of attention to what happened behind the scenes. In amazing detail you learn about how technology advanced and pixel artists constantly faced new design challenges for all these different portable games (and arcade games). If I look back at the time I played Donkey Kong on Nintendo or Streetfighter as a kid — I cannot help to feel a little nostalgic.

Critique

This book reads like a real documentary. Sometimes I felt being in a time capsule when looking at all these odd portable devices and game characters from the past. From the very first primitive steps of game development, commentary on game design, and showcases of the best pixel artists in the world to getting introduced to ancient game characters (that actually look very refined and alive) and how games were ported to cellphones, I can just say this book is unique and seldom seen. It makes you want to start designing your own game characters. Actually it is mentioned in the book that a hard fanbase of game designers still create games for old consoles.

I did contact the author of the book to congratulate him with this interesting book. He replied that he was not happy about the editing.That is the greatest pitfall of this book: deadlines can make a poor book concerning lay-out and erratalists. After all, there is so much game history told here.

Who should read the book

Being a webdesigner, I more than once designed a favicon, or little contextual icons for a website. Icon design when done good … these miniature images look very inviting.The header image in this CSS Zen Garden submission uses faux lego to make a nice piece of isometric pixelart. So anyone loving games, pushing pixels would love this book.

Sidenote

A very long time ago (we speak 1981), Donkey Kong, one of the first iconic game characters to hit arcades. With the continuous improvement of features in mobile devices — we see pixel art resurfacing again in mobile games! Game characters like Donkey Kong build with mere pixels are not part of a nostalgic distant memory but are very now (and here to stay). The future of pixel artists is ensured and thanks to the retro looking games being developed for all these mobile devices like cellphones and PDAs. And the whole craze of mobile phone users that download and share these retro-looking games among their peers. Just like in the old days — the restriction of screen estate, limited memory and processing power makes the artists that create or re-create these fun games are again creating pixel art in full glory!

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• WordPress 2 - A visual quickstart guide by Maria Langer and Miraz Jordan, published by Peachpitt Press.
• WordPress Complete by Hasin Hayder, published by PACKT publishing.

Have fun with the book reviews!

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Book Info

• WordPress Complete

• Written by Hassin hayder, published by PACKT
  ISBN 1-904811-89-2. 280 pages

Buy? Amazon UK | Amazon US

• Official book site

Summary

In the Preface we head off with blogging history, more than a dozen of blogging engines are compared, what sorts of blogs exist, what we can do to market our blogs to reach the public.

Next to the default WP blog engine, the author tells about WMU.
In the last chapters you will find some guidance on how to install it.
We learn how to register a free hosted wordpress.com blog and further how-to install WP manually on a hosted webspace of our own.

The author shows us a step-by-step guide of using cpanel (a webhost admin panel) to install WP as well! Also we see coverage of upgrading from older installations, troubleshooting and finally: we are going full gear inside the admin interface of WP, the Dashboard. We are ready to post!

The author begins in Chapter 3 Choosing and installing themes with saying that installing themes are a necessary feature to let users change the look and feel of their blog without any experience of HTML and CSS.

In a later chapter we will develop a entire 2-column theme from the ground up. Hayder shows us where to find some interesting themes to start with and why we should choose one theme over another theme. Links are provided where to get other themes besides the central themes listed at WP Codex as well.

We get started with all detailed features when dealing with posts and a closer view on the build-in rich text editor. A good tip is the WP hot keys to alleviate the strain of clicking each time on the Bold button to make anything bold that is. We learn more about trackbacks and pings. And the author takes the time to learn us some basics about ping services and other ways of posting (other blogger APIs, XML-RPC).

We get more into detail about making comments, moderating comments and fighting comment spam. And more about the gravatar, or better known as the image alternative to a commenter’s name.

Many bloggers wander how can I turn my blog into a full fledged CMS. In Chapter 5 Non Blog Content we will build a CMS in WP. The author uses a book store website as the example we are going to use. Step-by-step we will create a general purpose website that contains also non-blog content, or pages. Many of you might know that you can write posts in WP, but also add pages. We get our hands dirty again with modifying chunks of PHP within the WP template pages.

This time we need to adapt our pages to fit to our needs. We also see some custom plug-ins which will come in-handy for our book store site. The author explains shortly what the modified coded is intended for, and the explanation here is easy to follow. Again, you have many possibilities to customize your WP blog but you need both advanced knowledge about PHP and programming. I do believe it was a good choice to introduce us with some PHP programming techniques. WP uses a loop to display posts and comments, but we see here some ideas to go further. A good introduction, yes indeed! The WP Codex offers more ideas as well.

Most of you have read a feed and watched a podcast! In this chapter 6 Feeds and podcasting we learn first in detail what feeds are all about (history, RSS formats, RSS readers). We will develop a RSS aggregator plugin to process a feed and display it in our WP blog. As you see, we are again working with PHP in this chapter.

As I mentioned earlier on, this chapter 7 Developing themes deals with building themes from scratch. This means we start with a blank page named index.php …

We will build gradually our pages and add chunks of PHP to add our content step by step. We also learn some CSS too whilst building a 2 column WP theme including eg header, sidebar and footer! This method of building themes brings us the ultimate flexibility to create any WP theme we have in mind!

On many occasions a WP blog is not only about a single author. In this chapter 8 Community Blogging we learn how to add more users and how-to manage users in WP.

Like the heading says, in this chapter 9 we learn how to create plug-ins and widgets. We see how to add multiple instances of a widget.

In this last chapter we learn some extra tricks to install and manage our WP blog. And a custom install named WMU, a not officialy supported product of WP aimed at advanced users.

About the book

The authors tells us a basic understanding of PHP, variables and loops is more than enough to build strong templates in WP. Of course, a good understanding of building webpages with HTML and CSS is needed as well.

Again we see a lot screenshots of examples, highlighted code and dissected chunks of code. The author also explains what hooks are - essentially they are filters or actions. Interesting stuff to learn here!

• Useful links are formated with a different type for easier recognition. We see links about PHP, the WP Codex, and other useful stuff.
• large screenshots and important sidenotes are formatted between brackets and with a notebook icon for easier recognition.
• At the end of each chapter we get a short summary of what the current chapter is about.

Like I said in the intro of this book review, Hasin Hayder is a certified PHP programmer — it’s time to get our hands dirty with PHP. We actually learn basic actions to enable and disable parts of the WP template engine. This approach is a playful way to get familiar with the core template parts of WP. We also see references to themes where similar modifications have been done.

Criticism

The author recommends WordPress because of two major reasons: it is open-source and its vast pool of resources and user-support.

Just like Shaun Inman’s Mint stats have peppers to extend the basic functionality of the mint stats app, WP has a lot of active enthusiasts that build WP plugins to let you do more with your WP blog engine! Hasin Hayder is a certified Zend Engineer which simply means he knows a good share of PHP programming — and what do you know, in this book you see actual examples of plug-ins created by the author as well.

The book unfortunately is not a full guide to getting the most of your WordPress install. The topics explained in the book look advanced but there is of course a lot more to WP than what is said in this book.

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