And then, something clicked. I put down the Sartre and Hegel and picked up Zeldman and Cederholm. I got responses to my articles, email concerning my availability to freelance, and my blog readership shot up. All very nice perks, but never did I expect that one of my articles would lead to a textbook contribution deal, and another to magazine publication … (more…)

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456 Berea st’s Automatic Pullquotes with Javascript and CSS has got me foaming at the mouth. The movement of blogs toward a magazine/newspaper style format is an interesting one, and this helps the cause.

Misprinted Type presents a bunch of nice freeware grunge-esque fonts.

Squidfingers Patterns. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have plans to use a few dozen of these in the next couple weeks.

Dynamic Drive’s Stylesheet Switcher 1.1. The built-in random alone would’ve sold me on it, but - my god, is it clean.

How to Create Professional HDR Images. The best tutorial on the subject I’ve come across to this point.

CSS Rounded Corners Roundup. I could link to this by virtue of pun alone, but it’s actually very useful; I could think of about a dozen other nu-school techniques that could use a roundup of this sort.

Link Thumbnail: Oooooh. Could get old quickly, but hopefully the customizers out there will make sure that doesn’t happen. Very interesting in terms of brand and identity exposure, should you get the links.

Big ol’ list of Free Photoshop compatible plugins. You know what I like the best? when the title does the description work for me. I’m a fan.

Turning your photos into pop art. My cartoon beard has no rivals. I swears it.

Ten things you probably didn’t know about PHP. If you’re a designer and you think that development doesn’t affect you, think again.

Happy hallowe’en, ladies and gentlemen. Hope you enjoy the resources!

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I get distracted far too easily. I have an upright piano in my room and a window that overlooks a busy street. My CD and Vinyl collections constantly need restructuring and, against my better judgment, I have a few law apps to get through. My dog will bring me my slippers and a frisbee and my neighbour will call to tell me that the game is on in an hour and he’s having a bar-b-que,

but damnit,

there is just something innate about being a designer that makes one so wonderfully stubborn as to not be able to put down the work even in the most trying of times.

So what do we do? We sit at the screen and stare, ftp up and down trying to fix one pixel that doesn’t matter in the long run anyway, twiddle our thumbs and mess up our code in the process of semi-sentient consciousness so badly that when we finally get into a mood where we can just work through the madness, we’ve already crippled our design to the extent that we’re backpeddling.

I say: end it! don’t try to stress yourself out through the designwork when you know it’s better saved for another day. There are plenty of things you can do to manage your time efficiently, allowing your most productive moods to come at the best possible moments. I’m working on a redesign over at my home pad, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let this slump beat me.
So let me take you through a little excercise in Design Slumpbusting: Better Designing Through Effective Time Wasting.

1. When the uselessness-feeling hits, set a timer for 30 minutes and do the most mundane, mindless task you can. I play tetris on my cell phone, and have even been known to gather up small amounts of money and deposit them into my winter jacket and raincoat pockets among other places, effectively giving myself a little jolt of happiness some months down the road. Seems pointless and off topic, but it takes your mind off the task at hand - when the time goes off after thirty minutes of meaningless dribble, you just know your mind is racing to get something productive done. The more mindless the task, the better relaxed your brain will be when the timer goes off.
2. Read up on the newest design resources, technologies, and languages that, while maybe not immediately useful to the task at hand, you’ll need to know anyway. One in ten resources I think will never be of much use to me ends up being of extreme importance within a few hours of discovering it, I find, on average. Some recent finds: a nice selection of free grungewriter fonts, automatic pullquotes, text-resize detection, a nice process article, an excellent grass-texture tutorial, and the now invaluable quickref.
3. If you’re stuck in the CSS, why not get your RSS validation up to par? If you’re stuck on javascript, why not get your xhtml validation level up to 1.1 strict and lose some of those i.e. hacks for more seo-friendly markup? There is always more than one way to solve a problem, and surprisingly often, you’ll find a new solution by the happiest of accidents if you look in the right places at the right times.
4. Close Dreamweaver and open Notepad. This will force you to start tabbing your own material and being more conscious of your semantic structure - there is no hand to help you at a basic level, and it will challenge you to become more fine tuned, and in a hurry.
5. Lose the lorem-ipsum: Looking at a page template that has the same mundane text on it that you’ve seen on a bajillion other page-templates over the years will lead you to think that your page will be no better than mundane, either. When context is lacking, content is king.
6. Use the Rendered Source Chart firefox extension. Sometimes you never know what you’re screwing up until it gets a yellow border, tabs itself, and slaps you in the face.
7. Preach to a non-standardist. Find your favourite table-layout-using, flash-navigation-dependant friend or colleague and get them to ask you about standards-based solutions. You might just get so fired up over your preaching that you’ll get the desire to practice it, too.
8. Go buy a coffee. Seriously, you need to get out of the house anyway - have you even changed your shirt in three days? Go. Coffee. Now.
9. When in doubt, handbook it. Or, hell, protolize it, like all the cool kids are doing nowadays.
10. Learn to know when to quit - you can’t design when you’re too tired. This isn’t sleepbusting. Some guys can work on four hours of sleep and still get a full day of work in, but those guys are not you - and more importantly, those guys are not going to be happy when they realize they’ve sidestepped a potential ajax security risk, and lost their database. s’all I’m saying.

So, that’s the gist of it - hope these help. What are your slumpbusting tips?

(psst: digg it up)

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What with standardists ruling the web trends scene right now, the emergence of a new specification template for CSS is bound to be a major point of consideration in future endeavors. It is not, however, going to be remembered as the be-all and end-all of web design in the current web culture.

But, why not?

We’re getting trickier as designers and developers. Sure, now we’re offered fading and new colour options and borders and easier dropshadows, but aren’t these things we’ve already been able to do as it stands with a little graphical manipulation, possibly some client-side goodness, and it all still came out as standards compliant?

The long and the short of it: this will help designers ease their workload, but ultimately will not change the face of the web, especially in light of the web2.0 trends that are so prevalent and deadset in their ways as they are. The likelihood that Internet Explorer’s next incarnation will support png alpha fades to the extent that standardists were hoping are looking fairly slim, and the rest of the listed provisions for CSS3 don’t look like mainstays for IE7 either.

And it’s not like the text-shadow function won’t be used by every myspace hipster at any given juncture. All indications point to that becoming as useful and user-friendly as the blink effect once was.

Maybe I’m just being bitter, though. Maybe I’m simply upset that, even though my April Fools’ specifications were far superior, they were largely ignored by the W3C. I’m sure this will usher in many non-standardists eager to learn some CSS tricks, but is that really the test market that the W3C is aiming for?

My contention is that there needs to be firstly, a more active agreement between popular browsers and the W3C to bring functionality together with potential, and secondly, a stronger push for community involvement and a better learning environment for the new specifications.

But that’s me - what do you think? What is css3 missing, and what does it concentrate too hard on?

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Programmer Meet Designer: “This site was created to unite programmers and designers because rarely is a person good at both programming and designing. PMD helps programmers and designers partner up to make websites and web applications that look and work great. It also lets entrepreneurs and writers find people to work with”. Sort of like a classifieds section, only without the old ladies trying to get rid of ferrets. That is to say, exceedingly useful.
Most Inspired: It’s like Popurls for design galleries and showcases. Production for the designing masses will go up exponentially without having to go through so many of these individually.

The Quiet Death of the Major Re-launch: A great read. Discusses the lesser-thought-of effect of the new web: companies and startups are no longer making the huge impact right up front, but gradually building their services and web products into their full potential. This seems to have a far greater value.

Styleboost relaunches! I’m singing praises. One of my favourite galleries ever.

AjaxWP: Adding Ajax functionality to Wordpress blogs - the linked article is a fine example of this in action. And hey! it even remembers not to let ajax become the new flash.

Take care, everybody.

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