Web Design Archives (10 posts)
Lifford Wine Agency
Lifford is the largest wine importer in Toronto. They supply wine to restaurants and hotels but they also sell wine to consumers. With their new site you can order the wine online and have it shipped to your door if you live in Ontario.
Why would you want to buy wine from Lifford? Because they carry wines that the LCBO does not and they only carry the best. If you’re feeling thirsty or your wine cellar is getting low then visit www.liffordwine.com and view their selection of wines.
Posted in JAK MEDIA and Web Design at 5:41 PM | Comments (0)
Jeremy Cowart Photography
Jeremy Cowart Photography is what a photography portfolio website should be:
- simple design that doesn’t compete with the photography
- fast (no annoying Flash interfaces that take forever to load and learn)
- large beautiful images without jpeg artifacts
I’m always amazed at photography sites that have small images where you need a loupe to actually view them. Worse is when you click on a thumbnail image to get a photo that is slightly larger. Talk about frustrating. Jeremy Cowart or whoever designed his site has done a fabulous job.
Posted in Photography and Web Design at 3:49 PM | Comments (0)
Make My Logo BIGGER!!!
Make My Logo Bigger Cream is a clever infomercial that unfortunately has a lot of truth to it. If you’ve ever designed a logo or a website for someone, you’ll find Make My Logo Bigger Cream to be very amusing.
Posted in Web Design at 9:38 AM | Comments (2)
CSSEdit 2.6 rounds out my web development toolkit
If you’re a web developer you don’t use Adobe Dreamweaver to make websites — you use a bunch of different applications to edit code, transfer files and test your code.
Under Mac OS X I am using:
- Photoshop for graphic design, production and optimization
- BBEdit for coding
- Transmit for file transfers
- Safari and Firefox for initial testing
When it came to editing CSS I would use a combination of BBEdit and Firefox (with plugins) to see how my code was rendering. Switching back and forth between the programs works but it can be tedious. It’s also easy to make mistakes when writing the CSS.
The “one-window web development” of Coda is nice but it sacrifices too much in the way of features and by trying to simplify the web development workflow (at least for me). Joe Kissell at TidBITS has a great review of Coda that explains where the program falls short for some.
If anyone is interested, I’m selling my copy of Coda for $30. It currently sells for $69-$79 on Panic’s website.
Today I found myself having to do a lot of CSS editing for a site redesign and thought I would give MacRabbit’s CSSEdit 2.6 another try. I’m sold! CSSEdit is a fabulous piece of software. I don’t know how I managed without it.
You can also validate your CSS and catch mistakes before your code gets out of control and makes debugging difficult. The interface is very slick and full of useful features that have completely sold me on CSSEdit.
If you’re a web developer and you haven’t tried CSSEdit then download a trial version. Find out why this might be the best $30 you’ll spend his year.
Posted in OS X Software and Web Design and Web Development at 10:43 PM | Comments (0)
TextExpander 2 saves me time in Mac OS X
I’ve been on a Getting Things Done (GTD) kick lately — trying to be more productive in my day to day work. Through a series of geeky software tools and by approaching things like email differently, I’m wasting less time than before and being more productive.
If I type ‘ddate’ then it inserts ‘October 19, 2007’. If I type ‘andthe’ then it knows that I meant to type ‘and the’ and corrects my spelling mistake.
If you’re a web developer, you’ll love TextExpander. It will generate code for you automatically by typing a simple abbreviations. As an added bonus, the software inserts the cursor wherever you specify.
TextExpander keeps track of the keystrokes that it saves you from typing and translates this into time saved. After a couple hours of use, it has saved me from typing 1,932 characters, approximately 4 minutes of time.
SpamSieve is another fabulous program that has paid for itself many times. Since I installed the software, it has blocked 70,386 spam messages. Every day it deletes around 106 spam messages from my inbox. That adds up to hours of mindless filtering and deleting of messages.
Some links:
SmileOnMyMac
TextExpander 2: .Mac syncing and much more
Newsletters that teach
Posted in OS X Software and Web Design at 12:53 AM | Comments (1)
Blasting the Myth of the Fold
Web designers, take note and stop cramming everything “above the fold” on the homepage you’re working on. Better yet, tell your clients that you don’t need to cram everything near the top of the page. People know how to scroll.
Blasting the Myth of the Fold by Milissa Tarquini is a great article and something I can show the next client who has a fear of scroll bars.
Posted in Web Design at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)
Helvetica
The documentary film Helvetica will be getting its Canadian premiere in Toronto at Hot Docs (April 19-29). It’s at the top of my list of films to see at this year’s festival.
I’ve been hearing bits an pieces about the film on various design sites for the last year. I just watched a short clip of the film on Veer.com that features Erik Spiekermann. It looks very promising and should be inspiring to anyone who is a designer that works with type.
Posted in Design and Movies and Web Design at 2:32 PM | Comments (1)
Retro Style - Part 2
Welcome to readers of Design Melt Down.
Bombippy.com is one of the websites featured in an article called Retro Style - Part 2 on the Design Melt Down website. It’s an interesting read on what makes a website look “retro”.
If you’re a web designer, be sure to bookmark designmeltdown.com. It has some great articles, links to design resources and plenty of examples that are sure to inspire.
Posted in Web Design at 1:16 PM | Comments (0)
The Logos of Web 2.0
The FontShop has a great blog called FontFeed. If you’re a designer then you’ll want to bookmark this site.
Their latest entry The Logos of Web 2.0, takes a look at fonts used in some of the so-called Web 2.0 sites and brands. Chunky text combined with orange, green and blue colours are the latest trend.
Posted in Web Design at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)
stuffandjunk.com redesigned
Lissa’s blog, stuffandjunk.com has been slightly redesigned (sort of) and upgraded from Movable Type v2.66 to v3.15. Hopefully the upgrade will cut down on some of the spam
Bombippy v2.0 is just around the corner.
Posted in Web Design at 1:52 PM | Comments (0)
