I slept in this morning after staying up all night writing frantic emails. Kate had a wonderful suprise breakfast waiting for me. Hey anything that is not oatmeal theses days is a huge win!
I’ve been thinking there was something funny about the way Kate likes to clean the house but I could not quite put my finger on it.
For some reason, people like using Photoshop for designing the look of web pages. I love Photopshop for photo editing, the basics that I know how to do anyway, but it is hard as hell for me to use it to make a layout. Things like resizing and cropping elements of the design are just hard for me. For instance if I draw overlapping squares on a PS layer, then drop a photo into the same layer to simualte a frame matted photo, how can you then go back and edit any of those three design elements independently? Maybe you can but if the answer is each one has to be in its own layer…no thank you.
Anyway, I have always thought that the Synthis Process Modeler was a great drawing tool in addition to all of structured information design capabilities. Over the weekend I programmed a new Layer class that draws a Blueprint background grid divided up into three content columns. When I have a little more time I’ll update the Snap-to-Grid and Ruler features to support the grid artwork.
One interesting thing about all of this “grid” research is that I think adding configurable snap gridding particularly as it relates to rows and font sizes would be a great addition to the Synthis Form Designer (to the Modeler too for that matter). Most of the forms were originally designed to be printed on impact printers with single spaced single size fonts. Using a more intelligent snap grid on field drag creation could really make the design process faster and more consistent.
Misc
Grid Resources
Nice Designs
This is no doubt really old news to people with their ear to the ground in the world of web design but I’ve kind of just discovered the wacky worlds of CSS Grid templates and CSS Image clipping.
Since I still think that HTML tables are bad ass I think that grid frameworks are pretty cool. They give you an easy way to specify the dimensions of a div based on how many “grid” cells the div spans. It looks a hell of a lot easier than the “container in a container with an offset” approach I’ve used in the past.
There are at least three big competitors out there:
The next “old is new” is a technique that bundles a bunch of small icons into a single large image and then uses CSS to mask the image leaving only the desired icon visible.
Side note – I’ve seen the killer 16×16 Silk Icon Set before but it looks like it is getting quite popular.
Clever Uses: Simple User-Interface Trick Makes Your Remotes Idiot Proof.
I ran across this post on Life Hacker this morning and after all the grief I have take from Kate about our TV setup it pretty much made me laugh my ass off. If she gets on board with home theater equipment like she has with blogging though, she will be the one programming our abandoned Logitech Harmony remote when we get home.
In all seriousness, it is amazing how multiple choices and endless options have massively complicated our interaction with technology. My Typewriter application was written exactly for the purpose of stripping down the tech leaving just the bare productive essentials.
Hard Working Fail « FAIL Blog: Pictures and Videos of Owned, Pwnd and Fail Moments.
This definitely gets a big old WTF!?
| Dimensions (width x height) | Aspect Ratio | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 143 x 59 | 2.42 | GMail custom logo |
| 150 x 112 | ImageShack thumbnail | |
| 100 x 75 | ImageShack avatar | |
| 75 x 75 | 1 | Flickr square |
| 75 x 100 | 0.75 | Flickr thumbnail |
| 180 x 240 | 0.75 | Flickr small |
| 375 x 500 | 0.75 | Flickr medium |
| 768 x 1024 | 0.75 | Flickr large |
| 200 long side | Blogger small | |
| 320 long side | Blogger medium | |
| 400 long size | Blogger large | |
| 144 | Picasa thumbnail | |
| 288 | Picasa small | |
| 400 | Picasa Medium | |
| 800 | Picasa Large |
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