FeedStitch

Some Random Dude's Latest Updates From "appreciation"

Aug 14^th

25 Useful Videos and Presentations for Designers

With the huge number of design-related conferences and events around the world, the Web gives those of us who cannot attend them a great opportunity to listen and benefit from their great and talented speakers. To aid in this, here we present some of the best videos, interviews and presentations about design and related topics.

Using Design to Make Ideas New

Speaker: Milton Glaser
Legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser dives deep into a new painting inspired by Piero della Francesca. From there, he muses on what makes a convincing poster, by breaking down an idea and making it new.

Designing for Obama

Speaker: Steven Heller
Steven Heller speaks at AIGA Philly on the outpouring of posters for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Heller also compares today’s political graphics to the campaign posters of the last generation and explores the relationship between democracy and design.

Paula Scher Gets Serious

Speaker: Paula Scher
Paula Scher looks back on her life in design (she’s done album covers, books, the Citibank logo and much more) and pinpoints the moment when she started really having fun. Watch out for gorgeous designs and images from her legendary career.

An Interview With Debbie Millman

Speaker: Debbie Millman
AIGA President Debbie Millman talks at AIGA Philly about the need for designers to embrace technology and how the AIGA can adapt to changes in the field through an active membership.

David Carson on Design and Discovery

Speaker: David Carson
Great design is a never-ending journey of discovery, on which it helps to pack a healthy sense of humor. Sociologist and surfer-turned-designer David Carson walks through a gorgeous (and often quite funny) slide deck of his work and found images.

Designing the Obama Campaign

Speaker: Scott Thomas
As the design director for Obama’s 2008 campaign, Scott Thomas led a now-historic political campaign, in which branding, design and the Web played a truly pivotal role. Likening the experience to “building an airplane in flight,” Scott talks about the creative individual’s need for triage, the crucial role of incremental improvements and the importance of returning to the hand and keeping things simple.

Three Ways Good Design Makes You Happy

Speaker: Don Norman
Design critic Don Norman turns his incisive eye to beauty, fun, pleasure and emotion, as he looks at design that makes people happy. He identifies the three emotional cues that a well-designed product must hit to succeed.

Designs to Save Newspapers

Speaker: Jacek Utko
Jacek Utko is an extraordinary Polish newspaper designer whose redesigns for papers in Eastern Europe not only win awards but increase circulation by up to 100%. Can good design save newspaper? It just might.

Typographic Hierarchy

Speaker: Tony Pritchard
Typographic hierarchy is about analyzing textual information and prioritizing based on meaning. The designer determines the order in which the user views information through basic typographic techniques such as size, weight and position of type.

Urging Designers to Think Big

Speaker: Tim Brown
Tim Brown says that the design industry is preoccupied with creating nifty, fashionable objects, even as pressing questions like clean water access show it has a bigger role to play. He calls for a shift to local, collaborative, participatory “design thinking.”

How to Make a Font

Speaker: Chank Diesel
Watch a font come to life before you very eyes! Filmed on location at alphabetician Chank Diesel’s font-making workshop at Clockwork Active Media Systems in Minneapolis.

How Art Shapes Culture

Speaker: Thelma Golden
Thelma Golden, curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, walks us through three recent shows that explore how art examines and redefines culture. The “post-black” artists she works with are using their art to instigate a new dialogue on race, culture and the meaning of art itself.

An Interview With Erik Spiekermann

Speaker: Erik Spiekermann
An interview with professor and typography designer Erik Spiekermann about his opinion of typefaces such as Helvetica and Arial.

Happy Design

Speaker: Stefan Sagmeister
Graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister takes the audience on a whimsical journey through moments in his life that made him happy and notes how many of these moments had to do with good design.

Interview With Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere

Speaker: Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere
Hoefler and Frere-Jones are American typeface designers. Here is a clip of them talking about everyone’s favorite font in the documentary Helvetica.

John Maeda on His Journey in Design

Speaker: John Maeda
Designer John Maeda talks about his path from a Seattle tofu factory to the Rhode Island School of Design, of which he became president in 2008. Maeda, a tireless experimenter and witty observer, explores the crucial moment when design met computers.

Two Minutes With Robin Nicholas

Speaker: Robin Nicholas
Robin Nicholas, creator of Arial, discusses his creative inspirations, favorite typefaces and the evolution of fonts.

The True Face of Leonardo Da Vinci

Speaker: Siegfried Woldhek
Mona Lisa is one of the best-known faces on the planet. But would you recognize an image of Leonardo da Vinci? Illustrator Siegfried Woldhek uses some thoughtful image-analysis techniques to find what he believes is the true face of Leonardo.

Five Secrets from 86 Notebooks

Speaker: Michael Bierut
Renowned graphic designer Michael Bierut claims that he’s not creative. Instead, he likens his job to that of a doctor who tends to patients: “the sicker, the better.” Digging into the 86 notebooks he’s kept over his career, Bierut walks us through five projects, from conception to execution, extracting a handful of simple lessons (e.g. the problem contains the solution; don’t avoid the obvious) that lie at the foundation of brilliant design.

Thinking Deep on Design

Speaker: Philippe Starck
With no pretty slides to show, designer Philippe Starck spends 18 minutes reaching to the very root of the question “Why design?” Listen carefully for the perfect mantra for all of us, genius or not.

Two Minutes With Nadine Chahine

Speaker: Nadine Chahine
Nadine Chahine, a font designer and Arabic specialist at Monotype Imaging, discusses her creative inspirations, favorite typefaces and the evolution of fonts.

Treating Design as Art

Speaker: Paola Antonelli
Paola Antonelli, design curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, wants to spread her appreciation of design in all shapes and forms around the world.

Practice Makes Pixel Perfect

Speaker: Ryan Sims
Ryan Sims speaks about how to understand talent and how to become a great designer.

Intricate Beauty by Design

Speaker: Marian Bantjes
In graphic design, Marian Bantjes says, throwing your individuality into a project is considered heresy. She explains how she built her career doing just that, bringing her signature delicate illustrations to store fronts, valentines and even genetic diagrams.

Designing for the Tablet

Speaker: Marian Bantjes
Books, magazines, televisions. We hear these words and understand well what shape their content will take. But tablet? Digital magazine? How does the size of the object frame the user experience? How does it affect the object’s portability and accessibility? How will our experience with these devices compare with that of more “full-figured” media? Do we need to consider grid, typography and behavior differently? Hear four perspectives on how telling stories in new spaces creates new experiences.

[By the way, did you know we have a free Email Newsletter? Subscribe now and get fresh short tips and tricks in your inbox!]

Other Resources

(al)

HTML5 Templates

Papa bear: HTML5 Boilerplate
Mama bear: HTML5 Reset
Baby bear: HTML5 site template

Will You Pay for HootSuite?

Earlier this week, HootSuite announced that they will begin to charge for advanced features of the service, starting next week. The newly-introduced pricing plan provides a number of choices from a Freemium plan all the way through Platinum for $99.99/month.

Here’s the breakdown of the new pricing plans:

Here is some of what HootSuite had to say about the new pricing model:

Most of you will continue to use HootSuite in much the same way you do today. Additionally, power users and enterprises with teams can confidently rely on HootSuite for critical campaigns knowing there will be continuity of service from a stable company.

Impact for Regular Users

The free plan, which HootSuite anticipates will be appropriate for 95% of users, includes basic stats and analytics, five social network profiles and one RSS feed. The Bronze package for $4.99/month makes the jump to unlimited social networks and 10 RSS feeds.

It would appear that the Basic and Bronze packages will be more than enough for regular users who make HootSuite their tool of choice to manage all of their social networks and RSS feeds.

Impact for Power Users

If you’ve heard any grumblings about the new pricing model, it’s likely been from HootSuite power users who have made use of the team collaboration functions. This new pricing model takes away all of the team features for the Basic or Bronze plans and forces users to move to, at a minimum, the Silver plan that includes one team member for $19.99/mo.

The hardest hit goes to users who manage social media accounts for clients, for example, many virtual assistants. They currently have the team functions set up and running like a well-oiled machine, helping them manage all of the relevant social network profiles for their clients.

This introduction of the new pricing model will certainly require a change to how they are managing their accounts, and possibly require that they create a new account for each client. Or, as many have said, they may leave the service entirely.

What’s Your Take?

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of HootSuite as I’ve written a number of posts about it over the past year. Personally, I’m just fine with the Basic or Bronze account (depending on how I want to handle my RSS feeds), and I have no problem paying $5/month to use HootSuite.

While I think we need to get past the perspective that we’re entitled to get access to a multitude of online services for free (we pay for offline products and services that we find useful, online should be no different), I do see the point of team-based users who say it’s simply too expensive to pay $600 or even $1,200 per year to keep their accounts functioning as they currently are.

But, what’s your perspective as a HootSuite user? Will you move to a paid account? Are you considering leaving HootSuite for another service?

Aug 13^th

I Never Meta URL Like You Before: A Short Domain Name Trick

I love a good domain name. I sometimes look wistfully back at my youth and think about the swell URLs I would have bought if I had an inkling about what the Internet would become.

Today you’re lucky if you find a relevant, memorable domain that isn’t parked or in use — luckier still if it’s short.

With the traditional TLDs — top-level domains such as .com, .net, .org, and to some extent, locals like .ca and .co.uk — it’s getting more difficult to obtain short domain names without some creativity.

Every so often a new TLD shows up and there’s a gold-rush frenzy. When the .me extension came out, for instance, there was a bidding war on the domain name, aweso.me — a creative twist for a short and memorable URL.

I’ve long been waiting for a chance to snag a short domain name — and this is a story of how I was recently able to do so.

The Boring Technical Part

In May 2010, ICANN — the organization responsible for managing domain names and IP addresses — brought Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) to life.

This allows participating extensions to use characters and symbols from other alphabets. This is due to Unicode working with Punycode conversion.

What this meant is I was able to score the amazingly short URL ◉.ws, as well as ◉.◉.ws — in context, there are only 6 single letter domain names in existence today.

The Catch

It’s not all fun and games though. The obvious shortcoming is that ◉ (a Unicode dingbat symbol described as "fisheye") and other symbols aren’t exactly easy to type.

Secondly, most browsers (Opera and Safari are the exception) will change that character into the Unicode string: our nice circle dingbat character becomes http://xn--z1h.ws/ — not super presentational.

Email addresses using special characters (e.g. arley.mcblain@◉.ws) doesn’t work at the moment. When the actual symbol is used, Microsoft Outlook instantly crashes, and with the Unicode string, it will just throw back an error.

Lastly, and perhaps the most dumbfounding, the special characters render differently in browsers and seem immune to our CSS font styling wiles.

Font difference for the ➲ symbol – IE8 on left vs. Chrome on right.

This standard is new, there’s a lot of catching up to be done.

Why Use IDNs?

Sure, taking advantage of IDNs isn’t perfect, but it has its uses. Short URLs are not only useful on services like Twitter where every character counts, but they are a status symbol. Symbols may not be practical, but it’s cool.

I guess if you’re really fussy and find the useless symbols thing too silly, you could be practical and actually use this for what it’s for: allowing you to buy domains in other languages with accents and other previously impossible characters.

Phénoménal!

Making Your Own

If you’re interested in obtaining your own short URLs using IDN, here are the steps you should take.

Step 1: Find the Symbol You Want

A great place to start is by checking out this list of Unicode characters on Wikipedia. It’s not a complete list, but it’s pretty extensive and is a good starting point.

Step 2: Test the Symbol on a Web Page in Different Browsers

Before spending a penny, you might want to test what the character looks like in the different browsers on a demo page (like this) to prevent the browser-related madness I highlighted above.

Step 3: Check Availability

I ended up using Domain Site to check and register the domain name. Since this is relatively new, your domain name registrant might not have the capability of registering IDNs.

Step 4: Set Up the Domain Name with Your Host

Your web host will likely require that you convert the symbol to the Unicode string first. Easy enough, just use a Unicode converter tool.

Share Your Short URLs

If you were inspired to grab a short URL because of this article, link to it in the comments and show us what you got.

About the Author

Arley McBlain is a web designer, web developer, in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. If you’d like to keep in touch with the author, check out his personal site, ArleyM, and follow him on Twitter as @ArleyM.

iPhone “slide to unlock” Text in WebKit/CSS3

There are a couple of WebKit specific properties that make giving text a gradient background possible:

-webkit-background-clip: text;
-webkit-text-fill-color: transparent;

Those will allow the background of the parent element to become the background of the text inside. I gots to thinkin’, if we made a made a horizontal gradient that faded in a gray-white-gray pattern, then animated it from left to right, we could make the iPhone/iPad’s “slide to unlock” screen with no images at all!

WebKit only demo:

View Demo Download Files

Gradient Structure

The text “slide to unlock” is an h2 tag. We’ll be giving it the gradient background, which is structured like this, with 5 “color-stops”:

background:
   -webkit-gradient(linear,left top,right top,
        color-stop(0, #4d4d4d),
        color-stop(0.4, #4d4d4d),
        color-stop(0.5, white),
        color-stop(0.6, #4d4d4d),
        color-stop(1, #4d4d4d));

With the two properties from the beginning of this article, the text gets a highlight like this:

Notice that the width of the background is twice as wide as area. This gives us some gray to work with on either side of the highlight, so the white highlight part can slide by and the text can stay gray before and after. If we were to animate the background further left or right than what is available, the text goes black (bad).

The next step is to animate the position of that background from left to right.

The h2 tag sits within a “well” which takes care of getting us the black background behind the text (since we’ve stolen the background from the h2 itself). This controls the width of the h2 as well, since it defaults to 100% wide as a block-level element. The well has a fixed width. Then the h2 is double that width (200%). So our animation can start at negative the width of the well and end at positive the width of the well.

#well {
   width: 720px;
}

h2 {
   width: 200%;
  -webkit-animation: slidetounlock 5s infinite;
}

@-webkit-keyframes slidetounlock {
  0% {
    background-position: -720px 0;
  }
  100%{
    background-position: 720px 0;
  }
}

Yay! Animated highlight on the text! Here it all is together:

#well {
  padding: 14px 20px 20px 20px;
  -webkit-border-radius: 30px;
  background: -webkit-gradient(linear,left top,left bottom,color-stop(0, #010101),color-stop(1, #181818));
  border: 2px solid #454545;
  overflow: hidden;
}

h2 {
  font-size: 80px;
  background: -webkit-gradient(linear,left top,right top,color-stop(0, #4d4d4d),color-stop(0.4, #4d4d4d),color-stop(0.5, white),color-stop(0.6, #4d4d4d),color-stop(1, #4d4d4d));
  -webkit-background-clip: text;
  -webkit-text-fill-color: transparent;
  -webkit-animation: slidetounlock 5s infinite;
  font-family: "HelveticaNeue-Light", "Helvetica Neue Light", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif;
  font-weight: 300;
  padding: 0;
  width: 200%;
}

@-webkit-keyframes slidetounlock {
  0% {
    background-position: -720px 0;
  }
  100% {
    background-position: 720px 0;
  }
}

Bonus: The unlocky thing in jQuery

To me, this was mostly about replicating the cool text effect without any images. Done and done. But hey we might as well tackle the sliding unlock part too eh? The little slider button with the arrow on it probably could be accomplished with pure CSS (using triangles, among other things. But, let’s not go there today. The slider will remain an image, and go right inside the h2 itself.

<h2><img src="images/arrow.png" alt="slider" /> slide to unlock</h2>

We’ll load up jQuery, jQuery UI, and our own custom script:

<script src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js'></script>
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.2/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>
<script src='js/slidetounlock.js'></script>

We’ll use the jQuery UI draggable function on the image. We’ll restrict it’s movement to the X-axis (horizontal). Like all good jQuery UI functions, this has callbacks. We’ll attach one to the drag event which fires repeatedly as the element is dragged. With that, we’ll test if it has made it far enough to be considered “unlocked.” If it has, we’ll fire off an action. In this case, fading out the well. For the “stop” callback, fired when the mouse button is released, we’ll test if the element is under the our completion distance and snap it back to the left if not.

$(function() {
	$("h2 img").draggable({
		axis: 'x',
		containment: 'parent',
		drag: function(event, ui) {
			if (ui.position.left > 550) {
				$("#well").fadeOut();
			}
		},
		stop: function(event, ui) {
			if (ui.position.left < 551) {
				$(this).animate({
					left: 0
				})
			}
		}
	});
});

I tried to make the drag event also dim the opacity of the text as you slide it, like the iPhone/iPad, but it’s seeming to me like WebKit isn’t allowing partial opacity on text with background clip. Didn’t do a ton of research, but I do know that wrapping the text in a span and trying to adjust the opacity of that span just wouldn’t take (until it was zero).

Related: Marco Kupier has tackled this before as well, but with a different approach.

Performance Testing Comes Back With Boomerang

Yahoo’s Boomerang is one of the most interesting and innovative projects I’ve discovered recently. Developers often test the performance of pages and scripts using tools such as Firebug and YSlow. The tools can typically measure load times and latency to ensure your pages remain responsive.

Unfortunately, you can never be certain your lab testing represents conditions in the real world. You might be using Chrome on a new Mac Book connected to a 100Mb broadband pipe, but what if the majority of your users are sitting on the other side of the world using IE4 on Windows 98 with a dial-up connection? (OK, it’s unlikely, but you get the idea!)

Enter Boomerang — a new Yahoo JavaScript project which measures response times experienced by actual users. The tool can be used to measure page load times, bandwidth, latency, Ajax calls, widget load times, and more. The collected data is passed back to a single beacon URL on your server where it can be stored and analyzed.

You should note that Boomerang isn’t an install-and-go solution like YSlow — you need to define your own testing parameters, storage and reports. However, I suspect easy-to-use hosted versions of the application will appear in the near future.

Boomerang is a beta, but it’s free and available to use now. For more information, read the Boomerang documentation, download the files, or browse the project at github.

Would you find Boomerang useful? Will you try it on your systems?

Five Tips for Preparing a Design or Illustration Portfolio

As part of the design course I teach on here in Ireland, I see a lot students who come in for interviews with a portfolio. The portfolios are varied in terms of presentation and content and it’s fair to say that some leave a little to be desired. By the time they are leaving the course, they have prepared an online portfolio with which to impress potential employers and clients. Here are some tips for preparing a portfolio of design or illustration work whether on or off-line.

1. Show Only Your Best Work

This may sound obvious, but only include your very best work. It’s better to have three or four really good pieces of work than ten pieces of rubbish. A bad piece in your portfolio is like a bad link in a chain, it will bring down the overall quality and integrity of everything else you have in there.

Novartis Reflections Campaign by Tom Hussey

2. Know Your Strengths and Focus on Them

If the term “Jack of all trades, and master of none” comes to mind when people see your portfolio, then there is a problem. It may seem tempting to be able to offer ALL types of design services, or ALL types of illustration styles but that tends to make everything you do look lacklustre. Be really, really good at one or two things and stay focused on them.

Character Illustration by Yee Chong Wee

3. Include the Type of Work That You Actually Want To Do

If you hate making banner ads for example, do not include them in your portfolio because you can be absolutely sure that’s what you’ll get hired to do. If you don’t have any professional experience in the area that you want to work in, create some dummy work and make up your own projects and mockups. Write your own design briefs, or find some on the web and create some high quality work for yourself.

iPhone App Icon Design by Sant Valentin

4. Group Similar Disciplines

Group your work together logically. Organize the portfolio into categories (for example, Web Design, Logo Design, Packaging, Children’s Illustration, Medical Illustration).

Graphic Design by Hey Days

5. Keep It Simple and Just Do It

For online portfolios make sure your site is easy to navigate through and completely foolproof. Provide good quality images without pixelation or distortion. Don’t agonize over your portfolio to the point where you paralyze yourself, and don’t spend to much time drooling over other people’s portfolio. Certainly you can take ideas and inspiration from others but ultimately you have to just sit down and do your own. You can tweak your portfolio along the way and as it grows you will add and remove pieces, so just do it!

Nike by Jordan Metcalf

By following these tips you will build very strong foundations for turning your portfolio into something really special. Take time to review and select your work and make sure you know why you are picking each piece, and make sure you can talk about it too. Good luck!

What tips would you add for anyone preparing a portfolio?

Using a Client Welcome Packet to Get Off on the Right Foot

You just landed a new client. You have the signed contract in-hand, and work is about to commence. As you get started, you send the client a client welcome packet, and your new relationship is set for long-term success.

Wait … you don’t have a client welcome packet? You might want to create one! In this post, I’m going to explain what a client welcome packet is, why you might want one, and what you should include in it.

What is a Client Welcome Packet?

A client welcome packet is exactly that — a set of files that welcomes a client to your company and provides all of the information he or she needs to work with you effectively. It’s like a roadmap that leads the client through your services, your policies, and your work processes.

Why Bother?

Every new relationship has a learning curve. While you can certainly navigate through challenges as they arise, a client welcome packet helps to smooth the path by acting as a client’s go-to resource for questions he or she may have. It doesn’t eliminate questions or challenges, or attempt to remove direct contact with the client, but it gives the client vital information about your company in one place.

Some of the other ways both you and your clients can benefit from a welcome packet include:

You present a professional image.
Your packet reiterates your policies and procedures.
It shows the client that you care about meeting his/her needs.
It puts all of your clients at the same starting point.
The information included can act as a reminder to you about what you should be doing and when.

What’s In a Client Welcome Packet?

Your client welcome packet can include anything specific to your company or services that is valuable for your clients to know. Here are some ideas to get you thinking about what your welcome packet could include:

Thank you/welcome letter
Signed copy of the contract
Frequently asked questions
Payment policies
Credit card authorization form
Completed W-9 form
Company policies
A calendar of your days off
Contact information sheet (yours)
Contact information sheet (for the client to complete)
Your most recent company newsletter
Project questionnaire
Next steps

You don’t want to overload the client with information, so be selective and include only the information you consider most important.

Your welcome packet can be shared as a ZIP file with all of the relevant PDFs included, or provided online in a clients-only area. You can also send a hard copy of the client welcome packet and include additional printed materials such as business cards and brochures.

Do you use a client welcome packet? What information does yours include?

Image credit: Darknez

Aug 12^th

30 New Free High-Quality Fonts

Every now and then we look around, select fresh high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and find them so that you don’t have to.

In this selection, we’re pleased to present Piron, Nobile, St Marie, Code, Arcus, Crimson Text, Quadranta, Juice, Prociono, Mr Jones, Ibarra Real and various useful symbol fonts. Please note that some fonts are for personal use only and are clearly marked as such. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts; they can change from time to time.

[Offtopic: by the way, did you already get your copy of the Smashing Book?]

New Free High-Quality Fonts

Piron
Piron is a highly legible typeface, very well suited to any display or text usage: Web, print (especially magazines), brochures, logos, posters, flyers, motion graphics. The font comes in two weights: regular and oblique. Designed by Alexander Nedelev and Veronika Slavova. Available for free and commercial use, and available in OpenType format.

Nobile
The font is designed to work on digital screens and handheld devices without losing the distinctive look usually found in fonts designed for print. The aim here was to design a font that would function well, have good legibility on screen yet also look good — not only at larger display sizes but also right down to small text sizes. The font is available in the Google Font Directory and was released under the Open Font License. The family comes in four weights (regular, italic, bold and bold italic).

Mr Jones Book and Mr Jones Book Italic (Registration required)
Mr Jones was originally conceived as a family for print design, consisting of a sans and a headline. The lowercase forms are wide for legibility at small sizes, while the caps are narrower to save space and keep an even balance of negative space when used in body copy. The overall widths of certain characters have been adjusted to almost extremes to keep an even balance of white space around each letter. The font works well in body copy but will need decreased tracking in larger settings. It comes with proportional, old-style and tabular figures and discretionary ligatures.

Pigiarniq Inuktitut (Download link)
An oldie but a goodie. Heard of Nunavut? A small territory in Canada with one of the lowest population rates of the world? Probably not. Only 0.01 people live there per square kilometer, mostly Inuit. The citizens of Nunavut speak four languages: French, English, Innuinaqtun and Inuktitut. A few years ago, the government of the region decided to design a new typeface to enable its 28,000 citizens to use all four languages in a uniform manner. The result was a beautiful, rich and professional free sans-serif. The family includes bold, heavy, italic, light and regular weights, all available for free use.

St Marie
St Marie is a rich type family designed for online applications and print. This release is a preview of the upcoming family, and the designer has released two weights (St Marie Thin and St Marie Thin Web) for free. The download package contains the weights in the formats OTF, WOFF, EOT and SVG, as well as a @font-face kit. See this example of St Marie Thin Web (HTML-page).

Code: Free Font
This sturdy yet playful little font family can be applied to different kinds of graphic design work: Web, print, motion graphics, t-shirts, posters, logotypes. The font contains 192 characters and two weights (regular and bold) and is available in OTF for PC or Mac.

VAL Stencil
A quite distinctive, memorable font with two variations: lowercase letters bend to the left and uppercase letters bend to the right. This unique font will give your headlines originality and dynamism. Designed by Svetoslav Simov of Fontfabric, available in OTF.

akaDora (For personal use only)
akaDora is a fairly simple script font with wide character support. Designed by James Daniel Milligan.

Arcus and Arcus Italic (Registration required)
Arcus is a geometrically constructed font with rounded curves. The font contains a wide range of alternative signs, small capitals, lining and old-style numerals, fractions, superiors, inferiors, ligatures and discretionary ligatures; all this is within the frame of OpenType functions. The type family was designed for headlines, logotypes and corporate identities, and it is not a good fit for long text. Available for free and commercial use.

Crimson Text
Open that old tome from the bookshelf over the fireplace, stick your nose in its pages and smell the ink, the glue and the immortality of the printed words. That is what Crimson Text is meant to be like. The font is released under the Open Font License.

Acid (Free for personal use only)
Acid was designed by Stephan Baum specifically to be used in logotypes and body copy. The form of glyphs is similar to the design classic B42 by Marcel Breuer (Bauhaus) and has a very geometric character. The font contains 103 glyphs, comes in six weights (regular, regular italic, medium, medium italic, bold and bold italic) and is in the process of being developed. Released under Creative Commons.

Real Origami (Free for personal use only) (PDF specimen)
The designers based this font on an origami alphabet by Japanese artist Taichiro Hasegawa. A very original, distinctive and playful font.

Quadranta
According to its creator, this design was started with quadrant arcs. Quadranta is a display font that would fit logo designs and playful headlines. Available for personal and commercial use. Designed by Darim Kim using FontStruct.

Balonez Fantasia
Yet another distinctive, playful font with rounded glyphs. This would be great fit for brochures, magazine and t-shirts. Designed by Thiago Calza. Freely available for personal and commercial work. Available are two weights in TrueType.

Juice
Juice is a modern, dynamic sans-serif type family. The font contains six weights (light, light italic, regular, italic, bold and bold italic), each containing 161 glyphs. The font is available in TrueType format. Designed by Dhany Arliyanti.

Geomancy Typeface (Free for personal use only)
Geomancy is a chunky, retro geometric font that hearkens to French and American art deco. With some letterforms taken directly from posters and ephemera of the period, the all-uppercase set comes with many alternates and ligatures, so you can give a little of that varied, hand-painted feel to your work. Available in two weights: hairline and extra bold.

Prociono
Prociono is an Esperanto word meaning either the star Procyon or the animal species known as the raccoon. It is a roman typeface with blackletter elements. The release includes both OTF and TTF. Source files are available as well.

Edelsans (Free for personal use only)
Edelsans was designed as a noble geometric font for the screen, with few corners and mostly rounded glyphs. The typeface is not completely finished but is free for non-commercial use.

Neu Eichmass
Neu Eichmass (German for New Etalon) is a typeface based on the weight 100 grams. The name is a reference to International Prototype kilogram, as a base unit of mass in the International System of Units. The typeface has a modern, cold, measured feel to it, reflecting its origin (its metal “parents”). It is a sans-serif font and takes inspiration from famous grotesques and stenciled types associated with marketplaces and street traders. Further inspiration comes from 1920s and ’30s constructivism. The font can be easily stenciled and is appropriate for different uses (street art, retail, independent shops, street markets). It comes in a headline font and a medium point body text suitable for print. Designed by Ivan Khmelevsky.

Ingleby Font
A beautiful, carefully crafted serif font, with signs of the fine antiqua tradition. Designed by David Engelby, the font comes in four weights: regular, italic, bold and bold italic.

Ibarra Real
Ibarra Real is a public domain font of Ibero-American character. Created in 2005, Ibarra Real is an elegant design, mixing tradition and modernity; a genuine badge of the particular Spanish culture that was created by Joaquín Ibarra in 1780. Available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Notice 1: Packaging Symbols (Download)
A symbols font with various weather, packaging and usage symbols.

Notice 2: Navigation symbols (Download)
Yet another symbols font, this one containing symbols for public transit, car and flight navigation.

Notice 3: Cloth Symbols (Download)
This symbols font contains pictograms for the clothing industry. The font is available in OpenType and was designed by the Russian studio Otlab.

Glyphyx (Registration required)
This set of two free fonts features symbols and icons for use in data visualization. Glyphyx One includes symbols related to transportation, while Glyphyx Two has symbols related to leisure activities. Available in OpenType and TrueType formats for Windows and Mac.

Free Symbol Signs Collection
Here is a collection of 50 common symbols for signage, professional designed. The symbols are free for use and are available in OpenType format. All were designed by Sander Baumann, set to the proportions of a regular typeface, so you no longer need to copy and paste such icons into your designs.

Rally Character Set (Specimen | Preview | Download)
Lukyan Turetsky released this character set of car rally symbols. The font contains standard signs of control in rallies, rally-related infographic icons, blanks for logos and other graphics, symbols for legends and other symbols and marks. In OpenType and available for free.

Oblik Serif Bold (Registration required)
Oblik Serif Bold is a sophisticated contemporary font with vivid and playful glyphs. The font could be a great fit for headlines and posters but is hardly usable for long body text. The font has wide character support and is available for free and commercial use. Comes in OpenType format.

Paranoid
Paranoid is a yet another experimental font, collaboratively designed by Simon Carrasco, John Stuart and Kevin Yeun Kit Lo. Paranoid is a purely geometric display face, conceived as a contribution to (and subtle critique of) the still growing trend of bold, geometric and counterless typography. It is equally suited to bringing back the joy of ’80s dance parties or expressing the ominous foreboding of inevitable nuclear disaster. A flexible face in spite of its limited form. Please contact the designers before using this font commercially.

01.BASE
This free font is bold and experimental. It would come handy for bold statements on t-shirts and posters. The font was designed by Fabian De Lange and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

Last Click

Typedia
Typedia is a community website dedicated to classifying typefaces and educating people about typefaces. Think of it as a cross between IMDB and Wikipedia, except for type. Anyone can join, add or edit pages for typefaces and the people behind them.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

20 Fresh High-Quality Free Fonts
25 New High-Quality Free Fonts
15 Beautiful High-Quality Free Fonts
40 Excellent Free Fonts for Professional Design
You can find over 80 more free fonts in our Fonts section.

(al)

Easy Code Checking With Unicorn: the W3C’s Unified Validator

As a SitePoint reader, you understand the importance of code validation. Even if you’re not a semantic shaman, fixing problems is far easier when you know your HTML and CSS is valid. There are many online and offline tools to help your validation efforts but you normally need to test HTML, CSS, and feeds separately. HTML5 validators are also in short supply.

The W3C’s Unicorn project could save your sanity. It’s a unified system which aggregates results from several validators to produce a single mark-up report. It includes checks for:

HTML — including HTML4, XHTML and HTML5
CSS 1, 2, 2.1, and 3 (although it appears to default to 2.1)
SVG basic and tiny
mobile device ’suitability’
feed checkers for formats including RSS and Atom

The tool can be used online at validator.w3.org/unicorn/ or you can download the open source Java code for offline usage.

Web Developer Toolbar integration

If you’re using the WDT extension for Firefox (not Chrome — sorry), you can add Unicorn as a validation tool. Open the WDT Options dialog and choose Tools in the left-hand pane. Click Add then enter:

W3C Unicorn for the description
choose URL for the tool type, and
enter the URL
http://validator.w3.org/unicorn/check?ucn_task=conformance&ucn_uri=

OK your way out and you should now find the Unicorn entry in your WDT Tools menu.

Have you tried Unicorn? Did your site pass validation? Will you use the tool regularly?

CSS Sprites Workflow

When you are coding up a brand new site, I think this is a pretty efficient workflow for how to handle CSS Sprites.

Ignore sprites entirely. Make every background image its own separate image and reference them as such in the CSS.
When you are reasonably sure the design is “done,” use the SpriteMe bookmarklet to create the sprite.

Comment out (not delete) the old background properties in the CSS and add in the new Sprites-based version:

#logo {
  /* background: url(images/logo.png) no-repeat; */
  background: url(images/sprite.png) -10px -579px no-repeat;
}

Don’t worry about the comments bloating your CSS, you should compress your CSS before serving it on live sites anyway which will remove those.

Now if you find yourself needing to update the images inside the sprite, the process can be:

Update individual images.
Comment out Sprited CSS background images and uncomment regular background images
Remake sprite with SpriteMe, replace
Swap comments again

One of the complaints of working with sprites is that it makes updating images harder. I think this process makes it much easier. I guess an even easier process would be to have a PSD of your sprite so you can update that directly without touching CSS. If you can pull that off, great. I personally feel more organized having individual graphics. SpriteMe also gives you CSS with the locations of all the sprites, so if you needed to change the size of images or add/delete them, you’ll get those new numbers automatically.

If you have your own workflow for working with sprites, please share!

Related: Setting up sprites diagonally is rather clever. The idea is then you can use the sprite as a background image of a larger box without fear of other graphics in the sprite showing up. This is at the cost of a larger sprite file size because of the extra white space.

Creating Impact With Photographic Backgrounds on the Web

As web designers, we generally try to design sites with three main goals:

1. Grab attention

2. Communicate a message

3. Create a lasting visual impression

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Your design and layout plays a big part in determining if visitors will stay long enough to view your content and see what you have to say. By creating visual impact you grab the viewers attention and (hopefully) get them interested enough to read your message.

There are several ways to create visual impact and in the past I’ve written about Contrast, Value and Color which are all very important elements in design. Many skilled designers are using photographic background elements to to create eye-catching sites while not losing the message in the middle. Let’s have a look at some examples. These sites are a mixture of Flash and HTML based sites.

Chicago L Shirts site displays their t-shirts as full-sized background images.

The Culinaria Food And Wine uses large photographs of food and drink with text overlaid on a semi-transparent white box.

In the Formoda site, the main background image changes in each section. The images are brightly colored yet leave plenty of white space for the main heading and brief message on each page.

Future Management And Marketing uses the same photographic image in the background throughout the site. The text is overlaid on a semi-transparent background.

Each section on the Green Infrastructure site features a photographic close-up a nature scene – leaves, shells, bubbles which complement the text on the page.

Go To China has some beautiful photography. Again each section has its own background image and information appears in a white text box above the image.

My Big Dog Bakery has an unusual collection of background image, but the home page (below) has a sweet old-fashioned image of a girl with a pack of Irish Wolfhounds.

August Creative Agency

What do you think of these sites? Do you like the use of large photographic backgrounds?

Designing Web Apps for the iPad

What’s stopping you from creating a functional app/website for the iPad? My answer was the Objective-C coding language, time constraints and having to deal with the infamous Apple App Store.

But if you’re a web designer, like me, and you think that designing for the iPad is outside the realm of possibility — think again.

Love it or hate it, the iPad is an incredible medium. There is no denying that the touch form factor will have an incredible impact on how designers approach user interaction. So get ahead of the game and start experimenting with iPad web apps now.

In this article, I will guide you through my creative process in which I developed a simple but useful iPad web app in just one weekend: BracketSlash.com.

I do not consider myself a professional iPad app developer, so if you feel a little apprehensive, let my experience be an inspiration to you.

Why Did I Create a Web App for the iPad?

I created a web-based iPad app mainly for my own personal use. I got fed up with the App Store and all the paid apps that didn’t do the trick.

My particular project is a news aggregating app that makes it easy to take 5 minutes every couple hours and keep up-to-date on news stories from a variety of sources.

This helps because I am in business/finance and it takes too long to go through a static newspaper or browse multiple websites.

It turned out better than I thought, so I figure it may be of use to others. I made a landing page at www.bracketslash.com allowing anyone with an iPad to use it 100% free.

Again, I do not consider myself a professional and I truly believe any web/graphic designer can learn from my experiences to create web apps better than most of the ones you find in the App Store currently.

Start with a Functional Goal

Don’t just say "I’m going to create an iPad app" without thinking about how your app will be valuable to the end-user. Even iPad games are targeted towards certain audiences.

Some questions to ask yourself to tease out the functional goal of your iPad app include:

What do you want your iPad app to accomplish?
Who will use your iPad app?
What needs are you trying to fulfill for your users?

The one thing you have to remember is that it is not possible to create the "app to end all apps." Your app cannot be everything to everyone. Think in simple terms and execute your idea flawlessly; you will be more successful this way.

Draw It Out!

If you draw things out by hand, great. If you use a graphics tablet, even better. If you go straight to Photoshop, kudos to you.

Whatever your workflow is, always get your ideas down first.

Personally I go straight into a design software like Photoshop. I use geometric shapes (such as the custom shape tools) to get my ideas down and then I add in details progressively.

My design evolved a number of times — and expect yours to do the same. Always refer back to your functional goal, thinking about how the end-user will be interacting with your app.

The iPad is a highly visual medium so spend time making it pretty. What’s great about designing for that iPad is you don’t have to worry about cross-browser or cross-device compatibility. If it works on your iPad, it will probably work on everyone else’s.

Here are some quick aesthetical tips for the iPad:

Create all your designs at 768px x 1024px — the native resolution of the iPad
Remember that the iPad displays both in portrait and landscape mode
Always note where you want scrolling to occur
Don’t be afraid to use native iPad GUI elements (Find the PSD here)

A Cautionary Note Regarding iPad Resolution

One thing I noticed is that the native screen resolution (768 x 1024) appears smaller on your iPad than on your computer monitor. So keep in mind that the iPad resolution will look bigger on your computer monitor.

This presents some issues with sizing and you will quickly find experimenting with typography to be a pain in the rear.

My suggestion is to save your mock design images and open them up on your iPad photo viewer to get a feel for the layout and typography. This is not the most elegant solution, but it worked for me.

Know the Limitations

Never set boundaries when you’re brainstorming. That being said, you will be more productive in your endeavor if you have an idea of what is and what is not possible when developing for the iPad. I got frustrated many times, not realizing some of the limitations.

For your convenience, I have outlined a few of the main limitations below.

No Flash

I think this one is fairly obvious. With all the uproar recently, you should know by now that the iPad cannot display Flash objects. I don’t necessarily agree with this path, but the simple solution is to just not use it.

You can accomplish similar feats with HTML5 and CSS3.

No Mouse Cursor

This means that mouse events, such as mouseover and hover events, are not possible.

You may be able to find some workaround for this, but conveying how they work to your users might be difficult.

Scrollbars Don’t Act as Expected

Scrollbars are not displayed for scrollable divs with overflowing content.

Frames also have height/width issues.

In addition, scrolling requires two-finger gestures. (We’ll discuss this more fully later down the article.)

No CSS Fixed Positioning

HTML elements with the position:fixed CSS property will not show up correctly and are frustrating to control.

There are some quick fixes available for this (more on this later on).

Use Your Fingers

This is the fun part. The #1 difference between browsing on your computer or laptop and browsing on your iPad is that you get to use your fingers. There are ways to optimize your site for iPad use with a few simple yet powerful solutions.

Redirect Users Based on Device/Browser

You can add a few lines of JavaScript in your page’s <head> tags to redirect the user to your app if they are visiting your site with an iPad.

The JS code block below checks to see if the user agent is an iPad. If it is an iPad, the user is redirected to the app page.

<script type="text/javascript">
  if ( (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('iPad') != -1) ) {
    document.location = "http://www.bracketslash.com/app.php";
  }
</script>

Set the Size of the Viewport

The viewport is the rectangular area that determines how content is laid out and where text wraps on the page when viewed on iPad.

Your computer and iPad viewports are slightly different. Safari on the iPad has no windows, scrollbars, or resize buttons. The user browses with their fingers. Most of the touch gestures can be controlled with some manipulation of code.

To set the dimensions of the viewport, add the following meta markup inside your <head> tags:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />

Different Style Sheets for Different Orientations

To use different style sheets for different orientations (landscape mode or portrait mode), just add the following media query in the <head> tags of your web page.

<link rel="stylesheet" media="all and (orientation:portrait)" href="portrait.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" media="all and (orientation:landscape)" href="landscape.css">

Note: This is not a necessary component and can be kind of distracting for the user if the two style sheets are significantly different.

Control Your Touch Scrolling with iScroll

This is easily the single most useful bit of code that can help you control your web app. Created by Matteo Spinelli, iScroll is a project developed because the WebKit web browser engine (which is used on the iPhone, iPod, iPad, Android, and Palm Pre) does not provide a native way to scroll content inside a fixed width/height element.

This unfortunate situation prevents any web app to have a header and/or footer with a position:absolute CSS property, and a scrolling central area for contents.

The iScroll code base is extremely easy to work with. If you like iScroll, you may also be akin to these jQuery plugins: jQuery Swipe and JQTouch.

Use the "Add to Home Screen" Button

In the Apple Safari web browser, the user has the option to add your app to their Home screen. This simply adds an icon similar to how a native app looks. To customize this icon, you can link it in the <head> tags using the following code. To be safe, make sure your icon is at least 72pxx72px.

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://www.yoursite.com/your-apple-touch-icon.png" />

Take Advantage of HTML5 and CSS3

Many high-profile websites have adapted and redesigned their sites, calling themselves "iPad Ready."

In reality, the majority of these sites have simply rearranged their content to fit the iPad’s resolution and aspect ratio.

Personally, I don’t get the point. HTML5/CSS3 is the future and aims to improve the web experience for everyone.

Here are some simple things you can do to take advantage of the emerging standards:

Use CSS3 gradients, font shadows, rounded boxes and borders — these are especially useful for menus and simple website designs.
If you want to show videos, use an HTML5 video player instead of a Flash one (which obviously won’t work).
Use HTML5 to create offline apps and store data offline.
Tutorials for these kinds of functionalities are everywhere, and I made use of them when developing my iPad web app. Google them. Get creative.

Keep Moving Forward

Don’t get held back by irrelevant details. If one of your design functions or ideas is not working as intended, find alternate solutions to the problem.

Don’t try to stick to your plan so precisely that you lose sight of your functional goals.

If things don’t work as planned, find a creative alternative and move on. I am an incredibly meticulous designer, which can be both a good and a bad thing.

I found that not everything I planned worked, and I learned that I have to just let things go, figure out workarounds, and learn from my mistakes for my future iPad apps.

Spread Awareness

One of the major barriers for web apps is that they are not as popular as native apps.

There is no Apple App Store equivalents to help you get recognized — especially if you are creating something commercial.

Getting your app out there is infinitely more difficult if you are a no-name developer (like myself, *haha*).

Let as many people know your web app exists. If it’s good, it should do well.

Native iPad Apps versus iPad Web Apps

What is the difference between apps in the App Store and websites created specifically for the iPad?

Many argue that web apps are the future and will quickly outperform their native counterparts; this is because the openness of the web is more appealing than closed platforms.

I have noted some simple comparisons below to shed light on how powerful web apps can be.

Native iPad Apps

Native Apps are faster: uses more of the iPad’s resources and capabilities.
No need to search the web: one-stop shopping on the App Store.
Users feel more comfortable: They know the app was made specifically for their device, not adapted using HTML5/CSS3.
Easier to turn on and off: Apps are made to turn on/off without interruption or loss of data.
More difficult to develop: requires knowledge of Objective-C and use of Apple SDK.
Closed Platform: difficult to adapt for other devices like the Android platform.

iPad Web Apps

Emerging coding standards: HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript are bringing incredible client-side functionality to the web; especially with local/offline storage.
Tailor the site for any browser: switch between style sheets or redirect pages depending on which device or browser your user is operating. It is possible to make your app universal.
Easy to develop: Use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create iPad web apps instead of learning new languages. These are skills you already have.
Steve Jobs can’t censor your web app: The web is an open platform — meaning that you are in control. No waiting to get approved by the App Store.
Small market, not enough support: web apps need strength in numbers which means not only attracting users but developers as well.

About the Author

Stephen Vescio is a 20 year-old business student and freelance designer. You can visit his personal site at stephenvescio.com. Check out his free iPad app at BracketSlash.com.

Is Freelancing Work Without the Boring Bits?

Every would-be freelancer dreams of freelancing as a golden age in which work will actually be fun, we’ll have new-found passion, and the things we do will really matter — at least to us. No more working for someone else. And no more office politics.

But is freelancing really that good? Is it a golden age? Everyone’s idea of work heaven is different, so I can’t answer that question for you. What I can do is point out the areas where freelancing has differed from what I expected. If your expectations are anything like mine, you’ll be forewarned.

Freelancing’s Own Boring Bits

Freelancing definitely has its own boring bits. For me they include the following.

1. Chasing up invoices

For me, this is the most boring of all bits. Chasing up invoices is frustrating and time consuming, and to my mind, should be unnecessary. I hate it.

One benefit of freelancing, of course, is that you can pick and choose what you do with your time. So I generally do not work for companies that don’t pay me on time. This keeps the amount of invoice follow-up I have to do to a bare minimum. And that means I can focus on the interesting bits of what I do.

2. Quiet times

I really loathe quiet times. In fact, that was one of the reasons I wanted to freelance: so I could do something other than sit around my desk when there wasn’t much to do. All the same, I find quiet times — which do happen — a bit disconcerting. Boring, even.

They do, however, give me a chance to catch up on all the small tasks I’ve been neglecting, and work on my own personal projects, so in this case, the boredom can be alleviated.

3. Tax and friends

When I worked for an employer, that organization looked after my taxation and my superannuation. Now I have to worry about all that myself, along with obtaining business registration and meeting other legal and regulatory requirements (did those words make you shudder?), and it can be super-boring.

Using an accountant and/or legal adviser might be the way to go for most freelancers, but if you’re just starting out, you probably won’t feel you have the spare cash to splash around on these kinds of professionals. This belief can wind up hurting your business in the long run if you make mistakes, though, so even if you think finding an accountant or lawyer sounds dull, it’s probably a lot less tedious than the problems you’ll face if you don’t find one.

Either way, tax, legalities, and their friends are a pretty boring bunch.

4. Client misperceptions

Many clients seem to think that “freelancer” means you work all hours, and “contractor” means you can start working in a full-time temp role immediately. Constantly battling with clients to convince them that you work during business hours (and — yes — a phone call at 8pm on a Sunday is unreasonable), or negotiating more than five minutes’ notice to start an on-site contract, can wear thin very quickly.

To reduce the tedium, I try to see the funny side of things while I remind clients of my hours for what feels like the billionth time. I also focus on giving them a really great product by the deadline that I negotiate, rather than stewing over the client’s “unreasonable” demands.

5. Cashflow worries

Cashflow worries tend to be more of an issue for the freelancer than the salaried worker. It’s not just about having your invoices paid; it’s about finding work and completing it in a manner that coincides with your next grocery bill.

Cashflow requires planning, which I don’t mind, but I’m no fan of the endless where-will-I-find-next-month’s-income questions. Since I began freelancing, I’ve learned to have a little faith, but also to be more courageous about approaching people for work. But in my case, once next month’s income is sorted, I’m thinking about the following month’s, or the one after. This is one unavoidable boring bit I’m learning to accept.

Is Freelancing Work Without the Boring Bits?

No. Freelancing has its very own boring bits. For me, most of them are easy to manage, but most of them are also unavoidable. A born cynic, I was sure freelancing wasn’t for me for a very long time, because I assumed the boring bits would outweigh the benefits.

They don’t. While freelancing may not be work without the boring bits, for me, it’s a great way to live my life, enjoy a sense of control over what I do, and gain access to the kinds of projects and people that no single company has ever offered me.

What do you think are freelancing’s most boring bits? And how do you manage them?

Image by stock.xchng user pinkfloyd.

Wufoo API Contest

We’re giving away a friggin’ Battle Axe (and $3,000) to the winner of the Wufoo API contest. Cash prizes and Wufoo accounts for life to the second and third place winners as well. Developers, you have until the end of this month! Check out the page for ideas and API wrappers.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Aug 11^th

Should You Enforce Password Restrictions?

I dislike password restrictions. Passwords may be a necessarily evil, but they’re more repulsive when a perfectly reasonable key is rejected. We’ve all seen “errors” such as:

Your password is too short.
Your password must contain letters and numbers only.
Your password must be between 8 and 10 characters, use letters with at least one in uppercase, and have between one and four numbers. Please close your eyes, face north and recite Shakespeare while typing it.

Then, after you’ve spent 3 hours devising a reasonable password which adheres to the rules, you’re forced to change it again 7 days later.

I can understand banks and Government departments don’t want novices choosing “password” as their secret key, but are users so naive? (OK, don’t answer that.) Actually, “password” could be a reasonable option: do hackers bother trying it? One of the best passwords I ever defined had zero characters — no one ever attempted to enter nothing!

Does your Twitter client, photo gallery or blog comments form really require a password restriction? There are a number of issues with the approach:

It’s an irritation for users — especially those who understand the security implications.
Strict rules provide hackers with a template — they know not to bother trying passwords which are less than 8 characters, more than 12, have no numbers, etc.
The rules make passwords far more difficult to remember — especially if you’re forced to change them regularly. Many users will simply write it down on a post-it note and stick it to their screen.
If you specify what constitutes a “good” password, does it mean you’re partly responsible when a user’s account is compromised?

In my opinion, users should be allowed to choose whatever password they want. You can show a warning message when an easily-broken password is entered but, if they want the letter ‘p’, why not let them use it?

If you can’t trust users to enter a decent password, don’t let them choose one: create a random string and post it to them via email or snail mail.

Do you use password restrictions on your system? Has it been more or less successful than no restrictions whatsoever?

Web Directions USA Interview: Dan Rubin

I recently had a chance to talk to Dan Rubin about his upcoming participation in Web Directions USA, and here are some of the highlights.

Alyssa Gregory: Let’s start by talking about your upcoming presentations at Web Directions USA. Can you tell me what I can expect from each of your sessions?

Dan Rubin: There’s quite a bit of overlap between the workshop and presentation, though of course the latter is much more about demonstrating a lot in a short amount of time, and the former will be much more focused on participation by the attendees.

Both sessions are focused on the point where HTML5, CSS3 and visual design collide (in a good way) and how much-improved browser support is now allowing us to take full advantage of these tools, letting the rendering engines do more of the heavy lifting rather than relying on images. Recreating visual effects that used to require javascript or exporting images from a graphics editor like Photoshop is a great way to speed the loading and rendering of interface elements, while making it easier than ever to change or adapt our designs down the road.

There will also be plenty about grounding ourselves and not getting carried away with new toys like CSS Transitions and Transforms, or all manner of text-shadow and box-shadow tomfoolery. Far too often, web designers get caught up in the excitement over whatever is new and feels cutting edge, while losing sight of whether the design, interaction and user experience improves or deteriorates as a result.

I’m much more interested in how browsers (and technology in general) can help us do what we’re already doing, only better and easier, and I try to teach and promote that way of thinking and implementation.

AG: Tell me a little more about HTML5 and CSS3. How can the everyday designer use these technologies to make their work better and be more accessible?

DR: In a nutshell, HTML5 is the result of an evolutionary process, and as many before me have said, it’s far from revolutionary — and this is a good thing. If you know how to construct a document using semantic markup, you know how to write HTML5. As a designer, the new elements (section, article, audio, video and others) aren’t nearly as interesting as they might be to developers, but the important thing is that they don’t require any special knowledge to use if you already know how to write HTML. The Canvas element (not part of HTML5, but grouped with it more often than not) also brings powerful drawing and manipulation capabilities to browsers without the use of plugins.

The best resource to date on HTML5 is Jeremy Keith’s fantastic book, HTML5 for Web Designers. I can’t recommend it highly enough. For an online resource, SitePoint’s HTML5 Live with John Allsopp is great way to learn from the comfort of your own couch.

Much like HTML5 and previous versions of HTML, CSS3 isn’t much different than CSS2.1 — the most important thing is the browser support for many of the new properties. Folks may already be familiar with text-shadow, box-shadow, border-radius and opacity (which have been available to Webkit browsers for some time). They are definitely a big part of what CSS3 means to designers, and now have much broader browser support, in addition to designers really starting to understand that it’s just fine if sites display and behave a little differently in some browsers. We also now have multiple backgrounds (IE9 will support them!), and CSS columns and gradients have enough support to make their use worthwhile in many cases.

There are also a host of new selectors that have terrific support across the current crop of browsers, including :first-of-type, :nth-of-type(), :last-child, :empty, :selection, and :target, to name a few. These selectors, along with better support for CSS2.1 selectors, allow us to handle a lot of logic into our CSS that used to require JavaScript.

Also available (and full of exciting possibilities) are Media Queries, which allow us to tailor our stylesheets to various devices (not simply targeting specific devices, but specific characteristics of those devices). Though we’ve been using Media Queries for a while now (print and iPhone-specific stylesheets, for example), they are rapidly gaining popularity and attention thanks to an amazing article by Ethan Marcotte, published over on A List Apart. This is the future of web design, and what it should have been from the very beginning.

Once designers start thinking and designing with these tools in mind, our interfaces will become more responsive to the needs of users.

AG: Have you been involved in previous Web Directions events? What is one of the biggest benefits of attending an event like this?

DR: I was a volunteer behind the scenes for the first Web Directions North, held in Vancouver in 2007, and it was really a great experience as I was able to spend time getting to know John and Maxine better, plus the other fantastic volunteer staff, and attend many of the sessions (I even introduced Paul Hammond and George Oates for their combined presentation).

Attending events like Web Directions offers an opportunity to learn from some of the best in our industry (the speakers, organizers, and often the attendees), and more importantly it provides an environment for conversations, debates, laughter and commiseration with like-minded individuals who understand what you do. The hallway time between sessions, and the random chats at after parties and over meals/drinks are as big a part of the experience of a conference as the sessions and Q&A.

AG: You have a pretty impressive resume, Dan. What’s next for you?

DR: I get a bit dizzy when I think about what’s “next” — for me, everything’s still to come: whatever I’ve done to get to where I am now is just practice for whatever I decide to do tomorrow.

I can, however, list a few things I’d love to practice in the near future: wayfinding / environmental graphic design, type design, book design, write another book or two, self publish at least once, design and/or consult on physical product design, architectural and portrait photography, start a foundation (for a still-semi-secret Big Idea™)… I could probably go on and on :)

AG: One last question: will you be doing any singing at Web Directions USA? :)

DR: Will there be karaoke? I can’t resist karaoke…

AG: Thanks for your time, Dan!

Dan is a highly accomplished user interface designer and usability consultant, with over ten years of experience as a leader in the fields of web standards and usability, specifically focusing on the use of (X)HTML and CSS to streamline development and improve accessibility. His passion for all things creative and artistic isn’t a solely selfish endeavor either—you’ll frequently find him waxing educational about a cappella jazz and barbershop harmony, interface design, usability, web standards, typography, and graphic design in general.

tip: Win a Ticket to Web Directions

We’re giving one lucky SitePoint reader the chance to win a ticket to either Web Directions South in Sydney, Australia, or Web Directions USA (you’ll need to pay any airfares or accommodation). Just take our short quiz, and you could be in the running. But you better be quick — there are only a couple of days left!

Take the quiz!

Double Click in CSS

With the recent proliferation of touch devices, the web designers of the world are losing our beloved mouse pointer. There has been some interesting talk about how we essentially lose the :hover pseudo class in CSS as well as mouseenter, mouseleave, and mousemove in JavaScript. Then just earlier this week I did a post about how you can use the tabindex attribute to basically respond to a click with pure CSS. It got me thinking, can we somehow pull of a double click with pure CSS too? This would by no means replace the hover event, but might be somewhat of an alternative to have the sequence be: tap → change state / activate link → tap again to visit link.

Rabble rabble rabble!

These newfangled touch devices all support JavaScript anyway! You can just use JavaScript to make double click events! Rabble rabble rabble!

Yes, you can. For anyone interested, “dblclick” is a native JavaScript event. If you wanted to, for example, force links to be double clicked instead of single clicked, you could bind a simple { return false; } function to the click event. Then also bind a function to dblclick that would change the window.location to the links href attribute.

This article isn’t about that, it’s about hardcore CSS nerdery and seeing if we can also do it without using JavaScript.

The Results

I really wanted to boil it down to one technique and declare it the best possible way to accomplish CSS double clicking. But as it turns out, there are just too many issues and considerations to do that. Instead, I made up a page showing all the most interesting techniques tried.

Most of the techniques involve some kind of covering element which is hidden, kicked off the page, or buried when the first click happens. That first click can come in the form of :active or :focus. :active is nice because it doesn’t require HTML5. :focus does, because it needs the element to have a tabindex or contenteditable attribute to be able get focus. One way around that was to use an input element to do the covering, but that has it’s own quirks.

All in all, it was a nerdy good time poking around with this idea. There are probably dozens more ideas, but for something this ultimately trivial I had to nip it in the bud and call it a wrap.

View Demo

Credits

There was probably more than twenty different things tried between me and others. Special thanks to Darcy Bross and this comment on Forrst for the first lead into working examples and to Mattias Buelens and Topher Wilson for playing with it and working on variations.

If you want to play around with the idea, I suggest tinking around on JSBin and saving your best examples. I’ll link em up here if you guys figure out some awesome ones. Here are some interesting ones that happened in playing with all this:

http://jsbin.com/uqana4/2/
http://jsbin.com/owuso/6/

The Future of the Internet

“In only a few short years, electronic computing systems have been invented and improved at a tremendous rate. But computers did not ‘just grow.’ They have evolved… They were born and they are being improved as a consequence of man’s ingenuity, his imagination… and his mathematics.” — 1958 IBM brochure

The Internet is a medium that is evolving at breakneck speed. It’s a wild organism of sweeping cultural change — one that leaves the carcasses of dead media forms in its sizeable wake. It’s transformative: it has transformed the vast globe into a ‘global village’ and it has drawn human communication away from print-based media and into a post-Gutenberg digital era. Right now, its perils are equal to its potential. The debate over ‘net neutrality’ is at a fever pitch. There is a tug-of-war going on between an ‘open web’ and a more governed form of the web (like the Apple-approved apps on the iPad/iPhone) that has more security but less freedom.

An illustration of a computer from a 1958 IBM promotional brochure titled ‘World of Numbers’

So what’s the next step in its evolution, and what’s the big picture? What does the Internet mean as an extension of human communication, of the human mind? And forget tomorrow — where will the web be in fifty years, or a hundred? Will the Internet help make the world look like something out of Blade Runner or Minority Report? Let’s just pray it doesn’t have anything to do with The Matrix sequels, because those movies really sucked.

This article will offer in-depth analysis of a range of subjects — from realistic expectations stemming from current trends to some more imaginative speculations on the distant future.

[Offtopic: By the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has a mobile version? Try it out if you have an iPhone, Blackberry or another capable device.]

Security

“Death of the Open Web”?

Those words have an ominous ring for those of us who have a deep appreciation of the Internet as well as high hopes for its future. The phrase comes from the title of a recent New York Times article that struck a nerve with some readers. The article paints a disquieting picture of the web as a “haphazardly planned” digital city where “malware and spam have turned living conditions in many quarters unsafe and unsanitary.”

There is a growing sentiment that the open web is a fundamentally dangerous place. Recent waves of hacked WordPress sites revealed exploited PHP vulnerabilities and affected dozens of well-known designers and bloggers like Chris Pearson. The tools used by those with malicious intent evolve just as quickly as the rest of the web. It’s deeply saddening to hear that, according to Jonathan Zittrain, some web users have stooped so low as to set up ‘Captcha sweatshops’ where (very) low-paid people are employed to solve Captcha security technology for malicious purposes all day. This is the part where I weep for the inherent sadness of mankind.

“If we don’t do something about this,” says Jonathan Zittrain of the insecure web, “I see the end of much of the generative aspect of the technologies that we now take for granted.” Zittrain is a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University and the author of The Future of the Internet: and How to Stop It; watch his riveting Google Talk on these subjects.

The Wild West: mainstream media’s favorite metaphor for today’s Internet

The result of the Internet’s vulnerability is a generation of Internet-centric products — like the iPad, the Tivo and the XBOX — that are not easily modified by anyone except their vendors and their approved partners. These products do not allow unapproved third-party code (such as the kind that could be used to install a virus) to run on them, and are therefore more reliable than some areas of the web. Increased security often means restricted or censored content — and even worse — limited freedoms that could impede the style of innovation that propels the evolution of the Internet, and therefore, our digital future.

The web of 2010 is a place where a 17 year-old high school student can have an idea for a website, program it in three days, and quickly turn it into a social networking craze used by millions (that student’s name is Andrey Ternovskiy and he invented Chatroulette). That’s innovation in a nutshell. It’s a charming story and a compelling use of the web’s creative freedoms. If the security risks of the Internet kill the ‘open web’ and turn your average web experience into one that is governed by Apple or another proprietary company, the Andrey Ternovskiys of the world may never get their chance to innovate.

Security Solutions

We champion innovation on the Internet and it’s going to require innovation to steer it in the right direction. Jonathan Zittrain says that he hopes we can come together on agreements for regulating the open web so that we don’t “feel that we have to lock down our technologies in order to save our future.”

According to Vint Cerf, vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, “I think we’re going to end up looking for international agreements – maybe even treaties of some kind – in which certain classes of behavior are uniformly considered inappropriate.”

Perhaps the future of the Internet involves social structures of web users who collaborate on solutions to online security issues. Perhaps companies like Google and Apple will team up with international governmental bodies to form an international online security council. Or maybe the innovative spirit of the web could mean that an independent, democratic group of digital security experts, designers, and programmers will form a grassroots-level organization that rises to prominence while fighting hackers, innovating on security technology, writing manifestos for online behavior, and setting an example through positive and supportive life online.

Many people are fighting to ensure your ability to have your voice heard online — so use that voice to participate in the debate, stay informed, and demand a positive future. Concerned netizens and Smashing readers: unite!

Freedom

Net Neutrality

Some believe that the fate of the Internet has been up for grabs ever since the federal government stopped enforcing ‘network neutrality’ rules in the mid-2000’s. In a nutshell, net neutrality means equality among the information that travels to your computer: everyone has the right to build a website that is just as public, affordable, and easily accessible as any other. However, some companies like phone and internet service providers are proposing ‘pay tiers’ (web service where you need to pay premium fees in order to allow visitors to access your site quickly). These tiers of web service could kill net neutrality by allowing those who can afford premium service (particularly large media companies who don’t like sharing their audience with your blog) greater access to consumers than the average web user.

The debate over net neutrality reached a boiling point when Google and Verizon announced a ‘joint policy proposal for an open Internet’ on August 9th, 2010. Despite the proposal’s call for a “new, enforceable prohibition against discriminatory practices” amongst online content, many criticized it, citing leniency and loopholes.

Net neutrality needs to be made law. If the Internet were to have a slow lane and a fast lane, your average web user could lose many of his or her freedoms and opportunities online, thereby shattering the core values that make the Internet so profoundly valuable to society. However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg for this thorny issue. To learn more, read the full proposal or watch the Bill Moyers episode ‘The Net @ Risk.’

The World into the Web

Browser-based Everything

Google is developing a variety of applications and programs that exist entirely within the browser. Their PAC-MAN game was a preview of what’s to come because it allowed in-browser play of a simple, lightweight video game that required no downloads and relied on pure HTML, CSS, and Javascript. At the company’s 2010 I/O conference, Google laid out its plans to develop “rich multimedia applications that operate within the browser” (according to this New York Times report on the conference). The company plans to sell in-browser web applications like photo editing software (imagine using a Photoshop equivalent entirely within the browser) that it will sell in a web applications store called the Chrome Web Store.

If our programs and applications are about to be folded into the browser, what will exist within the browser in ten years? Currency? Education? Consciousness? Personally, I’m hopeful that my browser will be able to produce piping hot cheeseburgers sometime soon.

The Internet as a Collective Consciousness

The Internet is a medium, and philosopher Marshall McLuhan believed that all media are extensions of the human senses. The engine of our collective creative efforts is the force that’s causing the web to evolve more rapidly than any biological organism ever has.

Transcendence is one of the great themes of human culture. Image of seated Buddha statue: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Internet is an extension of the collective human mind and it’s evolving into a medium of transcendence. By constructing a place where the collective human consciousness is both centralized in one location (on your computer) and globally accessible (for those with the means to reach or use a computer, that is), our human spirit is transcending the human body. Way back in 1964, McLuhan himself wondered, “might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?”

With the advent of trends including social media, ‘lifecasting,’ and ‘mindcasting,’ the Internet is being used as a real-time portal for the human consciousness. Perhaps those trends will be inverted by some web users of the future: instead of bringing offline life to the web (as so-called ‘lifecasters’ do when they stream live video of their attendance at an offline event), some web users will live their entire public lives online. Imagine a pop star who conducts her entire career online: every interview, live performance, music video or album release conducted solely through a browser window or mobile screen. Or a media theorist who exploited the platform of the web while discussing the theoretical ramifications of those actions. It’d be a great gimmick.

The Web into the World

The ‘Web of Things’

The ‘web of things’ or ‘Internet of things’ is a concept that will be a reality (at least in a rudimentary form) in the near future. The idea is that devices, appliances, and even your pets can all be tracked online. With Google Maps for iPhone, you can currently track your location on a digital map in relation to the streets and landmarks in your area. So it’s not hard to imagine a world where you can zoom in on your location and see detailed, 3D renderings of your surroundings: the cars on your block, the coffee machine in your kitchen, even Rover running around in your backyard! And it’s a good thing that you’re digitally tracking the location of poor Rover; he’s liable to hop the fence and make a run for it now that you’ve created a satellite computer out of everything you own (including his dog collar) by attaching a tracking device to it.

AT&T is betting big on the web of things. According to this Reuters article, the phone service provider is investing in tracking devices that could be installed in cars, on dog collars, and on the pallets used to move large shipments of products. The dog collar, for example, “could send text messages or emails to the owner of a pet when it strays outside a certain area, or the device could allow continuous tracking of the pet.”

Combine the concept of the ‘web of things’ with Second Life-style 3D imaging and you can imagine a web-based duplicate world — a virtual world that corresponds to the real one. But what are the implications of a world where every physical item has a corresponding digital existence online? Can we track the physical effects of climate change in the web of things? Will there be a digital avatar for every pelican carcass in the vicinity of the oil spill that’s devastating the Gulf of Mexico? It’s a tragic shame to develop a virtual world if we let the natural one go to waste in the meantime.

Interactive Landscapes

It has been said that today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s reality. Unfortunately, most good science fiction stories are cautionary tales set in dystopian nightmares.

QR codes on the façade of Japan’s N Building. Photo: Gizmodo

Simon Mainwaring reports on the N building in Japan, where “the whole building facade has been transformed into a real time dialogue between smart phones and what’s going on inside the store.” The exterior of the building is layered with QR codes (an alternate form of bar code) that can deliver real-time information to your phone. In Stephen Spielberg’s film Minority Report (adapted from a short story by mad genius Philip K. Dick), Gap ads came alive to hawk khakis to Tom Cruise. Looks like we’re about one step away from this scenario.

Mr. Mainwaring imagines a future with “billboards that watch you shop and make targeted suggestions based on your age, location and past buying habits,” and “stores will effectively be turned inside out as dialogue and personalized interaction with customers begins outside the store.”

The technology is cool, but it sounds like a pretty annoying future if you ask me. Who wants to be accosted by a holographic salesperson? The web grants us a great opportunity to use our collective voices to speak out on topics that matter to us. Because there are no regulations yet for much of this technology, it may be up to concerned citizens to make themselves heard if Internet-based technology is used in intrusive or abrasive ways.

The ‘Innerweb’

Cyborgs are among us already — humans whose physical abilities have been extended or altered by mechanical elements built into the body (people who live with pacemakers are one example). What will happen when the Internet becomes available on a device that is biologically installed in a human? What will the first internal user interfaces look like?

Here’s one speculation.

In the near future, we may be capable of installing the Internet directly into the user’s field of vision via a tiny computer chip implanted into the eye. Sound far-fetched? I doubt that it would sound far-fetched for Barbara Campbell, whose sight has been partially restored by a digital retinal implant (CNN reports on Barbara’s artificial retina).

Ms. Campbell was blind for many years until she had a small microchip surgically implanted in her eye. A rudimentary image of Ms.Campbell’s surroundings is transmitted to the device, which stimulates cells in her retina, in turn transmitting a signal to her brain. It’s a miracle that the development of a bionic eye has begun to help the blind see.

How else might doctors and scientists take advantage of the internal microchip? Perhaps the user’s vision will be augmented with an Internet-based interface with capabilities including geolocation or object identification. Imagine if technology like Google Goggles (a web-based application that identifies images from landmarks to book covers) was applied inside that interface. The act of seeing could not only be restored but augmented; a user might be capable of viewing a landscape while simultaneously identifying web-based information about it or even searching it for physical objects not visible to the naked eye. Apply the concept of augmented sight with the idea of the ‘web of things’ — an environment where physical objects have a corresponding presence on the web — and you can imagine a world where missing people are located, theft is dramatically reduced, the blind can see, and ’seeing’ itself means something more than it used to.

If the web is an extension of our senses, it follows suit that the web may be capable of modifying those senses or even accelerating their evolution.

The Crown Jewels

“The next Bill Gates will be the deliverer of a highly technological solution to some of our climate change challenges.” — Lord Digby Jones of Birmingham

In preparation for this article, I considered a variety of wild ideas and fun speculations about the future. Could the Internet be used to solve the problem of climate change, generate tangible matter, or contact extraterrestrial life? Maybe those ideas sound like the stuff of imaginative fiction, but in a world where quantum teleportation has been achieved and researchers have created a living, synthetic cell, it almost seems as if the concept of science fiction is being eradicated while real technology brings our wildest fantasies to life. Here is the result of my most daring (absurd?) speculation.

Time Travel

The functionality of the Internet relies on a linear series of events. Image: Eadweard Muybridge

I called on physics teacher Mark Stratil to answer my last burning question: could the Internet ever be capable of facilitating the development of time travel? Here’s Mark’s answer:

“The Internet is still based on computers, which make linear calculations. Right now, all computers are based on binary code, which is a series of yes and no questions. You can make something that’s incredibly complex with a series of yes and no questions, but it takes a certain amount of time. The Internet still has to go through those calculations and it still physically has to make one calculation that will lead to the next calculation that will lead to the next. So no matter how fast we can get our computers – they’re making billions of calculations, trillions of calculations per second – there’s still going to be some lag time. They’re still limited by time in that way. They still need some time to make that conversation or that calculation.

In that way, they’re kind of chained to time. Their whole existence is based on a linear sequence of things that happen. In order to create something else, something that goes outside of time, you would have to make it a non-linear system — something that that’s not based on a series of yes and no questions, because those have to be answered in a precise order. It would have to be some kind of system that was answering all the questions at once.”

So Mark’s short answer to my fundamental question was basically that the Internet, in its current state, would not be capable of facilitating time travel. However, if the Internet was liberated from the linear structure of binary code and migrated onto an operating system that ‘answered all questions at once,’ then maybe it could have the potential to manipulate time or transcend the boundaries of time.

Sounds unlikely at this point, but one of the Internet’s greatest capabilities is the opportunity to share and develop ideas like these!

Conclusion

Responsible Evolution

Through technology, we hold the reins to our own evolution.

For the first time in history, it might be said that there are moral implications in the act of evolution. The Internet is an extension of our senses and our minds, and its progress is propelled by our own creative and intellectual efforts. The future of the Internet will be shaped by millions of choices and decisions by people from all walks of life. Designers and programmers like us have the advantage of technical skill and specialized knowledge. Given the increasing presence of the Internet in our lives, our choices can have deep reverberations in human society.

We’ll face small choices like what color to use for a button and larger choices like which platforms to endorse and which clients to support with our work. But the real questions form broad patterns behind every media trend and every mini technological revolution. Can we use technology to develop solutions to environmental problems — or will we abandon the natural world in favor of a digital one and the ‘web of things’? Have we fully considered what it means to merge biology and technology? And finally, do we really need a digital tracking device on our coffee machines?

What a thrilling time to be alive! Let’s proceed with great enthusiasm and a commitment to designing a future that is meaningful, peaceful, and staggeringly exciting.

Partial Bibliography

You may be interested in the following related posts:

Win a Custom Logo Design from Inkd

Inkd, the world’s first online marketplace for creative businesses, is giving away a standard custom logo design package, worth $299 to one lucky Six Revisions winner. Does your new company need an identity? Want to revamp your current brand with a modernized logo? Inkd is here to help!

Two professional designers from Inkd’s headquarters in Seattle, WA will work on your logo to produce 4 initial concepts, and then you will have up to 5 revision rounds to fine-tune and perfect your design. Get that unique and defining mark your business needs today with a custom logo from Inkd!

What is Inkd?

Inkd is the world’s first online marketplace for creative businesses. It’s the best place to find design templates, PowerPoint templates, logos, online printing — including new plastic cards and other creative business collateral.

Inkd is a true "buy and sell" community where graphic designers can upload business creative, and individuals and firms can download and use them as a cost effective starting point for their marketing.

Signing up is free and takes only a minute of your time.

All of the designs on Inkd are screened before being posted on the site, so you are sure to get only the best designs from the best pro graphic designers. Check out Inkd today!

How to Win the Custom Logo Design Package from Inkd

To win, simply leave a comment stating how you’ll benefit from Inkd’s custom logo design package.

This giveaway ends on August 18, 2010, after which the commenting system on this post will be closed.

Please only comment once. Leave a valid email address when filling out the comment web form so that we can contact you if you’ve won. Winners will be selected in the same method as previous Six Revisions giveaways. The winner will be announced on a separate post, so stay tuned via our RSS feed to see if you’ve won!

About the Author

Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He’s also a web developer/designer who specializes in front-end development (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) and also a book author. If you’d like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.

This group is pulling updates from:

rss json

« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 … 29 30 Next »

Some Random Dude's Latest Updates From "appreciation"

Using Design to Make Ideas New

Designing for Obama

Paula Scher Gets Serious

An Interview With Debbie Millman

David Carson on Design and Discovery

Designing the Obama Campaign

Three Ways Good Design Makes You Happy

Designs to Save Newspapers

Typographic Hierarchy

Urging Designers to Think Big

How to Make a Font

How Art Shapes Culture

An Interview With Erik Spiekermann

Happy Design

Interview With Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere

John Maeda on His Journey in Design

Two Minutes With Robin Nicholas

The True Face of Leonardo Da Vinci

Five Secrets from 86 Notebooks

Thinking Deep on Design

Two Minutes With Nadine Chahine

Treating Design as Art

Practice Makes Pixel Perfect

Intricate Beauty by Design

Designing for the Tablet

Other Resources

Impact for Regular Users

Impact for Power Users

What’s Your Take?

The Boring Technical Part

The Catch

Why Use IDNs?

Making Your Own

Step 1: Find the Symbol You Want

Step 2: Test the Symbol on a Web Page in Different Browsers

Step 3: Check Availability

Step 4: Set Up the Domain Name with Your Host

Share Your Short URLs

Related Content

About the Author

Gradient Structure

Bonus: The unlocky thing in jQuery

What is a Client Welcome Packet?

Why Bother?

What’s In a Client Welcome Packet?

New Free High-Quality Fonts

Last Click

Related Posts

Web Developer Toolbar integration

Why Did I Create a Web App for the iPad?

Start with a Functional Goal

Draw It Out!

A Cautionary Note Regarding iPad Resolution

Know the Limitations

No Flash

No Mouse Cursor

Scrollbars Don’t Act as Expected

No CSS Fixed Positioning

Use Your Fingers

Redirect Users Based on Device/Browser

Set the Size of the Viewport

Different Style Sheets for Different Orientations

Control Your Touch Scrolling with iScroll

Use the "Add to Home Screen" Button

Take Advantage of HTML5 and CSS3

Keep Moving Forward

Spread Awareness

Native iPad Apps versus iPad Web Apps

Native iPad Apps

iPad Web Apps

Related Content

About the Author

Freelancing’s Own Boring Bits

1. Chasing up invoices

2. Quiet times

3. Tax and friends

4. Client misperceptions

5. Cashflow worries

Is Freelancing Work Without the Boring Bits?