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Articles by Beth Dean
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Function Comes First
Open the doors to real communication
I was traveling to work by train, as usual. I guess I am not in the best of moods when I am still fresh from bed, but I was getting really irritated by the doors between compartments. I don’t know how many times I have had to help elderly people get through them because those doors are really heavy. Surely the person who designed them was thinking of a way to make sure the doors closed themselves without mechanisms that could wear off. Impeccable logic if it wasn’t for the fact that people can’t even open them. Yet there are several trains like that.
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Weekly News and Links Round Up
Find out what’s going on this week in web design.
- Adobe Opines on how the web is changing Hollywood.
- Another good Adobe article about developing a magazine from start to finish with CSS and WordPress. Sidenote: Please ignore that the authors of this article talk about CSS like it’s some new technology and something you could develop a non-Flash site without.
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What’s Your Level of Knowledge
With the standards war coming to an end many designers find themselves forced to draw the proverbial line in the sand, and ultimately determining what level of standards and accessibility knowledge they want to possess. Memes are popping up everywhere declaring absolutist views on everything from CSS levels to AJAX skills. We ask ourselves which of these categories we fall into, and whether we’re behind or ahead of the fold. This breed of thinking gets the community nowhere if we all bicker over who has the largest- CSS vocabulary. We begin to lose sight of the most important part of our jobs; our client’s needs.
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Dynamic Scrollbars in Flash (an Introduction to Components)
A few weeks ago we learned how to load dynamic text in Flash. So what if your external text file has more characters than your text field, or the amount of text fluctuates? Lucky for us Macromedia introduced the scrollbar component in MX 2004, which makes this a breeze. What’s a component you say?
Read more on Dynamic Scrollbars in Flash (an Introduction to Components)…
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Loading External MovieClips in Flash
Loading external MovieClips is one of the easiest ways to keep your SWF file size down and and load times low. For example, if one were creating a portfolio in Flash, one could make a main movie, and then another movie for each piece of work to be loaded. Then when a user browses the portfolio, they need only wait for the pieces they’ve selected, rather than wait for all pieces to load. One can also apply the
loadMovieaction to non-progressive JPGs. -
RSS – What Have You Done for Me Lately?
Why I don’t use RSS.
I want to use RSS, I really do. I just don’t have a reason. I haven’t seen many offerings beyond blog or news updates, and even that isn’t particularly interesting to me. There’s probably about 50 sites I read daily, and I’ve yet to find a good system for doing so. At the moment I divide all regularly read bookmarks in Firefox into two folders, daily, and weekly. Sometimes I open the whole folder twice daily, just to see if a few pages have updated, which I’m sure is screwing with someone’s stats. I tried tagging everything in del.icio.us, only to find myself missing the “open all tabs” advantage from Firefox. Perhaps part of this has to do with being a Windows user, I’ve yet to find an aggregator that presents the content in a manner which satisfies me.
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Dynamic Flash doesn’t have to hurt, I promise.
Let’s face it, as a designer you probably don’t have time to make minor updates to every web site you’ve ever worked on, which means you have to make this process as easy as possible for your clients. This is why we create dynamic sites. I’ve seen countless tutorials explaining dynamic text in Flash go on and on for pages with several necessary companion files, all of which are overkill. In a few painless steps (six, in fact) you can make updating the copy of your Flash movie as uncomplicated as editing a .txt file.
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Headline design tips
Don’t believe everything you learned in journalism school; becoming great at headline design is a learning process with a lot of room for flexibility and creativity.
Are you making the most of your headline options? From font sizes and choices to different ways to layer information, here are some tips gleaned mainly from experience:
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Create a Positive Home Work Environment
A lot of designers don’t have the luxury of choosing the optimal work space, but just because you don’t have an Aeron chair doesn’t mean you can’t be comfortable and productive. Here’s a few tips to help you make do with the guest room/basement/attic home office.
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Breaking for Lunch with Adobe Acrobat
Doing the lunch break with coworkers, especially when everyone’s engrossed in important projects, isn’t always as easy as phoning in an order. With each person on an independent timeline, collecting food choices for delivery can take longer than expected. Using Adobe Acrobat‘s Send for Review function is a good way of speeding up the proccess of finding out what each coworker wants to eat and collecting those choice in one convenient PDF.
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Even if belated, here is an overview of the most powerful publishing package I have ever come across
Adobe Creative Suite 2–it’s like the Christmas present I always wanted when I was a kid but that I would never find under the tree, the water in the hot desert the… publishing package that I have always only dreamed of… until Adobe released it.
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Does Ajax help our users or help ourselves?
Would Jakob Nielsen just say no to Ajax? Someone seems to think so, as the often controversial usability guru and web pioneer was spoofed in a recent article with the declaration: Ajax sucks. The article parodies nearly word for word Nielsen’s 1996 article Why Frames Suck Most of the Time.
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Yahoo Acquires Del.icio.us
The popular social bookmarking service Del.icio.us announces today they’ve joined Yahoo, and look forward to new features and improvements. Yahoo gained attention earlier this year from the user backlash associated with their purchase of Flickr.
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The PSD (Photoshop Document) format is becoming the most utilized format especially amongst the Creative Suite users
Due to the versatility of the PSD format, its employment spans through several disciplines of designRead more on The Wednesday Format: PSD, Photoshop’s Native Format…
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Adobe/Macromedia Merger: What It Means for Print Designers
Macromedia is no longer, Adobe is already promoting its new bundles. Some programs might cease to exist, others might be repurposed, but how does all this affect the print designer?
As of last Saturday Adobe and Macromedia have become one, both under the Adobe’s banner. Two new bundles are being marketed, the Design Bundle and the Web Bundle, with a third one still in the making, the Video Bundle. Questions arise about what will happen with GoLive, Fireworks, Director, but all in all, this big change doesn’t seem to affect print designers very much. Products like InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator are already established in the field of print and Adobe has to simply keep improving those programs as it’s already doing to keep them on the top.
Read more on Adobe/Macromedia Merger: What It Means for Print Designers…
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How to get a smoother edge on type created in Fireworks
Sometimes it’s necessary to create graphics with text for the web, but often times the results for simple text are choppy. With a few steps poor aliasing can be avoided.
First open a new document, and create your text. Here I’ve added a simple gradient to give the text some depth. Next, copy and paste your text into a new layer, aligning it directly above the current text.
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Goodbye Macromedia.
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A Redeemed Quark?
Listen to the company that listens
Hate it or love it, Quark is changing. Their marketing has shifted 180° from a “look at who is the best” viewpoint to “the company that listens”. -
See Through Transparency Problems
Adobe proides an excellent guide to transparency for print designers
Many designers and printers especially fear the transparency options in InDesign and Illustrator. They may not RIP properly, strange outlines around graphics appear, dark backgrounds magically materialize in place of drop shadows and so on.
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Microsoft ClearType
Microsoft offers a solution for the disparity between PC and Mac type.
LCDs use Sub PixelsMicrosoft’s ClearType improves readability of text on LCD displays, such as flat panel monitors, and laptop screens. ClearType enables your computer to display text in fractions of a pixel, rather than the standard single pixel for Windows computers, increasing text resolution.
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Hey, just what are you doing with digital these days?
Designing for digital used to involve managing the output of a glorified color copier while experimenting with bizarre process combinations to get something even close to the company logo. Heck, we’ve all even had a late night Kinko’s experience.
Read more on Hey, just what are you doing with digital these days?…
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Opera Now Free
Opera Web Browser No Longer Requires Licensing Fee
For those who wanted to try Opera and were discouraged by the licensing fee and ads within the browser, this is excellent news. Even more excellent news is the fact that web designers can now view their sites in Opera without having to pay to use the browser. This will expand the support for Opera to more websites.
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Restaurant Logos and the Design Process
Jeff Fisher at Creative Latitude talks to four designers about their experience desiging restaurant logos in this week's Logo Notions.
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