Hi! I'm professional illustrator/web designer currently planning my epic Zelda themed wedding.
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BogusRed's Shared Items
See what kind of stuff I'm reading and find interesting on the internet!
I watch various feeds with Google Reader and share items I find particularly interesting. Those shared items appear here. You can also subscribe to my shared items feed.
This is funny, but when you're actually a developer, this isn't funny at all. One can spend hundreds of hours writing great software only to have the user want it free. Devs do need food too!
20 Examples of Simplistic but Effective Logo Design
Something we hear over an over in the design world is that less is more. Even though using that statement has become a bit cliche, it is true – especially when it comes to logo design. Sometimes designers can get carried away with trying to incorporate too many complicated elements into a logo. It’s better to keep things simple and make use of clever negative space and typography. These types of marks are usually far more effective and memorable. To inspire you, here are 20 Examples of Simplistic but Effective Logo Design.
amelie() – a devious plan to get rid of IE6
IE6 must die - we all know this. Even Microsoft knows and acknowledges this (the IE9 team would love everybody to upgrade). The problem is that as a technical argument we don't get far.
The people who force their users to still use IE6 as the main "browser" don't want to change their environments as it means that they have to change thousands of computers and re-educate people who don't like computers on new systems. This is why we need to find a way to make IE6 a problem of other parts of these organisations.
This is why I dug through the IE6 toolkit and found a way to make it annoying to use the browser - the MotionBlur filter. Applied randomly every few seconds, this makes it a very strange experience to use IE6:
Here's the code, which you can also download from the homepage:
var x = 1,when=0,str,dir,fil;
function amelie(){
if(x % 2 === 0){
str = 0; dir = 0;
when = Math.floor( Math.random() * 10000 ) + 2000;
setTimeout( 'amelie()', when );
} else {
str = Math.floor( Math.random() * 2 ) + 2;
dir = Math.floor( Math.random() * 360 );
setTimeout( 'amelie()', 500 );
}
var fil = "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.MotionBlur(strength="+
str + ",direction=" + dir + ",enabled='true')";
document.body.style.filter = fil;
x++;
}
setTimeout('amelie()',1000);
}
Now, applied to our web sites this will annoy users, and they will complain and this is when the devious master plan comes into action:
- Use
amelie()in our web sites - Fake confusion and deny any problem when people start complaining - our code is OK (show build test logs if needed)
- Get some experts to talk about the concept of "software fatigue". This utter lie should state that software, like any other machine, deteriorates over time and starts to behave in an erratic manner. Explain parts of code as little cogs that get cracked over time or something like that. This works amazingly well - I used to tell people that when they shut down their computer they have to keep it off for 15 minutes before rebooting so "that all chips can unload".
- Spread the rumour that IE6's software fatigue means it doesn't work well with video cards and that this could be the reason for the display glitches.
- Get other experts to link the erratic display to deteriorating eyesight and headaches in office personnel.
- Thus, we turn IE6 into a health and safety issue and companies are much quicker in changing these than they are in changing technical environments because of technical problems.
Hey, it is Friday :)
Made In CSS; iOS icons and more
Do you enjoy the "looks at me build something cool in pure CSS"-meme? It is kinda fun. On the one hand is shows what amazing things people can build, and on the other.... it reminds us that we need some tools to help make life easier. At least the platform is here, and tools can come later.
Louis Harboe has followed up his purchase of an iPhone 4 with iOS 4 icons made with CSS. Now only do we get to see his work, but he talks about the high level ideas behind the implementation:
In the contacts icon, I used 5 different shapes for the silhouette icon. The head is a rectangle with rounded corners, followed by another rectangle for the neck and a distorted semi-circle for the body. In order to get the curve of the shoulders to the neck, I placed two circles on top of the shapes.
The weather icon has several rays of light shooting from behind the sun. Each one of these rays is actually a long rectangle with a gradient that fades to transparent on either end. I used -webkit-transform:rotate to rotate each rectangle to a different angle. The same effect was used for the iTunes icon.
To get the cloud icon on the iDisk icon, I used two circles layered on top of each other, above a rounded rectangle. The larger circle has a gradient that cuts off just before the rectangle.
Take a full example such as calendar:
background: #9B2424;
}
.calendar .header {
-webkit-border-top-left-radius: 30px;
-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 30px;
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(#EEC4C4), to(#521B1C), color-stop(.92,#da3434),color-stop(.1,#ef9fa5));
height: 50px;
width: 176px;
-webkit-box-shadow: inset 0px 2px 1px rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.4);
}
.calendar p.weekday {
color: #fff;
font-weight: bold;
text-shadow: 0px 1px 1px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7);
width: 176px;
line-height: 50px;
font-size: 25px;
text-align: center;
}
.calendar p.daynumber {
color: #000;
font-weight: bold;
text-shadow: 0px 1px 0px #fff;
width: 176px;
line-height: 126px;
font-size: 130px;
text-align: center;
}
.calendar .paper {
-webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 30px;
-webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 30px;
background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(#7A7A7A), to(#EDEDED), color-stop(.05,#BFBFBF),color-stop(.2,#E3E3E3));
height: 126px;
width: 176px;
}
Awesome. One nice thing about this approach is that it can scale. iPhone 4 users are already talking about how glaring it is when apps have low res assets. Even the Facebook applications.... the text looks great, but the icon is blocky.
Also, some other nice CSS gradient examples were put on display.
jQuery Mobile Announced; Touch-Optimized Web Framework for Smartphones & Tablets
I have had the pleasure to start working with the awesome jQuery team on a new mobile development. Today, John announced jQuery Mobile, "a unified user interface system across all popular mobile device platforms, built on the rock-solid jQuery and jQuery UI foundation."
Palm has sponsored the effort with other great folks, and I wrote about it over here:
When we heard that the jQuery team was putting a lot of effort towards supporting their great library on devices, we wanted to help. At first we started with devices for John to test on as he explored compatibility, but with the newly announced jQuery Mobile initiative, we wanted to do more.
What are we doing? We are going to sponsor some of the great work that will go into jQuery Mobile from jQuery team members such as the Filament Group who are well known for their work on jQuery UI and ThemeRoller. First and foremost, we want to allow the team to focus on making a great jQuery experience across the mobile Web.
Secondly, we will be working hard to make sure that webOS itself is a fantastic host for the product. This will mean testing help, and also some jQuery plugins that show off some of the great abilities of webOS (e.g. the notifications system) in a progressive way.
We are really excited to be working with the team as their launch into jQuery Mobile en force.
Here are some more details on the goals of jQuery Mobile from Mr. John Resig himself:
"The jQuery project is really excited to announce the work that we’ve been doing to bring jQuery to mobile devices. Not only is the core jQuery library being improved to work across all of the major mobile platforms, but we’re also working to release a complete, unified, mobile UI framework.
Absolutely critical to us is that jQuery and the mobile UI framework that we’re developing work across all major international mobile platforms (not just a few of the most popular platforms in North America). We’ve published a complete strategy overview detailing the work that we’re doing and a chart showing all the browsers that we’re going to support.
Right now we're working hard, planning out the features that we want to land and doing testing against the devices that we want to support — and hoping for a release later this year.
If you wish to help, please join the discussion in the jQuery Mobile Community.
Our aim is to provide tools to build dynamic touch interfaces that will adapt gracefully to a range of device form factors. The system will include both layouts (lists, detail panes, overlays) and a rich set of form controls and UI widgets (toggles, sliders, tabs)."
It has been enjoyable to see the great touch and mobile support that YUI 3.2 is adding, and we look forward to hosting the Dojo team at Palm for one of their events. Sencha Touch and SproutCore are showing us that Web applications can feel like "native" apps on other platforms. All in all, the future for a cross platform Web application world is bright. We look forward to working with the entire community to make it happen.
Glimmer: Visual Builder for JQuery Animations
From Tim Aidlin over at Microsoft comes a tutorial on using JQuery to do animation. The tutorial is focused on using a new library they have designed called Glimmer that allows designers and developers to create interactive elements and animations on web pages using JQuery. Using Glimmer you setup your HTML and CSS and then use the visual Glimmer tool to create animations and other effects:
The Glimmer tool then generates JQuery JavaScript automatically that you can pull into your page. An example snippet:
var timer;
function clear_canvas(event)
{
clearTimeout(timer);
timer = setTimeout(eval("big_guy_in"),"600");$("#slide1text").css("left","-800px");$("#slide1text").animate({"left":0},600, "easeOutElastic", null);$("#bigGuyPointing").css("left","600px");
$("#bigGuyPointing").animate({"left":600},1000, "linear", null);
$("#slide1").css("display","block");
$("#bigGuyPointing").animate({"left":600},1000, "linear", null);
}
Owned
Cool Guy
Comic by: dunno source via Comix Builder
Backpack Fail
Get your Obama-Sonic-Harry Potter bookbag!
Picture by: dunno source Submitted by: dunno source via Fail Uploader
Sunday Sweets: Cute-Tastic!
Friday Rewind: Double Fail
This is Why Men Don’t have Advice Columns
Fruitarian Warrior
Submitted by: dunno source via Submission Page
The First Rule of Crazy
If you have to say you’re not crazy, you’re probably crazy.
This is a momentous event for EFCP: an email written to us, about us, from a maybe/maybe not crazy person. You decide. Apparently, we imprison minds. Or something like that.
Now im not crazy but this site is offensive to people who is mentally not sane or even maybe crazy. Once you post the peoples email you are violating there right to have FREE minds! Free, understand? Thats not fair plus its illegal. Believe me, I know. Ive stopped many people from doing this to me and helped other people too. LOTS of other people.
See I can play this game too because Ive been there before and how will you like it then! I KNOW how it works, believe me
So you should think 2 or even 3 times before you post other peoples thoughts OR there minds OR if even they think they aren’t crazy OR even if they do even say are fine it does NOT MATTER!
You should already know better, but youll find out and then youll will, know better. Plus I just told so you CANT say you didnt know better at least from now on.
And Im keeping a copy of this email to send to them if you dont stop IMMEDIATELY! Just know that I dont like doing that because I dont like to talk to them anymore but I will if you dont stop IMMEDIATELY!
Thank you
Submitted by: Anon
Epic Coloring Book
Help yourself to a collection of Epic Coloring jobs:
Microsoft: The Ironing Is Delicious
Microsoft, founder member of the Business Software Alliance, doesn't think that copyright laws apply to itself.
Edit: This is from some static Bing spam; it isn't search results.
Thanks to Alex!
A boy can dream, can’t he?
What say you, Emily Post?
As an early holiday gift to you, I present the current leading candidate in the race for “douchecanoe of the year”…
UPDATE: Our anonymous tipster passes along this follow-up status update, adding, “The best part about this situation is that, by posting her latest status update, she just encouraged more people to come see how rude and greedy she is!”
related: facebook wedding drama
A Showcase of Clever Negative Space in Logo Design
Negative space is the space around and between the main objects in a design. This space often goes unnoticed, unless a creative designer is able to turn the negative space into a key element of the design. Logo designers often use negative space in a way that it becomes just as important as the positive space in conveying the meaning of the logo. Here is a showcase of logos that all possess creative use of negative space.
The Work Food Chain
Does it work like this where you work?
