I was recently reading about this new typography magazine called 8 Faces edited by designer, Elliot Jay Stocks. The cover of issue number 3 was designed by McBess, a French illustrator who lives in London. His style reminds me of R. Crumb a bit, but perhaps that was just the prevalence of naked women in the illustrations. Looking around on McBess’ website was pretty fun. I especially enjoyed this short music video/cartoon.
“Useful, social, living, layered and curated”
- Published: Oct 22nd, 2010
- Category: Art, Photography, Video/Short Film, Web/Design
Read this provocative article today by Steve McCallion about logos and social branding. The article cued off of the recent GAP logo debacle, citing it as an example of the myopia of current corporate brand strategists.
This video was embedded in the article as an example of a successful social branding project undertaken by Levi’s. It features an interview with photographer, Tim Barber, who curated the project’s New York show. I was previously unfamiliar with Tim Barber, but this video led me on to his site (online gallery) called Tiny Vices which contains some really good art work and photography (wow, Reza Nader!).
Myopic Outlook
- Published: Jul 30th, 2010
- Category: Web/Design
This problem came up yesterday about which I could find nothing on the internet, and it was just whacky enough to deserve some mention…well that, and the fact that we came up with a solution.
So the context is a HTML marketing email we developed for a regular multi-product promotion. As you can see, the rendering in Outlook 2007 on a PC shows the default purple as the visited link color. This was not desired, nor was it described by either the CSS or the HTML.
Visited links showing in default colors (contrary to the css styles).
As you can see, the HTML directs that the font color—in any case—should be white.
<tr valign="middle">
<td style="padding: 5px 10px;"><a class="link3DS" href="http://link"
target="_blank" style="color:#ffffff;">Alaska Cruises</a></td>
</tr>
The CSS says the same thing. The class on the above link is “link3DS” which as you can see below also directs the color to be white. (The entire body-embedded email style sheet here for reasons that will be explained later).
<body bgcolor="#1a2639" style="margin:0; padding:0;">
<style type="text/css">
<!--
img {display: block;}
a.orangeLink:link {color: #e6bc50; text-decoration: underline;}
a.orangeLink:visited {color: #969696; text-decoration: underline;}
a.orangeLink:hover {color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none;}
a.grayLink:link {color: #bdbcbc; text-decoration: underline;}
a.grayLink:visited {color: #969696; text-decoration: underline;}
a.grayLink:hover {color: #e6bc50; text-decoration: none;}
a.navLink:link {color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none;}
a.navLink:visited {color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none;}
a.navLink:hover {color: #1d3666; text-decoration: underline;}
a.link3DS:link {color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none;}
a.link3DS:visited {color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none;}
a.link3DS:hover {color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline;}
a.SO_link:link {color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none;}
a.SO_link:visited {color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none;}
a.SO_link:hover {color: #a43232; text-decoration: underline;}
-->
</style>
After banging heads on walls, my workmate, Kurt, noticed that if you put the long-deprecated VLINK attribute in the email’s body tag, the visited link would now display the desired color. “But why haven’t we had this problem in the past?” I queried. VLINK could not (will not!) be the solution!
Then I recalled that in designing this email, which embraced an entirely new template, I had stripped down the style sheet according to what was now relevant. In doing so, I had also stripped out the default pseudo-class styles as all the links in the new template were triggered be classes. So I popped these default styles back into this email, we tested it, and sure enough BINGO!, the visited links now rendered in their desired fashion.
So to the above style sheet, these default pseudo-class stylings were added to our anchor links:
a:link {color : #1d3666; text-decoration : underline;}
a:visited {color : #1d3666; text-decoration : underline;}
a:hover {color : #a43232; text-decoration : none;}
The moral of the story? Don’t forget to assign default pseudo-class styles to your anchor tag! Why? I haven’t the slightest idea. Perhaps some jocko working on the Outlook project at Microsoft can share some…well I won’t call it wisdom, but at least an explanation where none seems possible.
more details…
- Published: May 12th, 2009
- Category: Uncategorized, Web/Design
http://www.yelp.com/topic/seattle-internet-service-providers
Tis what it sez.
http://www.designbyfire.com/?p=30
AN OPEN LETTER to John Warnock
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
Clock your down and upload speeds! SPEED TEST
Icky but sticky—I was hacked!
- Published: Apr 11th, 2009
- Category: Uncategorized, Web/Design
Well, my website got hacked last week. Poor timing as it was just before the birth of our daughter on April 8. I am sorry if this caused any problems with anyone visiting my site. It was an unwelcome first for me and very strange to find that I was suddenly serving up a bunch of porn against my will…Actually, I found out because I got a notice from Google that the site was serving up malware—a black screen with a big warning notice in a red box. I guess Google is the Internet politzi now—well, I’m thankful in this case.
Apparently, this weird, encoded script was tacked on to several of my pages. In getting rid of the problem, I found out that there were a few entirely new folders on my server, one called “_images” which contained another folder entitled “amy-grove-nude” comprised of 1,094 lewdly named html files. There were also files with names that were strange anagrams of my own file names but they’d have underscores in them or the word order would be changed around.
While it was a virtual violation, it was, like all violations such as being robbed or worse—being physically violated—an awful feeling. “A net loss” as my friend, Hans, described being robbed. Icky.
