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Written on Nov 11, 2008 // Design

Usually ads these days are lame, but this one is gorgeous. Here’s the full set of how they made it.
Gotta love the irony though, with a tag line of ‘as real as it gets’ they still had to set it up with real life objects instead of drawing it in Photoshop itself.
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Written on Dec 30, 2006 // Design, Site
I’m currently switching back and forth between a lot of previous wordpress themes and new ones, trying to figure out what I want. My wishlist for content and bits of pieces I want to display on the front page is quite large, and I still haven’t found one that satisfies me 100%.
I want Hemingway blocks, widgets, latest posts from the forum, latest pics from the gallery, latest entries from the other blogs, the latest entry (a la popurls.com) from a couple of sites I always read, some site stats, albumcovers of stuff I’m listening to at any given moment (using data from last.fm), books I’m reading and other bits and pieces.
And of course, it has to look good. Easy on the eyes, minimalistic yet glossy, and the hardest part given the amount of stuff I want to shove onto the page; it shouldn’t look crowded. Which is extra tricky because a lot of you are still using low resolutions, 1024×768 or less. So to some degree the design has to be fluid or scale properly, seeing as I also want to make good use of screen estate for those of us with higher resolutions. Personally my screens use 1680×1050 and I’m sick and tired of all the layouts that are still fixed to 800×600. That’s half the screen empty.
Oh oh, AND I want to fiddle with loops to break up the monotony. Most themes still have columns going straight down, so there’s one column going down with all the blog entries, one or two columns with nothing but widgets… boring. So I’ll have to fiddle with the loop code to break it up a little, so for example you’ll get one blog entry, then a widget/block, then another entry. I think that’ll look nice.
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Written on Jan 03, 2006 // Design, Site
Here’s an interesting read about the importance of tagging. I still haven’t decided yet which route to take. Categories, technorati tags in the post, plugin for tags… there are so many choices. The plugins are nice because they make for some lovely eyecandy as well with tagclouds and ranks, but ofcourse that also means additional maintenance. Plus I’d love to find an article somewhere that shows the benefits in terms of how tagging a blog impacts search results/traffic. Seems like everyone’s just doing it for one reason or another without much in the way of hard facts to back it up.
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Written on Dec 12, 2005 // Design, Web
A new article each day, counting down to Christmas, with luvely webdesign stuff.
(He said adding script.aculo.us to the evergrowing todo list)
24ways.org
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Written on Nov 22, 2005 // Design, Site
The K2 theme got updated to revision 118 and lo and behold, all the IE layout issues that were driving me nuts have automagically disappeared, leaving me with a quiet tuesday evening to check out new plugins or finally buy Mint instead of having to pull my hair out trying to figure out the CSS. 3 cheers for Michael!
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Written on Nov 14, 2005 // Design, Site
the new layout is starting to come together nicely. Lots of white and lots of things not working yet at the moment, but so far so good. I like the white and the space arrangement, for now. I picked this color because it’s the trend at the moment and I have to be a trendwhore. ;)
It’s still pretty messed up in IE but meh, get a decent browser. Being momentarily out of Mac I can’t test it on Safari alas, I hope it renders well. I hope to finish things up over the next week and then maybe I’ll get round to fixing it for IE… maybe. Please let me know what you think of it so far, and keep in mind that it’s far from finished.
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Written on Nov 04, 2005 // Design
CSS Reboot is a community event for web professionals. On November 1st, 2005 at 12:00 GMT Rebooters from all over the world launched their web standards-based redesigns (or designs) simultaneously, bringing traffic, interest and a little respect to their sites.
Check it out, I only came across it today otherwise I ‘might’ have joined. Very cool project and lots of interesting designs to drool over.