dynagirl

Stockholm – The musical. Neato.

I can set the measurement units in CICEROS.
I can set the measurement units in DIDOTS.
hours, minutes, seconds, too.
miles!
feet!
kilometers!
BUT NOT FUCKING PIXELS! ! ! ! !

A nice Photoshop tutorial on cleaning up a face so it’s pretty / normal-looking. (Mouse over the “final result” image.) This is hardly Photoshop plastic surgery stuff, but it’s what I have to go through pretty much EVERY DAMNED TIME I’m given a person’s photograph for a site or brochure. Please! Look in the mirror. Comb your hair, powder your nose (men, too… and you might want do your shiny head while you’re at it), and do something about those eye bags — the five minutes you take will save a very expensive hour, and god forbid your company doesn’t have the budget for those hours and THEN THE INTERNETS WILL THINK YOU’RE UGLY.

Oh, and if you’re a smoker or drink a pot of coffee every day? Two words: whitening strips. You don’t have to go Ross-Nuclear-White, but it’ll take five years off of you.

Want a less lame looking mySpace profile? Mike Davidson (he of sIFR fame and many fine web sites) shows you how. He also has 57 billion friends.

X-Ray is a groovy new Firefox extention that shows you the code in context of a page.

This Xtra-pine Cleaning Hunk site is very cute but I was hoping they’d do it up like Subservient Chicken, and you could ask him to polish things in the room. Heh. Polish things.
via Very Big Blog

Neutral-good CSS ROCKSTAR — level six, without the book which would be about food, anyway.
Via 456 Berea Street

I’d never had a problem with people snarfing images before – using images I’ve posted here on their own pages, but linking to them directly rather than uploading them to their own server. I don’t check my stats too often, and just saw a huge traffic spike from various MySpace accounts. “Wow! I’m popular! I must have fans!” thought I… ha! Hardly. People seem fond of the Eddie Izzard and boob-tube sweater (NSFW) pictures. Too bad, babies, ’cause I just finally got around to adding some juju to my .htaccess file to stop that shit.

I noticed this some time ago already ( the current look, Disco CoolVetica, dates from May 2004 ) — which means that Helvetica, timeless as it is, and as gorgeous as it is, is somewhat played. What, then, is the new brown? Or is Helvetica’s resurgence a harbinger of a larger trend, towards elegant “classics” that may have been ahead of their time with their clean lines and optimistic, future-looking design?

For one thing, look for a lot more Century Gothic, Elephant, Engravers, Futura, with clear colors. Oh, sort of like I already did over here. I wish the client would send me copy so we can launch that already. HI, MOM!!

Let the DOM and Javascript add those nasty extra divs. Sweet; sweet sweet sweet!

Still a working draft, but at least it’s something. Also, techniques for implementation.

Usable wall colors. Jakob Nielsen, I hate you.

Salon.com “redesigns” to celebrate its tenth anniversary, and looks older and more tired than ever. Plus, a quick check of the code reveals ninety errors. It’s also slow as molasses. There’s no excuse for that much ugliness.

The Design Encyclopedia. It’s just started, and it’s fabulous, and will be moreso as it grows.

A List Apart answers the questions I was just recently puzzling out — how to have a lovely, high-resolution image for your print CSS, and a regular webby one for screen media. Neato.

A List Apart: Not actually dead! Yay! Evolt? Eh, buzzards are still circling; too early to say but the prognosis is not so good.

Creating Passionate Users on When Process Goes Bad. The large companies that are not afflicted with this are few and far between, and usually require some serious top-down drive away from process cruft. In most large institutions I’ve seen, no good idea goes unpunished, because it wouldn’t fit within the strict (and sometimes ridiculous) process guidelines, or someone else might have to do some actual work. Stay lithe! Stay open to the new!

Code Collapse looks pretty cool: you can set specific areas of your HTML to collapse and expand, not unlike the little expando-triangles that you use for layer sets in Photoshop or Illustrator. I’ll still be using the much cheaper (and faster, and lighter) BBEdit, but that’s a nifty trick.

Drag-and-drop, sortable lists with CSS and Javascript.

A simple restaurant menu with valid, semantic code (definition lists, a nice touch) and CSS. I’m always amazed at how many “web designers” tell me that things aren’t possible without layout tables. Buh-huh-huh-hogus!

Waaaaaaaaaay more trouble than it is worth.

Validating the code on an entire site. Noice.

Pretty colors: Flickr Pickr
Pretty colored lights: Spacializer
Thanks, Jen!

Mozilla’s nightly builds now include native, default support for Scaleable Vector Graphics. Samples of some neat SVG experiments here.

Why doesn’t Visio have a floating color palette or swatch window? I hate this program. Teeeeedious.

Adobe buys Macromedia, $3.4 billion dollars. I hope they decide to make a Visio-killer as their newest

Definitive Image Replacement, working with CSS on and images off? I’ll play around with this tomorrow.

Nifty and fairly graceful DOM-scripted lists let you have the goodness of degradeable, skinnable lists with fancy expand/contract function.

Love Basecamp/37 Signals’ Yellow Fade Technique? Fade anything and everything with FAT.

Really interesting Flash interface and information design at the Name Voyager.
Thanks, Jeff!