Grandscapes has this Manhattan Skyline poster that took over 3 years to design. They are supposedly working on some new ones, but I'm not sure for what city.
Archive for August, 2003
Ever wonder: what does FUD mean?
FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. It is a marketing technique used when a competitor launches a product that is both better than yours and costs less, i.e. your product is no longer competitive. Unable to respond with hard facts, scare-mongering is used via 'gossip channels' to cast a shadow of doubt over the competitors offerings and make people think twice before using it.
Design Matters: White space is one of a couple nice articles about designing, but mostly about designing websites. Its not technical and worth a look, me thinks:
Why is white space so important? Part of the reason is pshychological, and part of it is physical: the text needs room to breathe. When text crowds all the way to the edge, it leaves us feeling crowded and cramped. Long passages of text, written edge to edge can actually tire the eyes.
For anybody else who went to Lawrence University in Appleton, WI - there is some bad news over here usnews.com: America's Best Colleges 2004: Liberal Arts Colleges-Bachelor's (Nationally) Top Schools. It looks like we've fallen down to 51. Luckily, however, they group the top 100 in the same list now, so it doesn't look too bad and I guess we can still say we are "top tier"... I guess.
For those of us who love 40s... 40ozMaltLiquor.com :: The 40oz Archive. Check out favorites such as Big Bear, King Cobra, and Coqui 900.
A Whole Lotta Features is an article that details easy ways that you can move your static page content over into the moveabletype interface. Brad Choate talks about some of the advantages, such as being able to edit your static pages online without ftp and whatnot, having your entire site be searchable, and the ability to add comments and trackbacks on every page. Seems like a really good idea, and I think I'm going to move my content over pretty soon.
As you can see, I've been working on the site design a bit. The front page is almost done, and done enough to put up, I think. I'll make sure everything from the old version is moved over, but this is the main idea.
I used Allaire Homesite for the coding, which is a step up from Notepad for sure. I don't know what I was thinking trying to do without an HTML editor. The general layout is from glish.com's css section which is pretty good, me thinks. I know nothing validates as XHTML or whatever, but I'm working on it and making this look right on Internet Explorer and Mozilla is hard enough as it is.
The little post icon by the weblog entries is based on Wired.com's little icon. You can click that thing to comment on a post or to link directly to it. I'll be adding something eventually so you can see if someone commented on a post already. The menu on the right is based on the one at A List Apart and the nifty scroll-over effect with the word in the upper right is from Eric Meyer's page. Clicking on the little different colored boxes allows you to change the background color of the page. The script to do it is also from A List Apart and the color choices are straight from the Ximian Palate, which also has many nice icons. You can click the silver bar at the bottom for the default color. The badges at the bottom right are from Antipixel although you probably already knew that. The larger graphics that are advocating Mozilla over Internet Explorer are from Brayn Bell. I'm using Mozilla, and I think it is way better. Click on the Internet Explorer logo to find out more.
Other than that, let me know if something doesn't work here or whatever. I'll be updating the rest of the site over time.
I'm back in Chicago again and I'll be starting to look for a job while reading and sleeping. I'll update this site when I have something to say, but I doubt that will be very often. This website should go under a bit of a change soon, so that I can post my resume and stuff without feeling bad about it. I sort of miss Cambridge, where I was on the BUNAC program with Jordan (www.bunac.org.uk) for six months, but I think I'll miss Jordan more. Aww. Anyway, going around Italy afterwords was fun, but I am very tired now. I'm not sure what my plans are, but I'm thinking about going to Long Beach in California to live with Scott for a while, maybe go to Australia for the 4 month BUNAC thing, maybe visit Badger on his Teaching English in Japan deal, maybe visit the folks in Florida soon. I'm still looking into Law School, but I'm not sure if I really want to do it yet. We'll see, I guess. I'll probably update this as I update the webpage to make it look nice.
