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Thinking for a Living Relaunches
February 23rd, 2010A new and improved site for Thinking for a Living has launched! The site, in my opinion, is at the forefront of interactive design. It’s a great example of why Flash isn’t the only means of creating a dynamic interactive experience.
The site was designed by BBDK and Frank Chimero and built by Jedi Knight Ian Coyle. It features keyboard navigation, a fine grid, and a ton of original and inspirational content.
I’m super excited and proud to be a part of this fine network of people and sites. TFAL is a must read for any creative type.
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New Site Design Coming in 2010
December 31st, 2009Howdy folks. Hope everyone is having a great holiday season. As you’ve noticed, I haven’t posted much in the last week and won’t resume until next week. Just enjoying this time off with the family.
Anyway, I just briefly want to mention that I’ll be launching a revamped site in about a week or so. I’m pretty happy with it and I think you’ll like it a lot. Emil Olsson of TypeNeu is doing all the coding and he’s implemented some awesome functionality. I’ll let you all know right before I switch over to the new design because the site will have to be done for a little while.
Also, if you look in the header, on the right, you’ll notice a small ad. AisleOne is now part of the Fusion Ad Network. It’s a great network that caters to designers, developers, publishers and creative professionals. The ads are small and for the most part well-designed and unobtrusive. I’ve always struggled with displaying ads on the site, I’ve been approached by many companies in the past, but this is the first time that I feel comfortable doing it. The network is great and this is an easy way to pay for the site hosting and other site related costs. I’d love to know what you think about the new ads since your opinions matter most to me.
This version of the site won’t be up for long so I plopped the ads at the top, but in the new site design I’ve placed them in a much better space that isn’t so distracting.
Well, that’s it for now. I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year! I’ll be back on Monday. Peace.
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Photoshoptimize — Optimize Photoshop Performance
December 10th, 2009Yesterday I was searching around for tips on how to improve the overall performance of Photoshop. I found a bunch of good ones, but there was no site that included them all, at least not in a clean, simple layout that’s easy to read. So I decided to quickly put together a page since I figured it might be useful to others. I call it Photoshoptimize. Clever huh?
All these tips have improved overall performance, especially with redrawing the image when zooming or panning. Some of these tips might not fit your workflow, but the more you do the better.
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Basic Maths WordPress Theme
November 18th, 2009Khoi Vinh and Allan Cole have created Basic Maths, an excellent grid-based theme for WordPress that includes features like microformats, color-scheme control, full widget support and a key shortcut to display the grid. Not to mention it’s beautifully designed.
You can purchase it for $45. Well worth the price.
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AisleOne now Available on Kindle
May 21st, 2009For all you Kindle users out there, the AisleOne Kindle version has been approved by Amazon and is now available for a monthly price of $.99, which includes a 14-day free trial. They don’t give you any control over the design and layout of the feed so I’m sure it’s going to look ugly. Hey, at least you’ll get to access the content right? Anyway, enjoy.
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Introducing LegiStyles™
February 2nd, 2009As some of you already know, I use NetNewsWire for all my feed reading duties. It’s an amazing desktop applications that offers a ton of great features including synchronization. One of the great advantages of using NNW is that you can use custom CSS styles on your feeds.
There are a bunch of styles out there that are good but they all kind of look the same and most of them don’t focus on typography and readability. I’m trying to fill this void with what I like to call LegiStyles™, a series of custom NNW styles I’ve created that focus on design and typography. Best of all they’re free.
As of now I have 4 styles available but I plan to add more over time. If you don’t use NNW, I highly recommend it. If you do, head over to the site and download a style or two.
I’ve setup an RSS feed as a way to keep informed on news and updates. For all you Twitter users, follow LegiStyles for updates and also reply with any feedback using @legistyles.
Enjoy.
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Re-subscribe to the RSS feed
January 4th, 2009Google has been moving all the Feedburner feeds over to their servers and over the weekend I moved mine since the ping server is much faster, which gets the news to you faster. Anyway, the feed url has changed so please unsubscribe to the old feed and re-subscribe to the new one. Thanks.
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Lipsumlet Bookmarklet
December 17th, 2008An essential element for any graphic designer, be it print or online, is a block of Lorem Ipsum text. I know for me personally, I can’t function without “Lipsum”, especially since I work in advertising and actually copy isn’t written and approved until long after the design process has begun.
For the last few years, I’ve been using www.lipsum.com for all my Lorem Ipsum needs. The site has some nice features like the ability to select the amount of words, paragraphs, bytes or lists to copy as well as provides a little bit of history on the subject. It’s a nice tool but I really don’t need all those features and to have to load the page each time, highlight the text and copy it can get tiresome.
So I was ecstatic when Matt McInerney emailed me about a sweet little bookmarklet that he’d developed called Lipsumlet. Just drag the bookmarklet into your bookmarks and when you click it, it will spawn a small window with a block of lipsum, automatically copy it to your clipboard and then close the window, all in a matter of 3 seconds. Simple, fast and easy.
And for those of you using Safari (not sure if this works in FireFox), if you drop the bookmarklet into your bookmarks bar, you can quickly access it by pressing the assigned keyboard shortcut. So if you have Lipsumlet as the first bookmark in the bar, you can access it by pressing COMMAND + 1. This makes it even more accessible and saves time.
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NetNewsWire Style 2.5
November 2nd, 2008Version 2.5 of my NetNewsWire style is now available. The design is simple and clean with a great deal of focus on typography and legibility. In this new version I’ve made some improvements that will enhance the reading experience.
Another enhancement that I was hoping to implement was a consistent vertical baseline. But because of inconsistencies within RSS feeds it was very difficult to accomplish, probably even impossible. For example in certain feeds blocks of copy are not wrapped in the paragraph tag, instead just use the break tag. For this reason it’s hard to control the text and elements like images.
Anyhow, I’m very exited about the features I was able to add.
New Features in Version 2.5
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Widows
Prevention of typographic widows in titles and body copy via jQWidon’t. -
Capitalization
All words in title are capitalized. -
Image Resize
Images wider than 600px are resized to fit the fixed width of the style.
Special thanks to Oliver Boermans for helping me with some bugs.
To install just double click the file.
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Site Navigation
October 3rd, 2008So a few people have been contacting me, asking how to see previous posts other than the two on the homepage. The theme didn’t offer such a feature, but I found a plugin that adds “Previous” and “Next” links below the main posts. So now you can navigate back through the previous posts, two at a time.
Please let me know if you run into any issues with the new feature.
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You Might Be Subscribed To The Wrong RSS Feed
May 9th, 2008I use this great plugin on this site called FeedSmith which redirects all of my default feeds to my FeedBurner feed. It works well but I just found a bug in Safari. If you click on the blue RSS icon in the address field at the top, the default feed doesn’t get redirected so you end up subscribing to a basic default feed. This is the only instance where I found this problem.
I’m looking into the problem but in the meantime if you’re subscribed to the AisleOne feed could you please double check to see if the feed URL is:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/aisleone/
If it isn’t please update it. Thanks.