Basic Maths WordPress Theme

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Khoi 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.        

Introducing LegiStyles™

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As 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.        

Lipsumlet Bookmarklet

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An 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.        

NetNewsWire Style 2.5

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Version 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

  • 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.

Download NNW Style 2.5