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I've found that when I need to be inspired when coming up for an organization's (or website's) logo graphic design, it's hard to find examples. Going from site to site simply looking at how each website integrates their site with a graphic can in fact be inspirational, but only to a point. It's somewhat confining in the broad spectrum of things. Like the web design review websites, it's great to have an overview of hand-picked websites for their sheer brilliance in design, color coordination and artistic balance and symmetry...and it looks good too.

Thankfully, there is a website that does this, although since typography and logo design are a little obscure nowadays in favor of total website design (although typography is making a comeback as of late), I only know of one. The downside is that we must accept their professional wisdom without any second opinions. The upside is that we don't have to visit multiple sites to get some great inspiration.

Logo Lounge's Logo Trends is a yearly roundup of logos from the world-wide-web that attempts to see what the current trend in overall logo design is for the year. There are archives going back to 2003, and are current (as of this writing) to 2007. Each year's archive contains a decently sized showing of fascinating, trendy, and colorful marketing imagery to help you on your way. Keep in mind though, whilst getting inspiration, don't mimic too deeply! We are all artists afterall, and should use our own ingenuity and imagination to power our creations.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

If anyone's had any troubles with the text appearing in their versions of Safari 3 for Windows, make sure to update to the most recent version (3.0.2). It has now fixed the troubles I've had on both my work PC and personal laptop - neither of them would display the text. I am now able to properly browse the internet (I couldn't even type anything into the address bar before); and read the text on those pages. Absolutely wonderful! The Beta is now a workable one. The Apple team seems to have been working on this quite hastily, but doing a decent job. This'll probably be about the only product of theirs that I'll ever be using purposefully on a Windows machine (although, to be fair, it'll probably be just for testing!) except for QuickTime when I have to.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I love my daily dose of XKCD.

...also befitting if you date a librarian.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Although I personally detest Wordpress, it does have its uses and the user-interface is well-constructed, making it much easier for non-technical users to use it. Regardless, when it doesn't do quite what you want it to do, extending it can sometimes be really easy (due to the massive number of plugins), or extremely difficult. Most of the time, in my case (recently), it's the latter and not the former.

I was recently given the task to import an unmodified XML dataset into a web-based tool as tabular data, HTML'ified, and allow for visual editing of the information, and they wanted to use Wordpress. I thought, "Okay, that should be easy enough." Well, okay, do I create a plugin to handle the import? I don't really want to learn Wordpress hooks and programming functionality considering I hate the thing...no, I'll just import it directly into the database. I used a diff tool to discover that creating a new draft entry only modifies three database tables anyway, that's easy enough. Got that working, 1-2-3, lickity-split!

But now, we need to let staff have access to modify the tabular data.

Continue reading "Extending the Wordpress Visual Editor"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Using third party application websites (browsershots, for example), VirtualMachines, or a full blown Macintosh to test your websites in Safari's WebKit rendering engine while you code on Windows? FRET NO MORE! Apple has released the Beta 3 of their browser, Safari, with a release for Microsoft Windows' users...get this...using the OSX theme and style, as well as OSX embedded fonts! Although it's still pretty buggy, the fact that it's on the horizon and will have less bugs than Swift (as it's corporation-based, rather than single developer based), I'm extremely happy! Plus, it'd be interesting to see how Apple's font rendering compares to Microsoft's. It's a pretty small download to boot!

Although I've only tried this once (directly after installing) and had a problem with the embedded fonts not showing up, I should probably log off or restart the computer to see if changes are needed to take effect first. Either way, this'll make testing much, much nicer.

Now let's just hope it's not the MacIE5 episode, but in reverse.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski