Web Development

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

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