Monday, November 3rd, 2008
Amazon is now providing what they call “frustration-free” packaging for some of their products.

Basically, these items are packaged at in ready-to-ship boxes, minus the retail packaging. Amazon can send the boxes without using extra packaging. It sounds like it saves everybody some money and helps reduce waste. Great call Amazon.
Design-wise, I’m really digging the way that Fisher-Price cardboard box looks in the picture. Nice and simple.
Tagged as Amazon, Design, Environment
Posted in Art & Design, Random Thoughts | Comments Off on Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
I just discovered the CouponNinja website and completely fell in love with the header images:

It makes me snicker every time I look at it.
Via Design Shack.
Tagged as Design, Inspiration
Posted in Art & Design, Web Design | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
Apple has just released the 10.4.11 update for Mac OS X Tiger, which has two interesting tidbits. First of all, it lists “Improves compatibility when using OpenType fonts in QuarkExpress.” I would be really interested in knowing more about exactly what has changed here. Unfortunately, given how tight-lipped Apple usually is about these types of things, I doubt I’ll find out.
The second item pertains to Safari 3. Starting with this update, Safari 3 will be the default browser. Now, this is really great, but it introduces some problems with my workflow. If I install this update, how am I going to be able to continue to test my designs in Safari 2.x?
As it turns out, Michel Fortin has gone through the trouble of creating standalone versions of every Safari installment. So go ahead, jump on that update from Apple, then grab a standalone copy of Safari 2.
Tagged as Apple, Browsers, Design, Fonts, HTML, Mac, OpenType, OS X, Quark, Safari, Web Development
Posted in Font Management, Mac, Web Design | Comments Off on Multi Safari
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
I stumbled across the Blog Spoon Graphics website the other day and was very impressed by the design.

I particularly like their notebook-style links. The subscribe link is a good example of this (although I can’t actually click on it):

Their site footer also demonstrates a nice use of the “crusty notebook page” style:

It’s a very nice looking site all around.
Tagged as CSS, Design, HTML
Posted in Web Design | Comments Off on Blog Spoon Graphics Website
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
WeDesignerWall currently has a pretty good list of WordPress Theme Hacks. This is a good resource if you either trying to create your own theme or customize someone else’s.
These is also a section on one way to get customized titles. They use this example:
<title>
<?php
if (is_home()) {
echo bloginfo('name');
} elseif (is_404()) {
echo '404 Not Found';
} elseif (is_category()) {
echo 'Category:'; wp_title('');
} elseif (is_search()) {
echo 'Search Results';
} elseif ( is_day() || is_month() || is_year() ) {
echo 'Archives:'; wp_title('');
} else {
echo wp_title('');
}
?>
</title>
I personally use something similar for this page:
<title>
<?php /* Title for homepage is "blogtitle | blogdescription", all other pages get "pagetitle | blogtitle" */
if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) { wp_title('',true); echo ' | '; bloginfo('name'); }
else { bloginfo('name'); echo ': '; bloginfo('description'); } ?>
</title>
Tagged as Design, Hacks, PHP, Theme Development, Web Design, WordPress
Posted in Programming, Web Design | 1 Comment »