Today I decided to finally sign up for Evernote since it's finally out of private beta. Basically it's a way to organize and keep all kinds of things you come across all day. There's a desktop app as well as a web app that allows you to add a new note to evernote. The feature I'll probably use the most is mobile uploads where I can take a picture of soemthing and upload it right to the site via MMS on my phone. Evernote will even do some OCR on images and try and pull out text it see's in the images. Incredibly useful.
It’s been a while since my last post, and that’s due to life being crazy! Derek got married and I was in the wedding, and I quit my job at CYber SYtes because I got a better offer from AppRiver. Taking this job unfortunately meant for me that I had to move to Pensacola!
Check out this video from Chad Pugh. He spent 40 hours in Illustrator and took a screenshot every 5 seconds while creating this amazing drawing he calls "Science Machine."
A few weeks ago I had to start on a site design for a client, and I went through more design revisions on this site than any other I've done. Now this isn't all the clients' fault, most of these are just suggestions I got from the great people over at the Godbit Forum. Overall, I've got 11 different versions of the same site here. About mid-way through I was worried, (especially when the client requested a purple background!), but it turned out to be a site that both the client and I were happy with.
Click to the left to see the full sized image (beware it's almost 2MB!)
Well, I’ve been on the job search for about a month now and it’s finally over. I love being part of Eject Media, but it just hasn’t been netting me enough money, and when it does the work can be inconsistent. I plan to stay with it though, so don’t worry!
Last Wednesday I sent out about 15 nicely printed resumé’s and cover letters to various companies. On Friday of that week I got a call back from Cyber Sytes saying they wanted to meet with me soon....like the coming Monday. I went in, met with everyone (literally), and they offered me a job as a web designer on the spot! That was yesterday, and today was my first day there.
So far so good, I’ve got one day under my belt for now. Ironically when I start my first major project tomorrow it will be for a company I interviewed with several weeks ago and was turned down for!
Wanna be hip and check out the new cool website to go to? Wanna get a taste of the music I like? Well now you can do both. Muxtape is a cool new way to make an MP3 mixtape and share it with the world.
I uploaded 12 songs (the max) and organized them to go from rockin’ to chill music. It’s a lot of my favorite artists, and I hope you find something new you like. It’s almost an hour long, so check it out, play it while you work or something.
While working on a simple website that didn't need any kind of CMS with it, I came up with a very simple way of creating a dynamic navigation bar with PHP. The code is pretty simple, but I've always done this manually before and this just makes it simple. So here it is.
So if you are on the page that navigation button relates to it will give you <li id="current">Home</li>. If you're on any other page, it gives you <li><a href="index.php">Home</a></li>.
Easy enough. So just call that for each button you need between your <ul> tags:
I know it's nothing spectacular, but it sped up the coding process for me once I figured it out, and it will certainly be a lot faster in the future if anything needs to be changed or added.
If you don’t already know, I’m a huge advocate of the Ban Comic Sans site. It’s a bad font, and it’s just plain overused. Look for it next time you see anything that’s been designed, I’ve seen it everywhere from menus to billboards. Another font that I similarly despise is Papyrus, so much to that I own http://banpapyrus.com - one day I’ll get around to making a real site for it, I promise.
I suppose you can link the use of comic sans to print design, but it really can be used in any kind of media. But, I got to thinking the other day, every different type of media has it’s own “comic sans” per se. These are all extremely common to see in their respective media types, but that’s because they’ve become overused and bland now. Whenever I see any of these, it makes me wonder if the designer behind it is actually aware of how incredibly overused they are! The problem with any of these is that when you look at a design, I shouldn’t see the tools or fonts used, I should see the design and overall message.
I’ve got a more detailed write up about all these after the jump.
When a video is uploaded to YouTube, the default view is a 320x240 video stretched to fit in a 640x480 player with a low audio bitrate. For some newer videos, youtube also retains a full 640x480 copy of the video with higher quality audio. Sometimes you will be allowed to see a button that allows you to watch the higher quality videos, but it’s not on every video.
I recently discovered that by adding &fmt=18 to the end of the URL, you can view the higher quality video for those that have it! Check out the screenshot comparison below from the Starcraft 2 trailer:
Wanna be hip and check out the new cool website to go to? Wanna get a taste of the music I like? Well now you can do both. 
I finally signed up for Twitter today. 