Colour Lovers (A wonderful resource for inspiration!) just released a cool article that explores the connections between Pantone’s 2009 Spring Color Report, Color of the Year (Mimosa!) and the top colors and palettes within the Colour Lovers community. Here’s a peek at some of their top palettes:
If you’re looking for some color ideas or some visual stimulation via fun spring colors, check out the article!
The servicemark (SM) is quite the unusual little character on the web. One might assume that it would act like the copyright symbol (©) or the trademark symbol (™) and have its own special HTML entity code, but alas, this is not the case.
The obvious solution is to use the <sup> tag, but… it doesn’t look that awesome.
It’s not the end of the world, but it’s a bit large for our purposes and doesn’t really look like a trademark-type character, just some floaty text.
There is a unicode character that represents this mark, which can be displayed as 
but unfortunately it really isn’t that well supported. Many fonts don’t have this character defined, and even if they do, it usually doesn’t show in IE and instead renders as an empty box. Frustrating!
Fortunately, there is a way around this, as discovered by someone named Tim McCormack:
Lucida Sans Unicode is one of the few fonts that does support the servicemark character. Therefore, if you put a span around your unicode character and set the styles for that span to render it in Lucida Sans Unicode, it appears to work in most browsers.
HTML:
CSS:
And the end result:
The text is now smaller, still superscript, and more trademark-esque. Bonus: It works in IE6!
A while back, I received a polo shirt from my girlfriend for Christmas that was a bit too small. It was quite the rad polo shirt, so I was bummed to find that they were out of any bigger sizes when I tried to exchange it. What on earth makes this a “Fresh-worthy” analogy? Where am I going with this? Hang in there.
Instead of a bigger polo shirt, I picked up this beautifully-printed, and cleverly presented book on art/street art/graffiti book called Also Known As (back). It was put out by the talented folks at AKANYC. Inside the front and back covers there were these stunning, yet subtle patterns that at first glance looked like hyper-decorative Victorian wallpaper tessellation, printed with a matte gloss over them, creating an awesome effect against the heavy gloss stock. Upon looking closely at the patterns, I noticed that it was far from the traditional patterning. Among the flourishes, crowbars, switch-blades, bolt-cutters, brass knuckles and 40 oz beer bottles were dispersed in a way that made them look like they belonged there just as much as flowers, fruits and veggies, or other traditional imagery would have (this pattern can be seen in the “Downloads” section of the AKANYC site). I was blown away, and it would be a while before I saw this artist’s work again.
Cut & Paste is a national ‘Digital Design Tournament’ where artists create 2D, 3D or motion works on the spot in front of judges (Aaron Draplin, Dave Maddocks and Kat Topaz are listed for Portland) and an audience! It was a huge success last time. We’re especially excited because one of eROI’s own is entering the competition! Stay tuned for updates…
The day is finally here! The new website for The White House has launched, and may I say I’m impressed. It is just amazing to have an administration that understands how people are using digital media these days. yay.
The site’s aesthetic is so appropriate; clean, with modern lines and colors (lots of white and gray!) supported by elegant, historical touches.
We’re not seeing any Gotham (Obama’s signature typeface during his campaign), but they’ve stuck with faces from the Hoefler & Frere-Jones foundry with an elegant use of Hoefler Text and Whitney for image-based typography. Georgia and Lucida Sans are used for web text. I’ll miss seeing Gotham around, but still give a big thumbs-up!
The Portland Advertising Federation (PAF) put on a great lunch yesterday. It was a talk given by Mike Byrne from Anomaly. The topic was about how his agency re-thought their business model. He included a lot of interesting tidbits that had me scribbling notes. Some of the things he mentioned had me thinking, “how can they possibly get away working like that?!” while other points had me nodding furiously in agreement. Even though the talk was geared towards running an agency, I thought his points could be applied to one’s day to day work, and life in general.
Here are some of my key take-aways from the talk:
“Strive to be Stupid”
(More heart and feeling, less relying on rational thought.)
-Stupid ain’t dumb
-By being stupid you can be brilliant
-Smart is business as usual
Have you been to Portland’s historic Chinatown or “hidden Japantown” lately? Well, here’s your chance! This art walk will cover galleries in the area with a focus on the Chinese New Year (year of the ox!).
January 25th, 2009, 2pm
Group meets at:
Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center
121 NW Second Ave
Portland, OR 97209
Although I love WordPress, I always wished it provided a better way to have custom page types with their own custom fields. The built in “Posts” and “Pages” work great for regular blogs, but for a more complex website they aren’t enough. What about “Portfolio Items”, “Job Listings”, “Events”? And for a basic brochure site you don’t even need the “Posts” and its placement in the nav just serves to confuse whoever has to manage the website. Often I will use a “Post” as a different type of page content – but I always have to explain to clients that they have nothing to do with blog posts, so just ignore the name and ‘imagine’ that it’s called something else.
Last year I saw a demonstration of the Expression Engine CMS presented by Josh Pyles of Pixelmatrix Design. I drooled over its ability to create different page types with their own custom fields, all presented in a beautiful UI. I ogled and stared and sighed and wished that WordPress could do the same thing. One of my favorite plugins, More Fields, could add some of that custom field functionality, but without custom page types and the beautiful UI. (more…)
Specialization in the creative field can be a double-edged sword at times. It can help us land primo jobs and clients, allow us to develop solid styles, themes and practices in our bodies or work and can eventually (or ideally) carve us niches as experts or authorities in our given field. Folks become aware of what we are good at, and in which medium and application, and expect each piece to reflect that. The adverse side to specialization, in my opinion, can be when we find ourselves cornered. When one day rolls around and we kinda feel like we’d rather be taking pictures than drawing, or find ourselves painting when we should be editing video. We are stuck. In a perfect world, we apply whatever style, medium or approach that we feel is appropriate—or more importantly, that inspires us and makes us smile, stop and think. We don’t all live in said world, but some people seem to. Some creatives seem to never run out of ideas or motivation, and never seem cornered.
Enter the creative that does not let specialization shackle them to the doldrums of repetition. Enter Geoff McFetridge and Champion Graphics.
Welcome to our second post dedicated to delving into the nitty gritty information about a typeface. Previously, we explored the infamous Papyrus by Chris Costello. Today we’re going to learn all about Trebuchet MS. It’s a web safe font, so that makes it especially exciting!
Trebuchet (pronouced tray-byou-shay) is a humanist sans-serif typeface. Some other examples of humanist sans serif are: Lucida Grande, Gill Sans, Myriad, Frutiger, Tahoma, Verdana and Optima.
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