Design

Barack Obama’s design team has garnered a lot of praise for their work on his campaign materials, including the official website. Heck, there have been entire articles devoted to praising their choice of typefaces. One of the cooler elements the Obama team has cooked up for their website is a slideshow-like animated list for front page navigation.

If you’re a fan of this slideshow, and you want to create a similar effect on your own site, look no further than the aptly-named BarackSlideshow script. DevThought has come up with a bit of CSS and JavaScript that loads images and animation effects almost identical to the originals. Some users in the comment thread are reporting browser or plug-in specific issues with the script, so your mileage may vary.

The buttonless iPhone, and the sleek styling of other apple products, has taken the Wall Street Journal to musing, “What’s Steve’s Beef about buttons.”

According to the article, Jobs’ blood-lust for buttons goes back further than you might imagine. “Mr. Jobs was adamant that the keyboard for the original Macintosh not include “up,” “down,” “right” and “left” keys that allow users to move the cursor around their computer screens, giving it a sleeker appearance,” at the cost of utility.

But, in a world where multi-touch technology is allowing buttons to disappear, it looks like real Steve is getting his wish.

Now that we’ve harangued you to upgrade your Web site, take advantage of business blogs, read your Web stats/, incorporate search engine tips and use Web 2.0 themes, it’s time to choose a Web design firm to make all of the above happen for your small business. Google “web design” and spend the rest of your natural life clicking links or narrow down your search around some specific best-practices criteria.

1. Best of Show - Good Web firms have great or imaginative Web sites they designed themselves. Their sites employ logical navigation, have intuitive layout and you’re never more than 2 clicks away from what you want. Look for a way to get in touch with them; check for samples or a portfolio.
2. Site Suckiness Quotient – if a firm is confident in what it does, the rep will give you non-judgmental analysis of your site. No one should tell you that your current site sucks (you probably know that already); rather, they should discuss (in addition to improving navigation) what they would do to make your site more marketable. Do they mention replacing graphics with text? How about improving the content-richness of the text you already have? That’s valuable input.
3. The Online 5K – if the conversation begins with, “It’ll cost about $5,000 to redesign your site,” then hang up. The $5K delimiter has replaced the $3K ruler in build ‘em fast design and the fact is, it does not have to cost $5,000 for a straightforward site without too much interactivity. Yes, of course, interactivity is good and we recommend it, but design itself just doesn’t cost that much. (Programming does.)
4. The Monthly Gotcha – Web sites have to be updated. If the firm recommends a large fee for “maintenance,” then be concerned. They should be using relatively easy tools to enable you or a staff member to edit the site without enrolling in a community college (remember, Webmaster is a job!). One such tool is Adobe’s Contribute ($150 retail) and there are plenty of content management systems (CMS) as well. Beware the firm that doesn’t encourage you to self-edit. A modern site should be editable by the site owner.
5. The Full Monty – Web sites that are completely Flash are rarely editable except by a Flash programmer. Read the want ads for Flash programmers and deduce how much they charge hourly. Certain sites do well in Flash; most small business sites do not. Is the firm you’re considering pushing Flash? Ask about site updates before you sign and don’t send money without signing a contract (see #8).
6. Who’s Your Daddy? – Does the Web firm employ designers, coders and programmers or is it a virtual firm with only contractors in various countries? It’s better business to have a designer or project manager for your site who is your single point of contact during the design and build process. You should build a relationship with your design firm; there should be a person there with whom you can relate and who understand your business’s culture.
7. Ownership – Who owns the finished site? (We’ve already cautioned you to be sure you own your domain.) The copyright for your site should be yours but there’s a secondary issue: who owns the original files used to build your site? If there are cool graphical buttons and in 6 months you want another button, can you get the original graphic file that is the basis of the button? Ownership of content and original build files should be part of your contract. Those files include Photoshop, Illustrator and similar graphics.
8. Bottom Feeders – I’ve often said that if I weren’t married to a lawyer, I’d never again speak to one willingly (unless you get into trouble and then you want the biggest, baddest one out there, eh?). Get a contract with your design firm that specifies what the work product will be, the launch date and ownership (plus lots of other lawyerly things). If the Web firm is incorporated, you stand a better chance of that contract actually meaning something.
9. See No Evil – Looking at an online portfolio is one thing. Talking to real clients whose sites don’t make the Web Top 5 portfolio choices is another. Google the firm; if they aren’t showing up as site author in the meta tags, I wonder how their clients rate their work. Due diligence is your job.
10. Lift the Veil – Anyone can click “View/Page Source” in a browser. Look at some of their sites; better yet, have someone who knows HTML do it for you. Are their sites coded well or are they generated from pre-built templates? Do they contained sliced images (an antique site design technique)? Do they validate according to WC3 standards and are they ADA compliant?

There are too many horror stories about aborted Web site builds and yours doesn’t have to be one of them. Do your own thorough investigation before signing anything that you showed first to your attorney.

One of the only things that keeps some people
using a Mac, or even buying Macs for their business, is the whole "Macs are better for graphics/multimedia"
mantra. I’ll leave that debate for the Digg Holy Wars, but it is definitely interesting to see someone ditch OS X for
Linux in an art/design class. Linux is not typically considered tops in this area, and I don’t think anyone would
debate that. So turning a bunch of Mac boxes into Ubuntu machines for the sole purpose of teaching open source Linux
apps to a class of art students is a gutsy move. Yet that’s exactly what Gurdy Leete did, and supposedly it worked out
just fine. In fact, Gurdy converted one Mac-based media lab
into an Ubuntu-based media lab with apparently stellar results (not to mention much lower software costs). Granted,
Gurdy sometimes had to fall back on OS X (for printing to their AppleTalk-based printers for instance), but for the most
part the lab functioned the same as before. Some students really enjoyed being able to tweak their OSS tools, while
others relied on the application repository and Leete’s expertise. Again, it amazes me to see all the open source
alternatives out there, some of which are nearly as mature as their profit-based cousins. Leete’s experiences are worth
a read to anyone considering a switch, and also serves as a good list of alternative apps. I hadn’t heard of Scribus, but had been looking for just such a tool. Leete’s next move is to
replace Maya with Blender, and move away from Avid and Final Cut Pro to some OSS
replacements. Hopefully he’ll report how that goes as well… My only problem with all this is that in the
"real" world, you’re a lot less likely to find these tools being used. So if I were a student, I’d be a
little interested in learning Photoshop as well as GIMP.

Okay, I admit it:
I’m a design snob. Sure, I’m no world-class designer myself, you don’t have to be a chef to tell when something tastes
nasty, you don’t need to be a design whiz to know that most of the desktop backgrounds at almost every big
free-wallpapers site out there suck. Don’t lose hope just yet, though: Design blog Joey Interactive has a great round-up of web sites that have a slightly higher ratio of
don’t-suck to suck in the wallpaper department. Especially unique is the high proportion of wallpapers for higher
resolutions and widescreen and multi-monitor setups. My desktop background has been plain black for longer than I’d
like to admit, and it didn’t take me more than five minutes to find a handful of backgrounds I wouldn’t be ashamed to
use.

Before you ask: no, the headline is not a typo - Qtpfsgui is an app for the Linux users in the crowd that brings the oh-so hyper-realistic High Dynamic Range look to images without the need for a larger app like GIMP. However, Qtpfsgui isn’t an image editor, per se - it only provides the specific tools for merging different exposures of the same image into an HDR image, so if you were shooting by hand or need to re-align one of your shots for some reason, Qtpfsgui is not the tool for those particular jobs.

Qtpfsgui works with JPEG, TIFF and RAW formats, but be careful if you edit any of these images before bringing them to Qtpfsgui, as it relies on the exposure data in the EXIF tags to properly HDR-ify your images.

Nathan Willis has a nice writeup at Linux.com covering more of what Qtpfsgui is capable of, otherwise you can snag your own copy from its home at SourceForge.

Thanks again FreeRhino

Among the many updates in Photoshop CS2 are the new tools users have for selecting multiple layers. These new abilites are really handy, but I’ve been hearing rumors of hair-pulling from some users who aren’t aware of what’s changed, especially in the upgraded layers palette. For today’s Imaging Tip, I’d like to point you towards a few very handy remedies, tips and techniques our very own Jan Kabili at the Unofficial Photoshop Weblog has shed some light on.

First of all, it is now possible to select more than one layer in the layers palette, but you have to be careful where you’re clicking. Second, it is still possible to link layers, Adobe just tweaked how you do it, as linking now involves the aforementioned multiple-selection technique. Third and finally, it is also now possible to marquee-select layers like objects - Illustrator users know what I’m talkin about here. Head over to Jan’s explanation of how this new addition to the layers paradigm actually works.

During last week’s Adobe Live event, Adobe announced that it would halt development of Freehand and GoLive, according to Macsimum News. The programs are the first to be axed since Adobe’s acquisition of the company late last year. Their elimination is not unexpected, though, since the products overlapped Adobe’s Illustrator and Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, respectively. Though the programs’ development will cease, Adobe intends to continue to support the products, and back in April the company released a Freehand to Illustrator migration guide (PDF).

[Image from Flash Insider]

Designers, what is the number one thing your customers ask of you when they see your mockups? “Make my logo bigger, please!”

Companies spend large amounts of money on ad runs and web developments and want to stand out. Well, there are now a few things on the market that can help businesses increase the size of logos online and in print materials, fix whitespace, easily create starbursts, make designs stand out with fluorescent colors and create emotional ads.

This suite of six products will ensure customers are happy with their designs, all for just 3 easy payments of $29.99. Check out the infomercial to see if it might work for you! Also makes a great stocking stuffer!

HDRwalls offers a welcome change from hum-drum single color desktop backgrounds or the limited selection of built-in OS wallpapers. They currently have about 500 High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos in resolutions ranging from 800×600 to 1920×1200. They also provide sizes for iPod Touch, PSP, Blackberry, and iPhone.

HDR photography is the result of increasing the dynamic range of a photo through tone mapping and combining multiple exposures. The HDR group on Flickr has great examples and offers tips to create your own HDR images (and maybe even use them as desktop backgrounds).

[Thanks Michael!]