Viget Inspire

Delivering on our promise to make the Design Share into a series we recently wrapped up the second event. We stuck with our original format… mostly. Each presenter was still tasked with a 5 minute limit on their presentations with just under 10 minutes slated for question and answer. In short, we rotated speakers every 15 minutes. Based on feedback from the previous event we reduced the number of presenters from 6 to 4 resulting in an hour worth of presentations. At the end of the hour we added a 20 minute, panel-style Q&A. All in all, making for a nice sampling of work in a single evening.

Continue reading "Design Share 2: More With Less"

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In this post I'm going to show you how to display your FeedStitch feed on your site using a few simple lines of jQuery. FeedStitch is a site we made to allow users to aggregate feeds quickly and easily, and then offer various output options for the feeds users create. When FeedStitich first launched Mark Cornick wrote about parsing FeedStitch’s JSON feed with plain old JavaScript. As he pointed out, his example was just one way to do it and is less bulky than including the entire jQuery library, but it is a little more complex for people not accustomed to writing straight JavaScript. The designers here at Viget use the jQuery framework for most of our JavaScript needs so we usually have the library loading into most of our sites anyway. One of the great features in jQuery is that it can easily parse JSON feeds using the $.getJSON() function. This is something I have touched on before in my previous post about pulling your Flickr feed.

For this example, I made a FeedStitch feed with all the Viget blogs aggregated into single feed. If you go to a FeedStitch feed, you can grab the JSON feed at the very bottom of the page (next to the RSS feed icon). When looking at the raw JSON feed you'll probably see a mess of all kinds of variables and text, but here is what the beginning of the FeedStitch JSON feed looks like if we format it nicely:

Continue reading "Displaying Your FeedStitch JSON Feed Using jQuery"

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As soon as designers got ahold of the web as a design medium (probably about 15 years ago),  they were thinking about fonts, right?  (It was at least in the top five on the "first things to think about" list).  So, in an age where tens of thousands of fonts have been invented, why are we mostly still using the same six?

Techniques like image replacement and sIFR have done us well. They remain the strongholds until something better comes along -- which may have just happened: namely, I'm talking about Cufón by Simo Kinnunen.

Cufón (I'm pronouncing it "koo-fon") is a font-replacement technique that uses javascript and vector graphics to write fonts from a font file (TTF, OTF or PFB) to your browser. It's easier/safer to use than sIFR and lighter on size than image replacement, but has the same copyright issues as both.

Continue reading "Cufón Font Replacement - The Good and The Bad"

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Deep in the heart of Georgetown lies the Center for Digital Imaging Arts (CDIA) an extension of Boston University's applied arts school. I was recently asked to participate in a portfolio review of some of the school's upcoming web design graduates along with representatives from a few other fine agencies in the DC area. Among other options the school offers a Graphic and Web Design Certificate to help get future designers a leg up in pursuing their passions. I've been really impressed with the school's outreach into the local community. They seem to 'get it' and the students are smart to have connected with the school to jump start their careers. 

CDIA Student Portfolios:

• Erin Feliciano: http://erinfeliciano.com
• Pol Klein: http://polklein.com
• Laura Heffelfinger: http://ldhcreative.com
• Corey Clark: http://cclark1.cdiaweb.com
• Daniel Dominguez: http://www.coldfrontdesigns.com
• Jill Cockerham: http://www.jillcockerham.com
• Ronit Rosenthal: http://ronitrosenthal.com
• Theresa Stephens: http://tstephensmedia.com
• Charlotte Vazquez: http://spellsoup.com
• Amanda Kirby: http://amandakirbydesign.com/html/index.html

Continue reading "Portfolio Reviewin’, Thoughts and Ideas for Design Students"

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Once a month, two designers at Viget put together a presentation for the rest of the design team. Sometimes it's on finding inspiration, sometimes it's on new ideas or initiatives, and sometimes it's just a fun little knowledge-sharing presentation.

The following is one of the latter: A simple presentation I put together with some jQuery plugins to demonstrate the various ways jQuery can interact with type on the web.

You can view it here (click the headers to advance slides).

Topics Covered

• Keeping a vertical rhythm
• Removing "widows"
• Ampersands, ligatures & special characters
• Typographic animations
• Font detection

Plugins & Links

• Filipe Fortes - Lineheight Fix
• Dave Cardwell - Widon't
• Justin Hileman - Regular Expression Replacement
• Karl Swedberg (my hero) - Fancy Letter plugin
• jQuery UI
• Remy Sharp - Font Detection

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A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of presenting at Refresh the Triangle with one of Viget's crazy talented web developers, David Eisinger. Our original plan was to get up there and talk about how designers and developers can collaborate effectively, but we're both pretty snarky so somewhere along the way our talk title became "10 Things Designers Do To Piss Developers Off (and vice versa)".

As we battled it out putting slides together and making long lists of things we hated about our web counterparts, I found myself becoming much more aware of my "designer quirks". A few of David's points rang especially true, much to my embarrassment. It's hard for a designer to admit they aren't perfection on a stick.

So what hit home the hardest? Well, for starters...

Continue reading "Stop Driving Your Developers Crazy"

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Sharing notes at this year's conference went beyond Twitter -- there were a few folks at the SXSW Interactive Conference who took sketchnotes. Sketchnotes are elaborate notes with handwritten lettering and sketchy drawings of what is happening during the talk. They are an artform; a combination of comic strip and information design.  It takes a good listener and fast illustrator to get down a good sketchnote. The popularity of taking sketchnotes has grown and many people are now scanning in the pages of their moleskin and uploading them to flickr. I thought I would share with you a few of my favorites from this year's conference.

Continue reading "A Graphic Look at SXSWi 2009"

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