A few weeks ago, Jim and I got the chance to go to New York for a day and see some great speakers at Future of Web Design 2008. This was the third FOWD Carsonified has held (read Jackson's notes from the first one), and their experience in planning tightly-scheduled, well-organized conferences definitely showed.

There were too many talks and impressions to really go through'em all, plus there are already great in-depth discussions out there, so I just wanted to toss out my top five takeaways. There were a lot of good talks (Powazek, Mall, Swedberg) that don't get mentioned here, not because I didn't learn anything from them, but because they didn't fit neatly into these five points.

Continue reading "Five Lessons From FOWD ‘08"

Leave a comment ( 4 )

Earlier this week Flickr posted on their blog that the three billionth photo had been uploaded, so I thought this would be the perfect time to promote Flickr's services some more. A while back I wrote about pulling Flickr images using jQuery, but in that example we were using feeds provided by Flickr's services. Feeds are great because they don't require an API key, and with response formats like JSON, its become relatively easy to parse out the information coming in. The downside is that you can only work with the information within the feed you're pulling. Plus, that post was mostly about using jQuery and may have been a little much for most people who just want to simply pull images from Flickr. In this post, I'll show you how to easily use the Flickr API to display pictures on your site.

The Easy Way

Flickr offers a free badge creator because anyone with a Flickr account wants to show off pictures on their website. After answering some questions about how you want your badge to look, you get a tailored JavaScript include that you can just paste into your HTML and have pictures display on your page. This is really easy for anyone that just wants to show a couple photos on their blog, but doesn't feel like learning about the API (which as you'll see later is super easy). For example, here is what a personal badge (from Flickr user "vigetinspire") might look like:

Continue reading "Using the Flickr API: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges"

Leave a comment ( 6 )

We've all heard of information overload, and most of us recognize that too much data overwhelms rather than educates. It kills our efficiency and distracts us from important tasks. With so much information at our fingertips, even small decisions become difficult. I can lose hours of time on Good Reads sifting through reviews trying to decide what book I should read next. It's fun and interesting, and my choice is well-informed, but I used to visit the library and choose something off the shelf in 5-10 minutes. Is the trade-off really worth it?

Lately I've been noticing a similar phenomenon while designing. The explosion of great CSS galleries and design blogs out there has made it impossible to feel "caught up". There are so many cool things out there to discover... and the possibility of missing something eats at me.

Continue reading "Overcoming Inspiration Overload"

Leave a comment ( 29 )

For some reason, it remains difficult to hunt down font families that have a serif and sans-serif combo. As far as I have found, none of the font sites allow you to search by this designation, yet it seems quite useful to utilize the hard work of typographers who, with great attention, have designed sets that work in this capacity. I'm not a huge student of typography, but I do understand that there's some grumbling about the use of these pairings, that using them produces less-than-ideal results or reflects a bit of laziness. I get it, and agree that some of the best combos are hand picked, but this post isn't about that. There are plenty of other font pairings that don't share a family, that work together because they contrast nicely, but again maybe a different post. This post is simply put together to identify what is available in the event that you're needing a quick sans/sans-serif harmonious combo or you're looking for wider variations within a single family style.

There isn't a clearly standardized name for serif/sans-serif paired families, but from what I can find, superfamily is the term most commonly used. You may also find references that use the terms suite, hyperfamily, type system, or family group. Following is a list compiled from other posts that I found and personal font searches. Please share superfamilies that you know of that didn't make the list, and I'll be glad to add them.

Continue reading "Superfamily Font Roundup: 40+ Serif and Sans Font Pairings"

Leave a comment ( 14 )

I was working on a project the other day that took advantage of a technique very similar to the one used in the image above, and I realized that I haven’t seen any tutorials online that really explained this process, so I figured I would share it in the case that you’re ever interested in achieving a similar effect. It’s also a chance to go over exactly what channels and load selection can do for you as a designer working in Photoshop.

Channel controls aren’t just for color/plate separation. We can wield the power of channel selection to capture elements of an image—very similar to creating paths—and apply them to our design. This can come in handy when you want to do anything from knocking out a white background from a logo, to creating true monotone images right in a RGB PSD file. The uses are endless. Load Selection, on the other hand, is a slightly more hidden feature, though just as powerful as Channels. You might know Load Selection through the use of paths you’ve created in Photoshop or imported over from Illustrator.  Loading a Selection in tandem with a Channel works pretty much the same way. With that said, on to the tutorial.

Continue reading "Load Selections with Channels in Photoshop"

Leave a comment ( 10 )

Throughout the year the team here at Viget embarks on numerous internal projects aimed to expand our expertise. With that thought in mind, we just recently designed an built an iPhone-specific site to accommodate the majority of our mobile users. The overall process was an enjoyable one. Here's a glimpse of how the project came together.

Continue reading "Viget.com gets iPhone-ized"

Leave a comment ( 12 )

Recently, our team set aside some time to make another flash mob happen. If you’re unfamiliar with what that is, take a look back at our first. This time around, we decided to use our 4 hours to whip up some t-shirt designs that reflected some of our “inspirations”. We talked about defining parameters, but bailed quickly on that and decided to leave it wide open. To keep it fun (somebody needs bragging rights), we’re asking that you check out the design concepts and vote on your favorite. We’ll then print up 3 of the winning design and draw randomly from the commenters who respond to this post to see who gets them. If you want to purchase one of these t-shirts in the meantime, we’ve set up a no-commissions Spreadshirt shop where you can grab one. We’ve ordered a couple of test shirts and the quality is nice, although not perfect (it’s what you’d expect from a one-off, digitally printed t-shirt shop). We’re pretty happy with the results, though.

Continue reading "Viget Flash Mob: T-Shirts"

Leave a comment ( 19 )