Ordinary-Life.net

Believe it or not I'm starting to work on a design for this site. As part of that process I wanted to look over my old designs, both those that were used, and those that never made it to the finish line. Have a look!

I'd love to hear any thoughts you might have, please feel free to leave a comment.

Ok, this is pretty badass I must admit.

I am very much digging the work done by Deeo. LINK (Caution: Some Artistic Nudity). A clash of tagger culture combined with traditional japanese prints. I just may order one!

Pretty cool discussion of how a large web application is optomized for large scale, framed in the context of facebook.

This salt and pepper set in the form of Angel and Devil is AWESOME. Someone buy it for me please? LINK

Create file with the name “.htaccess”

Cut/Paste the below lines

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

Upload to your main public HTML directory. Now you can access template groups in Expression Engine without having to type out http://www.urlhere.com/index.php/templategroupname/, instead you get http://www.urlhere.com/templategroupname/

I love the illustration and general fun feel of this site, great work!

In what will probably be one of the best ExpressionEngine tutorials of the year, Jamie Pittock is going to build and document a fairy complex EE driven website, and document the process. I’ve already picked up a few tricks o try on my next few large project, and I’m super excited to see how this series continues.

Digital Web has an article on building your design inspiration collection, and I thought now would be a good time to share some of my resources. My Flickr website screen shot archive is a constant source of reference material when I need to see something well designed. I also love NotCot.org for its fantastic array of art, toys and products that all share a solid design sensibility.

Nick has been kind enough to post up some information on how he adds personality to his vector illustrations.

http://javierzhx.deviantart.com/gallery/#_browse/resources

Some cool stuff here in a variety of styles, the usual grunge, some fractal and even a rising sun starburst effect.

Luke has yet another post delving into the details of form design, this time concentrating on address collection. He presented an interesting example that shows how an effort to simplify may in fact be a step in the wrong direction, it’s definitely worth the quick read. An interesting observation in his second example that popped up, was how Apple placed the form fields in the same physical location and order as you would when filling out an envelope. Making the form feel as familiar as possible, even those more used to paper email then digital.

I have to confess I’m a bit of a fan boy, Luke’s upcoming book should be due out soonish and its tops on my to-buy list.

Design Meltdown has a cool little screencast of various drop down menus. Better then screenshots, though I’d like to see a screenshot for each option, then a mini-screenshot showing just that one menu.

So much to my shame this site has been mostly dormant for longer then I want to confess. I’m hoping yet again to get it off the ground for a variety of reasons. One of the biggest being that I’m getting to design more these days and in doing so I’m starting to remember I was good at it and really enjoyed it.

One of the biggest catalysts for this change has been my recent attendance at the Future of Web Design conference this year, where I saw a great many designers I’ve admired as well as meeting my very long time net friend and fellow designer Lea (which was fantastic to do after so many years).

So I have to kick things off, not with a whimper but with a bang. I’ve started using Lea’s Art of Self Branding series as a starting point and from it’s first step I’ve asked friends and co-workers to describe me in 3 adjectives. I wanted to put this up to both share in the process and to hold myself accountable. Feel free to add your own adjectives in the comments if you’d like.

Lea: Long time friend, fellow designer
Obsessive, Sincere, Hilarious

Chip: Former boss, old friend
Loyal, Finicky, Smart

Christine: friend
Quirky, Smart, Hermit

Max: friend
intelligent, honest, nerdy

Larissa: Friend, writer
cynical, charming, genuine

Russ: New Boss
creative, tenacious, clever

Melissa S.: Friend
Blunt, Thoughtful, Witty

Melissa B.: Sister
Witty, Intelligent, Introvert

Devorah: New Friend
Clever, warm, mischievous

Richard: Old Friend
perfectionist, picky, honest

Monday: Long time internet Friend
Loyal, Sharp-witted, Talented

Addye: Long time internet friend, designer
thorough, dicsiplined, and consistent

A very interesting image resizing technique. I see no reason this won’t become a standard feature in image editing packages, and possibly worm its way into thumbnail generation on websites.