If there’s one thing I enjoy most about running Authentic Jobs , it’s hearing positive feedback from customers. Not every employer finds the right candidate, mind you — that’s why the money-back guarantee in place. But many do. Here are a few recent testimonials. … Read the rest here
Alex Cornell and Scott Hansen of ISO50 have thrown together an impressive and definitive Field Guide to Color Management . Though there are literally thousands of guides on the web like this, ISO50’s is not only replete covering everything from lighting to print settings but also comes from a trusted resource plenty experienced with color management and printing . Consider this advice for workspace color management: An additional step you can take to ensure ideal lighting conditions in your workspace is to paint the walls with Munsell 8 Gray. This paint is specially formulated to have a flat spectral response with no color bias. Unlike other hues, this type of gray will not affect your perception of other colors in the spectrum. It creates a “pure” and neutral viewing environment. … Read the rest here
Alex Cornell and Scott Hansen of ISO50 have thrown together an impressive and definitive Field Guide to Color Management . Though there are literally thousands of guides on the web like this, ISO50’s is not only replete covering everything from lighting to print settings but also comes from a trusted resource plenty experienced with color management and printing . Consider this advice for workspace color management: An additional step you can take to ensure ideal lighting conditions in your workspace is to paint the walls with Munsell 8 Gray. This paint is specially formulated to have a flat spectral response with no color bias. … Read the rest here
Talk of South by Southwest seems to come around quicker each year. I’m already looking forward to heading back to Austin, not least of all because I may get the chance to be on a couple of great panels (please cast a thumbs up if you like the sound of the panels). First up is Is Your Website Heading for a Car-Wreck? with Alan Colville , Jon Tan and Giles Colborne . … Read the rest here
While it’s been a fairly quiet summer around these parts, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve been slacking off. Let’s run down the list. New Chalkwork Icons & Search Back in June while sitting around recovering from some minor surgery, I spent a weekend producing a new free icon set for payments and ecommerce called, naturally, Chalkwork Payments . It highlighted a fairly obvious deficiency in the collection, so immediately after I set to work on a much larger commerce set. Creatively named Chalkwork Commerce of course. Due to the growing size of the overall icon family (2500+ now), I decided a better way to find a specific icon was in order. … Read the rest here
A compilation of resources, products, and inspiration spotted before, after, but not during knee surgery. Los Angeles Times gets a makeover A rather nice overhaul of the latimes.com site. (Here’s what it looked like in February 2008 .) Oliver Kavanagh A rather audacious, springboard-style home page that leaves me wanting to try something similar. DIY ring light with LEDs …and other DIY camera mods using LEDs. The 6 brand naming styles Josh Levine: The 6 naming styles add context so you can see the full landscape of choices… Read the rest here
A few weeks ago I received the following remarks from Jeff Lin, an Authentic Jobs customer and founder of Bust Out Solutions : Just wanted to let you know that I posted a job probably two years ago for a designer, got several responses, and ultimately found one guy who I tried to hire. It didn’t work out at the time, but we kept in touch, and I finally hired him a few months ago. It’s worked out great, and we recently launched Best Buy Idea X . I’m happy with the design, and in part thanks to Authentic Jobs for helping me find great talent! Employers continue to find talented web and creative professionals through Authentic Jobs , which has been filling full-time and freelance positions throughout the globe since 2005. … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been taking a bit of a break lately. But there’s some exciting stuff coming up in the not too distant future. Excuses, Excuses Despite the temptations of ever-warming weather, I had to throw most of my free time towards a new presentation for An Event Apart and @media last week, and on a gameplan for teaching in the fall. Well, that and sometimes I just don’t have much of anything to say. Rather than drop posts on here that I don’t care about, I decided to take a few weeks away from this site to recharge. … Read the rest here
SidebarAds is shutting its doors. After almost a year, this little pet project from Sidebar Creative is calling it quits. Originally conceived as The Deck "Light" but focusing more heavily on the designer/developer crowd, it would grow to more than a million ad views a month. Too bad the advertisers didn’t come join the fun. It was great fun to put together and a learning experience all ’round… Read the rest here
With all the talk of URL shortening services, I decided to add a quick service into Snook.ca, which is run on CakePHP, to redirect a short URL to a post. Because my static content already has short URLs and all I have are posts, creating a short URL handler for it was very easy. To give you some context, I route my posts through a specific structure: /archives/:category /archives/:category/:articlename In this case, I have a couple routes that route everything to my Posts controller and the bycat or view actions. These action take the named parameters and pulls out the appropriate content. Easy peasy. … Read the rest here
There’s something about the Diggbroglio that has left me scratching my head: how is it that so many people are up in arms about the DiggBar when they’ve had nothing to say about the framing bars of StumbleUpon, FaceBook, etc. etc.? Now, please note that I’m not saying the DiggBar, or any other framing bar, is cool and we should all love it. I’m not. I absolutely, completely, totally get all the reasons why framing bars are bad for breaking bookmarking and navigating and search engines and copyright and hijacking content and so on. … Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
Last Friday I played in Coudal Partner’s Layer Tennis in a east coast vs west coast brawl with Derek Powazek , a friend and one of my favorite web designers. I thought it might be fun to give some background on the match. The view from my desk during the match. For those uninitiated with Layer Tennis, the premise is simple: two players trade a Photoshop document back and forth, each player has 15 minutes to iterate on the previous “volley” however they see fit. The matches are played live on Friday afternoons, and people follow along and comment via Twitter… Read the rest here
Jason Santa Maria Go to the source
Last Friday I played in Coudal Partner’s Layer Tennis in a east coast vs west coast brawl with Derek Powazek , a friend and one of my favorite web designers. I thought it might be fun to give some background on the match. The view from my desk during the match. For those uninitiated with Layer Tennis, the premise is simple: two players trade a Photoshop document back and forth, each player has 15 minutes to iterate on the previous “volley” however they see fit. … Read the rest here
One of the things that I’ve found mind-bendingly annoying about Leopard (besides its complete refusal to allow classic window management) is the “this file was downloaded from the internet, are you sure you want to open it?” dialog box. Yes, damn it: I just downloaded the file with the express intent of opening it. Stop bothering me. Keep it up and I might mistake you for PC . What’s even worse is that the dialog requires mouse input to get past. It would be just within the limits of acceptability if the dialog buttons responded to keyboard input; if I could hit command-O or something to invoke “Open”, then I’d probably keep the safeguard in place, because I could just charge past it with a quick twitch of the fingers. … Read the rest here
We’ve rolled out some changes over here at SimpleBits that have been chipped away at for months. Visually, it’s not a drastic difference, but lots of adjustments and polishing were done in other areas. Chunks of copy were chopped, multiple pages combined into one, things simplified. More care and attention was given to the internal layout of pages that aren’t weblog pages. Finally. Also, the idea of fluid grid layouts has intrigued me since I heard Ethan talk about them at a Markup & Style Society event we threw a year ago… Read the rest here
We’ve rolled out some changes over here at SimpleBits that have been chipped away at for months. Visually, it’s not a drastic difference, but lots of adjustments and polishing were done in other areas. Chunks of copy were chopped, multiple pages combined into one, things simplified. More care and attention was given to the internal layout of pages that aren’t weblog pages. Finally. … Read the rest here
As some of our regular readers have guessed, yes it is true. Digital Web Magazine has ceased publication. For the reasons cited in Time To Change , it was clear to us that what we had was no longer working. We called upon both our staff and readers for ideas on what we could change. We received a lot of good feedback. … Read the rest here
While I’ve known of Yahoo Pipes for awhile, I never really thought to use it until now. Pipes is a neat tool that Yahoo has put together to allow you to mashup feeds, filter feeds and create a completely new feed. Commonly, I’ve seen people take feeds from a number of different sources on a particular subject and combine them into a master feed. For example, they want a master CakePHP feed but want to grab only posts that actually mention CakePHP. … Read the rest here
In building this iteration of the blog, I decided to follow that trendiest of trends and embed my latest Twitter status on my sidebar. Despite having been on Twitter for awhile and having my site linked from my Twitter account, I didn’t really have anything pushing people from my site back to Twitter. Problem solved: add status to sidebar. But what’s the best way to keep it up to date? … Read the rest here
View from on stage as I’m preparing to speak at An Event Apart New Orleans 2008. I’ll be straight up with you: I don’t profess to be an expert speaker. I’ve had my share of presentations that have been total flops, along with some very successful ones. But if anything, I’ve done quite a bit of speaking over the past four years (see the summary on my LinkedIn public profile ), and therefore I’ve learned a few things about speaking along the way. Below are 20 things I’ve learned. Though this list is geared towards one-hour sessions rather than panels and workshops, some of the same principles apply… Read the rest here
