I have relocated to Portland, Oregon to teach at Portland State University in the Graphic Design Dept. The interview process, house hunting, packing and driving have consumed a great deal of the summer for me. Thanks to everyone in Chicago for their help and good wishes.

I have lots of new projects to add to the site in the coming weeks…

Adobe’s Photoshop doesn’t address the fact that when you’re listening to Motorhead dangerously loud you might catch the cord to your headphones on your foot and unplug them, filling your local coffee shop with “Ace of Spades”. It really is rather embarrassing, even if it is also tough as nails. Breakaway is a simple (and free) application that automatically pauses your iTunes when you headphones are disconnected; saving you from publicly releasing the fact that you listen to a terrible band like Yellowcard (no sarcasm here). With various configurations you can easily make it work for you. Like a lot of free software it isn’t without it’s bugs/glitches but so far it has kept me from getting all blushy and shy.

More often than not we are making quick edits to projects, sometime without our design files. How do we grab that color from the ‘contact page’ header graphic so we can change the body text color to match without an image editing program???

Well, leave it to the Mozilla community, Alex Sirota to be specific, to develop a color sampling tool that lives right in your browser. Colorzilla offers you an ‘eyedropper’ tool that captures Hexadecimal and RGB values for any color in your browser. You cand right click the icon in your status bar and copy that color is a number of differnt formats, paste it into your CSS document and wha-la….done.

In the mean time I do want to direct your attention to a good friends ‘Sacavenger Hunt’ project. Jon Gitelson is an artist in Chicago who is working on a book publising project and he is looking for your help. Check out his project HERE.

More soon… *ian

This site shows the versatility of CSS and WordPress as means to create a content rich web site. The TBS design consists of numerous color schemes and areas of information. Along with the main web site that outlines the school, its mission and the people involved a series of additional blogs for Students, Alumni, Parents and Faculty were also developed.

TBS includes Google Calendars and Google Maps as well as AddThis bookmarking function for each page.

This project was developed for the good people at UseAllFive in California.

See the site on-line: The Berkeley School

The site is another WordPress driven project. WordPress as a Content Management System is far more flexible and easy to learn that other CMS tools such as Joomla. (In my humble opinion)

Custompox employs the Shopp Plugin as well offering a clean and easy e-commerce solution as well as a nice Flash audio player on the home page for previewing some guitar samples.

This site was developed for Glantz Design.

See the site on-line: Custompbox

For me, the key to a good solid WordPress install is establishing a set of commonly used (and reliable) plugins that can be uploaded with your core WP files so that you can install them right away. In a way you are just creating your own default WP installation that suits your work flow and style of developing.

Here is my short list of essential WordPress plugins that make my life a lot easier:

1. Classy wp_list_pages : Anyone who works with CSS knows that the last and first items in a list are most likely to need special treatment. In WordPress a lot of navigation works off of auto-generated lists of pages and posts hence the need for more control. I wish I had found this plugin a year earlier than I did this is now a must have for my work flow.
2. HITS-IE6 PNG Fix : A fairly comprehensive plugin that provides you with 5 different PNG fix methods for Internet Explorer 6. As PNGs become more and more popular—as well as being preferred by designers who love gradients and drop shadows—the need for PNG fixing is obvious. Very simple, reliable plugin that will do the work for you.
3. PHPEnkoder : I’m a big fan of the HIVE Logic Enkoder in both its on-line and desktop (mac only) forms. So when I discovered that someone had developed a plugin based on their Enkoder I knew I’d like it. This plugin takes any ‘mailto:’ link in your posts and scrambles it so that Bots can’t get your email address… which means less spam. (Note: I have seen this plugin conflict with other plugins so make sure you test. Specifically this does not work well with Shopp because it scrambles email addresses that are entered when ordering)
4. Contact Form 7 : Hands down one of the most powerful and convenient plugins you will find for WordPress. Allows you to create PHP based forms that include validation and send the entry as an email to any address you want.

Those are just the four essential plugins I use for most web sites I work on. If you are looking for a good calendar I suggest Event Calendar 3 and if you need to embed flash content (as I did on this site) I suggest you check out ph-embed Flash.

The design for this site required the use of PNG-24 graphics with full transparency. Using some posterization as well as PNG Crusher I was able to ease some of the load time. In the end the integrity of the design outweighed the need for faster load times.

Each section of the site has its own configuration of graphic objects on the left side of the browser window; all floating over the wood grain background. A simple yet visually refined execution.

This site was developed for Glantz Design.

See the site on-line: www.soctherapy.com

This site was built using WordPress as a frame work and Content Management System (CMS) for easier updating. Also included is a Shop area powered by the Shopp plug-in for WordPress. I simple, yet diverse, plug-in that allows the using to create and manage products easily. You can easily connect Shopp to a PayPal account and be in business from the day the site launches.

This site was developed for Glantz Design.

See the site on-line: www.codegreenlights.com

Over the past 3-4 years social media has taken center stage in our on-line lives. Our on-line identities and lines of communications are more diverse than ever. Remember when it was just mySpace and email? And now? Facebook, Twitter and mySpace (although we all know how passé mySpace has become) are all competing for our attention and ad revenue.

Awhile back I downloaded TweetDeck, one of the various desktop applications developed for Adobe’s AIR platform.

Let me say that after a few new versions and tweaking the features TweetDeck has really come into its own and it is the perfect answer to consolidating various part of your Social Media life. TD now has the capacity to post, comment, “like” and reply via Twitter, Facebook and mySpace. And it works better than it ever. You select which accounts you are posting to or post to all of them and keep them in sync. I recommend checking it out.

Using the multi-user capabilities of WordPress I developed a modular and expandable site that allows various editors and contributors to write and publish material. Through the use of Templates, Plug-ins and extensive CSS styling I was able to create a truly ‘live’ site where content is added and manipulated on a daily basis.

Plug-ins used include: Event Calendar 3 and PHP Enkoder.

View this site on-line: Proximity Magazine