Bible Design and Binding: Bleeding Through: The Sorry State of Bible Paper Back in June, Iyov posted an excellent photo essay titled "Bible paper bleedthrough," using photos from my review of Cambridge's Pitt Minion NKJV to illustrate just how bad the problem of thin, translucent Bible paper really is. In my review, I described the paper as "relatively opaque," saying the ghosted print image from the reverse of the page was "faint, and not pronounced enough to be distracting." Iyov then used the photos illustrating the review to argue that my assessment shows just how far we've sunk: "…we have become so accustomed to bleedthrough that four layers of text can quality as 'relatively opaque.'" Fair enough. The photo above illustrates a phenomenon that goes by a couple of names — some call it bleed-through, others ghosting. I have a stack of vintage Bibles at my elbow. Readability ought to be the highest goal of any Bible edition. "There are many problems with Bibles being produced today: poor bindings, poor editing, overly small margins, and poor typesetting.
David Baron's weblog: What does a blur radius mean? [Note that this blog entry contains a good bit of markup, including script and SVG, and will probably not syndicate very well.] A bunch of Web platform features involve blurring. For example, the CSS text-shadow property lets a shadow be both positioned and blurred. Each shadow is given with three numbers: the first two give the position and the third gives the blur radius. text with a shadow The CSS box-shadow property is similar, though it also takes a fourth number, a spread radius, which I won't discuss here, except to say that nothing discussed here is relevant to it. The HTML canvas element has a similar shadow mechanism, which applies to all drawing operations: Different browsers, however, have historically done different things for the same blur radius, both in terms of blurring algorithm and what the radius means for that algorithm (i.e., how blurry a given radius makes things). In Firefox 4, we've changed our implementation to match these changes in the specs. box blur . See also:
Sanborn Fire Insurance Map Typography Title pages, headings and letterforms clipped, cropped and isolatedfrom maps and map publications issued between about 1880 and 1920. "D. A. Sanborn, a young surveyor from Somerville, Massachusetts, was engaged in 1866 by the Aetna Insurance Company to prepare insurance maps for several cities in Tennessee. [..] Before working for Aetna, Sanborn conducted surveys and compiled an atlas of the city of Boston titled 'Insurance Map of Boston, Volume 1, 1867'. [..] The atlas includes twenty-nine large plates showing sections of Boston at the scale of 50 feet to an inch. Albany, Georgia - April, 1920 Allentown, Pennsylvania - March 1885 Allentown, Pennsylvania - 1897 Allentown, Pennsylvania - October, 1891 Allentown, Pennsylvania - 1911 Ansonia, Connecticut - 1884[example full map] Aspen, Colorado - February, 1893 Boston, Massachusetts - 1867 Brunswick, Georgia - July, 1920 Charlottesville, Virginia - October, 1907 Cincinnati, Ohio - 1904 Colorado Springs, Colorado - 1907 Denver, Colorado - 1887
Boost Your Sales by 80% with a 'Call to Action' One of the most important elements of your web site is the "call to action." Your site may have a compelling headline that grabs your visitors' attention. It may have well-written salescopy, great graphics, awesome navigation, fantastic testimonials, and an unbelievable opt-in offer. But all these things aren't going to mean squat if you don't include a clear call to action! Take a moment to consider the purpose of your web site. Now ask yourself: Does your site tell your visitors exactly how to do these things? Your visitors need to know what you want them TO DO. Be explicit about the actions you want your visitors to take. The Power of Suggestion Just in case it's been a while since you brushed up on your marketing lingo, a call to action is a strongly worded suggestion that clearly states what action you want your visitors to take. For example, the following phrases are all calls to action: "Click Here to Subscribe!" Don’t Rush It! Don't Beat Around the Bush! Final Thoughts
What Would Seth Godin Do Seth Godin advocates using cookies to distinguish between new and returning visitors to your site: “One opportunity that’s underused is the idea of using cookies to treat returning visitors differently than newbies. It’s more work at first, but it can offer two experiences to two different sorts of people.” (Source: In the Middle, Starting) I built this WordPress plugin to implement Seth Godin’s idea. By default, new visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. New visitors will appreciate some context and background information about your site. I can be reached at wwsgd AT richardkmiller DOT com. Installation is easy: Download the WWSGD WordPress plugin and unzip it.Copy the what-would-seth-godin-do folder to your WordPress plugins folder (/wp-content/plugins/).Activate the plugin on the Plugins page.Customize settings in the Settings panel, WWSGD subpanel. That’s it! Do what should do
The Future of CSS: Finally, Sane Layout Tools HTML5 and CSS 3 offer web designers new semantic tags, fancy animations, server-side fonts and much more, but that’s not the end of the story. The next major development in web design will likely revolve around one of the things neither HTML5 nor CSS 3 have yet addressed — page layout. For all the great new tools in both technologies, the task of making page elements arrange themselves the way you’d like remains an imperfect process at best. Floats, absolute positions and the occasional bit of JavaScript will get the job done, but that’s a lot of code for something as basic as positioning elements on the page. Surely there’s a better way. These CSS rules tell the browser that our section tag should be a box. If that sounds good to you then you’ll be excited to know that the code above will actually work in the latest versions of Firefox, Safari and Chrome, which all support the W3C’s Flexible Box Layout Module. See Also:
HTML5 Makes a Great Color Picker HTML5 is changing more than just websites — it’s changing the capabilities of browsers, as well. For example, a very clever use of the HTML5 canvas tag allows developer Heather Arthur’s Rainbow color scheme add-on for Firefox to extract a color palette from any webpage. Because browser add-ons — those in Firefox and Chrome anyway — can be built using HTML, they too can take advantage of HTML5′s new tools. In Arthur’s case, that means using the HTML5 <canvas> element to load the entire web page and then use the getImageData function to extract colors. Now it’s true there are already some add-ons (and desktop software) that can do this, but the shortcoming of most such add-ons is that they simply parse a page’s DOM and extract CSS styles to build a color palette. Arthur’s method of putting the page in a canvas tag and then parsing that means that all the colors are extract since the entire page effectively becomes a single, parsable image. See Also:
Horizontal Scrolling Websites Design Inspiration chethstudios Design Magazine Its Sometimes great and refreshing to see someone break the conventional web design style of top-down scrolling and come up with horizontal scrolling website. Not only these look structurally different, it gives you the freedom to do whatever you wish, and come up with new ideas because its a whole different game in web designing . This design trend is mostly seen in design and photography portfolios. Here are some excellent examples to inspire you to create a horizontal scrolling site! IndoFolio Pretty Production PDCdesigns22 Inhouse James Joyce Candice Holloway Peter Pearson Aubrey Edwards Photography Dimitris Theocharis Photography Tom Hoops Photography Stephane TARTELIN stéphane BUCCO the boxdoodle project Jaynelle Lording Harry Wittlinger zupadupa Furniture store Merus Wines hvasshannibal Eolo Perfido Photography nirvana the band the show Snohetta Talents Tinkainteractive Mariana
Pairing typefaces in book design Choosing a typeface combination was something I struggled with when designing my first book. So it’s with pleasure that book designer, page compositor and layout artist Stephen Tiano wrote the following as a guest contribution. Image courtesy of arnoKath Choosing typefaces is one of the two most important choices you make when designing a book. I know of two ways to select typefaces for book projects. A few of my favorite type superfamilies are Fontin/Fontin Sans, Liberation Serif/LiberationSans, and Scala Pro/Scala Sans Pro. The second way to pair types is the “hard,” creative way; the doping-it-out kind of way, where the book designer does the matching. Contrasting, at first blush, is by far the easier of the two ways to work out pairings. Some obvious points to compare are letter height, x-height, stroke weight, character shapes, and direction of the axis (vertical or angled). For book design, I stop here, except for my desire to sometime set a book in Optima, a Near-Serif Sans.
Best Practices of Combining Typefaces - Smashing Magazine HOWTO: Configure Tor + SASL + irc to connect to Freenode | random neuron misfires Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 at 8:39 pm| 17,722 views | trackback urlTags: freenode, identd, irc, linux, nickname, Perl, Python, Tcl, VMware, xchat I fought this problem on the train into the city today, because my MiFi‘s hostname was not correctly reversing to it’s given IP (verified by dig) and Freenode was denying the connection; it looked like this: Mar 22 06:51:41 * Looking up irc.freenode.net Mar 22 06:51:41 * Connecting to chat.freenode.net (86.65.39.15) port 6667... Mar 22 06:51:42 * Connected. Now logging in... Mar 22 06:51:42 * *** Looking up your hostname... I wanted to connect, to talk to the folks in #linux, and ask them about another question I had (see newer blog post about fullscreen VMware session for that). At first, I tried installing a few identd daemons, then some of the spoofing identd daemons, then purged them all and decided to try identifying using SASL like it suggested. I did a few seconds of Google’ing and found a helpful website with a SASL plugin in C.
10 Things You Can Do To Become A Better Web Designer Like a lot of web designers I didn’t go to school to learn design or development. My degrees are in completely unrelated fields. As a web designer and developer I’m close to 100% self-taught. That self-teaching isn’t random though. Since the beginning I’ve set a course for self-study that I continue to adapt to this day. First I want to offer a few thoughts on learning in general. Two Types of Learning One of the frequent topics of conversation on small business forums is how important a college education is. Most people typically fall on one side or the other and I’ve usually found that side depends on their own career path. There are good arguments for both sides, but I think the best way to learn is through a combination of theory and practice. Theory Learning through theory is about learning from the experience of others. Theory: Builds a solid foundationShows you how others have solved problemsTeaches you why things work as they doGives you a roadmap for further study Practice Practice: