Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

Preview of a series in progress. I’m taking the official Street Fighter 4 artwork and making vector duotone silhouettes from them. Each character’s form is done in black and then an accent is added, matching the character’s main signature color and attack. The process of vectorizing is simplified with live-trace, but I’m still doing a lot of cleanup and individual adjustment to ensure recognizability. I got the idea from a series of linoleum block prints that I did back in college that were black & white silhouettes of 6 different Soul Calibur 2 characters.

I had a client approach me and ask if I knew how to customize MySpace. I replied “Sure can!” thinking that it couldn’t possibly be that difficult. Oh sweet merciful Jesus was I ever wrong. Instead of elegant semantic code full of classes to hook into, MySpace is a horrible mishmash of tables, divs, and transparent spacer images. You can’t directly style any ID elements, since hash marks (#) get stripped out whenever you save profile edits.

I dug through googled pages of style templates until coming across Hacking A More Tasteful MySpace by Mike Davidson. However, this was written almost 2 years ago, and MySpace code has become even more convoluted since then. Enter Alexander Agnarson (LOOK at that MySpace, WOW!) and his update to Mike’s excellent hack.

Honestly, my initial efforts pale in comparison. I’m a neat freak though, and my goal was to make all of the content boxes line up with even widths down the column and even gaps throughout, so mission accomplished. It’s still a WIP, now that I have the alignment all sorted out I can work on the flourishes.

I’ve been pretty busy this week. Set the axe to the grindstone and finished the site layout for MB Design. Had it go live on Sunday, so now I can FINALLY put together business cards to hand out. It’s still a work in progress, as I’m not entirely happy with the copy, but I have a wonderful team of professionals (read: relatives and my lady) pouring over it with a fine toothed comb. I suppose that this is my first real usability test. It’s being done on the cheap, as described by Steve Krug in his excellent book “Don’t make me Think”, the premiere guide to solid web UI design.

As for business cards, I’m going all-out. In every “top 10 cool business cards” blog article I’ve read, there is always ALWAYS a transparent plastic card included. They’re durable, stylish, and definitely leave people thinking. I’m going to throw my hat in and try to capitalize on the trend. The one catch that I’ve noticed is that a plastic card isn’t exactly the easiest to write on. People are always writing additional info on the back of their cards. Should I sacrifice that functionality for style? Hell no! I’ve got a way to get the best of both style and function. I noticed that a lot of plastic card printing companies can add a credit-card style signature strip to the back of a card. Who says it can only be used for signatures? DUH! I’m totally going to use those as a writable area for the back of my cards.

I have a relative (always hit up those connections) that owns a promotional materials company. Strangely enough, he doesn’t have a website for me to plug (I smell business opportunity). He’s looking into pricing. Will post pics of my bitchin’ business cards when they come in.