Pixelmatrix Design

You may or may not have heard of “progressive enhancement” before. It’s a farely simple philosophy when it comes to designing or styling documents for the web, and it takes a bit of an open mind to accept, but it’s something I’ve been really thinking about lately. Put simply, it’s creating a design that looks good in older browsers, but adding in additional touches that really make the design shine in newer browsers.

Note: This is not the same as “graceful degradation” which employs a similar technique. Graceful degradation is built around the opposite technique. Designing something for modern browsers and providing a way for it to degrade (still work) in older browsers. Similar result, but different thought process. This is also a good way to design/code for sites that have more of a modern audience.

Continue Reading →

This is a guide for designers who want or need to make resolution-independent glyphs or other resources for Mac apps. I must preface all this information with a note that much of this information was taught to me by Cabel Sasser and the guys at Panic. They’re way ahead in resolution-independence.

Continue Reading →

I’ve noticed a lot of people using the reCAPTCHA widget lately. While it’s my belief that users shouldn’t have to pay the price for websites’ spam issues, I think this is a neat service and idea overall. The only problem is that reCAPTCHA has an awful UI, and confused me the first 4 times I used it! I have a few ideas that will make this widget a lot more user-friendly and usable.

Continue Reading →

Today at Beer and Blog we discussed the possibilities of distributed “micro-blogging” services using an open standard, and blogging platforms. It’s certainly an interesting idea, and I would love to see it come to fruition, but I still have several doubts about it. There are several key components that may seem small overall, but they are the little nuances that make Twitter our favorite online service.

Continue Reading →

My WebVisions name badge. Click to view on Flickr

WebVisions is a local conference for web professionals that’s been going on for a number of years. This year was the first year that I had heard of it, and I was very excited that it was right here in Portland. This year’s topic was about the “future of the web”, and there was a lot of great talks around this topic. I just want to take a few minutes to go over a few cool things I learned and thought about.

Continue Reading →

Did you know that while using the Move Tool (V) in Photoshop, you can press 1-0 on your keyboard to control the opacity of the current layer?

1 = 10%, 2 = 20%, 0 = 100%, etc….

If you’re fast enough you can even type a specific number (like 23) and it will assign that opacity to the layer.

Thought i’d share this tip for anyone who doesn’t know.

As promised, here’s a walkthrough on the process that Michael Sigler and I came up with for making smooth screenshot layouts that are non-destructive. It takes a bit of work, but it pays off with some amazingly beautiful screenshots.

Continue Reading →

Lets say you want to simply change the fill color of a layer in Photoshop from white to black. The typical process is not very effective:

1. Load the selection for the layer you want to change (option click on the layer)
2. Make sure you have the correct color in the foreground
3. Hit Option-Delete to fill it with the foreground

Not only is this a slow process, but it also does not respect the transparency mask, leaving pixels that used to be 25% transparent to be 50% transparent now.

Fortunately there is a quick and easy method that does respect the transparency of your layer, and it’s also a lot quicker:

Simply select the layer you want to change colors for, make sure you’ve got the new color in the foreground and hit: Option-Shift-Delete. This tip also works for shape layers and text layers as well!

Thanks to Brian Zeitler for teaching me this trick a while back!

I realized that I have read a bunch of great books lately and haven’t posted anything about them! I try to constantly be increasing my knowledge of design and the web by reading books, and I think these reviews might be helpful if you’re looking for a book to check out. I will try to make these reviews a semi-regular occurrence. Without any further ado, here’s my take on two books i’ve read lately.

Continue Reading →

This is another post about interfacing with the control panel in Expression Engine and a number of people have requested it after my previous post (Creating an Admin Bar for Expression Engine).

It’s actually not too complicated. I’ll help you get set-up with some syntax for the blog homepage and your blog comments page. Let’s get started.

Continue Reading →