Here is a link that shows 8 fonts that should be used in CSS but aren’t. They are long, lost and forgotten typefaces that actually… should come in handy in web design. Have a look at the post on 3point7designs. They show each font’s availability on Mac and PC… No Linux info though, sorry all you open-sourcers.
So although I’ve been hacking away at the code of the current design of this site I realised that it wasn’t conducive to a portfolio site. So in an attempt to make myself seem more ‘designery’ I will be trying to implement the design I have concocted as shown in the screen shot. Any comments would be appreciated (Russell). The next step is to Photoshop a concept for the portfolio page.
Finally everything to do with the Rave On Air website is finished. Sponsors logos are all in place, curved boxes are all…. curved, and the colours are odd but thats what the ‘client’ wanted so thats what I’ve done.
Have a look here
Have a look at the current site at www.raveonair.com
[Edit]
I spoke too soon… already there is ‘more content’ to go up and problems that don’t exists and yet they are there. So frustrating.
I am now using Lightview to test it compared to Lightbox 2.
On the plus side it looks a lot prettier (if that were possible) and its transitions are sleeker. It has two key features that Lighbox does not… It has the ability to have a slideshow in the same screen with the click of a button and is very smooth. The other is that it scales the image to fit into the browser window. This was a major problem for me with the last project’s slides as they had to be 1024×768 (for some reason).
There is a downside though, depending on how large the image is the scaling process can cause a lot of artefacts and is completely useless with text (like a slideshow for example). As if you’ve zoomed out in photoshop… the image is very pixelly. I recommed re-scaling all images to a max of 800×600 (which I will be doing with my slide show) to make the most of the progam.
Oh and its also in one handy little package that you upload to the plug-ins folder in Wordpress :D
Here it is on the Wordpress site if you want to test it out for yourself.
Whilst searching the interweb last night trying desperately to find a way to block google’s ’sponsored links’ within its gmail system, I came across a brilliant little add-on for firefox that does that plus much more! It’s so simple too.
Its called ’stylish’ and essentially overwrites the existing css of the page by using !important. So to remove ads its as easy as finding out the container’s name and setting it to display:none !important;. Easy right? Well actually it can be quite hard to find the names of what you want to change… thats why there is a dev community that has done it for you at http://userstyles.org/
All you do is install the ’stylish’ add-on for firefox and then search the site for the pages that people have changed. So I searched for gmail and found hundreds of mods for it from simply removing ads to re-colouring the whole site. There are a few nice little applications that are web-wide (like the google ad blocking) and some that are only site wide (I have changed the colour of the Facebook header).
The great thing is, you can write your own or edit existing ones and preview all of them before saving them. Even then its a simple toggle-on, toggle-off system.
I recommend this for every web developer.
Today I got a message from Danille Leben from Rave On Air askin me if I had received the email about the new branding. I hadn’t but I had. It was in my spam folder. Anyway the new ‘branded’ site is online but I’m not convinced by it. There were a few ‘must-have’ things they said needed to be put on the website… which made it harder to cut up their template. The theme had to rotate every time someone went to the site, so there was a different colour each time, easy to do - bit of javascript and several css files.
The problem was the headings HAD to be in Century Gothic font, meaning they had to be images, meaning I had to cut each heading out and create a div just for it so I could have it as the background of the div and rotate it with the stylesheet. This was made infinitely more complex as the templates I had been sent were all different sizes and alignments but obviously meant to be the same thing.
Anyway… after many hours of slaving away over Illustrator and photoshop the site is now re-branded. It does rotate the themes randomly when you hit refresh but doesn’t always work if you try to do it too often. I just grabbed the first javascript file I found.
Have a look here
Have a look at the current site www.raveonair.com
I was expecting the presentation to be inclusive of other members of the class, but no it was just each group or individual with Flo and Dave. Valid feedback was received and the main thing I got out of it was that our idea (Myself and Robert Andre) is very VERY large in scope and we need to refine down each aspect we want to present. Flo made a good point that we should present as if we were pitching to TFL and not only to someone with technical understanding but also to someone who could potentially buy the idea of us.
With this information we have decided on 4 things to prepare for our final presentation (even though they are slightly off brief).
1. Plan a route through multiple points (done but with manual if statements).
2. Create a flash animation of what the interface will look like and what information it displays.
3. Have a small demo video showing real-time implementation of an SMS text based system.
4. Have an image map that allows the user to select the route directly (might have to be a flash file rather than php as I can’t get the selection to input the data into a ‘$_GET’ field.
Here’s the presentation we used for the formative anyway.
Yes I’m still up!
I’ve made a new blog for the Virtual Environments project which you can check out here or click the link on the right.
I’ve also fleshed out my new website design a little more… looks like I won’t be using my newly found Java script drop-down menus.
Here’s a screen shot.
I’m working on the Rave On Air 08 holding page at the moment using html, css and php. I think I’m getting the hang of all the web malarkey now… It’s a work in progress and is subject to change what with the creative side of it being kinda taken away from me.
In Feb or April the theme will have been decided on and I will have to make the whole site, and make the whole site match the theme. Anywho, it’s currently hosted on my own site until the dispute with the RaveOnAir domain name is resolved so check it out…
UPDATED 04/03/08 - Domain issues resolved
Have a look here
Have a look at the current site at www.raveonair.com
I have just finished a quick template of a holder page for Rave On Air 2008. There is no branding for it yet and I don’t expect there will be for a few months yet so I was instructed to use the Ravensbourne colour scheme. Let me know what you think.
