Sunday-Edition

Successful design complements content and reveals its inherent value. The needs of your target audience determine the content and design of your message whether it’s presented on the Internet or in print-based materials.

Logo design has come a very long way from the IBM, UPS, Levis and FedEx logos of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.

Great logo design is still based on fundamental design principles—type, shape, color, graphic content, tone and balance—but today, our society is a very visual one. Contemporary identity design needs to be much more dynamic and punchy to have any lasting impact.

In general, a great logo must say something about the company it represents, even in a simple type design approach. All elements should be clean, easily read, and very appropriate for the given market and audience.

A great logo delivers a clear, well defined message of uniqueness and individuality. Many times, logos are the first and only impression consumers encounter when they are shopping for a particular product or service.

A great logo must say something about the company it represents. Distilling a client’s persona, mission, or marketing approach into a single gesture or emotion that can be conveyed by a strong stand-alone image is the heart and soul of the logo design process.

Brand Identity

Identity branding is the new paradigm in strategic business marketing. What is your unique selling position and are you branding your product to maximize that advantage?

I have developed and managed successful identity brand and image projects within the government and corporate sectors. The design of a consistent business wide brand image, cements your profile and increases recognition when media campaigns are aimed to increase your reach.

In the fall of 2003, my wife became interested in kickboxing at a local private instructor facility in town. Having lost my strong physique over several years of comfortable married home life I decided to attend a class with her to see what this was all about.

One night we stopped by and watched a class. It was not your typical cardio kick boxing class. There was the regular workout but also an added flair of martial arts and inner peace with ones body. I thought it would be fun but I was feeling as though I had gone to far down the road to recover from the land of the couch potato. My wife encouraged me to try, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well I could do it. The first few visits took a toll on me, but shortly I began to feel the muscle strengthen all over once again.

Soon I was addicted. I started attending 3 nights a week, and began a self-evaluation of all the junk I was eating. I changed that too. I went cold turkey. I decided if it was prepackaged, wrapped in sugar, or just taste good it was bad for me on the inside. I started a strict diet of only eating organically grown foods - meaning “real food”, no meat, only fish and chicken and loads of tasteless fiber. No more soda, sweet drinks, pizza, and the mother of all bad foods packaged microwave treats. Oh, one simple trick I learned, never eat a meal larger than your fist, but if you must, don’t clean the plate. Leave something for the fat rats at the local dump.

I definitely feel younger now and know that I’m in much better shape than I’ve ever been in years. I am now more confident, full of energy and stronger.

I’ve been attending as a religion for 4 years now (as of this writing) and during that time I have lost 35-lbs of fat and went from a tight 34-inch waist to a loose 31-inch waist.

It’s a nice feeling knowing you can finally fit into all those jeans in the back of the closet once again.

Good article summarizing the dangers of Cross-Site Scripting and how to prevent them. Examples are in Perl but the basic message is never trust anything from the browser.

Where cross-site scripting is concerned, particular caution needs to be taken if you allow visitors to your site to add content to it or “echo back” values they’ve submitted (such as a word they’re searching for).

These days it’s better to use PHP libraries like PEAR::HTML_QuickForm or PEAR::Validate to prevent oversights when using regular expressions to validate incoming data.

When you need to allow visitors to add marked up content, the most effective approach is BBTags (common to vBulletin and phpBB) - PEAR::HTML_BBCodeParser can help. “One to watch” in that area is KSES which is an “HTML and XHTML filter”, if you want visitors to be able to use native tags.

I also found these excellent articles:

http://www.phparch.com/sample.php?mid=16

http://shiflett.org/talks/apachecon2003

You will no doubt come across many quirky layout issues when building a site with CSS. You’ll end up banging your head against a wall time and again. This is an attempt to make the design process easier, and provide a quick reference to check when you run into trouble. Read the rest of this entry »

To remove odor from fabrics time, air, soap and water, and ammonia in water are recommended. Since the skunk’s spray is an oily compound, it can be removed by methods used to remove oily soil, or the odor molecule can be destroyed with a weak acid. The use of white vinegar, dry-cleaning fluid or household chlorine bleach in a weak solution is suggested for removing skunk odor from clothing or pets. Use these products in separate steps, not together. Tomato juice, an acid, is sometimes recommended for washing pets, but do not use on clothing. Read the rest of this entry »

PHP is now running over a million web sites and with good reason. PHP is open source, it runs equally well on NT and UNIX, it’s well documented. PHP is no doubt stealing market share from Microsoft’s Active Server Pages, but the media has been unusually quiet about the issue. Even as Apache’s success has become front page news, PHP has gone largely unnoticed. Maybe Microsoft wants to keep it that way. Read the rest of this entry »

I sometimes ponder what a good web design is. And when doing this there are several things that immediately come to my mind. The first being the visual i.e. aesthetic component of a website. This is wrong!

The first and foremost principle should be getting the point across. If a website doesn’t do this it has failed. What a web designer should do is understand every single aspect of the project he is assigned to and then transform what he has learned about the subject into images and text that is as easy as possible to understand and navigate.

Which brings us to another principle, web site navigation. Have you ever visited a site where it just seemed like you were going in circles? Navigation will make or break a website Site navigation takes careful and intelligent planning. The larger the site, the more emphasis should be placed on navigation. I think that navigation is a key to good, functional website design.

I think that web design should be about communication above all. It should make our message heard, believed and acted upon. The final test of web design is its ability to motivate the reader in the intended manner. If a designer wants the audience to buy, to believe or to feel and if he achieves the goal he has set then he can then call himself a successful web designer.

Having said that, I think good web design is usually clear, simple, and easy to navigate. It never gets in the way of the product or service it promotes by drawing too much attention to itself. It supports and explains the product or service of the client. It is a capitalist tool first and foremost. Therefore, the true measure of web design is its ability to perform that task above all.

Color in Web design is learning how to separate the “artistic” from “technical”. “Artistic” point of view is all about usage of color so as to provoke the viewer to associate the site with its context more easily. Whereas “technical” should deal with the diversity of platforms, operating systems, browsers, and system colors (8,16,24-32 bit) Internet users have on their computers - namely the web safe palette and why I chose not to use it any more. Read the rest of this entry »