Posts

Throwback Design

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So right now the design trends are very simplistic, lots of white space, big buttons, flat colors. Think minimalist. Think flat. Does this remind anyone else of the 90s? I am sure I've been at this too long, and I guess my age is now showing. Everything often comes full circle, and design (in any form) is no exception... look at fashion design, it's like someone went through my elementary school clothing and tried to make it seem new again. Of course there are new things thrown in there. Infinite scrolling is really hitting the main stream, as is parallax scrolling (I TOTALLY was designing a website for my singer friend years ago with this concept in mind... I never did finish the site tho - I should really go back and look at that some day. Maybe I was a bit ahead of the game there... of course it was built in Flex, a dying technology.) Why these trends? Why this movement? In a word, mobile. I don't think it's any secret or any great epiphany that mobile is ste...
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InDesign default units

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I always found it annoying that when first creating a document InDesign it defaults the size in Picas. Call me unworthy, but I don't work in Picas, I work in Inches (yes I am Canadian, whatever metric system). So every time I would create a document I would go to Edit - Preferences - Units & Increments and change the Horizontal and Vertical Ruler Units to Inches. One day it occurred to me, shouldn't there be a way to set this once and have it the default so that I don't have to do this EVERY DAMN TIME? (Why it took me so long to think of this, I don't know. Don't judge.) After just clicking around InDesign for a couple minutes I found no immediate way to do this, so I turned to my old friend Google. At the end of this article ( http://indesignsecrets.com/changing-indesigns-default-ruler-measurements.php ) I discovered that there is a very simple way to do this, it`s just not all that intuitive. Open up InDesign but do NOT open or create ...
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Illustrator Align to Artboard

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Image
Don't ask me why, but me and the Illustrator Artboard have never truly gotten along. I had a logo file that I wanted to export as a JPG on a perfectly square background so that it looked good on the client's Twitter and Facebook page. I knew how to get the artboard to be a square but I did not know how to center the logo on the artboard. A little research with Google found me the answer. ( http://kcoppock.wordpress.com/2007/03/18/adobe-illustrator-align-to-artboard/ ) First to get the artboard square; File - Document Setup..., hit the "Edit Artboards" button. In the options just under the file menu there is W and H (width and height), choose the same number for both, hit Enter, voila! Next, getting the logo centered on the artboard. First I grouped all the objects in the logo (select all objects, right click, group). Then I opened the Align panel (Window - Align). On the Align panel I clicked the "Align To" arrow in the bottom right ...
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Where have you been?

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Where have I been you ask? Well I went and had a baby, aka time sucker/love of my life. I haven't been working much with code, so I have less to post about. I've been doing a lot of visual design and IA work lately and it's great! Hope to start posting more often!
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Great example on creating and positioning TitleWindows. http://www.mxml.it/index.php/2008/06/18/positioning-popups/
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Paper Prototyping

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I've been pretty far down in the trenches the last couple months, hence my lack of posting. It's good to be busy, and working on what I love the most, visual designs. A fun thing happened while on the client site last week, and I thought I'd quickly post about it. I was there to present my visual designs and get feedback before the requirements doc was finalized. I had suggested to the client previously, with the recommendation of my company's UX Director, that I try some paper prototyping with some real users. They liked the idea, but didn't really speak of it much since. So there I was, on the client site, working away at some suggested changes made by the BAs in our morning session, and here comes a BA with a user. "Do you want to try some paper prototyping?" I was a little stunned, but luckily had my visuals previously printed (all be it in black and white). I took the user into a meeting room. Now this isn't something I had ever done before, I rea...
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Default Flex DateChooser to tomorrow

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I have a DateChooser control and I was trying to default it to have tomorrow's date selected. This is actually really easy to do, but it took me a fair amount of time to figure it out, so I thought I'd post this just in case anyone else has some trouble. Create a variable for today's date: [Bindable] private var today:Date = new Date(); Then set the selected date of the DateChooser. You may also want to set showToday to false so that today's date isn't highlighted. <mx:DateChooser selectedDate="{new Date(today.fullYear,today.month,today.date+1)}" showToday="false"/> The selectedDate property only understands straight dates with no time, which is why I had to assign it this way. If you're at the end of the month/year Flex is smart enough to know that date + 1 should take you to the next month/year. Here is a sample with view source enabled.
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