I linked to Smashing Magazine’s monthly free desktop designs before, but I’m doing it again because this month one of the entries they posted is from… me. Yippee! Scroll down more than halfway to find my “Halloscene”.
Even if you don’t want to download my desktop (and really, I’d never know), you should check it out to see the other 39 designs chosen this month from designers all over the world.
The good news is that I’m too busy to post. The bad news is that I’m too busy to post. Here’s a quickie, and once I wrap up a couple of things I’ve been working on, I’ll hop back in the blogging saddle.
Many designers use Lorem Ipsum as dummy text in their layouts. Why?
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English.
So where can you get your own Lorem Ipsum text? http://www.lipsum.com/ It’s free, easy to customize, and is much less distracting than: “There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain” over and over again.
If you don’t know why the headline of this post necessitated an exclamation mark, it’s because Microsoft stopped making Internet Explorer for a Mac at version 5. They’re now up to version 7. Why do I care? Well, if I wasn’t a web designer, I wouldn’t. I love me some Firefox, and am completely happy using it as my everyday browser. As a web designer, though, I need to test the sites I design on a variety of platforms and with different browsers. I do have a PC running Windows, but I have Explorer 7 installed on that computer and in a move that makes web designers everywhere grind their teeth into little nubs, you can’t run multiple versions of Explorer on the same machine (well, not easily). And Explorer 6 and Explorer 7 have completely different sets of bugs and quirks.
All praise YouTube. I did a Google search for “view internet explorer 6 on a Mac” and came to this video, with links to a site that allows you to have “several versions of IE installed side by side… try that on a PC ;).”
I now officially love Mike Kronenberg. A donation is headed your way shortly.
Check out Glenn Feron’s retouching skills. I truly couldn’t look away. No wonder you never see anyone in real life who looks like a magazine model. They don’t even look like themselves. Even Faith Hill is not as hot as… Faith Hill. As a designer who has done her share of retouching, I’m impressed at the technical prowess behind Glenn Feron’s work, but I think good retouching enhances what’s already there, it doesn’t completely revise it.
What do you think? Does this contribute to the low self-esteem of many girls and women (and men)? Or is it acceptable to make people look as good as they can?
Check out this fabulous video following the progress of a magazine layout. FYI, the designer is using InDesign. My favorite part is when he just gives up on the headline and inserts a row of Xs. I’d guess that he just got the sixty-seventh email from his editor saying, “Sorry, but we changed the head again.” Been there.
