Clickfire Blog » Graphic Design

Clickfire Site Redesign

Emory Rowland — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 21:29:23 +0000

It’s a beautiful, graphically optimized, fully validating sunny fall day outside. Why am I ablogging?

The new Clickfire site design is finished!

Some things about the new design that I really like are:

The Logo – Even though the previous logo went through some serious obsessive compulsive iterations, I am convinced that the new one is fresher, more cheerful and colorful. I admit an attachment to the heavy handed mouse and fire components, but I believe the less overt new one is going to better serve.

Code Improvements – No more table containers. To my surprise, I was able to drop the content into the CSS divs in my favorite WYSIWYG editor (the name begins with a “F,” not a “D,” by the way. I have cleaned up most of the old pages, some dating back years ago to when I first started learning CSS. The new pages are in XHTML and tend to have a better chance at validating. A few hybrid pages are still floating around.

Colors – It’s goodbye green, beige and black and hello red, green blue on white. I got complaints about the previous colors being to loud and this finally sank in. I struggled with going to a white background because white just plain hurts my eyes as do fluorescent lights and flash grenades. Toning down the contrast and brightness in my LCD monitor pretty much gets rid of the pain. I hope the new color scheme will improve the user experience. From what I’ve read, dark text on white backgrounds seems to be the preferred user interface scheme.

Credits – Thanks to Sergios Singeridis (site?) for taking our rough ideas and turning them into a reality. He’s a rock star web designer and very pleasant to work with. Terima kasih to my wife for helping get the content and graphics integrated. I am so completely in love with WordPress. Most of all, thanks to God for giving me the patience to undertake this!

Overall, I think the new design is cleaner, faster and easier to navigate. There is no turning back, especially considering the time invested in plopping all the old content into the new static XHTML pages. Now, I can finally do what I really intended on doing with the site, publishing viewpoints, tools and content.

My question to you: What do you think of the new design?

Okay, time to head out for some sun.

Cool Form Graphic

Emory Rowland — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 21:31:24 +0000

Just thought this graphic looked cool for some reason. Now time to get back to work and stop fooling around with Photoshop!

Taliban Webmaster?

Emory Rowland — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 23:11:22 +0000

This image is not what it seems. A word of advice: don’t get in an argument with your wife while she’s learning Adobe Photoshop.

Google Toolbar Buttons

Emory Rowland — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 06:14:47 +0000

I’ve been noodling around and making custom buttons for the new Google Toolbar buttons for beta version 4 of the Google toolbar for Internet Explorer 5.5+. In Google’s words, a custom toolbar button is “a push button that you can add to the Google Toolbar that can have custom navigation, search, send and update capabilities.” Custom buttons offer cute and convenient possibilities of keeping visitors connected to your web site.

The Cute
Google Toolbar Buttons are the same size (16 X16) as the standard for favicons. Webmasters can use their existing favicons or create one to use as the button image (must take the simple step to convert it to base64 encoding with a tool like this).

The Possibilities
What I really dig about the custom toolbar buttons is that Google lets developers add a search component to narrow a search to a particular site by entering text in the search field and clicking a button. For example, if you don’t find what you’re looking for on your favorite search engine, narrow your search to Slashdot by clicking the button (assuming you added it) and the query goes to Slashdot.org and displays results. The Whois.sc button shows you the the Whois data for the page you are viewing in one click–very useful. My favorite feature is the ability to create a button that displays your site’s rss feed with each entry refreshing in a drop down list. So, fans of your site or blog can see when you’ve updated something.

Essentially, to create your own custom Google Toolbar button, all you need do is look at the Google example in the api documentation and just substitute your own site info. Then, save it to an XML file and link the button. The below button for the Clickfire site displays the most recent articles and reviews.

The link code to install the button is this:

http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=http://www.clickfire.com/googlebutton.xml

Substitute your own site URI and XML file name.

Here is the Google Toolbar Button code I used for my Blog (http://www.clickfire.com/googlebutton2.xml). Substitute your info to create your own button’s XML file:

< ?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?>

– Add Clickfire button | – Add Clickfire Blog button | – Add Clickfire News button

SEO Implications
Despite the Google Toolbar Button Gallery rearrangement, Google is still allowing link from the directory to be “followed,” so, in theory, you should still get the benefit of a link if one of the pages with your button on it is indexed. I’ve noticed backlinks from the foreign versions of the Google Toolbar Button being reported.

Happy buttoning.

IrfanView Version 3.98

Emory Rowland — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 00:55:40 +0000

It’s coming up on something like 10 years that I’ve been using IrfanView Image viewer for Windows and it just keeps getting better. I’ve written about the unbelievable small, fast and efficient IrfanView features for viewing and even doing some light graphic design work like making favicons. This is one of the most useful software programs I’ve ever used and a tribute to the power of freeware.

IrfanView 3.98 Release Notes:

Option to support IrfanView by installing Google Toolbar and/or Google
Desktop Search (OPTIONAL !)
New Thumbnail window option: Load thumbs from all subfolders (CTRL+F)
Alpha blending effect added for slideshow/fullscreen
(Properties->Fullscreen)
New options for fullscreen/slideshow: Set text position/alignment
PlugIn for AFPL Ghostscript: PS, EPS, PDF formats (see
Properties->PlugIns)
Support for CGM/SVG formats : CADImage.DLL (Shareware, see i_plugins.txt)
Support for HDR format (Formats PlugIn, thanks Kevin)
New option for DigiCam RAW formats: Load half size image
(Properties->PlugIns)
New effects added: Sepia, Raindrops, Fragment etc. (Thanks to GENiEBEN
Option to set the start corner for crop and text-layout in batch mode
New placeholders for Date/Time: %Y, %m, %d (see help file for examples)
New placeholders: $M (multipage index), $d (directory name)
Most of normal placeholders can be used for “/convert=” too
Option to hide main window in Thumbnails mode (Properties->Misc 1)
New lossless JPG dialog option: Set DPI value
Set loading options for Ghostscript, MrSID, JPM: Properties->PlugIns
New JPG save option: Reset EXIF orientation tag
New advanced slideshow dialog option: Play in window mode
Command line option for EXE Slideshow: /monitor=X (start on monitor X)
Command line option: /dpi works now for /scan, /scanhidden and /batchscan
New special INI options to hide caption/menu bar permanently (see FAQs)
Support for 3GP format (Quicktime PlugIn)
New hotkeys: Red eye, Fullscreen text, Direct print, Lossless JPG (see
help file)
Several PlugIns are changed/updated, please install the newest versions:
Download from: http://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm
Some minor bugs/features fixed/added (slideshow, print)

Interesting Logo Design

Emory Rowland — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 06:23:46 +0000

A while back, I wrote about my efforts to determine how the topic of company logo design should be defined while I was figuring out how to create a logo for the new Clickfire site design. I was honest about my ignorance of logo design methodologies, which I was sure existed somewhere, perhaps deep in the depths of some art school professor’s power point presentation.

I really relish finding a company logo that communicates the company message in a minimalist way like this one from IT.com, a “vertical search engine for information technology solutions.” You gotta love that domain name. The colors of each letter contrast but form blocks that fit together into what could be construed as a human figure.

See what I mean?