Category: Design

Categories
Design

Going to Make a Lego Dog Sculpture

I’ve decided to make a Lego sculpture over the summer. I kinda wanted to be a Lego designer growing up and somehow lost track of that one, so out of the blue a week or so ago I thought that finally making a Lego sculpture of my own would be a good idea.

I decided that I would be making a dog for my first attempt. I’m modeling it after a Jack Russell Terrier I was once lucky to know named Rocky. He’s not too big, has short hair, and I figured it’d be nice to make something in memory of that crazy guy.

The first task has been to gather up as many white and black bricks as possible. I’ve bought a few bucket sets already, found some bricks that are older than me that were still in my parents attic (so glad I stopped my Mom from throwing them out years ago now), and ordered some individual bricks from lego.com.

It’s so cool that you can order individual bricks online, they have pretty much every shape and color imaginable. Another very useful tool I found was the Lego Digital Designer which is a free download. It allows me to build virtual prototypes before ordering any bricks, so far it’s come very much in handy.

Very eager to finish this creation up and will be sure to upload some photos once it’s complete.

Categories
Design Development

Landscapes & Interiors

Finishing up a website for Landscapes & Interiors. They’re a landscaping and cleaning service located in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. The client wanted an original website that they would be able to easily maintain and have the ability to make simple edits on their own.

We decided to build the website  on the Joomla! open source CMS (content management system). I’ve built many sites with Joomla! recently and each client has been very much pleased with the rich CMS functionality that we are able to deliver to them at a very reasonable cost. It really amazes me just how much functionality they are getting from an open source project.

We also relied on the Yahoo! YUI library to build the site as well. The site makes use of the following YUI components:

  • CSS Reset
  • CSS Fonts
  • CSS Grids
  • Yahoo Global Object
  • DOM Collection
  • Event Utility

YUI really helped us to work faster and knowing that their library is used and tested by Yahoo! for A-Grade Browser support is a real time saver.

The client did an excellent job in providing and organizing content for use on the site. I cannot stress how vital it is for a client to provide appropriate content in an organized manner for a site to be successful. They are the content experts and when we can mesh our respective areas of expertise a great site is almost always the result.

Since the business is new and this is their first website, special attention was spent to make sure that there is room for growth. The content regions and navigation elements all are easy to add or edit via Joomla! with little if any CSS adjust necessary to manage additional or changed content.

There are still some further tweaks and adjustments to be made to the site, but we did go live today, so check out www.landscapesandinteriors.com and see what great services and support that they offer. Again, it was a real pleasure working with this client, I had a great deal of fun and they are very satisfied with their site and that’s always great to know.

Categories
Design Development

Playtown Cafe

Playtown CafeFinished up a site a few weeks ago for Playtown Cafe in Boca Raton, Florida. They were looking for a website and overall design package that was unique, fun, and really stood out. Geoff designed a logo for them that really nailed all those requirements.

The site is powered by WordPress, so that the client can easily maintain the site on their own. The client who claimed to be, “horrible with computers” was able to pick up the WordPress CMS in very short time and has really run with it. It’s always great when you can have a client see how easy it is to keep a site fresh and up to date using the latest web technologies available today.

Under the hood this site is using some very impressive technology to power it.

Working with client was a great experience. They had a great idea of what they needed, but also were open enough with creative and tech input that was a pleasure to work with. Check out Playtown Cafe.

Categories
Design Development

sjrates.com

sjrates.comJust finished up building www.sjrates.com. It’s a site that makes comparing local rates easy and convenient for those in Southern New Jersey.

The client approached with with a sound idea of making it easier for local people to compare rates. Instead of having to search each financial institution individually, he wanted to group them all together to save users time.

The site makes use of many technologies.  Notable uses include:

Working with the client was a real pleasure. I thought we had a great client – developer relationship and I this really helped contribute to a really nice finished project.

Categories
Design

What the Font?

Found a very cool and usefull iphone app called What the Font? It’s very cool. It’s a app that helps to identify a font.

So for instance, you take a photo using the iphone of a font.  You then crop the image so just the font in question is selected. It then uploads the font and processes it letter by letter and gives back a list of fonts that it think it might be. It takes a minute or so for the whole process, but that’s so much faster than it would take to go through the thousands of fonts I have installed.

So far it’s turned out to be pretty accurate and has helped New Guy Mike and myself figure out what font was used in some old print documents that were created before he worked here.

It’s a very cool app so check it out at the App Store, and oh yeah it’s free too.