Archived Dialog Entries

These are entries from my first blog started back in early 2003.

May 6, 2004—Get Extra Storage

My hotmail account is always reminding me to "get extra storage". Why, becuase I only have 2MB of storage and I am constantly deleting emails to save file storage. So I have now decided to get extra storage. The name...

April 27, 2004—Makeover

The US Treasury redesigned the $50 bill and unveiled it yesterday. Currency design has always intrigued me. There are many similarities with it and web design. More on this later. As the Treasury is giving currency a makeover I...

April 20, 2004—Resources of Old

Back in the day of "old school web design" we didn't have the resources like we do today. We didn't have A List Apart, Site Point, or the number of weblogs that provide us a resource in web development. (Or...

April 14, 2004—Send us your feedback.

Occasionally I will send feedback to websites when they have a redesign or new features. I am usually prompted to do so by a link on their site that says "Send us your feedback", or "Tell us what you think"....

April 6, 2004—Text Images Rant

You have seen them on websites, (ebay is the biggest abuser), you may have clicked on them, search Engines don't like them, results can be cheap looking. I am talking about text images. I visited real.com the other day,...

April 1, 2004—New Design for blakems

Here is my new redesign for my site. I have been working on it for months and I finally got to point where it is complete. This site was my inspiration. Kindly refresh if you don't see any changes. Update:...

March 30, 2004—Google Tools

Google launched a new interface design yesterday. Even though there were some small changes, it looks like they are positioning themselves closer to that IPO. Google's new design made it alot easier to find their other numerous tools. One tool...

March 23, 2004—Update: Bill Gates to Give Away Apple G5s

We know that Bill is giving away Apple G5s in April but are they really G5s. I did a little research and this is what I found. Back in October, a Microsoft employee was fired for reporting the shipment...

March 19, 2004—Bill Gates to Give Away Apple G5s

Corbis Images will start giving away one Apple G5 a day in April. (hat tip: Cameron) I'll have to wait and see if I am lucky. Did you know that Bill Gates founded Corbis in 1989. So Bill will be...

March 18, 2004—Bracktology Design

It is that time of year again, today the big dance starts once again. College Basketball's March madness begins. Every year I make my picks and hope for the best. The past few year I have been setting up...

March 11, 2004—Relaunching a website this year?

Here are some quick facts about website launches this year. Are you going to be involved in any of them? 58% of Websites are planning a relaunch this year. 49% of Website managers say usability is their top challenge in...

March 9, 2004—More popular websites moving towards Web Standards

Back from my vacation, which was totally awesome. If you ever want to spoil yourself, go on cruise with Royal Caribbean. Their service and quality of vacation was superb.Now that I am back in the swing of things, I have...

February 27, 2004—Cruising Next Week

It has been more than four years since my last cruise and that week has arrived again for me and my wife Sheila. I will leaving the snow and cold of Utah to go on a vacation all next...

February 26, 2004—The designer's dirty little secret

I recently finished designing a mailer for Array Express. The design is based on a wallet with the tagline "Feed your wallet". It was difficult finding the right photo of a wallet from any of the stock photo houses,...

February 20, 2004—The rule with the horizontal rule (<hr />)

The other day my fellow co-worker, Cameron, and I were discussing what the best way to style the hr tag was? I usually try to use a div if I just need a line for presentation. But what if I...

February 18, 2004—Sen. Kerry on Episode II of Star Wars?

While I was sick a couple of weeks ago, my daughter and I were watching Star Wars Episode II. There is a scene where there is a council of the "Confederacy of Independent Systems" on Geonosis. San Hill is...

February 13, 2004—Get a grip on your design

If you enjoy cooking as I do, you will recognize name OXO Good Grips. OXO is an award winning manufacturer of small cooking appliances. Their innovative design and attention to how a product is actually used by someone is...

February 2, 2004—What's with all of those AOL Top Speed superbowl Ads

If you watched the superbowl, I am sure you didn't miss the excitment on and off the field. Anyway, I am sure you saw at least one of the AOL ads where they teamed up with American chopper guys to...

January 26, 2004—Daily Standards Feature

IAB has been featured on The Daily Standards today. If you navigate to the some of the forms now, you may notice that their pre-existing form is back up with bad old html. There have been some problems with passing...

January 22, 2004—Recent launches

I just recently finished launching some websites. IAB launched a couple of weeks ago, and we are still updating several pages of it while we continue. It uses one of the lastest ALA articles on CSS dropdown menus. Also the...

January 6, 2004—NASA Mission Names

It is amazing to see that pictures of the red planet Mars. It is great that we can all share in the excitement of this new frontier with the technology today. Everyone can get the photos of Mars just...

December 30, 2003—The Olivia Award

I was honored earlier this month by receiving the 2003 Olivia award for my work on American Longevity. The Olivia award is awarded annually for the best design of 2003 from IDI. It was one of the most enjoyable...

December 19, 2003—Color

What we do with color is essential to design. Complementary, duo tone, monochromatic, the color of the year, or however you go about choosing your color effects the way people see your site. Each color can change the mood...

November 25, 2003—The US Government wants You...that is you artists and designers

The US Mint is inviting all artists to participate in "a renaissance of American coin and medal design." ...professional artists (Master Designers) and college and graduate-level art students (Associate Designers) in sculpture, engraving, graphic design, drawing and other visual arts,...

November 14, 2003—My Top Ten Favelets

I decided after posting a couple of favelets here to compile a list of the my top ten favorite favelets (bookmarklets). Most of the favelets here are ones I use with the most frequency, some are just cool. Many of...

November 13, 2003—Image dragger

This favelet is among my top in "cool favelets" so far. Image Drag Credit: Simon Willison...

November 5, 2003—Driven by Design Review

I just returned from the Driven by Design conference and seminar. It was put on by Apple with other supporting sponsors like Adobe, Quark, HP and others. The promotional materials were beautifully design and presented. The event over all was...

October 23, 2003—What size is that font?

I have come across another favelet of good use. Ever wanted to know the rgb of color on a website or know what size font is being used. Look no further than Pixy's new Cascaded Styles of '+document.title+'Cascaded StylesFavelet made...

October 22, 2003—Alist Apart Opens Doors

After many weeks A List Apart re-opens its doors again with three great kickoff articles. If you are looking for a better way to do tabs in CSS than read Doug Bowman's article. His article offers a great tutorial on...

October 16, 2003—Design Practices

Heidi P. Adkisson has launched a new site about Design Practices. There are some very interesting stats and research that has been done. For example, "60% of the websites tested had the logo linked to Home plus explicit 'Home' link...

October 16, 2003—Semantics in HTML?

Are there really semantics in HTML? There are but maybe it should be titled differently like "document structure". Anyway, I finished giving a quick presentation on the topic. The goal with "document structure" is to use the HTML tags that...

October 1, 2003—Ibocity cut in half

I just finished completing a new face lift for ibocity.com which involved a re-write of the each page from HTML 4.0 into XHTML 1.0/CSS code. The perl code was optimized by Garth Hill making it more streamline. This is only...

September 19, 2003—Array Express......Super Express

The team, here at IDI, recently launched the new ARRAY Express website. The site's design and secondary pages were done by Cameron Moll. I helped out by doing the home page CSS/XHTML code, the initial code for the secondary pages...

September 5, 2003—outside the USA

I ran across lycos.es the other day and found it to be using CSS for layout. Unfortunately lycos.com is still using tables, when will they make the change. I wonder what the percentage of foreign sites have started the transition...

August 28, 2003—Semantics

There has been some good discussion on XHTML semantics and CSS lately. They are some good habits to aquire. Read them and learn: StopDesign | Zeldman | Simple Bits...

August 20, 2003—Aspen Leaf

I recently finished three paintings for our front room. It has an Aspen leaf motive. Each painting is has a single aspen leaf in the middle. It goes perfect with our new couch. It was fun doing some traditional art...

August 18, 2003—SEO Works great with CSS/XHTML layouts

A List Apart ran a great article on improving Search Engine Optimization by using XHTML/CSS. I would have to concur a 100% that it improves SEO a great deal. I was went to check our some the recent sites I...

August 15, 2003—The Latest Style

That style would be CSS. It will not only be the latest style but the style to continue to take over web development. I have seen lately, a greater number of companies and individuals switch over to xhtml/css standards for...

July 23, 2003—Designing for the future.

The internet is moving forward, so do we design for the future or are you still stuck designing in the past. By that, I mean do you design with web standards? Designing with web standards makes it easier to design...

July 14, 2003—Longevity matters

Welcome to all those coming from Zeldman. I have heard from a few visitors about some bugs in Mozilla with "text zoom" and Opera 7 display problems. When we tested the site, we tested it in IE 5.5 and Mozilla...

July 11, 2003—AmericanLongevity

As mentioned before, American Longevity has finally launched. Another site built with CSS and great design. The site uses Contribute for content managment, it has terrible support for CSS but there are bugs that you can take advantage of and...

July 3, 2003—A CSS portal site

We just launched a portal website, using all css for layout. Unfortantly, you can't get into the portal unless you sign up. The external marketing pages use a somewhat css-table hybrid for layout. Not only does the portal use CSS...

June 30, 2003—Look another tableless Site.

We should be launching Americanlongevity.net soon. The new design resides here http://newsite.americanlongevity.net. This site is built without using tables for layout and conforms to current webstands. It was built with namely three style sheets. A primary, a secondary pages one...

June 23, 2003—Patent # 4,558,302

Patent # 4,558,302 expired last friday--or also known as the "gif" file format. we may now be free to use it as we like to create our images dynamically...

June 16, 2003—Ascii ARt

Interested in creating ascii art. Check out typorganism.com/ (via Zeldman). They have many tools also. Just look at what can be done . . . . . . . . . . . . = ..(BBDBh' . Ds h .BDD=<<+=BB'...

June 13, 2003—Microsoft using standards?

I couldn't believe when microsoft announced Frontpage 2003. As scary as the previous version were for writing terrible code, the new one bosts that it writes standard-compliant code, and the first WYSIWYG to use XSLT. Any way, I will never...

June 10, 2003—Launching

I have decided to go public and launch "dialog" on my site. It will be a collection of happenings, ideas, facts and everything else under the moon. The right menu may be a little screwy right now as I am...

June 5, 2003—Let it begin

Welcome, the dialog is up and running now....