DiaLOG

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, who will be invited to create and submit new designs for selected coin and medal programs throughout the year.

I think it would be awesome to design coins and money, there is so much detail and precision required that make a coin. The changes that have been made to the quarter in the last few years have given our money a new aticipated look. Every time I get a quarter I look to see if it is one of the new designs released. Even the new twenty dollar bills got me excited with their new design. The US government is finally catching up to the rest of the world in coin design, it should be exciting to see.

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 the favelets I have used in the past have been duplicated in Firebird Extensions, like the Web Developer Extension. Just drag the links to your bookmarks, some only work in Internet Explorer or Mozilla 1.x browsers.

TOP TEN FAVELETS FOR WEB DEVELOPMENT

1. Image Drag Moz

Makes every image on a page “draggable”.

2. Ruler 1.1 Moz

Need to size up something on a web page. Use this tool to get the dimensions on a page. Hit enter to exit out of the ruler.

3. Edit/Test styles Moz

Opens a small window where you can edit that pages CSS on the fly. No need to refresh that page.

4. Image List IE

Opens a new window with a list of that page's images with their file size and dimensions.

5. View CSS Moz, IE

Opens a new window with that pages style sheets.

6. Show Specific Elements IE Moz

Outlines any element you specify and with any color you specify.

7. generated source Moz, IE

Ever wanted to see what the browser generates from the code. This will let you see what the code javascript and other scripts generate on a page.

8. Show Tables IE, Moz

Shows all tables and nested tables with a different border color.

9. Show all DIVs IE, Moz

Need to quickly outline all divs, this does the trick.

10. Server Info (netcraft) IE, Moz

This is a handy little site that will tell you information about a website's server.

November 13, 2003

Image dragger

This favelet is among my top in “cool favelets” so far.

Image Drag

Credit: Simon Willison

November 05, 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 more like a show case of all of the new products being release by the leaders in design industry. I didn’t get to see everything being showcased but, here is a list of the items that I found useful at the conference.

• Adobe’s Version Cue
• Illustrator’s new 3D effects
• Apple’s New G5 with Panther OS
• Apple’s 23” cinema display

There were not many disappointments but, some of them were the lack of attention to standards based HTML layouts. Mainly this is attributed to Adobe’s Golive WYSIWYG software. I will most always favor hand coding over the WYSIWYG software. I just think hand coding makes a site’s code lighter and easier to work with.

Anyway, if Driven By Design comes to your city, I would suggest going and llearn what the industry is coming out with next in software and hardware.