MyRatePlan widget design

Requesting comments… I designed this in Illustrator and added the shadow in Photoshop. I intend to use this design for a Yahoo! widget for MyRatePlan.com.

Weekend? What weekend?

And low, the supervisor sayeth unto thee, “Thou shalt attend the conference and maketh sure thet no errors croppeth up in any technical fashion.” Thusly I spake in reply, “Thy wish is not only my command but also my greatest desire.”

So woe unto those who standeth in the path of the devine conference. Especially unto the speaker who stayeth on stage overly long keeping me and company mine long into the night. Woe, I sayeth! Woe!

For it came to pass in the land of Rush that said speaker did paseth judgement onto the lowly company of weary conference goers and spake over long allowing too much drink to be imbibed by the masses thusly burdened.

I spent all weekend at the office preparing for this!?

GTAC Website

I built this website for the Georgia Tech Analog Consortium (GTAC). This was a full-site redesign incorporating apache Server Side Includes (SSI) for headers, footers, and link-boxes. All content was pre-existing.

Credits: title-bar background by Apple. Photos by multiple unknown.

I designed all layout and background art (other than that used as the background for the header). And built all the CSS from scratch.

GTAC website copyright © Georgia Tech 2006.

The GTAC website is located at: http://www.ece.gatech.edu/research/GTAC.
They have not yet adopted the new design, but you can try it out, here.

A 2 hour cover design

I hacked this together with only 2 hours of work. sprisingly, it won out over several designs from a “professional” designer… of course, I had the advantage of having local photographs to work with instead of generic art.

Photo credit: insets by Gary Meeks.

I fiddled with the color a bit to make the photographer’s lighting stand out a bit more, by adding a “soft lighting” layer over each photo with solid colors. I think the overall effect worked nicely and the whole thing turned out more professional looking that I had hoped.

As it stands, this will be used for my company’s internal/industry status report.

Why I Hate iWeb

So… I’ve been given an assignment at work:

Take this iWeb-designed site and fix these 50 typos and have it ready to preview in 3 hours.

So naturally, my first instinct is to open the HTML files and start making changes.

WTF #1: All the style information is included on-page and not in a separate file.

WTF #2: All the style information is done inside style= attributes. i.e. no classes and no tag-based styling.

WTF #3: All the blocks on the page are positioned absolutely.

So after wading through all the CSS markup that shouldn’t even be there for a couple of changes, I get fed up and decide to try making changes in iWeb instead.

WTF #4: iWeb only opens .sites files in the ~/Library/Application Support/iWeb folder. I couldn’t just open one from somewhere else on my hard drive.

So I get through all the site changes and I find out that iWeb doesn’t support even half the basic HTML tags… only DIV, SPAN, A, IMG and um… yeah, that’s about it. It spits out nice cross-platform code and images, but at what cost?!

I cannot build TABLES of information; I cannot flow objects with the text; I cannot even align objects very well at all.

When i saw alignment lines show up, I thought to myself, “oh cool! they took a page out of Interface Builder,” but I was wrong. It’s only a half-asses implementation that only aligns the centers of objects, and sometimes not even those.

I sent in about 4 or 5 comments and feature requests… and I stated in one of them that “This kind of sloppiness is something I’d expect from Microsoft. Coming as it does from Apple, I am appalled.”