the singularity of being and nothingness
Archive for September, 2008
On Becoming a Better Web Designer: A Dr. Phil Moment
Sep 15th
Over the last several weeks, I've seen my blog readership increase signficantly. I am extremely grateful for the kind words that people have shared with me, and of course, for everyone who follows my ramblings about web design.
During this time, I've had several readers contact me, seeking advice about how to get more into web design, how to improve their skills, etc. I am extremely humbled that anyone would seek my advice on this, and I have done my best to provide the best suggestions I can. So now, let me distill down some of the things I've said.
I don't want to get overly Dr. Phil-ish on this, but I think the psychology of the web designer is a crucial component to be becoming better. What does this mean? Well, I continually advocate that one of the best ways to become a better designer is to live in the billion-and-three design galleries that are out there. Let me diverge for a second and shamelessly plug my own — css-imagine.com. There, I'm done :).
In all seriousness, I believe that examining and learning from the design of others is a great way to improve. First, by doing this, you begin to More >
Flippin' Cool Spry Goodness
Sep 1st
As followers of this blog know, I am a pretty big fan of Adobe's JavaScript framework, Spry. Admittedly, it's not a super-huge framework like jQuery, but I like its simplicity and how rapidly I can develop a solution with it.
One thing I've been frustrated with is Spry's effects. While they have some good effects, I never found them particularly flexible or usable beyond little dynamic enhacements. Apparently, most of this is because I hadn't read the documentation enough.
Enter effect clustering. Normally, Spry effects run in turn of function call: so if you have, say, a tool-tip that you want to fade out and move, these effects would run in order (which wouldn't really make sense to do anyway). However, as I discovered with great joy yesterday, Spry allows for something called "effect clustering" which allows any number of effects to be run in parallel with one another.
I about peed my pants when I found this out, it's so cool and useful. So here's an example of this in action.
And here's the code:
FadeMove = function(element, options) { Spry.Effect.Cluster.call(this, options); var duration = 1000; var toggle = 'false'; var from = 100; var to = 0; var fromPos = new Spry.Effect.Utils.Position(); fromPos.x = More > 
