Monday, October 18, 2010 at 3:48PM To celebrate 500 followers on Instagr.am, I've posted my first 100 photos to Flickr, proving once-again that the iPhone4 camera is amazing!
View the photoset on Flickr...
Wednesday, September 22, 2010 at 1:26PM I've been trying to find a decent solution for cross-browser testing. I've used Browsershots.org in the past, and the results have become less & less relative to my intended target audience.
After a search, I found that Adobe has a beta product called Adobe BrowserLab, and it's quite good.
A couple things that were brought to my attention early-on: [a] it still only delivers your sites as screenshots, so you cannot test page interactions and [b] there's currently no support for @font-face.
I recorded a Screencast as I walked through the testing of a client site that I'm testing.
Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 9:33AM While I don't normally "do weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs", I do on occasion produce photo DVD's for family, friends, and a few clients. After scanning photos (or converting 35mm slides/8mm film/home video), and editing a heart-wrenching production, I could just hand them a CD-R and be done with the project, but I always like to wow these clients with Jewelboxing cases.
The good folks over at Coudal Partners have sold these cases for a long time, and I absolutely love them.
A Jewelboxing "kit" comes with all the plastic parts, all the paper parts and the software templates to roll your own custom presentation.
I should add that this solution is for short-run projects only. Any more than 40, and my marriage would be on the rocks. The stresses of dealing with a cheap desktop printer is interesting to say the least. :-)
I thought I would take a few pictures as I assembled my latest project. I always use the "Kings" style case, because the King is larger, and just looks great. (My blurry photos, however do not. My iPhone has easily-replaced my point & shoot camera)
Finished product, showing the front & back of the cases.
All of the components are printed and the "perforated bits" are removed.
The only thing Jewelboxing doesn't include is what I call a "stomper" to apply the self-adhesive disc labels. Impossible without it. The tweezers are because we have four shedding pets. Sorry.
Insert the 2-sided printed tray card, then insert the CD tray thingy.
Since the CD tray is clear, I always use tight registration to make the artwork bleed from the CD to the background. It brings the OOHS and AAHS.
The finished product. The spine is printed on the back of the tray portion.
Ready to ship! Pretty stacks make for happy clients. :)
Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 11:18AM It's been a busy month here at Creative Component!
After the launch of Squareflair.com a few months back, I've been so busy with Squarespace development I could puke jump for joy. Seriously, if there's any question about my love for this platform, then you don't follow me on Twitter, so do that now.
Here's what was just released into the wild, and there's more that are wrapping-up very soon.
This site was built in one day using Squarespace, the best web-publishing platform available today. It was made on a Mac, designed using Adobe Fireworks and fueled by Monster Energy, Tullly's Kona Blend, Timothy's Fair Trade Colombian Dorado Coffees with help from the Keurig brewing system. High-quality 'real' fonts are made available by Typekit, and the progressively-enhanced CSS3-3D was inspired by Mark Dotto and was featured on WORKERSoftheWEB.
This site was meant to be viewed in a modern browser, like Safari, Firefox or Chrome. Did you know those browsers are free? If you're using IE, then you're missing-out on the way this site was intended to be viewed, but more than that— most of the internet's greatest sites don't perform well using Internet Explorer. Of-course, you could be viewing this site in a corporate office, where you're forced to use IE. I remember those days, and I really do feel for you. If this is the case, you need to do what I did— make friends with your IT Department, specifically the people who have admin rights to install software. Bribe them with food. Everyone in IT loves cookies, cakes, donuts, beer, pie and bacon. If they don't, then don't trust them.
Never trust anyone who says they don't like bacon.
About Creative Component
Creative Component is a design studio based in Indianapolis, Indiana specializing in producing clean, simple and accessible websites, with particular expertise in the User Interface. Our diverse clientele range from large multinationals to independent start-ups.
Our clients come to us for handmade, thoughtful brand experiences. That's what we give them.
Creative Component was founded by designer Alan Houser in 2005. Alan has worked professionally in web design since 2000, and prior, spent a decade as a video/multimedia producer.
Our CMS platform of choice is Squarespace. After opening the Squareflair storefront in 2010, that's pretty-much all we do today.