A HattersWorkshop Blog – Technology, The Web, and Everything
Judging the CT Student Innovation Exposition (E-Commerce)... Want to know what the next 10 years will look like? Ask a high school student. Their creativity isnt limited by their knowledge of what we currently call technological limitations. They have a vision of...
The Value of Feeling Appreciated as an Employee in... Whether you’re a new employee or the vice president of the company, everyone wants to feel valued, even appreciated, in the workplace. Not only does it improve morale and make the workplace a more pleasant...
The difference between classic and motion tweens in... Here it is: If you're used to doing things "the cs3 way" then you can continue to do so with the classic tween tool. It works the same way as you remember, using key frames as normal, but you cannot...
PHP: If (equal to AND not equal) - eliminate form spam... Just learned a great function of PHP thats already made my forms a lot better. A while back I wrote an article about eliminating form spam without captchas by using css to hide a text input box for bots...
Drop Downs, Fly Outs, and Accordion Site Navigation: This last week I was in a meeting discussing a client site. It was a typical business meeting that was going into overtime on a Friday afternoon, and then things turned for the worst... someone suggested...
Mar
12
2009
Category : Cool Websites
Need to get inspired by others in a hurry? Do you need a muse?
Check out www.debutart.com. Browse new works of art by artist or tag and view decently high resolution images of their work. No more clicking though google images to find pictures that would be great if only they weren’t taken with a cell phone.
Mar
05
2009
Below are a few really good videos I saw over the weekend of the a photo being fully retouched. The main thing that people don’t realize about photo retouching is that you change everything… being incredibly through and idealizing everything to the point that the picture is almost no longer of the subject anymore. The trick is to not over do it or it becomes too noticeable and that breaks the illusion.
I see people in life looking at magazines and ogling at the “people” on the cover. I use the term “people” loosely because as previously stated and as the video examples below will show: no one looks this good ever – let alone all the time. To believe that these cover shots are real is akin to believing that Grim’s Fairy Tales is a historical text!
Reading a fictional book is fun, as is staring at a retouched photo of Hillary Duff. The difference is that we all know that the book is fiction, yet because our eyes can see it we decided at some point that the photograph is real.
As people view more produced events, whether it be an ad, a movie, or the Music Awards their attitude towards reality shifts so that the perfected reality as the norm, and anyone who is having a “normal day” is ugly by comparison. Such is the case when you see a person “untouched”. By comparison anyone without an army of stylists and photoshop artists is a second rate beauty at best.
Watch and learn.
I’ll post some tutorials soon. These guys all fly through their work.
Mar
05
2009
Category : Great Tutorials, Photoshop, Typography
In what is sure to be a hugely trafficked and bookmarked post, 50 Stunning Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials. I’m delighted that Smashing Magazine took the time to explain basic typography FIRST. While not a complete history or explanation of everything type this might be the most complete, yet concise, summary of what you need to know before you go gallivanting off with an army of text effects.
This post is not just a heaping pile of knowledge. This is SEM success on an SEO goldmine. Better yet, Smashing Magazine will shine for this and in the process we can only hope that their younger readers this will pause and learn something from the first half (the typography section) before stampeding towards the tutorials.
Yes, the effects are cool, but using an interesting effect on poorly is still an utter failure while good type can stand on its own without any effects what so ever. I also hope that readers understand that you should never use an effect gratuitously. Use the right effect to further your message; not to use an effect.
Feb
26
2009
I found a wicked easy to use color palette generator at http://www.colorcombos.com. Besides being free it also has a few features that I like that set it apart from the plethora of other color generator sites I found before getting to this one.
And did I mention this site is free? Love it…
Feb
19
2009
Category : General Web Info, Technology
I image if done wrong this could look… so bad. Fortunately for the folks at Kobi in Leeds, they found the people to do it right. The site is well designed, has bright colors, good typography, and an attractive navigation. Then you click a button and everything moves… Not a fade in fade out like you see on so many other flash sites. Oh no, instead the pages all move behind a window as if they were on a roll of paper somewhere inside the site.
I’ve heard of this style of navigation, but never seen it before. Kudos to Kobe for doing it right.
So now that I’ve admired the site for a few sentences, I’m now thinking about some of the pros and cons of this type of layout. The user experience is enriched with the addition of the new eye candy, and there doesn’t appear to be any loss in usability. So the only cons I can find to this type of transition are that you just can’t do this kind of scripting on the timeline in flash and the usual setbacks that apply to all flash sites.
As cool as this is, no novice would be able to code it. (You could if you really wanted to and if the site was small enough, but you would have to make every instance of translation [ie from page A to B, A to C, B to A, B to C, C to A, and finally C to B, etc.] and this only gets more complicated as you get bigger. The alternative used here is to use a single frame movie that houses all pages in one long symbol. Clicking the navigation plays a function that sets the _y property on the movie. Using action script like this also allows you to control the speed and ease of the tween more precisely than using the timeline. Some would say this is the only way to do flash and the more of it I see, the more I agree with them.
Now the other setbacks that apply to all flash movies: lack of a back button support, no out of box ability to deep link into the internal pages of the site, questionably SEO, reduced crawlable content, and a limited site map. All of which can be addressed with third party solutions after the fact by a skilled web designer.
Feb
15
2009
I think its about time to move the site to WordPress. I cant customize EVERYTHING in wordpress, but Id comfortable with the 99% that I can edit. Anyone with a firm grip of css and php can do just about anything and a huge devloper community is constantly creating new applets that continue to amaze me. Contunue Reading
Feb
12
2009
Category : Featured, Flash, Technology
Here it is:
If you’re used to doing things “the cs3 way” then you can continue to do so with the classic tween tool. It works the same way as you remember, using key frames as normal, but you cannot use it like a new CS4 tween function or use 3d tweens.
DOWNSAVING:
If you use only classic tweens you will be able to down save your CS4 documents to CS3 without any problem. Using CS4 motion tweens will result in the whole of your tween turning into keyframes as if you had decompiled the swf. (Which might do the trick, or you might start to cry, depending on how you need to use it.)
CS4 Introduces The new Motion Tween. Why Adobe did not use the old name for the Old way and give the New name to the New function I dont know. CS4 Motion tweens operate totally differently than CS3 motion tweens.
The biggest changes that I see are:
I wasn’t sure where Flash was going. Before CS4 came out I thought Flash was dying. Flash has always been in sort of a strange place when it comes to its role in a website. Developers and clients alike wonder if its for eye candy or if you should use is as the technology to build your whole website on and Im not going to argue that here.
The fact is that a lot of the eyecandy can be replicated with JQuery, so why bother learning Flash? Cs4 has changed all that. Now the question is: where to Flash and After Effects meet?
If you still need more info, of if you are a visual learner. Check out this guys video on CS4 and 3d Tweens. I only wish it was on youtube or some other embeddable video site instead of a downloadable video.
Feb
10
2009
Ever wanted to know what was hot today – Not just in your tribe but across the internet? It’s not a new idea but previous attempts haven’t been able to do it as completely as we can now with RSS. Back in 2006 the hugely popular Popurls.com launched and was a collection of urls like digg and Slashdot for instance. You went to one site and then went to a lot of other sites, and basically did the old way of doing things.
Welcome to 2009. RSS now feeds one site, The Web List, with all this content. While some pages allow for ultimate user customization, The Web List lists about a dozen or so major RSS feeds ranging from Digg, Delicious, to Wired and TechCrunch, to Metafilter, dzone, and NYTimes, plus others with huge circulation Ive never heard of.
I added this sucker to my Speed Dial Console. I go back and forth between this and Stumble when I need something random in my day. These days usually this.
Jan
31
2009
2009 should have been the year when the world would move away from IE6. Sadly though, it doesnt look to be the case. IE6 still has enough market share on most sites that we dont want to discount them because they cannot access the content we are providing, but the sad reality is: when you are using a two generation dated browser you cannot except to see all the new toys… Contunue Reading
Jan
12
2009
Category : Cool Websites, Flash, SEO / SEM, Technology
“We CAN’T tell you all the poprietary details, but… We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text… “ – Google.
And I’m glad they don’t. Otherwise it would be too easy for every spammer, scraper, and hacker to destroy yet another beautiful thing on the internet. However, for the rest of us with day jobs, it would be nice to know just how Google does what they say they do. Maybe not everything, but “Will a hidden textbox containing variables in layer2 be indexed higher than my content in layer 1 (below layer 2)?” is a reasonable question, and one worth knowing before you broadcast your global variables or GET strings into general search text.
http://www.flashnseo.com/ has you coverd. Flashnseo is a group internet project to discover answers to specific flash SEO questions. They use good old fasion slouthing and trial and error; but it works.
Among the answers already discovered are:
Check over their site and get some answers. If you’re in a possition to help please do so.
