In the Beginning There Was Design

In the midst of updating one of my websites, I needed to describe various product options by their color. Now, I may be a graphic designer but naming colors isn’t my thing. So I searched Google for “color names,” and one of the first results that came up was a neat little web app by Chir.ag.

This excellent tool let’s you either select your desired color from a list, input its HEX value, or move around a full spectrum to find your color-match. It then gives you an exact or approximate color name, which I’ve found to be fairly accurate.

Pretty cool.

Check it out for yourself

Been out for a while, busy working on new projects:

• Just redesigned: www.judaicahouse.net
• Just finished: smallwonderscoaching.com
• Almost finished: commhealthissues.rutgers.edu

Your thoughts are welcomed.

Session.edu’s career center is a nice resource center for some design tools, including this simple-but-useful colorwheel i would like to share with you today:

So far I’ve been setting the trend of posting referrals to other sites, and I think I’ll be continuing in this fashion.  Unless I have something original to point out, I don’t feel a need to repeat what others have said.

Today I’m going to post a link to a site that, well it’s not the least inspirational in terms of its design and layout.  However, it does contain a lot of key information for any web or graphic designers who are just dipping their feet in the design puddle.  I think that a lot of what’s said on that site could be a good refreshment for long practicing designers as well- sometimes it is easy to get caught in a whirlwind of ideas, and returning to the basics may help in sorting things out.  Some of the articles on the site are less relevant because of the popularity and usefulness of cascading style sheets, but it’s always fun to be reminded of what we once thought to be efficient deign methods:

Today I discovered a free font website that has a pretty large collection of very useful fonts.

They have lots of unique typefaces sorted by genres.  Check it out at:

Many articles were written about this issue, and a decent amount of fixes and hacks were created to solve it, yet many designers are still struggling with it because no hack is ever perfect.

I’m talking about the infamous transparent PNG issue that occurs in Internet Explorer, versions 6 and earlier. According to Browser News, over 30% of the currently used browsers are older versions of Internet Explorer. This means that for almost every site that is created, regardless of its content and target audience will have a significant percentage of its visitor demographics using out-of-date browsers, creating many issues including java usability and the ever frustrating PNG transparency problem.

This issue can be best visualized (for those who don’t use IE 6 and earlier) as a malicious application of an opaque fill of color on the areas of an image where full transparency was intended to be. The following image compares IE 6 (top) to Firefox, and as you can see, Internet Explorer cannot deal properly with transparencies in PNGs:

Bob Osola describes the issue as a consideration of usage between PNGs and GIFs. He offers a decent solution that I’ve been using for quite a while and am very satisfied with. It was praised in a 2004 PC Magazine article (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1645331,00.asp). The problem with his fix is that it doesn’t apply for css backgrounds, so I recommend using it only if you need to fix some foreground transparent PNGs.

24Ways.org came up with a similar solution that fixes transparent CSS background images, but it only works in the simplest of cases, which means you can’t repeat or position the background.

I’ve tried a number of other fixes, including some complicated flash ones that significantly slowed down the page loading time, but the only two that were lightweight, easily integratable and didn’t affect loading time are the ones described above.  (Note that these scripts set all other browsers, including IE 7+ to ignore the script, or rather only IE 6 and below to notice the script.)

Good luck, and try to only use transparent PNGs when necessary.