Journal
Very occasional writings and observations.
Byrd & Belle Device Covers
17 Jan 12
Over the holidays, I recieved a Kindle 4 and have been really happy with it. One area where I found it to be lacking, however, was its absence of a cover or sleeve, so I looked for something to cover it up. When I found the site for Byrd & Belle, I knew I had found what I was looking for.
On Parallax Scrolling Sites
05 Jan 12
Yesterday, some colleagues and I were bandying about the URLs of a few Parallax Scrolling sites as sources of design inspiration. They’re the sort of sites that have been cropping up in the past year that do funky things as you scroll through them. Like this, that, and these over here. I’m not going to give a tutorial on how to build them—you can find those elsewhere. Instead, I want to focus on the the choice of whether or not to use parallax scrolling as a design tool.
Clean Water
23 Dec 11
In a month, I’ll turn 38 years old.
For my birthday, I’ve decided to forego presents. Instead, I’ve set a goal to raise $1,000 to help fund new Charity: Water projects. $1,000 is enough to help bring water to 50 people who need it. In order to meet that goal, though, I need your help. If you’d like to pitch in—you can donate any amount—it would mean a lot to me, and it would be life-changing for those people who really need clean water.
Read more about this campaign and help me reach that goal
Creating Efficient Full Page Drop Shadows using Canvas
03 Jan 11
A very common design pattern is you’ll find on websites is a centered content area with a drop shadow, which creates the effect of lifting the content away from the page background. As developers, there are numerous options available to us to create that drop shadow, and while I’ll touch on some typical methods, I’ll focus on what I believe to be a less common technique and in which circumnstances it would be good to use.
The Flexible Scalable Background Image, Redux
29 Oct 10
Some time ago, I wrote about a method for setting up background images which scale to fill a browser window, regardless of the window’s size. It was, however, a hacked together solution which leaned on Javascript to do the heavy lifting—a solution I was never competely satisfied with it. It didn’t work everywhere people wanted it to work, and it wasn’t as elegant as it could be. The latest crop of browsers can do it a better way, and this is an update to that old technique which takes advantage of the new capabilities those browsers offer.
