Bleached Graphics: Blog

Twitter doesn’t have to be updates about your eating habbits.

August 18th, 2009

I use Twitter.  It took me awhile, and I felt a little dirty after signing up for it…you see, I associated Twitter as being a website where friends/strangers posted needless information about what they were currently doing with their less than stellar lives.

I didn’t care what my friends were having for lunch.  It didn’t matter to me that they were in their car, texting while they drove.  I would rather stab myself in the eyes than have to read their internet slang, misspelled updates on being bored at work.  And these were just my negative reactions to my friends…just imagine what expletives I would say to comment on updates from people I didn’t even know…

However, being an avid reader of various design magazines, I started to come across more and more articles about how Twitter could be used as an excellent networking tool, a way to stay up-to-date on the latest design trends and provide ways to help out / be helped out by other designers via advice/links to tutorials.  The more positive things I heard about Twitter, related to my career, the more I couldn’t further deny its usefulness.

I signed up.  I followed.  I got followed back.  And now, I have myself a nice little group of designers (and some friends) that I keep up with on a daily basis.  The benefits?  They are quite visible.  I’ve learned a lot from following other designers.  I’ve received help when needed, and I’ve even dished out some comments/advice of my own.  My work has improved because I’m using the knowledge I’ve learned from others/linked articles & tutorials, daily.

I recommend that anyone that is serious about creating a network of like-minded peers, that you don’t have to work too hard to keep updated with, sign up for Twitter and use it as it should be used…as a means to quickly convey useful information.  However, if you just want to let your friends know what you’re doing…I suggest giving them a call.  If they actually care, they won’t hang-up on you.

To demonstrate some of the useful information that is posted on my Twitter feed, daily,here are some links to articles that other users have posted within the last few hours…

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250+ Resources to Help You Become a CSS Expert

30+ PHP Best Practices for Beginners

Protected: Strange occurrences

June 11th, 2009

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I hate Kit Kat radio commercials…

June 10th, 2009

kit kats with your coffee! making fat people squeal with gleeFor the past two years, Kit Kat bars have been pissing me off. If you’ve been paying attention to the radio during your morning commute, you’ve more than likely heard a Kit Kat commercial or two. Click here to listen to one of the commercials For me, that’s one or two too many. I turn my radio off when they come on…a bit excessive maybe, but I can’t help it…their current marketing plan, though apparently effective (which depresses me) makes me cringe and I’d rather listen to silence than listen to their crappy commercials again.

For those of you who haven’t heard the commercials, the basic premise of them is this:
“HAY GUYS! YOU KNOW WHAT’S AWESOME!? KIT KATS WITH YOUR COFFEE! THEY WERE MADE FOR EACH OTHER! NO SERIOUSLY! BUY KIT KATS WITH YOUR COFFEE! KIT KATS COFFEE COFFEEKITKATSGIMMEABREAKCOFFEEKITKATSBESTFRIENDS!!!!!”

Or, listen to an actual commercial here…

Each commercial has some stupid scenario where somebody says something along the lines of “you know what you should do…you should get rid of your pastry chef and install a Kit Kat vending machine because Kit Kats go great with coffee!!”

Then there will be some sort of rebuttal like “but we’re a bakery…what would we do with our chef?”

AND THEN there’s a witty come-back: “IDK. maybe he can stand there and make change for the vending machine?”
With the closing statement: “Looks like coffee has a new best friend! Buy a Kit Kat bar with your coffee!”

So what’s my problem with this campaign? It’s the fact that this just reeks of pathetic. It sounds like they’re begging for you to buy their candy, and they feel like they need to latch onto something that just about everyone consumes (see coffee) because their product doesn’t have the legs to stand on its own as a viable product.

I imagine there was some marketing meeting and during it, some fat guy that eats candy for breakfast was dipping his Kit Kat into his coffee. Someone (that previously had nothing of value to add to the marketing meeting) noticed this and quipped “looks like your coffee has a new best friend!” to which everyone else in the room responded with copious amounts of laughter, because they’re all simple minded, and there you have it.

Well Kit Kat, your marketing campaign has had the opposite effect on me that you had hoped for. While I have always enjoyed you as a candy, I refuse to purchase you anymore because I don’t want to somehow be misconstrued in your statistics as an increase in sales during this campaign you are running. However, if you come up with a new marketing campaign that doesn’t revolve around you pathetically trying to force yourself into a market that you/nor any other candy belongs in (by the way, that should be noted…other candy bars do not try to pass themselves off as breakfast foods…you’re not being a pioneer here, Kit Kat, you’re being an idiot).

ps. i sometimes write about really dumb topics…

The new dredg.com & a past interview with Drew Roulette

June 8th, 2009

The new dredg.com was made public tonight. I’m quite impressed by it.  They really have the starting of an online community that their site has never offered before. Fans of the band will be able to converse with each other and apparently there is a point system in place that, at least to me it seems, may be used in their online store.

However, it’s the website’s design that really has me impressed.  The site uses the artwork developed for dredg’s new album, which comes out June 9th mind you!, and almost seemlessly reproduces it online to give a well branded/atmoshperic feel.

In anticipation for the album’s release tomorrow (even though I’m aware that the internet has it wide spread already), here is an interview I conducted with the bass player of dredg, Drew Roulette, back in November of 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

Isis @The Paraside Rock Club, Allston, MA - 2009.06.05

June 8th, 2009

I’ve seen Isis about five times now, and Friday’s performance was by far one of my favorites.  I just love shows at the Paradise.  It’s really one of the best venues in Boston.  The sound is always spot-on.(at least from what I remember)…

The show opened with Tombs and Pelican, who both put on good sets.  I had never seen either before, even though I had been supposed to see Pelican about three times in the past…just never worked out.

Isis went out at about 11:15pm and performed the following set:

Hall of the Dead
20 Minutes / 40 Yards
Dulcinea
Threshold of Transformation
Ghost Key
In Fiction
Hand of the Host
Carry
Celestial

Only 9 songs…but the show lasted just shy of an hour and a half.
and for your downloading pleasure: http://www.sendspace.com/file/vszq1w

Preview track - Dulcinea

Advanced web course week 2

June 4th, 2009

So…as I sit waiting for my third class to start, I might as well write a little bit about what we did last week.

The class focused on using XML and stylizing it with XSLT, CSS and Spry.

I can’t really say that I’ve come up with many real world senarios as to why I’d want to stylize an XML sheet directly…but taking what we learned and applying it to XHTML using javascript (Spry) has already given me some ideas as to ways I can improve some of the freelance projects I have coming up. I’ll actually be using the XML/Spry combo to work out a quick and easy way for me/my client to update their website’s audio, image and video galeries.

Here is the example of the Spry/XML page that I created:
http://bleachedgraphics.com/advweb/spry/

I’m going to try to write up a short tutorial on how to create the above link & cover what we go over in class, tonight, soon…

Typekit

June 3rd, 2009

Since as long as I can remember, there have been 6ish font “familes” available on the web. Fonts that a designer knows everyone will have installed on their computer, so they’re safe to use, as they will load properly on any computer.

Typekit is coming out soon, this summer actually, and it’s going to change the way that fonts are used on the internet. With it, one will be able to link to a font library via Javascript and CSS and an actual font file will be loaded. No faking it with using images or embeded fonts in flash files…as long as the font library you are looking for is part of Typekit, you can use it in desgining your website, and everyone will be able to see that font the way you inteded it to look. Read the rest of this entry »

Telescreen Podcast

May 27th, 2009

Using a few of the tracks from my previous post/live recording of the Telescreen concert, I’ve created a short podcast.

http://bleachedgraphics.com/podcast.xml

You can download the XML file to check out how I put it together to make your own / load it into iTunes to listen to the songs.

Edumicated: RSS Feed

May 22nd, 2009

Last night was my first class in the 35-week Advanced Web Development Certificate Program that I am enrolled in at the New England Institute of Art.  It’s a nice, small class size and I’m quite excited about the material that we will be covering.

The first class was a basic over-view of what we’re going to be doing…how back-end programing works and the various languages we’ll be exploring and applications we’ll be using/making during the course of this…….course.

The first assignment we were given was to create a fake RSS feed XML file.  The purpose of this was to learn how one of these is set up.  I’ve been working with XML files for some projects I’ve worked on.  I have xml files that are used in my portfolio section, in partnership with my flash files…so this was no where near a difficult concept for me to grasp.  Regardless, the point of this class is to strengthen and expand the foundation I have in the coding aspects of web design.  So, here I will now talk about what I ‘learned.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Brands of the World

May 21st, 2009

I don’t know how well known this site is…I just found out about it today…

www.brandsoftheworld.com

There have been a few times where I’ve had to wade through Google image search, looking for a corporate logo that was good enough quality to use for a project…would have been a lot easier had I known of this.  Most of the logos (if not all….I just did a few quick searches in it) are in .eps format.  Can’t get better than that, really!