Troy McNeil - FortySeven Media’s Newest Web Ninja!

by Nate Croft in Business

It is my great pleasure to introduce to our good friend Troy McNeil. Troy is our is our web ninja in training and his kung-fu is excellent. He may look like a mild mannered scooter enthusiast, but lurking under that calm exterior is the heart of a code warrior! He’s stealthy too. He has already been at work on some of our projects and you didn’t even know! But that time is past, today we welcome Troy to our blog. He’ll be posting his thoughts on, well, whatever he wants because he’s really funny. Plus, he can give you an insider’s view of the inner workings of FortySeven Media.

Making Accessible CSS Buttons Look Awesome

by Jonathan Longnecker in Design, Tutorials

Buttons. They’re those little things that people really like to click and push. I personally think they’re pretty important to help guide a user through the actions they need to perform. But I’ll be the first to admit I’ve made my fair share of image buttons. Totally inaccessible; just an image with some alt text. Now depending on your site design and the type of site, that might be ok. For instance, if you’re dealing with a simple marketing site that’s kind of grungy; you’ll probably need to make that button look like it fits.

But there’s a problem if you’re dealing with a site or web application that will have 50 or 100+ buttons that all say different things. Now you’re looking at maintaining a ton of images and a lot of manual linking everywhere….not very ideal!

Photoshop Tutorial - CBOO (What is that?!)

by Nate Croft in Design, Tutorials

You don’t know it yet, but you’re about to learn one of my favorite and most used Photoshop tricks. You’ve seen this everywhere but might not know it. It has, in some form or fashion, saved more lifeless photos than anything else. What is this awesomeness I speak of? I speak of the CBOO. But that’s Mr. CBOO to you.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. I just had to think of something to call “thing that I do.” CBOO stands for: Copy, Blur, Overlay, Opacity.

Here’s an example of a photo that could benefit from some CBOO:

FortySeven Media Gets Social!

by Jonathan Longnecker in Business, Personal

Want even more 47m? Well now you can have us!….no wait that’s weird. What I mean is we’re officially on Twitter and Flickr now so you can follow us or check out our portfolio elsewhere.

Smashing Magazine Loves Us - Again!

by Jonathan Longnecker in Design

I was just informed by a Google Alert this morning that Smashing Magazine has listed us in their latest article, “Retro and Vintage in Modern Web Design. Awesome! Not only did they list us, but they used our site for two of their 15 examples of common graphic elements. Gotta say, guys we’re honored you would list us with so many other amazing designs. Thanks for the mentions! There really is a ton of great stuff in the article, so go check it out!