Designing to Create a Response

by Nate Croft in Design

Objectivity is often like a dog’s head on a car ride, it goes right out the window. It can be easy to lose sight of your goal sometimes. Keeping your efforts focused on creating the right response is key to a successful design. Let’s take a look at designing to evoke a positive response.

When you boil it down, a designer’s job is to communicate. If we can create a work of art as well, that’s great, but not at the expense of the message. Start with the two most important questions before beginning a design: “Who is this for?” and “What is it intended to do?” As a designer, sometimes it’s easy to just start designing something. Resist that urge! Take a moment to wrap your head around it.

Custom Webclip Icons for your iPhone or iPod Touch Home Screen

by Jonathan Longnecker in Tutorials

So some of you may have heard about the iPhone, iPod Touch update yesterday that lets you add shortcuts on your home screen to webpages. My iPhone does a nice job of taking a screenshot of the page I’m on and making a pretty little icon that looks like my other icons on the home screen. But wait! I want my logo and not a tiny version of the whole page! Turns out it’s super simple to have your custom icon show up.

Ready? Make an icon that’s 158x158. Save it as “apple-touch-icon.png,” and put it in the root folder of your website. Wow that was easy.

Making Your Footer Stay Put With CSS

by Jonathan Longnecker in Design, Tutorials

One problem I run into pretty frequently when coding a site in to XHTML and CSS is making my footer dock to the bottom of the screen. It’s especially annoying if you have a page that’s short on content and the footer, which happens to be a different color that the body background doesn’t stay at the bottom of the browser window. I can hear you say, “But why don’t you just do a fixed position on it. That’s easy enough.” True, but if you do that then it’s always at the bottom of the screen no matter how tall the window is. So if I have a page with a lot of content that footer shouldn’t show up until the content is done. How do we fix this? Let me show you. Here’s what the problem looks like:

This tutorial assumes a few things: 1. That you know basic HTML formatting, and 2. That you have a pretty good understanding of CSS.

So first we need to make sure that everything except the footer is inside a container div. So your code would look something like this:

Lessons from the Music Industry

by Jonathan Longnecker in Business, Personal

I’m a frequent reader of Seth Godin’s blog, and his recent entry “Music Lessons” is mostly right on the money.

I think everyone is in agreement that the music industry has been ripping us off for years; their business model from 1950 is dead, and they’re floundering around trying to figure out what to do. Copy protection; while a decent first tackle at the problem; should have been dropped years ago. Suing your own customers. Stupid. Yeah, yeah we’ve heard all this before.

What makes Godin’s entry so interesting is that he reminds us that it can happen to any business.

What’s Your Thing?

by Nate Croft in Personal

Years ago while I was in college, I worked for several different major retailers over a period of about two years. I did a stint at The Home Depot loading cement bags and heaving potting soil. I survived a Christmas season as your friendly neighborhood consumer electronics consultant at Best Buy. And believe it or not, I even worked a desperate couple of months at Bed Bath and Beyond.

It was great time in my life, but I wasn’t aware of it until much later. At the time, I was miserable.

The purely logical, problem solving part of my brain must have been put in charge for a while because I was looking at things from a very narrow perspective then. I needed money. To get money, I needed a job. So I got one. Now I had some money. There was a very “*happy word* and Jane” sort of simplicity at work here. For various reasons, (none of which included being fired, thank God) I switched from one job to the next, trying to find one that I could stick with. I really wanted to work, to do a good job and enjoy doing it. But that wasn’t happening.