A couple days ago Continental Airlines and United announced their merger, becoming the largest carrier.
United was the “cooler” airline of the two, with it’s Saul Bass designed tulip icon and clean typography. They describe themselves as having “a bold, yet simple design, representing the spirit of the United brand.” Continental, on the other hand, last updated their logo in the 1990s with a more refined, formal look. So, how do these two brands come together? You be the judge.
Someone decided it would be best to have both worlds. So, they used the United name and Continental’s look and came up with this.
Personally, I feel that United got the shorter end of this stick. At a glance you don’t even realize that the name as changed because the typography and logo are associated with Continental. It is rumored that this is just a stop gap measure, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Green, sustainability, and recycling are all buzz words we hear in today’s culture. But what’s actually being done? Here are a few awesome stories about how plastic is being used:
Design student Anna Bullus started thinking about recycling gum after walking on her campus’ spotted sidewalks. She realized that gum is simply modified rubber, and should be able to be recycled. After 8 months she perfected the process of turning gum into pellets, and then into a plastic using secret additives. The plastic is now being used to create seat cushions that feel like memory foam, and there are more products to come! Learn more here.
I upgraded my Ubuntu machine to the latest LTS build last week and was quickly disappointed that my terminal no longer had opacity. No matter what I did, the window would just appear as a solid color. I tried googling, etc. but couldn’t find any solution online.
I gave up and ended up editing my background profile and fixed it totally by accident. I switched my background from transparent to a solid color and then back to transparent and voilà! transparency was back.
I’m not 100% sure why the issue happened in the first place-anyone?-but I hope that someone finds this fix out there.
We recently came across an old issue that I’ve experienced with flash, dynamic text, and superscripts before, but some of our other developers had never seen before, so I thought I would create an entry for posterity’s sake.
The issue is as follows, you want to enter superscript into an HTML enabled text field, so you add a sup tag around the text you want to superscript. You compile your file and no text appears where you expect it to. Turns out, sup and sub tags are not supported by a textfield that is dynamically populated.
Oh crap. What to do?
Well, don’t fret!
Download these fonts, install, and restart Flash. Next you need to embed the fonts in the SWF. There are many ways to do this that are well documented. My preferred method is to open your FLA and create a dynamic textfield, setting the font to the desired super or sub font. Then include the characters you want to publish (typically, I just need numerals). Limiting the characters you include will limit the file size of the resulting SWF.
Use the following html tag to set the super or sub font. For instance,
This text requires a footnote <font face=”GG Superscript Sans”>1</font>
Voila, you’re ready to add super or sub scripted fonts to your flash.
At the Architectural Digest Show this past weekend I heard about an App from Benjamin Moore “Color Capture”. This app allows you to take a picture, or use a picture from your library and match a color. (It is similar to the eyedropper tool on Photoshop.) You can see the spectrum of colors that exist within the photo and also save colors you like. Although designed for Interior Designers and Architects, this apps also has a place in the graphic design world. So, next time you see something you like, take and picture and use the app to figure out the colors!
Who would have thought that going to the NSTA Conference in Philly last week would have been so much fun? Don’t get me wrong, hanging with teachers can pretty much guarantee good times, but, sloths, penguins, millipedes, stick bugs, black widows, tarantulas, etc…Not to mention the ability to build myself out of Lego’s?…I was blown away.
I went to the conference to hang with National Geographic, one of the many well respected brands on our client roster. They had a booth at the conference and we saw it as a great opportunity to represent our work, as Nat Geo was showing screen shots of the education site that we are on the brink of launching for them. It was also a great opportunity to see what’s going on out there in the education industry and meet some key influencers in the community. I was overwhelmed by the technology and pure fun that was circulating the Pennsylvania Convention Center. I met passionate educators from Lego, The Discovery Channel, The American Museum of Natural History, Texas Instruments, Subaru, and yes even Toyota. The conference was filled with industry leaders who were amazingly perky despite the long day and lack of chairs.
The Sea World exhibit was by far the highlight of my day however. They had a live sloth named Harry….of course…who was the most active sloth I have ever seen. Granted the only other sloth I have seen was high up in a tree in Costa Rica..covered in moss…and didn’t move…I guess it could have been a stick…but regardless, Harry was not a stick…he was active, had horrible teeth, long nails and was about 20 years old. Long story short I have an awesome job and get to play with Sloths!
Me: “We did some research that indicates that the registration may have run out. Your organization registered and managed the domain name, so I can’t help with this since we have no involvement in managing the domain name.”
Client: “[very angry] I am reading your email in disbelief. You are the webmaster – how can there be an aspect of our website that you have no control over?”
Why is that client from hell? Because they don’t understand the relationship between domain name registration and site functionality? Because they called the webmaster when there was a problem with the website?
Sites like these, while good for the occasional laugh, only contribute to web professionals’ image as aloof, arrogant, know-it-alls. If clients don’t know how this stuff works, it’s not their fault.
On a positive note, Michael Beirut’s talk about great clients is inspiring, and highly recommended:
I’ve been using the console a lot more on my windows machine here at blenderbox, and I find myself typing in the unix command ‘ls’ to display the directory listing over and over. Each time I want to display the directory, I end up having to type in two commands. I finally decided to do something about this today and created a batch file for ls to run the dir command. To do this,
Open a new text file, type: dir
Save as ls.bat in C:\Windows\System32\
Now whenever I type ls by mistake, it runs the dir command, giving me the directory listing. Sweet yea?
Who would have ever thought that after a few attempts at making your own home/office brew that we could sit down with our team, identify a client that we would LOVE to work with and then WIN them? Brooklyn Brewery, with its headquarters in Williamsburg Brooklyn, has just signed Blenderbox to be their 2010 Digital Agency of Record. Brooklyn Brewery was started in 1987 By Steve Hindy and distributes a number of their signature brews in 14 countries and growing. Blenderbox welcomes the opportunity to work with such a well known and respected brand. With it’s identity instilled by Milton Glaser, best know for his I Love New York campaign, Brooklyn Brewery will be a great brand to add to the Blenderbox client Roster. We look forward to some inspiring brainstorming sessions catalyzed by a Brooklyn Lager or Cookie Jar Porter!
We recently discovered this great online color palette tool that had all of us in design giddy about it. You can create all kinds of palettes for online use, from mono to complementary and beyond. The contrast and saturation levels can be adjusted and previews are available to show you your palette on light and dark page templates. The tool also features an export function which allows you to export your palette to photoshop, HTML/CSS or XML. Additionally, the “Vision Simulation” option lets you preview your palette through the eyes of people with color blindness and other vision impairments, a great feature for assessing accessibility concerns.
Check it out here
Created by Petr Stanicek in the Czech Republic. Thanks Petr!
