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Web Developement, Web Design, Graphic Design, & Interactive Media Blog of Joren Rapini

Font Face Replacement Embedding Techniques and Resources

Thanks to current lack of support for and other licensing issues regarding @font-face, we have to turn to other methods of using special fonts on our web pages. But what to choose? There are several great proven methods out there for font face replacements on a website, so today we’re going to take a look at 4 of the bigger ones that I have taken for a spin. I’m going to list for you the pros and cons that I discovered for each method.

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Mar
28

Comment To Win One Thousand Free Business Cards - Winner Announced

Hey everyone! Got some goodies this week. U-printing has offered up one thousand business cards to the lucky winner. In order to enter, all you have to do is leave a comment at the end of the blog post, describing what you would use the free business cards and/or canvas print for.

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Mar
7

Design a Space Cloud Starry Fantasy Scene with Photoshop

Sorry for the long delay in posts! It’s been a busy month. This article is a tutorial for how to create the following fantasy scene in Photoshop. You can use these techniques in a bunch of different ways from within a web interface design, to my example which is a wallpaper that I created as a Valentine’s Day gift to my fiance Candy.


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Mar
1

Amazing Web Designer Resource Collection and Color Tools

I was originally going to write a quick post on some color tool resources, being inspired by Well Styled’s brand new revision of their awesome color tool, found here. The Color Scheme Designer has a lot of neat new functions, including generating a preview of a website with the colors that you have picked along with new customization features. I realized that most of the tools I had to write about were already included in this very nice website that Tom Dufour brought to my attention, called Web Designer Heaven.

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Feb
8

Easy Client Control Over Page Elements with CushyCMS

Every client you deal with should have a unique solution to fit their needs. CushyCMS is definitely no end-all-be-all CMS solution, but it is absolutely perfect for a certain niche of websites. If you are developing a website that, for example, will often need a couple paragraphs on the front page changed often, or they’re a restaurant that just wants to update specials and prices every once and a while, then CushyCMS is a pretty optimal solution. You can let your client take control without damaging anything else on the website and, best of all, they get off your case on making updates! It’s extremely quick and easy to set up, and very easy to explain to your clients on how to use it as well.

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Jan
25

Enhance Your Love For Music With These Applications

There is one thing in my life that I will always cherish above even web designing and developing (gasp), and that is music. I was a musician for several years, and that even included being a high school band geek. I totally rocked that saxophone. In the last few years, I have expanded my horizon when it comes to music to encompass just about everything and I have a bit of an addiction to amassing as much of a collection as I can. If you share my love for music, then you will appreciate this post. I’m going to go over some of the applications and services that I use on my computer that helps with all kinds of aspects of dealing with a music collection from managing your library, finding new music, and just getting the most of out the experience.

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Jan
20

Are CSS Frameworks Really Worth Using?

I’ve witnessed the beauty of frameworks for languages like PHP such as CakePHP, and for Ruby such as Ruby on Rails, not to mention the myriad of great javascript libraries that are out there. I see the potential for making life a lot easier by using these frameworks. They prevent you from having to reinvent the wheel, and can really speed up your production. The difference between these and CSS frameworks such as Blueprint is that they impact how the site functions, and not really how it appears to the user (I’m not including js libraries in this statement). So to me, the idea of a CSS framework seems like you’d be producing some stale designs.

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Jan
15

Useful Free Applications For Any Web Dev / Designer

This is somewhat of a continuation of Great Firefox Plugins For Any Web Designer or Developer where I talked about some handy Firefox plugins, and now I’d like to speak at you about some applications that I’ve found useful throughout my career, whether it be something that can help make a task a little easier or something that just helps me get through a day of work by making it more enjoyable.

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Jan
5

Double Body Background CSS Trick

So, you just created this awesome fancy background for a website. The top part of the background is large and in charge, while everything below it is going to be a repeating background that goes all the way down to the bottom of the page and helps define your website’s borders. The goal is to make sure the top background sits on top of the repeating background so that you cannot see the repeating background until the top one is done, but how do you utilize 2 centered background images without the browser creating a horizontal scrollbar?

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Dec
30

Great Firefox Plugins For Any Web Designer or Developer

The greatest thing about technology advancing is that it allows us to be more efficient and lazy than we ever have been before. I wanted to talk about some of the applications, services, and resources that I use that make my life as a web designer/developer easier, quicker, and more enjoyable. And more tasty. I realized that I bloated this article enough with just Firefox plugins, so I’m going to make another post after this one that involves useful non-Firefox applications. You may have already heard of a lot of these, but read on anyways because you never know what you might have missed. Or, possibly you are just enthralled by my incredible writing. Or you salivate over any mention of Firefox plugins.

If you still aren’t convinced, just shut up and read on anyways, I promise you’ll get a Hershey kiss at the end. Maybe.

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Dec
21
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