Recent Entries in Design
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Its the experience stupid
Here is an excerpt of a conversation I have had numerous times in my life with people after seeing them reading a printed magazine or newspaper that is readily available online for free: Me: You know you can get that...
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Redesigning Movable Type's Comment Management Screen?
In a project I have been working on I have had the need to revisit an old plugin of mine: the Contact Form plugin. When designing the inquiry management screen the plugin I thought it would be a nice user...
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Awesome Baby Room
Mach Kobayashi is an effects artist at a little computer animation house called Pixar. His newborn son, Dyson, just might end up in the games industry one day, thanks to the work of a family friend. Mach wrote in...
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.tiff: one of my favorite bloggers
One of my favorite bloggers of late is an old friend and colleague from Six Apart, Tiffany Chow. Each month she composes a collage/calendar of self-portraits capturing as succinctly as one can her state of mind for each day. I...
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Understanding Movable Type Template Sets
Since releasing the Hybrid News Theme I have been contacted by a number of people on the ProNet mailing list asking me to shed some light on the process of creating template sets, or themes as most other products call...
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Increasing your site's page views with photo galleries
In my on-going blitz of plugins and enhancements for Movable Type I am adding one more to the list: upgrades and enhancements to the Photo Gallery plugin, which you can already see on my personal photo galleries. A screenshot of...
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Teaser: Hybrid News Theme for Movable Type
The most common request from people contacting me is for a redesign for their web site. While I am happy to work with them to completely redesign their website and engineering one exclusively for them, but rarely do people have...
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Hope: it's infectious
When was the last time a president was cool? So cool he permeated the very fabric of pop culture? I certainly can not remember a time, but perhaps I am just not old enough. To give you an idea of...
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Will someone please pass me the hydrospanner?
Thanks to my friend and brother in-law Erik who always manages to send me the best Star Wars links in the world. This time he sent me to a site featuring a do-it-yourself, cut-out of the Millennium Falcon created and...
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Spread the Love through Twitter
I just finished purchasing a t-shirt from Zazzle and at the end of the process it prompted me with: I love the idea of telling my friends about this purchase and even promoting Zazzle because I love the shirt. What...
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"As long as themes are selling, why make them free?"
The Revolution Theme will begin to transcend the blogging platform it was originally designed for, and Brian as a designer will gain greater visibility in a market he has yet to tap. In a post on wordpress wank, one of...
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Another awesome theme for Movable Type
A couple of weeks I gave a preview of some of the amazing hacks we had been working on at Six Apart, and tonight we got to release one of them: Jim Ramsey's Mid-Century Template Set. Mid-Century sets a new...
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Universal Template Set Hacks
With the release of Movable Type Pro, and with us making is completely free to bloggers, the Universal Template Set has been quickly making its way into the hands of more bloggers. I often get asked by other UTS users,...
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I took the survey, you should too!
It's that time of year again, and yes, I took the survey just as everyone else in my field seems to be doing....
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Putting the Universal Template Set to Work
One of the primary design goals for the Universal Template Set released in Movable Type 4.1, was to create a template set that was not only compelling on its own, but also something that could be easily configured and modified...
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Hemingway for Movable Type 4
Following quickly on the heels of Cutline and 2813, I am happy to announce the availability of the popular Hemingway theme for Movable Type 4 users. For this theme however I can take no credit - I am merely a...
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2813 for Movable Type 4
A couple of days ago I released Cutline for Movable Type 4. Now I am getting around to re-releasing 2813 for Movable Type 4. It is a simple theme for simple sites and blogs. It is not done yet, so...
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Finally: Cutline for Movable Type 4
About twice a month for the last year I have been getting requests to update my port of the Cutline theme to Movable Type 4.x. Today I am happy to announce that I have a first draft of the updated...
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Movable Love
Aaron Bailey just launched a beautiful new site devoted to all of the amazing blogs powered by Movable Type. It is called Movable Love and will serve not only as an index of blogs powered by MT, but will specifically...
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Stop Design Photo Gallery Plugin for Movable Type 4.1
In today's Movable Type hackathon I chose to focus on a Movable Type plugin of mine that has been neglected quite far too much since the release of MT4: the Photo Gallery plugin. I held off primarily because I knew...
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Movable Type is whatever you want it to be
What has always drawn me to Movable Type is its flexibility. Most of the time we, that is Six Apart: my employer and creator of Movable Type, talk and think about MT's flexibility in terms of the web sites it...
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Cool Paper Engineering
This year for my birthday, Harper hit a home run when he purchased one of the coolest pop-up books I have ever laid my eyes on. The thickness of the book as a ratio to the number of pages I...
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*drool*
To be honest I am not much of a Benz fan myself, but god I would love to drive one of these puppies: Thanks Debi!...
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"Its all about flloooowwww"
My friend Jim Ramsey just recently wrote an essay for A List Apart entitled Designing for Flow. In web design, when we think about flow we usually think about “task flows” or “flow charts” but there’s another type of flow...
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Feed Readers Kill Design
In Jason Santa Maria's talk today at An Event Apart he outlined the latest thinking in design fundamentals for expressing your brand and identity through web design. However when his slide came up entitled "Sweat the Small Stuff" and he...
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Attending An Event Apart
Today and tomorrow I will be attending An Event Apart in San Francisco. I have attended more then my share of geeky technology conferences, but this will be my first geeky design conference.One of the things I have found...
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Prefab Chicken Coops
My wife and I have been talking for several years about getting some chickens. I never really took the idea seriously until now, when I saw the Eglu. I love it, you can order these prefabricated chicken coops of various...
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One step closer to a blog HTML standard
As a long time advocate for a blog HTML standard, it is exciting to see that Drupal has adopted support for the Six Apart HTML standard that I work really hard to get as much of Six Apart to adopt...
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Majordojo's design changes again
Not too long ago I was inspired to redesign majordojo after seeing a beautiful design on a blog I frequently read. 901am's design is exceptional and so I ported the design to work against Movable Type's default templates. I was...
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Major Relaunch of Majordojo's Plugins
It is with a great sigh of relief that I am finally able to announce a major relaunch of [almost] all of Majordojo's Movable Type Plugins. This relaunch is primarily focused on improving the resources and documentation of the plugins....
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2813 for Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal
Before finishing my port of Cutline I got distracted by another one of my favorite WordPress themes: 2813, whose credits are relatively complicated, "Designed by Eli Foner and Paul Stamatiou. Optimized by Neil Patel," and began a port of it...
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Cutline for Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal
As an exercise in seeing how easy it might be to replicate other popular blog designs using Six Apart's HTML and CSS Standard, I turned to what I think is a very simple and elegant design that came out of...
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One, Two and Three Column Templates for Movable Type
I have long been advocating the adoption of an HTML and CSS standard for blogs. Movable Type has forever made its default templates that utilize just such a standard available on its website. But you will only find the "two-column-right"...
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See the Tag Widget in action
Arvind just sent me a link to an updated screencast of one of his many Movable Type plugins called MTProtect. In this plugin Arvind utilized a Javascript widget/control that I created a while ago, the screencast he created shows it...
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Eating my own dogfood
I know I have relatively recently redesigned my weblog, and despite my liking the design I have very much, I feel it is important to adopt an HTML and design standard I have been advocating for over a year now....
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Movable Type 3.3 and Photo Gallery Update
In case you haven’t heard, the software that powers this weblog has been upgraded to the newly released version of Movable Type: 3.3 Beta 1. Now begins the process of ensuring that the many plugins I have written for the...
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Releasing Photo Gallery: a Movable Type Plugin
I have been taking a lot of photos lately and have had to upload them for friends and family to see. I have been using a plugin for Movable Type that I wrote a while ago and have been learning...
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Arin's got a whole new blog
We started the project a while ago, but we are currently in a rush to get all our little projects finished before the Bug's arrival (scheduled May 9th, but I am rooting for a Cinco de Mayo baby) - expecting...
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Why we need a "design standard"
Republished from The Style Contest - "The general concept behind standards is to provide predictable building blocks for others to build with so that the need for re-invention is minimized, to lower the costs of creation and innovation, and to reap the benefits of shared infrastructure."
