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Graphic designers responding to the crisis in Japan

Posted on March 23rd, 2011 in Inspiration with No Comments

Help Japan, poster by
James White of Sig­nal­noise

Since the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11th, people around the world have been trying to find ways to assist the people of Japan as the crisis continues to unfold. Graphic Designers have begun to create artwork in response, and many of these beautifully designed pieces are raising money toward relief efforts. I’ve found several articles that discuss the best ways to become involved.

AIGA: How can designers support relief efforts in Japan?

Aqua Velvet: Help Japan

Creative Review: Japan: how to respond?

Red Cross: Disaster Update: Earthquake in Japan

Adding custom webfonts to websites

Posted on March 12th, 2011 in Methods with No Comments

Currently I am working on another website with Jay Carskadden. Jay has designed this site for a local career counselor and I will be building the site using WordPress. In her designs for this website, Jay is using Highbrow Cafetorium JNL as one of the website’s main fonts. However, this font is not considered one of the standard browser safe fonts.

Traditionally there are only a few fonts suggested for use on websites. These “standard browser safe fonts”” are the fonts that are most commonly found on all computers. Needless to say, the font choices are somewhat limited. However if these standard fonts are used with CSS styling, a website’s text should look similar across all browsers. If it was absolutely necessary to use a non-standard font on websites, website developers usually created jpg images of the text.

Recently new webfonts have been developed for use on websites. There are several font companies offering these new webfonts but this site, I will be using the Highbrow webfont, licensed by MyFonts.

While webfonts still do not work on all browsers (Webfonts are supported by Firefox 3.5+, IE 5+, Opera 10+, Chrome 4+, Safari 3.1+, iOS Mobile Safari, Andriod 2.2+ and BlackBerry OS 6.), with proper use, they add flexibility to the creative design of websites.

At this point, I am working on the building the basic html site and so far the Highbrow font looks great!

Building WordPress sites

Posted on March 1st, 2011 in New work with No Comments

Jay Carskadden WordPress site
Designed by Jay Carskadden, site development by Carol Tompkins

Recently I was hired by a local graphic designer, Jay Carskadden to build a website to promote her business, Jay Carskadden Graphic Design. After talking, we choose to use WordPress to create her website because of the features that WordPress offered and the ease of using this Content Management System.

Working with Jay’s design files, I created a website that features a custom portfolio gallery and blog. While there are WordPress themes (basic template designs for websites) available, I have been designing and building my own themes which allows websites to have their own individual look and features. Jay’s designs for her site had some unique features and we were able to create a website that closely matched her original concepts by creating a specific theme for her site.

One of the best features of WordPress is that it is very user friendly. Once the website was built, I spent a few hours showing Jay the basics of how WordPress works. After this Jay was able to go into her own site to update content on any of the pages and to start blogging. Visit her site and blog — she has a great portfolio and she’s been creating some interesting posts!

Working with Jay to build this website was a very enjoyable experience and her creativity allowed me to try new methods in order to achieve the look that she wanted for her website. Jay and I are currently “teaming up” to build another website for a new client.