Dayn W Creative

A design colleague of mine asked me if I knew how to kern characters in Flash. After some experimentation, I think I figured it out.

It’s all about the letter spacing input in the Property Inspector. Create some text, select the text box, and adjust the letter spacing slider in the Property Inspector, and you’ll find the space between all characters in the text box responds accordingly. We’re used to this.

Now, to adjust the kerning, use the text tool to highlight a single letter. Now adjust the letter spacing slider. You should see that the spacing is adjusted only to the right of the letter you selected. Bingo! Kerning in Flash.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Home to the worst 1998-looking, blink-tag-bearing, rainbow-background, browser-crashing designs of all time, MySpace is a single justification why page design should be left to the pros. That said, I know the masses love to spray comments containing 1400px wide images of monkeys smoking, so I’d rather it happen in a container like MySpace than spread all over the net. At least they’re not clogging my blog pipes with greasy design hairballs.

I’m not anti-MySpace. Shoot, I’ve got a MySpace page. I even have posted hypocritical pictures of my dog. Further, we’ve had jobs designing or pimping-out MySpace pages. (aside: For all you CSS heads out there, designing around the MySpace caveats is like trying to dial a cell phone with your foot. Your left foot.) For those of us viewing a MySpace member page whose design God himself is ashamed of, there is no way to bypass all that nastiness and just get to the meat of who the member’s friends are, or if we share an affinity for potato skins.

Enter Virb. I heard about this social network from the Net@Nite podcast with Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte. Virb takes all the features of what a social networking site should be, and wraps it in beautiful, compliant, standards based layout. After setting up my page in Virb and poking around, it seems like the audience is much more refined than the riff-raff that has spoiled MySpace, although much smaller.  I’m sure it must be growing.

Virb is totally customizable. They provide you with hooks for the modules, and you are free to design your page using HTML and CSS, but no JavaScript. Liberate yourself from pasting code into your bio, this is how customization should be.

Best of all, every Virb member page has a button at the top offering the equivalent of the much loved “skip intro”. It’s called the “Remove Customization” button, and it’s almost worth paying for. This button instantly allows you to view any Virb member page in a standard, unified format, without any of the member customization.

So, go for it. Impress your neighbors with animated Pokemon emoticons and Borat backgrounds. I’ll be the one who has taped down the “Remove Customization” button.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Local Portland color gurus and personal heroes, COLOURLovers is up for a Best Community Website of 2007. That’s a Webby Award, folks!

They are up against some fierce competition from big players Flickr, Threadless, Delicious, and Yahoo! Answers. Read all the reasons to vote for the little guy here. Then, vote for COLOURlovers here.

Rock the vote, help get Cinderella to the ball, and all that. If you haven’t used COLOURlovers, and you’re at all interested in color and design, stop what you’re doing immediately and head over to www.colourlovers.com. You’ll find Dayn W Creative there at http://www.colourlovers.com/lover/daynw.

Popularity: 9% [?]

I ran across this image while researching for the white space post. It looks like this was in the NY Times in 2004.

I guess this just goes to show you that a little graphic design know how can go a long way. Oh, and having an ex-pres father and buddies in the oil industry can’t hurt either.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Buddy, let it breathe. The appropriation of white space in a design is one of the most over looked principles out there. Too often, I see graphics that are otherwise brilliant, but are too close to neighbors or borders, making the overall aesthetic cluttered and busy. Nothing turns a visitor away quicker that not knowing where to start or what to look at.

Our eyes need room to breathe between each new element. It’s much more visually appealing if there is ample white space between elements on a page or the edge an element is next to. I think of it as giving the brain a mini rest to catalog what it just saw before the next task. This becomes even more important as the number of elements on the page increases.

Check out this camcorder on target.com. There is quite a bit of info on this page, but because each of the page elements are given ample white space, things don’t feel cluttered. Notice the vertical space between the product title, the price, and even the list items in the “add to” list. The designer also wasn’t afraid of using small typefaces, again providing plenty of brain resting room.

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Popularity: 10% [?]