As we gear up for the 4th season of Mad Men on AMC let’s revisit the previous 3 seasons through an illustrated flicker album by the truly artistic and comedic Dyna Moe. Check out her website no body’s sweetheart (you’re our sweetheart, love) and check out her Flicker Mad Men Illustrated photo-stream.
The new stuff coming out in Cascading Style Sheets and HTML is amazing. What required mounds and mounds of code can now be done in a few lines of text. What required graphics can not be done programmatically on the browser. Here are three great examples:
Alex Girón and his Solar System
Alex is a Web Developer and Graphic Designer out of Virginia. He is the creative director from nclude. He set out to explore the border-radius features and came up with something interesting. This working model of the Milky Way Solar system shows the planets using border-radius and their orbits and revolutions using –web kit animation properties and transform.
Jeff Batterton and his iPhone
Jeff is a User Interface designer and he’s coded an iPhone with a working world clock with NO IMAGES WHATSOEVER. Click on the image to see what I’m talking about. Its all carefully crafted markup and CSS. Keep in mind that this will only display correctly on a webkit browser and has only been tested in Google Chrome. It seems to look fine on Safari 5, but not FireFox 3.6 (definitely not Internet Explorer).
The Challenge
Family owned and operated, West Coast Subs brings the fresh, surf style of California to Toms River, NJ. Residing next to the family’s fashion boutique, The Cali Way (http://thecaliway.com), the owners of West Coast Subs needed to focus their efforts on quickly opening two storefronts. They contacted Local Wisdom to design and develop a site boasting West Coast Subs’ fresh and healthy ingredients along with its Cali flair. Before beginning we sampled the food, and they are accurate; the food is great.
Design
Renowned for its surfing aficionados and health conscious residents, California is the true inspiration behind West Coast Subs. Our design experts were able to create a surf-style aesthetic that complements the shop’s healthy and fresh menu, while highlighting the owner’s passion for the ocean and all things surfing. We built the site using Jquery to provide users with a fun and compelling interface.
Development
Without sacrificing design quality, we were able to develop a site for West Coast Subs, which would deploy in two stages. We shared in the company’s urgency to have a web presence, deploying the first stage of the site to showcase their menu. This put West Coast Subs on the map allowing the site to begin impacting search results, maximizing its customer potential. Next, we tackled the full spectrum, rounding out the full content migration along with design nuances which speak to the shop’s surf-style atmosphere.
How did it go
Being nimble for a customer is core to our philosophy. We were able to share in the client’s urgency and launch the menu stage of WestCoastSubs.com within two weeks then complete the development of the larger site. The rapid deployment, professional design, and local buzz exceeded the client’s expectations.
LWers:
RJay (Design)
Melissa (Develop)
Derrick (Account & Project Management)
Plethora is a great source of personally curated design and art work spanning a series of disciplines. Although the best inspiration comes from the real world, this iPhone app is a great free place to see aggregated work for: web & interactive, graphic design, branding, art, illustration, photography, product and industrial design, interior design, and architecture.
Learn more from the Plethora website or download from itunes.
James Chudley of Smashing Magazine posted a great article on How to Use Photos to Sell More Online. Its a lengthy article with great photo examples. The article was written for products, but I believe these can be put to use no matter what you are doing online. Most importantly, we don’t want to put up a photo just to put up a photo… make it do something for you like:
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We curate quite a few websites where we manage the use of photography. We work hard not to “slap on a photo”, but make it have some meaning and usefulness in the grand scheme of the website. Read the full article.
Couldn’t believe when Derrick told me about this, and can’t wait!!!! Hey Shawn, quick game of escort, 1 on 1???
A while back I put together a media storage unit and posted about it. I was asked by one of our readers to post the instructions/ blueprints so they could build their own also. Well, what the audience wants, the audience gets, so here they are.
I’ve put the details in the images themselves to make it easy to print out. Also I recently made 2 of these of a different width and a different purpose. One was 30 inches wide so the shelving and corresponding silts had to be reduced in width also, but it’s easy to figure out how much to shorten them by. The last unit I made has about 7 shelves and was made to replace a stereo rack. Now the stereo is on the wall with all it’s cd’s, a record player and a small top shelf for pictures, but I’ll post pics later on.
If you have any questions, post a comment and I’ll respond asap 
This article is 3 years old, but I think it really nails the reason Apple has the following it does. The lack of choice theory makes sense once you think about it. Why do you think Apple customers are so loyal?
“Pundits often refer to them as “zealots” or “fanboys.” The more polite references include “Mac loyalists.” I am, of course, talking about Apple’s (AAPL) more vocal customers, those who will defend the company and its products in any debate going on around them. What is it that drives their passion for most things Apple? Is it a deluded mind, warped by the Reality Distortion Field that Steve Jobs so successfully wraps every new product in? In short, the answer is no.
The truth behind the scenes is not that Apple has a large group of customers that are too dedicated and passionate about their products, or the company as a whole. The reality is far more simple and obvious: Apple simply has a large group of very satisfied customers — and that’s the secret ingredient left out of nearly every analysis or op-ed piece that mentions these “zealots.” ”
Read the original article here
Looks like Saturday I’ll be playing with LW’s newest toy, the Apple Ipad Contact me if you’d like to stop by and play with them, I’ll be receiving 2 on Saturday! I have a feeling our expertise offerings are going to expand after Saturday…
