Solve my problem. When I download new fonts from Dafont or FontFreak or wherever, the process goes like this:
Download the zip file.
Drag the .ttf file from the zip folder to my desktop.
Right click on the .ttf file.
Select ‘Install’ from the context menu.
Ctrl-click to select the font files and the zip file.
Press delete.
Close and then restart Illustrator or Photoshop or whatever, because the new fonts won’t be recognized without a restart.
Ok, so the last one probably isn’t going anywhere, but there’s got to be a way to take a zip file and have it automatically install any font files therein. Really, it’s already been done, sort of: the Install Plugin feature in Wordpress. All you have to do is select a zip file to upload and Wordpress does the rest. It’s possibly my favorite feature in any program of all time.
Drag and Drop?
Here’s one way it could work: like a Photoshop droplet. Drag the zip file onto the icon of this new, wonderful program and it will unpack the fonts, install them and (optionally) move the original files to the trash. That’s it. Nothing else.
How about making it a Firefox Add-on? How great would that be?
Seriously. What can I do to help? Would you like a delicious Diet Rite cola? Piping hot Arby’s? Get on it.
Here’s my dilemma: I run a site powered by Drupal 5. When I originally set it up, I couldn’t run the Clean URL test because of a problem with my GoDaddy hosting account (read the fix here). I’ve since fixed the issue, but in the meantime, the site has gotten lots of links to the “unclean” URLs and I don’t want to undo what’s been done. I want to upgrade to Clean URLs, but keep the links to the old URLs functional.
Here’s a Photoshop action you can install to create an instant border around your images. It works like this when you set it in motion:
Create a new layer
Fill the new layer with white
Convert the new layer’s blending mode to “Multiply”
Add a stroke to the new layer
Set stroke position to “inside”
Giggle quietly at your own sense of self-satisfaction
After applying the action, double-click on the stroke in the layer palette and adjust to taste. If you need help installing the action, there’s a good tutorial here.
It’s true. Musically has an interesting compilation of the year’s best lesser-known Digital Music Startups, some brilliant, and others…Let’s just say we were over 100 slots behind Bompaboo, the online store for used .mp3 files.
They say:
We ended up with 200 everything from social networks to streaming sites to recommendation engines to mixtapes to online games to… well, you get the picture. They weren’t all successful (or, indeed, legal), and they’re presented in no particular order within their categories. Oh, and some are less startups and more projects from established firms.
Rifflet was #170, in case you had assembled your own list and wanted to compare.
From Menards.com. It’s a nice touch that seems rooted in a designer’s genuine affection for the brand, or at least its history. Or maybe they’re jerks and wouldn’t pay until that guy’s face was on there somewhere, and that was the compromise. Sheesh, clients.
In case you don’t know who the face is, it’s this dude:
It’s hard presenting a Photoshop mockup to a client, especially one that hasn’t gone through the design process before. Why can’t I click anywhere? Is it broken? Do you have any idea what you’re doing?
Calm down, tough guy. The problem with sending a mockup as it sits in Photoshop is that it’s in a void; we need to give it some context and show what it will look like in finished form.
It’s the Browser, Stupid
There’s only one way to present a web design that’s going to make any sense: in a browser window. And not just any browser. It needs to be Internet Explorer. Unless you have reason to suspect your client uses Firefox, (or possibly Safari if you know he/she is a Mac user) IE is the most familiar interface, so why not let your client see exactly how it’s going to look on her computer?
Not exactly, but close. Google is now hosting “millions” of images from the archives of LIFE magazine, the vast majority of which were never before published. The best part: the scans are wallpaper-makingly ginormously huge. Some of them suffer from some halftone issues, but hey, what do you expect?
Obviously, there’s no Creative Commons license on these images, so keep these out of your next car commercial, but they’re a great source of design inspiration. It’s great to see the mistakes too—the bad exposures and soft-focuses that give these photos some humanity (and make you think twice about deleting your bad photos).
Here are some of my favorites (There’s a NASA-overload in this list, but anyone who knows me shouldn’t be surprised):
I like LaterThis a lot, because I work on two computers and I like to access my bookmarks on both of them. It works like this: Find a page you want to save, click on the LaterThis bookmarklet in your browser toolbar (or bookmarks list) and walla-it’s automatically saved to your account. As an extra bonus, LaterThis creates an RSS feed of all your saved pages, which we will be using here.
If you want to see this widget in action, check out the bottom of the sidebar on this page.
There are lots of ways to have an RSS feed display in your sidebar, but I think the best and most flexible is based on a great NETTUTS tutorial by Jeffery Way that uses PHP to parse the feed.
How great is this? Iyaz and Rob from Channelflip (The UK’s Finest Video Magazine) take a pretty detailed look at Rifflet.com, our project site for lonely musicians to upload and remix unfinished songs. If you like a good creation story, you can read Part I and Part II of “Making a Social Music Site in Drupal” which chronicles building Rifflet out of the open-source scrapheap.
Never mind that this album is completely great. From the titles written in one of those old push-pin on velvet signs to the delicately laid out “letter to science,” the artwork is one of my favorites from this year.
A few days ago, Hajas Tamás was kind enough to read my post about Making a Social Music Site in Drupal and mention it on his blog. The catch is that, two years of college Spanish notwithstanding, I am uni-language; if it ain’t in English, I got nothing. I recognize exactly three words in the post: Rifflet, guitar and Drupal. So how do I read what he/she wrote?
Google Translator
According to Google, .hu domain names are registered to Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. I went over to Google Translate, which I thought would be the best bet, but I’m still missing a crucial piece of information: I have no idea what language this is in. I tried with no luck choosing the ‘Romanian’ or ‘Bulgarian’ options. There was a ‘Detect Language’ option (hidden) at the top of the list, which revealed that the page is written in Hungarian, but I got the error message “We are not yet able to translate from Hungarian into English.” Fair enough.
I Googled “Hungarian to English webpage translator” and found Webforditas.hu, which did exactly what I want, but the results were less than stellar:
At the end of Part I, we had decided on Drupal as the CMS of choice for Rifflet.com, a site where users can upload and share unfinished music they’ve recorded. Here’s where the problems started:
I initially installed Drupal 6.2 because GoDaddy, our hosting company, offered it as part of their 1-Click installation program. If you’re not familiar, here’s how it works: instead of going to Drupal’s site, downloading the latest version, setting up a mysql database, uploading the files and running the installer script, you can just tell Godaddy to install Drupal and let you know when it’s ready. It’s nice, although to be honest, doing it the hard way only takes about 5-10 minutes.
I found these handmade greeting cards at the MacArthur Artist’s Market here in Springfield. They were made by Good Behavior and feature found art from school textbooks and other recycled stuff.
Bonus: I also bought the greatest thing ever–a little bound notebook featuring a ’70s drawing of the Mercury spacecraft.
According to Google, .hu domain names are registered to Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. I went over to 
I found these handmade greeting cards at the 
