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Meet:Jon

Jon has a B.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois. After completing his Master's Degree from the University of Illinois in Mass Communications, he worked in video production and post-production in conjunction with several advertising agencies in Central Illinois. In 2003, he began producing long-form and 30-second television commercials for Insight Media in Springfield, Illinois. He produced several award-winning campaigns, including a finalist for a national award for creative production from the Cable Advertising Bureau. He also co-produced and edited several short-form music videos and full-length concerts for national, touring musical acts, and two seasons of the aforementioned Alternate Tunings, a television program on the UPN network showcasing live musical performances.

Posts by Jon

• Saturday, April 4, 2009
  A Plea to the World’s Programmers   Complaint Department, fonts (0)

  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 [...]

  
  
• Sunday, February 22, 2009
  Safely Convert an Existing Drupal Site to Clean URLs   Web Design (3)

  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 [...]

  
  
• Wednesday, February 18, 2009
  Get a Free Photoshop Action to Automatically Make a Border on Your Photo   Computer Machines (0)

  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 [...]

  
  
• Monday, February 9, 2009
  Rifflet Voted One of the Top 200 Digital Music Startups of ‘08   Projects (2)

  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 [...]

  
  
• Tuesday, January 27, 2009
  My Favorite Favicon   Good Advertising (0)

  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:

  From [...]

  
  
• Sunday, November 23, 2008
  Use ‘Save for Web’ to Make a Website Mockup   Web Design (0)

  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; [...]

  
  
• Wednesday, November 19, 2008
  Google Adds Every Picture Ever to Archives   Design (0)

  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 [...]

  
  
• Tuesday, October 28, 2008
  Make a Recent Bookmarks Widget with LaterThis and PHP   Web Design (3)

  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 [...]

  
  
• Wednesday, October 15, 2008
  Some Very Nice Dudes Give Rifflet The Once Over   Computer Machines, Projects (0)

  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 [...]

  
  
• Saturday, October 11, 2008
  TV on the Radio’s “Dear Science”   Design, Packaging (0)

  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.
  Update: Here’s a song from the album:

  
  
• Monday, September 29, 2008
  How Do You Read Comments on Your Blog in a Foreign Language?   Computer Machines (10)

  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 [...]

  
  
• Wednesday, September 10, 2008
  Making a Social Music Site in Drupal, Part II   Open Source, Projects (2)

  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 [...]

  
  
• Monday, August 4, 2008
  Kickass Handmade Greeting Cards   Design, Packaging (1)

  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.

  
  
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This is the blog for Ancillary Factory, a graphic and web design company in Springfield, Illinois.
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