07
Pantone Colors Fall 2009
The new Pantone colors for fall 2009 are pictured above, which I absolutely love this year. The colors are so vibrant and inspiring! Click here to read the full Fall Fashion Report from Pantone. Make sure you check out all the great color tools Pantone has to offer for any design project you’re working on at www.pantone.com.
23
Adobe Font Finder
Adobe now has a way to find a font for your next design project at http://www.adobe.com/type/- There are over 2,500 fonts to choose from in many different categories. You can search for fonts using their keyword search tool or use the Font Finder to locate the perfect font by classification, style, use and more. Another way to find fonts is by categories, collections, by font designers. I’m looking forward to using this nice tool from Adobe in the future. I also have my eye on Adobe Font Folio 11. Ooh, that makes me excited! There are over 2,300 fonts from the Adobe Type Library in OpenType® format. Font Folio 11 is a great selection of typeface for print, web, video, and electronic documents that has true cross-form compatibility.
20
How to Get the Most Out of Your Designer
Most people don’t realize the time, energy and expertise that go into creating a website, logo, or any graphic element. Small and large design studios face the same challenges with educating current and potential clients to the standard design practices they adhere to. Most people who are looking for a website or logo design need to be educated on some basics before they decide to hire one. This is just a little guide to help you (the client) get the most of your designer.
First, a client needs to do their homework on what type of designer they want and what that designer’s experience or credentials are. Do they only work with certain hosts or systems? There are many solutions for a website design. For example, one CMS or shopping cart isn’t right for all businesses. Next, the client must know their budget, realistic time frame and what their business model and goals are. Without a solid understanding of a client’s own business model and goals for the business, developing a website for that business can be challenging. The next most important thing is for a client to understand that the design firm they decide to hire is a professional business, the same as a law firm or architect. || Read more »
08
How to Keep Scrapers From Stealing Your Blog Content
A scummy feed scraper stole my entire blog feed and has posted all of my images and feed on their site without my permission. It’s one thing to link to someone’s blog post because you think it’s cool or you want to show your visitors something they could really use. But, come on, my entire blog was on their site. I know I have some cool stuff on here, but really, my entire blog? That’s ridiculous!
This is the offending party – http://www.web2designer.org. I’m not giving them an actual link because I don’t think they deserve it.
If this has happened to you, check this site out -http://www.jtpratt.com/how-to-keep-feed-scrapers-spammers-and-splogs-from-stealing-your-content. I found it in a Google search. There’s tons of good information on what to do if someone steals your content and posts from your blog. The quickest thing you can do is block the offending IP address (if you know it). This article also gives a nifty tool to find out a sites IP address – http://www.zoneedit.com/lookup.html.
I’m in the class of people I guess that still get amazed when someone steals something from my site. I don’t understand why people do it. But, hopefully, this post will help someone else who’s had their blog posts scraped and posted on some site. By the way, this is how you correctly link to a blog post on another person’s website.
07
7 Useful WordPress Plugins
Here are 7 great plugins from WordPress that can add some cool features and extra customization to your WordPress site. Some are easy to use and some are more advanced.
WP – Choose Thumb – This is a cool plugin that allows you to add a thumbnail to any post or archive page by adding a simple line of code to your index file. You do however, need to go back in to all of your posts and select the the thumbnail you would like to show as your thumbnail. That can be time consuming. If you’ve already uploaded an image in your post, it won’t show unless it’s selected. Other than that, I like the styling of it. I like this better than the Thumbnail Excerpts plugin.
Exclude Pages – Great plugin because it shows a check box in all of your pages to allow you to easily exclude any page from any listings in your page navigation menus.
Custom Excerpts – Do you use the template tag <?php the_excerpt(”) ?> in your theme? Did you ever notice all formatting is stripped out? Custom Excerpts allows you to set a custom excerpt text, length, and to choose HTML tags to allow. This is a very easy way to format your code without messing with the core files. Finally, your links will show in an excerpt. The only problem I’ve come across it when using the <!–more–> code. It strips out the automatic permalink that can say “Click Here to Read More” (or whatever you call your link). || Read more »
17
Images from the web
This is a crash course in using images from the web on a a blog and website. If you do want to use an image you find in a Google, Yahoo or some other image search, please follow these simple steps.
- DON’T just use an image from a GOOGLE or YAHOO image search!
- Find a legal place to purchase a graphic you want to use on your website or blog (iStock, Dreamstime, BigStock Photo, etc.)
- Make sure this image doesn’t belong to someone else (9 times out of 10 it will).
- Use an image legally, take the time to find out who the author of the image is.
- Just because an image is on the Internet, and you can right click to save to your desktop, doesn’t mean it’s free to take an use, especially for commercial use.
- If you don’t want to do any of that, make your own graphics or images.
- If you don’t want to make your own images and still take whatever you want, legal action could be taken against you by the artist or image owner.
Just remember, the Internet is not a place to just take whatever you want and use it. The sad truth is that it happens way to much and many artists and designers are left with the bad taste in their mouth from copyright infringement.
