OK, designers. Next time you ponder that great visual identity, forget the “visual mark looks good on a fax machine, too” requirement. If Flogos, an Alabama-based special effects company gets their way we’ll all be putting our logo comps through the “looks great chopped out of helium soap bubbles and floating through the sky” test.

They claim to be ready to custom “float” your logo in size increments (diameter?) of 24, 36, and 48 inches. They already have contracts in place with Disney and Universal Studios and pro sports teams are raising eyebrows. In addition to assumed stress relieving benefits of this device to a skeet-shooting logo critic such as myself, the inventors also say they can vary the height of these “cloud advertisements” and the soap/helium mixtures are safe for the environment and airplanes.

There does, however seem to be a number of Flogos skeptics out there with cynical chatter appearing on LiveScience and Brand New over the conquest of pristine “blue sky” space for the purposes of marketing. While I see their point, daytime sky marketing isn’t a new medium (and we don’t even need to discuss “night time signage” using roaming search lights, fireworks, and other darkness shattering media). Airplane banners, sky writing, tethered helium markers and hot air balloons have been around for decades — and arguably do their work in a more visually obtrusive fashion than a few dainty bubbles. Colorado based GoFast, a sports energy drink has even sought to conquest the skys by sponsoring a jet pack team (didn’t know there was such a thing, but it looks like they’re having a “pilot search” if you feel like getting in line as a guinea pig ala flambe’. Boss, consider this my formal request for time off — yee haw!).

So whether you’re a Flogos cynic or a Flogos seeker watching for the first appearance of this thing in your neighborhood (I predict a used car lot), you have to admit there’s something captivating about a free floating logo drifting skyward, with only the wind to guide it. Just try and tell me you’ve never stood there in that crowd — stiff necked and squinting up at that tiny disappearing spec that used to be some kid’s helium balloon while everyone takes turns whispering, “I can still see it!” and “Where’d it go?”. So with that type of captivation, maybe this company has stumbled upon the advertising specialties industry’s lightning in a bottle — or in a bubble? But let’s not even bother asking if there’s a money back guarantee for those unexpected wind gusts.

One requirement of a good web site is the ability to change the look and feel without much difficulty. There are at least two broad strategies for accomplishing this. One strategy is to use templates to generate the HTML for a page. Changing the template(s) changes the site.

Within the last few years, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has become a popular method to create radically different looks for the same HTML. The CSS Zen Garden is the poster site for this technique. By submitting a new CSS file and associated graphics, web designers can radically change the presentation of identical HTML.

It is no small task to create clean HTML which is properly prepped for this technique. Web browser compatibility complicates the process further.

Tasks like this require the development of a framework to simplify the decision making process and avoid the need to reinvent the wheel for every site. I believe the use of microformats is one way to tackle the underlying HTML structure.

Google has also come up with an interesting approach called BlueprintCSS, which deserves some consideration. They have addressed some of the common layout and flexible design issues by creating screen and print CSS stylesheets which act on a standardized naming convention for HTML classes. They have also included a “Plug-in” architecture which really make their solution interesting.

The result is a feature set which includes: “an easily customizable grid, sensible typography, relative font-sizes everywhere, a typographic baseline, an extendable plugin system, perfected CSS reset, a stylesheet for printing, compressed version, no bloat of any kind”

This seems like a good starting point and at the very least it can serve as guide when creating a custom framework for your own site.

This is a fascinating illusion that was new to me. Amazingly, the squares labeled A and B are both the same shade of gray. Click the image to learn more.

Here are some other related fun links:

• Archimedes Laboratory
• More Demos

What can I say about this? Sketching your own furniture into reality seems cool, but I’m looking forward to a day when I can rapid prototype my own full-scale house.

This post makes me a bit of a Mac-basher, but Apple’s Mac vs. PC ads are so smug I have to do it.

Apparently, the way the new MacBook is designed, the sharp plastic of case cuts into the user’s wrists as they type. Now, I thought Macs were user-friendly?

There have been 3 suggested solutions that I know. One, get out the sand paper and get to work. Two, uglify your Apple-art with wrist pads. Three,–my personal favorite–wear wrist bands. I see a Mac-inspired fashion trend here.

Well, if you don’t like your options, you can always run OSX on a Dell (or other Intel-based laptop).

I was so excited to read about the upcoming full-length independent film, Helvetica, that I almost forgot to be depressed at what a geek that makes me.

Today, by chance, I stumbled across a whole realm of computer graphics that I had never even considered… pixel art. Originating before the days of Photoshop and other vector-based programs, this genre of art is created, well, one pixel at a time. Sounds ridiculous, right? See if you still think so after checking out the following images, which are some of my favorites from the eBoy website:

I am amazed by the complexity of these works. They are bright and fun, and it seems as though there is always something new to discover about them. And I can’t even begin to guess at the number of hours that were put into each image. Incredible.

Much of eBoy’s images are done in the classic 3D style, which is a near-isometric projection. This just means that lines don’t converge as they approach the horizon, they stay parallel. Thus, the sides of blocks, walls, and buildings all have a “two pixels over, one pixel up” slope. Not all pixel art follows this formula, however, and can be equally (if not much more) impressive. The following images are from DeviantArt, where you can view hundreds of pixel art entries.

For a final example, I’d like to provide a link to Drububu’s portfolio. He uses pixel art fused with some really nice Flash work to create some very interesting applications and animations. It’s definitely worth a look.

The first pixel art was created as early as the 1970’s, but I would be remiss not to mention the history of art using simple blocks of color. For thousands of years, artists have created intricate mosaics and beadworks with their bare hands. A far cry from a mouse and a computer screen, these art forms are arguably more difficult and tedious than pixel art, and clearly set the precident for the digital manifestation seen today. Regardless, the time and effort put into all these forms of artwork is astounding, and these artists should be applauded for their patience and dedication to their craft.

Wendy MacNaughton recalls her design adventure in a national civic sensitization campaign for the first democratic local elections in Rwanda in late 2000. Sure, mixing your own spray mount from flower and water is tough — a MacGyverism to be admired. But what must it be like to be handed the task of conceptualizing a visual vernacular in a developing nation that has endured unimaginable hardship — as well as ethnic and political tension? This requires a return to an axiom of all good visual communication: “In order to create effective, relevant work, visual communicators need to learn to work cooperatively with members of the communities they are communicating to.”

Wendy’s closing remarks leave some ambiguity as to whether or not her efforts performed as intended. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating case study of an important, gutsy project.

And, let’s just ignore that little blurb about the Mac being “useless”.

I recently discovered an clever idea known as “Sparklines“. Sparklines are “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics” and the concept was developed by Edward Tufte, a professor emeritus at Yale University who specializes in the presentation of informational graphics.

I am particularly fond of anything related to the role of symbols in communication and this immediately caught my eye. I have written the following paragraph to demonstrate one use of sparklines.

A web developer must consider the popularity of web browsers when designing a web site to ensure the widest audience will be able to access the site’s content effectively. Internet Explorer won the first browser war with Netscape and remained unchallenged and unchanged for several years. A relatively new web browser called Firefox has put Microsoft on guard. Over the last year Firefox has been able to exceed 25% market share. You can see in red each month that Firefox has had higher than 25% market share since January 2005.

After several years of dormancy in the browser space, Microsoft has literally apologized and released IE7 (Beta 2). It is interesting to watch the adoption rate of a new browser, therefore I have prepared some statistics on three well known browsers.

• Internet Explorer 7 adoption has been steady with a low of .2% in January and a high of 1.1% in May of this year.
• Firefox has had its ups and downs but has increased from 16.6% in January 2005 to 25.7% in May of this year.
• Netscape 7 never really got off the ground and is at its lowest mark to date. Its highest market share was 1.6% in November of 2003. Currently only .3% of web users are browsing with Netscape.

It will be interesting to see if IE7 can pull market share from the loyal following that Firefox has for good reasons already engendered.

As you can see, sparklines offer a quick intuitive look at information by embedding it compactly within the text itself.

These are simple examples that are utilizing the code written by Eric W. Bachtal. Eric’s code is a .NET implementation of the Python CGI program developed by Joe Gregorio. These guys have made it very easy to incorporate different sparkline graphs into your web site. Just assemble an image source tag with data points and instructions and the “web service” will create and return the graph.

Here is a simple example:

img title="IE7 adoption rate" xsrc="http://www.elexicon.com/sparkline.ashx?type=smooth&d=0,3,4,5,9
&height=15&min-color=red&max-color=blue&step=10&max-m=true&min-m=true&scale=true"  

There is a lot of potential here. Bissantz has some clever and attractive implementations of sparklines for Microsoft Office and the web.

Sparklines are a nice tool to consider for densely representing data. Using them inline with text or in mobile applications, where screen space is limited, can be an effective way to give the user a little more help decifering and remembering the content you are trying to communicate.

The Elexicon Blog is ready for Lightboxing!  You can take a look at Lightbox in all its glory by clicking on the following images (taken from DeviantArt)… then read up on how to place the Lightboxed images in your own posts.

Inserting this type of link into your Elexicon Blog posts is a little tricky, so I thought I would write up a quick tutorial for everyone.  When you are typing up your blog entry in “Write Post” section of WordPress, you’ll need to click on the HTML button along the text area’s menu bar.  Once there, you can insert your code for the Lightbox image links, which should take the following form:

<a href=”TARGET_IMAGE_URL” rel=”lightbox[SET_NAME]” title=”IMAGE_CAPTION”>
<img src=”THUMBNAIL_URL” />
</a>

Not too bad, right?  The rel attribute’s SET_NAME should be the same for all images that will be part of a particular Lightbox “slideshow”.  It must be different than all other groups, so it might be a good idea to use the date as part of your chosen SET_NAME.  The title attribute defines what caption the Lightbox image will have below it, and is completely optional.  Finally, the image URLs can be absoulte or relative, and can link images from an external website.

Happy Lightboxing!