Lenticular Business Cards Are Awesome

Yup, I'm totally blown away!

Wow, I just received my new lenticular business cards from The Mines Press (Visit MinesPress.com | follow @theminespress on Twitter) and they look fantastic! A few months ago, I was incredibly lucky and won a set of business cards after entering in a contest on one of my favorite blogs WebExpedition18. I strongly advise you to add their RSS feed, read their articles, and follow @colaja and the other writers and contributers to help you stay on top of all the latest and greatest webdesign trends.

Go on, follow those links in another tab right now... I'll wait here :)

Not "Just Another Surfin' Safari..."

I was doing my daily web surfing and regular reading a few months ago when I stumbled on the WebExpedition18 special giveaway post. I actually just commented and tweated the "Win Attractive Lenticular Business Cards from The Mines Press Inc." post because I thought the cards were super cool. Suffice to say that I was pleasantly surprised about winning the contest — and I am even more surprised at how cool the cards really are after they arrived at my door! Another plus is that he cards arrived more than two weeks before they were scheduled to ship. Extra nice... The cards are absolutely beautiful and the level of quality is stellar. They're double-sided, and incorporate multiple images which are revealed as you view the cards from different angles.

An American Dream Come True

The Mines Press is a family owned company located in New York and has been in business for more than 76 years. The company was started in 1933 during 'The Great Depression' and has grown to more than 130 employees. Yup, they are an example of 'The American Dream' come true and an inspiration in these difficult times... I followed the tips and recommendations on how to make use of the lenticular technology, and I think I was able to leverage it to get really nice results. Their customer service is fantastic, and the high quality of their work is outstanding. That said, if you're looking to stand out from the crowd, I encourage you to visit The Mines Press and have them handle all your future printing needs.

A bit about branding and Identity

These cards are a perfect fit for my brand. My design goals were to support and extend my web presence by matching the 'active', 'alive', and 'playful' nature of my current branding efforts and online identity. Yeah, the lenticular technology is incredibly cool and geeky but more importantly, it also adds a bit of sophistication and an active, lively and techy feel to my otherwise basic business cards.

LINKS:

· Lenticular business cards example & information »

· Read WebExpedition18 »

A few photos of my business cards

Here are a few photos of my new cards... It's tricky to photograph lenticular cards because they change depending on the angle at which you view them. I did my best to capture them in the photos, but it wasn't easy — you need to see and hold them to really appreciate 'em. They have a truly unique feel, and they're definitely unforgettable.

Size Matters: Methodologie Web Canvas

via methodologie.com

Methodologie is kind enough to share their 'Web Canvas' with all of us in the design community. Their Web Canvas is a grid that displays screen resolutions and the percentage of users that are capable of viewing the different screen resolutions. Their statistics are fresh (August, 2009) and based on numbers from http://thecounter.com and http://marketshare.hitslink.com

I've added this little gem to my delicious bookmarks... I think it'll be a helpful little tool when starting new projects or when I'm wrestling over what screen resolution to design for. All of this info and our own design experience seem to support the notion that in many cases size matters ;-)

Here's the link to the Methodologie Web Canvas...

• http://www.methodologie.com/webcanvas/

Posted via web from ptamaro | posterous

Microsoft Announces SuperPreview for IE Browser Testing

SuperPreview is a new free standalone application from Microsoft (still in beta) which enables you to see how your websites will look across different versions of Internet Explorer making migration from IE6 to 7 and 8 much easier than before, without have to start up a Virtual Machine

=> read more | digg story

I used Digg's "post to blog" mechanism to post this story here to see how it worked. It seems like a neat way to help folks post more frequently, and at least get a post started quickly. Helpful if you want to blog about something you read but don't have much time, or you're busy doing other things. The original post was on WebDesignerDepot.com, which is an awesome web design blog I read regularly.

Here's a quick update
I tried to install "Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview for Windows Internet Explorer" or whatever they're calling it (whew) on the laptop at work. As always, I was cautiously optimistic because it's a MSFT product. It required that I install some other stuff, and I didn't feel like bothering at the time. The install was going to take just a few minutes longer than "forever" so I canceled the install and created two new virtual machine's so I now have all three Internet Explorer browsers available for testing. I may install "Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview for Windows Internet Explorer" someday, but for now I'll stick to a more typical testing approach... I think I now have 16 different browsers on that machine?

Top 10 Benefits of an Online Life

Squeezin' spare time into a busy life
With three very active kids, a full-time job and a few side projects, two cars and a house that are in constant need of repair and maintenance – my spare time is extremely limited, and lately it seems like it's even tougher than ever to find even a few minutes to do things I enjoy doing like blogging and reading blogs or trying to develop my artistic skills by doing purely creative stuff....

Enter the social space
Using online tools like Twitter, Flickr, Social|Median, FriendFeed, etc. etc. etc., and my favorite RSS feed reader is the only way for me to actually keep-up with the virtual onslaught of new and interesting products and services on the web. If you're a dog, you should be eating your own dog food AND the dog food others are cookin' up. That said, I've been using all sorts of services for years because I feel really strongly that:

• "You need to use it to design it effectively..."


• it's an easy and enjoyable way to stay on top of trends and try to become (or hopefully remain) hip...


• it helps you develop, respect, and maintain a healthy "user-centered" design and development approach...


• you meet some very interesting people, and learn a lot along the way...


• it feels good to help others to learn, and spread the love...


• create an online persona and personal brand to extend the "real you" and you might even learn things about yourself you may not have known before...


• gain experience and grow your design & technical capabilities and stay competitive...


• find yourself getting involved in really interesting projects...


• eliminate any possibility of becoming bored...


• it's a LOT of fun!

Props to some of "my peeps"
With these things in mind I want to just spread the love for some of the folks that have had a positive impact on my online experience(s). These folks are riding the latest waves and definitely on top of the latest trends. They've also got great insight, they're interesting people, have an active online life, and they will help you keep the creative juices flowing if you're stuck in a creative rut. I especially like the funny tweets, and interesting links. Twitter is and has always been lots of fun as well as one of my favorite services and sources of inspiration, so I'll start there. Here are some folks* you should really consider paying attention to and following:

• Orli


• imjustcreative


• adellecharles


• justcreative


• socialmedian


• chriscoyier


• pglyman


• beckychr007


• fermion


• Kitta


• hellyeahdude


• smashingmag


• fubiz


• Photoshop_GU


• aaronv


• cookbook


• hoshposh


• You?

*I do plan on adding to this list when I get more time — it's not everyone so sorry if I have not mentioned you yet. Also, If you want me to follow you just follow me and feed us some juicy tweets. If you are on this list and you'd rather not be, just let me know.

More to come soon I hope
Okay , that's all I have time for rite now, but I'll try to add to this soon... I'm off to the library to see if we can find some Babar books at the Library and drop the big girls off in the center.

Google Shines On With Chrome

Google just released their new "One box for everything" browser called Chrome. The name is a direct reference to the term used to describe a desktop software application's interface elements. The name also implies "shiny and new" which it definitely is. The current beta is only available for Windows users, and unfortunately the Mac and Linux versions are not out yet and it's not clear when they'll hit the street.

Do We Need Another Browser, But Why?
Google's goal and concept for Chrome was that, "spend much of our time working inside a browser" and the "web gets better with more options and innovation." They also wanted to "completely rethink the browser" and create "a modern platform for web pages and applications." Let's see what develops in the near future, but so far things are impressive.

It's Got That Creamy Goodness
All the code is open source, and they've "used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox" and under the hood they built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine which should keep even extremely complex web apps in control. That said, Chrome is blazing FAST! It's also CSS3 capable, so users will have a better overall experience. The interface is kinda Microsoft Vista looking and very simple which makes it easy to use since there are only a limited number of features so far. Some of the features are: DNS pre-fetching, gears, phishing & malware protection, dynamic tabs, and "incognito mode" (ala Safari?). There's also a cool little feature called "Task Manager" where you type about:memory in the location bar to see the current memory usage for your browsers... Looks like Firefox is a RAM hog with all my Add-ons, extensions and plugins installed. You can see the full list of features and video explanations on their features page.

Give Google Chrome a try...
Download Google Chrome »

Geeky Stuff &mdash Get Your Geek On
Here are some fun things you can do already, remember this is just an initial beta release! I'm sure the folks at Google have lots of cool stuff on the way.

• Highlight some text or page elements and right-mouse-click and choose "Inspect element" to see a developer inspector (Firebug-like) which allows you to see the DOM and mess with it, and you can dock/un-dock to the window or view it in a tab, and do some other nifty things... [This is an awesome feature]


• Type about:memory in the location bar to see your memory use.


• Find more helpful info on GChrome here or get more GChrome developer info here.


• Type about:version in the location to get your current installed version of GChrome.


• Or, check the version "About Google Chrome" from the wrench menu, and it'll even tell you if your installed version is up to date.

Or make your Firefox new and shiny with this:
Chromifox 1.0rc2 Theme

...another blatant rip-off of another default theme from another great open source web browser! This time, the target is Google Chrome, or more specifically Chromium, the open source project behind it. The clean lines, slick layout, and compact style of Chromium were the points of inspiration for this theme. Chromifox offers a coat of Chrome for Firefox.