Mike Lavella

Metro IE10 Banning Flash

Mike Lavella — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 20:15:55 +0000

With the release of Windows 8 supposedly coming sometime in 2012, Microsoft has announced that Flash along with all other plugins will be banned from the new “Metro Style IE” browser. The Metro styled IE resembles what is currently seen on Windows 7 phones. This browser will be as HTML-only as possible which Microsoft is hoping will provide long battery life and greater performance. Read More

Superfish

Mike Lavella — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 15:46:36 +0000

Enabling users to intuitively navigate a web page is one of the most important aspects of designing a great site. Users need to be able to find information quickly and with the help of the jQuery Superfish plugin, this can be easily achieved. Superfish takes a purely CSS navigational method and adds Javascript for some cool enhancements such as animations and time delays on mouseout. Plus, if for some reason a user has JavaScript disabled, the Superfish navigation will degrade to CSS without a problem. It even supports those stubborn IE6 users who refuse to update. I’ve personally used the Superfish nav bar on at least five different sites and can attest to it’s ease of use.

Nivo Slider

Mike Lavella — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 23:53:39 +0000

After spending some time recently looking for a nice animated slide show, I came across the jQuery Nivo Slider. The thing I really liked about this plug-in is the slick transitions which look very Flash-like. This is an awesome alternative to using Flash since some mobile users on iPhones and iPad’s won’t be able to see your embedded .SWF file. Nivo Slider obviously requires the latest and greatest jQuery release but all you need to do is upload your images, reference the images in the HTML and you’ll get this bad boy rocking and rolling. I highly recommend this plug-in and it’s quite flexible allowing you to customize the slide show as needed. For you WordPress developers, there are several Nivo Slider plug-ins that can be thrown on your site. On my home page, I’m currently using JJ NextGen JQuery Slider which can be downloaded here.

Photoshop Channels

Mike Lavella — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 21:14:03 +0000

Channels in Photoshop are arguably a more intrigal part of the software than Layers considering Channels were around before Layers. Photoshop Channels store the color information of an image and when working in RGB mode, consist of three different Channel layers (Red, Green and Blue). Photoshop supports fifty six Channels so additional Channels can obviosly be created to blend and adjust colors as needed. Channels can store selections which are extremely useful when needing to restore a previously used selection. A really good tutorial describing how to save and load selections via Channels can be viewed below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEkce_QYZDI

Shooting and Editing in Camera Raw

Mike Lavella — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:20:21 +0000

With the prices of digital cameras becoming more affordable and with a lot of the mid range cameras being capable of shooting in Camera Raw, many photographers are taking the leap to this format. When you set your digital camera to one of those predefined settings such as Portrait, Action Shot, Night Scene or Macro, you are basically changing the ISO and exposure settings. You click the shutter, the camera processes the image based on whatever setting you chose, and then the image is compressed into a JPEG. When a picture is taken in the Camera RAW format, the image is captured as is with no ISO settings or compression being applied. You are essentially getting a digital photo negative and can take this file into the Camera Raw plugin for Photoshop and make adjustments non-destructively. This tutorial shows some new features in Photoshop’s Camera Raw plugin:

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/the-complete-picture-with-julieanne-kost/new-camera-raw-features-in-cs5/

Adobe Bridge Slideshow

Mike Lavella — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:30:06 +0000

I’m currently studying to take my Adobe Photoshop CS5 Certification exam later this month and in reading the Adobe Photoshop CS5 Classroom in a Book I learned you can create a pretty slick looking slide show of your photos that can be shown on the web. To do this, you’ll need to fire up Bridge, select the files you want to include, and then select Web Gallery in the Output panel. Set the settings and then save gallery. Bridge exports everything and you’ll get an index.html file with full slide show and gallery controls which can be uploaded to your site. Check out this video for a deeper explanation.

Free Fonts for Logo Design

Mike Lavella — Wed, 25 May 2011 02:36:09 +0000

When working with design branding (whether that incorporates a new logo or not), it’s important to use a font that helps define and expand the message you are trying to convey. With fonts, we have the Serif (with decorations) or San Serif (without decoration). A side by side comparison can be seen here. An example of a serif font would be Times New Roman which displays more of a classic scripty look that can be seen on a lot of newspapers. San Serif fonts are typically used for the content of websites due to them being easier to read. An example of a san serif font would be Arial.

You can Google “free fonts” and find a ton of different sites where you can download fonts to incorporate into your designs. One such site for free fonts is dafont.com and another good resource displaying fonts for logo designers can be seen here.

Burgatory Logo

Mike Lavella — Mon, 16 May 2011 23:46:15 +0000

Burgatory is a new high class burger joint in Pittsburgh located in Fox Chapel’s Water Works. The place has great food and decent beer. Not to continue to plug the establishment for it’s food, I wanted to point out it’s logo. A designer’s task in logo design is to create something distinctive, original and simple while conveying a certain message. Following the K.I.S.S. principle of design, (Keep It Simple, Stupid), allows logos to be recognizable and unique without looking over done. An effective logo essentially boils down to two things: great idea and effective execution. In the case of Burgatory, this logo is simple, aesthetically pleasing and in my opinion just cool. Props go to Wall-to-Wall Studio for creating this image.

Dreamweaver CS5 Local Test Server

Mike Lavella — Mon, 09 May 2011 23:49:29 +0000

Dreamweaver is my go to program for creating and editing websites. Unlike Visual Studio, it doesn’t come with a local web server to test your server side code. If you are developing a php site, you can use a prepackaged program like XAMPP or WAMP to easily install everything you need (apache, php, mysql) to test your site locally before uploading it to a web server. At work, I setup XAMPP on a pc so I can test my site before the world sees it. The firs step was to download XAMPP and then follow the local installation steps. The one hiccup I ran into was that after installation, Apache wasn’t running when I clicked on Start in the Control Panel. After doing some searching, I found that I was missing a C++ library and by downloading the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x86) got me up and running. The key is to create your site folders within the htdocs folder. For example, I installed XAMPP in the default location (c:\xampp) and my site folders are located in c:\xampp\htdogs\(site folder name). The local address is then http://localhost/(site folder name)/

HDR in Photoshop CS5

Mike Lavella — Tue, 03 May 2011 00:14:03 +0000

The human eye can distinguish shadows and highlights much better than a camera. A digital camera is more limited in the dynamic range (ration beetween dark and bright) that it can reproduce. When using HDR (High Dynamic Range) in Photoshop, it allows you to take multiple photographs captured in different exposures and merge them into a single image giving you a much more detailed picture. For example, you can you can take an image that is underexposed, one that is overepoxed and one with middle exposure, combine all three resulting in am image with a greater dark to bright range. Pretty sweet stuff. Check out this tutorial:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-photoshop-cs5/create-enhanced-hdr-images-with-hdr-pro/