Graphics and Web Design

I have an extensive media library in iTunes, and am very picky about everything having album art. Having family that plays in the Greenwood Community Band, and liking classical/band music, I have quite a few albums from them. Being a small band, the album artwork tends to be extremely basic, which drives me crazy since I listen to these frequently. Fortunately I have photography of the band at various venues and had some free time today to make some artwork for them.

There is a plague of tiny sans-serif fonts being used for body text on the web. I find sans-serif to be difficult enough to read without it being tiny as well, and am rather certain the prevalence of this type of text is one of the primary reasons people find it uncomfortable to read book-length material on computer screens; that and cheap low-ppi (pixels per inch) monitors. Even I find sans-serif fonts more readable on low-ppi monitors, as such monitors reproduce serifs poorly, but I can't read for a long period of time on those either.

There are hacks available to change sans-serif fonts on-screen to larger or (as I use in cases where I will be reading a lot) serif fonts using CSS. For most sites which I only browse occasionally I find NoSquint more practical. This handy Firefox plugin allows you to conditionally resize text on pages in an easy and site-specific way, and it remembers your size settings on the next site visit.

If you do web design or web application development check out the Web Developer Extension for Firefox.  An incredibly handy toolbar addition to Firefox, It includes handy utilities like the  ability to edit CSS in real time, on any site you are browsing.  You can even edit the HTML source of web pages directly and see real-time updates.  That's not all however, it includes more options to do everything from visualize page elements, resize the browser window to test content, validate page code with a click, autopopulate form fields when building web applications, and more.

A disastrous announcement has been made by Adobe and Macromedia. Macromedia is being bought out by Adobe.