xBlog: The visual thinking weblog
14th April 2008

GridFox - The Grid Layout Firefox Extension

“Grid-based layouts have become really popular among web designers over the last year… However, I ran into a problem when coding grid-based layouts. How can I be sure my grid is maintained from the original mockup to the final coded version? When I coded my first grid-based layout, I found myself regularly taking screenshots of the site and comparing them with my original grid in Photoshop. There had to be an easier way.

Enter GridFox. GridFox is a Firefox extension that overlays a grid on any website. If you can open it in Firefox, you can put a grid on top of it. It’s easy to customize, allowing you to create the exact grid you designed your layout around.”

posted in Software/Hardware, Web design | Permalink | Comments Off

25th March 2008

Turn Photoshop Layers On/Off in InDesign.

“InDesign lets you control the visibility of layers in your placed Photoshop graphics. That can be pretty handy when you find yourself designing a series of related ads that require minor changes to the same image.

In InDesign, select a placed Photoshop graphic and choose Object > Object Layer Options. This gives you a dialog box where you can toggle the eyeball next to any layer to turn it on or off.”

posted in Graphic design, Software/Hardware | Permalink | Comments Off

19th March 2008

Evaluating the Wordpress 2.5 Interface

“Wordpress 2.5’s interface overhaul is getting closer, and now that I’ve been able to play with the release candidate, these are my thoughts.

The official Wordpress blog posted up a nice sneak peek into the Wordpress 2.5 release, and intriguingly enough, most of it seems to be an interface update thanks to the fine folks from Happy Cog. Excitedly, I grabbed the release candidate and installed it on my laptop to play with. While the experience was primarily positive, there were some things that irked me. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but the ones that I felt most passionate about are here.”

posted in Interface design, Software/Hardware, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments Off

11th March 2008

Goodbye, cruel Word: A personal history of electronic writing

“For the first time, I no longer have a copy of Microsoft Word installed on either of my computers. That’s some change. I wrote my first two books, and many hundreds of articles, in Word. But I’m writing my third book in an inexpensive yet wonderful piece of Mac-only software written by a single person instead of a “business unit” at Redmond. Scoured of Word, my computers feel clean, refreshed, relieved of a hideous and malign burden. How did it come to this?”

posted in Language, Software/Hardware | Permalink | Comments Off

10th March 2008

xScope is an Ideal Tool for Web Designers

“xScope ($27) is a great utility for Mac-based web and UX (user experience) designers. It provides a number of floating tools for measuring, aligning, and inspecting on-screen graphics.” (Thanks swissmiss!)

posted in Software/Hardware, Web design | Permalink | Comments Off

25th February 2008

Vector Magic Leaves Stanford: No Longer Free. Desktop Coming Soon.

“I’m rather sad to be reporting this one, but Vector Magic, the awesome free online vectorizing service is no longer free. It looks like the creators behind the service have left Stanford to make a desktop version of the popular software, which will be selling for a price that has yet-to-be-decided. Personally, I prefer Vector Magic over Live Trace in Illustrator, but that may change if the price isn’t right. Vector Magic is a single-function software. It’s nice, but It only does one thing. I can’t see myself paying more than $50 for a software that only does one thing, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.”

posted in Illustration, Software/Hardware | Permalink | Comments Off

19th February 2008

Meet Adobe Illustrator (1987)

“As promised a couple of weeks ago, I’ve uploaded a copy of the VHS tape that shipped in the box with Illustrator 1.0, hosted by company co-founder/CEO/Illustrator developer John Warnock…”

posted in Illustration, Software/Hardware | Permalink | Comments Off

14th February 2008

List of information graphics software

This is a list of software to create any kind of information graphics:

  • either includes the ability to create one or more infographics from a provided data set
  • either it is provided specifically for information visualization

posted in Information graphics, Software/Hardware | Permalink | Comments Off

12th February 2008

Podcasting Equipment Guide

“So, you’re thinking about podcasting and have no idea where to start. Or maybe you tried recording using your computer’s built-in microphone, or the USB headset you bought to use with Skype, and realized just how bad that sounds.

My hope is that this article detailing different setups I’ve used over the last few years will assist you in putting together a recording rig that suits both your needs and budget.”

posted in Software/Hardware, Sound design | Permalink | Comments Off

18th November 2007

VectorMagic | The Online Tool for Precision Bitmap to Vector Conversion

“This site converts bitmap images to vector art — it’s an online auto-tracer. Just upload your image and we will vectorize it for you. Vector art is useful because it allows you to scale an image without making it blurry or pixelated. Vectorization (aka tracing) is the process of converting a raster image to a vector image. Raster images are pixel-based, whereas vector images are represented by geometric shapes such as lines, circles and curves.”

posted in Illustration, Logos/Symbols, Software/Hardware | Permalink | Comments Off

23rd October 2007

Sim Daltonism

“Sim Daltonism is a color blindness simulator for Mac OS X. It filters in real-time the area around the mouse pointer and displays the result — as seen by a color blind person — in a floating palette.

Since there are many types of color blindness, Sim Daltonism allow you to choose the one you want to see.”

posted in Accessibility, Apple/Macintosh, Color, Graphic design, Software/Hardware, Web design | Permalink | Comments Off

18th October 2007

Microsoft Live Labs: Seadragon

“Seadragon is an incubation project resulting from the acquisition of Seadragon Software in February. Its aim is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network.”

posted in Interface design, Software/Hardware | Permalink | Comments Off

16th October 2007

InfoVis CyberInfrastructure

“This web site provides access to a comprehehsive set of software packages easing the exploration, modification, comparison, and extension of data mining and information visualization algorithms. Diverse software packages were bundled into learning modules. Access to a large-scale data repository, extensive compute resources, and a growing set of references are provided as well. It is our hope that the community will adopt this resource to foster Information Visualization education and research.”

posted in Data visualization, Software/Hardware, Visual thinking | Permalink | Comments Off

4th October 2007

DrawIt 3: Drawing and Illustrating for the Mac

“DrawIt is not your typical image-editor. It does not fill up your window with lots of pallets you don’t use but instead presents with just one simple and clean window. Nevertheless, DrawIt packs an impressive feature-list into this single window. DrawIt is layer-based, has a powerful vector-drawing tool, incredible support for masks and much, much more. Check the feature-list below to discover why DrawIt might be the tool you need.”

posted in Illustration, Software/Hardware | Permalink | Comments Off

28th September 2007

Idea: The Histogram as the Image

“The below image looks like a simple gradient with my website’s name on it. But it’s more than that. There’s a picture hidden in that gradient. Can you find it?”

posted in Illustration, Software/Hardware, Web graphics | Permalink | Comments Off