False alarm

It turns out VE Interior Design’s site is not finished because Microsoft has chosen to flex their proprietary corporate muscle and collectively give the finger to web standards as well as the Mac OSX.

As a mac user, I’ve long ignored Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.  It’s not that I have any real distain for the product (or didn’t until this week), or Microsoft in general, really.  I love the Xbox.  But since this past weekend I have a serious problem with Internet Explorer.  They started this fight.  

Way back when, Apple released a little web browser called Safari, after which Microsoft cut off all Macintosh support for IE.  There hasn’t been a new version for years, while the megaton horde of PCs sold each year come shipped with shiny new crazy versions of Explorer.  I still don’t really have a problem with this.  I prefer Mozilla and Google Chrome for all of my web browsing.  Subsequently, as a designer who uses a Mac to do my work, I am only able to test my sites on Safari, Mozilla, and IE5…I’ve never messed with Opera.

So I finish the VE site, post it for client review and hear back…it’s doing weird things in IE.  Well…as clunky as it is, IE is the most widely used browser out there so this is a problem.  I don’t want my work to look terrible.  I don’t want my clients to look terrible either.  SO a-Googling we go.

Ok so the internet has standards.  There’s a group of folks who set these standards collectively and try to help out designers by keeping everything in line with them.  You may see little buttons on sites claiming them to be “WC3 compliant.”  Well, that little badge shouts out, “I believe in the standard!”  Microsoft apparently does not.  They very intentionally created their browser to parse CSS (the programming for layout control on web pages) in very strange ways.  It’s a flagrant departure from the standards and a system wide headache for developers.

Fortunately, since it’s such a pain, there are some great resources out there to combat the whole issue.  I’ve found Sitepoint (specifically their CSS guide) and Position is Everything to be VERY helpful in this area.

Fight the good fight, bretherine.

P.S. Yesterday I gave a pack of cigarettes to a guy named John who had a dog named Cheeseburger.  He’s been living in a tent in the woods since Katrina. He might be one of the nicest people I’ve talked to in awhile.  It’s a cold time of year to be homeless.  

  P.P.S. I know she’s been around forever, but I’ve been hooked on Mirah for the last week.  While sad, I find her music to be quite hopeful in a way.  I guess I can relate.  Also, I missed the show, but I heard Grails on the radio and liked it a lot.  Peace.

Rapid Summer

July is screaming to a conclusion and the days seems to be ripping by at a mechanical pace. Lots and lots of good things are happening. Here’s a flyer I designed today for a benefit Habitat is putting on:

If you live in Athens, you should definitely come. It should be a great show. I’m particularly excited about Don Chambers’ appearance. So that show’s pretty much planned, but we’ve got a bunch of other events in the works, including three different fund raising races. As you can imagine, races are a complicated affair but a lot of fun.

I promised you some photos of the show my wife and I shot at the Caledonia. These are from her blog:

The band pictured is Pet Volcano

Anyway, that’s some of the stuff going on. Vacation someday.

Mass media & Wall-E

We’re shooting a tv commercial for Habitat today AND shooting a concert tonight. Hyper. I’ll try and post some stuff when both are done.

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Last night I finally had a chance to see Wall-E. Oh my goodness. This film doesn’t feel at all like the rest of Pixar’s work and pushes beyond a cartoon into something more complex. It feels like a full blown drama, but there are these ridiculous robots bleeping at each other the whole time. It’s amazing. As it started I was skeptical. Can this maintain my interest for an entire film? How are they going to develop character out of what amounts to a metal cube with arms?

They developed the character. They developed the story. In short, by the end I’d cried twice. Yes, I feel like an idiot, but what can I say? Pixar is awesome.

Identity and Expansion

I’ve been talking a lot, and have yet to show you anything.  A small collection of my commercial work can be found at ZachAlig.com and a gallery of my wife’s photography is posted at AlyssaAligPhotography.com.  I made both of these sites in a hurried rush to get something online to show clients and am currently working to redo both of them in a more attractive manner.  They are, however, better than nothing and so I’m glad they’re there.  A large portion of my income also comes from Savannah Wedding Films, and my work is posted in their galleries.

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Flash is a wonderful thing.  I let my web skills fall to the side while I was in college working on film, but now that I’m paying attention to web design again, I’m finding out how rapidly the complications of good design have grown.  As the internet has grown and allowed for richer user experiences, so has the knowledge required to create said experiences.  The possibilities are at once exciting and intimidating and it’s difficult to know where to start.  There seems to be a myriad of books out there to help you train yourself, but I’ve found that a combination of the Flash’s help files and the videos at Lynda.com have yielded great results.  If you haven’t tried it, I really recommend it.  The lectures are on par with courses I took at SCAD (and paid over $200 per class session for).  The subscription is like $25 a month.  Besides your computer and software, it’s the best investment you could make.  You’ll stay cutting edge.

 

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One last note:  I’m always a little behind on these things, but Paste Magazine put The National on the cover of their magazine in January, so I figured I’d check out the album.  I ended up really liking what I heard.  I think America finally has an answer to Coldplay and I hope these boys go far.  One interesting fact is that the lead singer also works as a freelance graphic designer.