Even though I have no plans of releasing these to the public, I thought you might enjoy seeing this fun little cross-platform project I have been working on. It is really just a fancy list for me to keep handy and remind me of what to work on most days. Not only does it come with a spiffy iPhone version (including a custom iPhone icon, of course), it now has an Adobe AIR version that ...

Thanks to an equally relaxing and productive morning, I managed to wrangled up my earlier drawing into this fun vector. It's sized just perfect for your iPhone, but I am thinking it would make for a great poster print. What do you think? Anyone got recommendations on a place to print them at? I've only ever used Cafepress, which is slightly pricey.

Although it doesn't directly relate to the drawing, this is what I read today ...

After a yummy Thanksgiving lunch and hanging with the co-workers, I spent some time updating a few graphics for the DFP course's Project 3 example.

Despite the fact that these pieces will end up in Flash as part of an AIR deployment, I still created the vectors in Illustrator and did a copy-import. Not because I am lazy, but because I still prefer working with AI's interface and color selectors over the Flash IDE.

And, of course, ...

The lovely geometric type icon I made during the DFP Lecture today. Simple and customizable, but after continually seeing all of the pretty things that James White keeps putting out, I really just wanted to make something colorful. The icon is entirely vector, which was really difficult to achieve with the color blending of the radial shape and the necessary drop shadow ... had to delve into that cumbersome Illustrator Transparency panel masking interface, which ...

I decided that for this week's Illustration Friday theme of "blur" I would make this pretty Mac icon ... one, because it has been a while since I made an icon and I miss all 262,144 of those pixels and two, because when I think of blurred things, I immediately think the fuzzy color circles I see at night when I am not wearing my glasses or contacts.

I started with some shapes in Illustrator and ...

With the currently progressing update to the Dra Studio and some recent client projects, I have been trying to find a decent Wordpress theme or framework that I could start from and build each future project on. After trying out quite a few nice and fully-featured ones, including Thematic, Hybrid, Starkers, The Buffet Framework, and Emptiness, I found myself more encumbered than enabled ... having to match up with their structure and layouts, working within ...

The last few days have been full of a lot o' work ... creating code and pre-pro examples for students, updating curriculum in the classroom, then keeping busy through the wee hours of the night and morning creating for some Illustrative clients.

Thanks to Norm reminding me about how easy it is to setup local databases with MAMP or XAMPP, I have been having an easier time working with Wordpress:http://wordpress.org lately. I will eventually need to ...

Sadly, one of my favorite lil' Mac tools, Validator, which is perfect for validating XML files against custom Document Type Declarations (DTDs), is currently not working with Snow Leopard, or more specifically, Snow Leopard's implementation of 64-bit Perl.

There is an easy way have 10.6 load the 32-bit version of Perl, but unfortunately, even after doing so, it looks like Validator is still having some other issues.

There is no contact information on Robert Crews' website, so ...

Tonight's DFP icon experiment resulted in a pretty 2 for 1 tag special. It is not much of an easter egg, but I thought my name choice on the Christmas tag was a fun one. :) As always, these should be available for purchase soon on GraphicRiver and as always, I'll update this with the link when they are.

Thanks to the built-in screen capturing feature of Snow Leopard's new Quicktime X, I actually managed to ...

It is time again for the monthly DFP discussion on icons. My über example today ended up being this lovely tribute to Kodak's belated Kodachrome plastic slide mounts. It's kinda crazy that these were still being widely used just back in the 1990s.

The icon should be available soon from the nice GraphicRiver folks, in both the hinged and notch variety.

**Update: It is! Buy it here, kiddies.

Another icon I worked up as an advanced example for my DFP students. Like the others, this one should be available from GraphicRiver within a few days.** Update: The icon has been approved and is now available for purchase

I really think Adobe is heading down the wrong path with their no coding push of Catalyst. Didn't they learn anything from the WYSIWYG garbage that can be produced by Dreamweaver? I guess not. While there may be a small percentage of legitimate UX development planned for this app, I can already see it becoming another eyesore in the Adobe periodic table.

Something quick I whipped up for Brandon.

Sadly, the type is not mine ... my pens weren't liking the blue lead I drew this piece with, so my type came out all bloated. This is the beautiful "Peixe Frito" by Billy Argel.

If you haven't already, definitely check out AppleInsider's or TechCrunch's coverage of the sweet App Wall that developers at Apple made for the recent WWDC event.

Here are all the deets:

"What you're looking at:
Over 3,000 apps - and growing - are downloaded every minute from the App Store. This is a live feed showing the activity of 20,000 popular apps currently on the store. Every time a customer downloads an app, its icon lights up (5 ...

Just a quick post … last night we had a good time in class talking about some of the fun interface gags that have been finding their way online. If you haven’t seen some of the innovative stuff Apple and Quicksilver have done with their sites and adverts, be sure to check ‘em out! You might also want to watch the cool Wario and HEMA interface destructions.

During the DFP lab session yesterday, Norm and my students were having issues validating their XML data files using a couple of the services we normally recommend. Namely, their XML files were showing no errors, despite adding intentional mal-formed tags and whatnot.
It just so happened that Norm was reading through one of FlashTuts newer posts about different methods for setting up a Flash Development Sandbox and discovered a great Eclipse plugin for writing and validating ...

After more than a few months of hearing so many things about “gumbo” and “thermo” and whatnot, Adobe has finally officially announced some of their newest technologies, including a beta version of their hottest prototyping app and apparently the new center of the universe … Catalyst.But before you go all crazy, start revising your game plan and implementing untested workflows, I just want to remind you of a few other Adobe products that were supposed ...

It only took like four days for them to approve it ( </sarcasm> ), but the pretty swirly whirly icon I made in class the other night is finally available for purchase. Totally color-customizable, it should be perfect for your next acid-trip enabled application. ;)You can purchase it here.

I was working on an example of something for a student and decided to offer this simple, yet textured Polaroid-ish photo frame icon (512 by 512 pixels) for anyone that might need it.You should be able to pick it up on GraphicRiver really soon:graphicriver.net/user/DraStudioAs a bonus, it includes a font I made of my quick-fast handwriting style … called "Thin Oscar".If for some reason, they don’t like it, I’ll just offer it for free from ...

The BackgroundDuring a recent lecture in my Deployment of Flash Projects class, while discussing Adobe AIR and trying to summarize the essential parts of desktop User Interface design, I found myself lacking in a over-arching term and general category to which I could attach many of the nit-picky and minute ideas that collectively make for superb deployments (or at the very least, improve poor deployments to acceptable).I mean, there was definitely plenty of discussion about ...

This pretty “Call for Entries” poster, promoting Adobe’s Design Achievement Awards, has been popping up all over campus and it is such a simple, yet fun design. If you’d like, visit Adobe’s site to find out more about this event and even download the poster PDF. Enjoy!

In my ongoing attempt to fall more and more in love with the “One-Window Web Development” amazingness that is Panic’s Coda app, I have reached another yet milestone. I present to you the following Syntax Modes, re-colored to match the ever-popular Textmate “Twilight” theme:ActionScriptCSSHTMLJavascriptJSP-HTMLPHP-HTMLXMLCoda Coloring Theme - "Twlight"In case you are wondering, the font I am using is the delicious Inconsolata by Raph Levien.P.S. If anyone wants to send me a few example files of ...

After Sitepoint showed us all how easy it is to add custom references to the "Books" section of Coda (using their excellent HTML and CSS references as examples), I began my search for even more handy code guides with which to fill out that big empty gray space at Command+6.

Jon Hicks had some good stuff to say, as did the Coda Google Group, but what really got me moving was when I found Ray Brown's ...

The last 48 hours or so, I have been chucking a whole pile of new web, logo, illustration and t-shirt projects at the Illustrative Portfolio section. Even took some time to rewrite the CodeIgniter PHP files to optimize their indexing and output. Now, instead of having to manually add each thumbnail and larger image reference by hand, I can simply upload new examples to specified folders and magically, new samples show up on the Portfolio ...

I am a little late to the game on this, but recently I was creating an iPhone screen optimized version of a site for my personal usage and thought I would share some of my findings.

The InitialThough Apple recommends through the expansive information in its iPhone Developer Connection to implement CSS3 conditional statements to effectively achieve alternate style-sheets for personal computers and for the iPhone, I wasn’t satisfied with the resulting functionality. Yes, it did ...