A few years ago I thought it would be funny to have a "pretend agency" so I had someone to talk to about the operations side of design. I wrote all the posts as if there was a larger staff.

Although it's just me talking to myself and an imaginary staff, I keep my notes on the more business-like aspects of my design work here as a public forum: "Agency + Lyceum".

Design — Leave a comment
05
Dec 11

Treading on Sacred Ground: Logo Design

John McWade’s latest DesignTalk post on logo design, and it describes how one can emotionally approach the client’s desire to ‘create a new flag’:

The logo is not “just a graphic” any more than a flag is a piece of colored cloth.

That’s why it’s so hard to design. You’re working on sacred soil. I’m exaggerating only a little, but I’m not kidding.

This describes the situation well. Personally, I’ve always felt the discomfort from the client knowing that this was very much the case; I tend to shy away from logos for this very reason. McWade’s post goes on to describe an approach to handling the client with courtesy and understanding.

Correlated thought: I’m not crazy :)

Marketing :: — Leave a comment
06
Oct 11

Multisite-Friendly Sitemaps

I’m pretty lucky that my main website at davidseah.com is indexed frequently. However, I’ve wondered if the sub-blog content was being indexed at all.

I’ve just replaced my Google Sitemap plugin with Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps, which promises not only to be multisite-friendly, but boasts of speed advantages over similar plugins. It also can include links to the sub-blog sitemaps within the root site. I’m making this entry to mark the day and time that I implemented this change. I’m curious to see if search engine traffic or rankings change at all.

Development — Leave a comment
27
Sep 11

Pondering HTML5

Ok team! What the hell is HTML5? I am under the general impression that HTML5 + Javascript is the web and mobile platform of the future. It’s supported on the iPad as one of the two ways to make an app. Windows 8 apparently will make extensive use of it.

What is HTML5?

From the Wikipedia entry, I gather that HTML5 is two compatible specs, one from the WHATWG group and another from the W3CD. It adds a bunch of new elements and drops old presentational elements like <center>. It also defines the Document Object Model (DOM) and introduces new APIs. Notably:

  • Canvas Immediate Mode drawing
  • Timed media playback
  • Offline storage
  • Document Editing
  • Drag-and-Drop
  • Etc.

There’s also a few new APIs that are not part of either spec, for example:

  • File API
  • Directories and Systems
  • Web Storage
  • Geolocation

HTML5 is apparently a moving target. It’s not a finished spec, but a lot of people are using it anyway. With Microsoft and Apple both using it, I’m guessing that at least some familiarity with HTML5 layout concepts, object types, and the DOM + Javascript is going to be worth knowing.

Looking at the comparison of layout engine compatibility with HTML5, I am getting the picture that this is indeed an application support layer for the web. The support across the major layout engines is still pretty spotty, and I don’t imagine it will be very uniform for the next 3 years. So choosing some working subset of features for now will be important.

Thinking about HTML5 Apps

I don’t think the web application model changes that much. From a practical perspective, HTML5 provides standardization of some APIs now, and introduces the Canvas, Audio, and Video objects. CSS still provides the styling. Javascript still provides the runtime interactivity. There is still a mechanism for storing data on a server and retrieving it asynchronously. HTML5 promises to add things like native databases, geolocation, and other storage options.

It’s tempting to just go back to Flash, but it’s quickly becoming a has-been technology. Sure, there are things you can do with Flash that you couldn’t before, but it’s going to become a specialized solution much in the way that Macromedia Director continues to be. Flash may hang on because of its authoring tools, which make online interactivity accessible to unsophisticated programmers. I like Actionscript, actually, over Javascript, but I don’t feel a compelling reason to keep using Flash.

A few HTML5 links:

I think the biggest win right now with HTML5 might be the use of the new elements which are more broadly supported, such as the VIDEO, CANVAS, and AUDIO tags. Combination with so-called “responsive web design” for all device sizes might be cool too. I picked up ABA’s Responsive Web Design book to get an idea of how this works.

So…using HTML 4.1 Javascript techniques with the working bits of HTML5′s better-defined DOM might be the way to go for now.

To check this assumption, I decided to look into combination of HTML5 + jQuery, and found that actually HTML5 includes Javascript changes that mirror how jQuery works, with new functions and new APIs to handle all kinds of intriguing things. I’m going to head to the bookstore and have a look.

Development — Leave a comment
14
Jul 11

Asymmetric Columns of Content

I have recently discovered Pinterest, which implements a pinboard of cute pictures tied to one’s interest. It’s sort of a visual bookmarking system, and the people who are into it generally are trying to pick beautiful pictures. I also like the layout of the screen:

"Pinterest"

I looked around to find out what jQuery plugin might implement this kind of layout, and I think it’s Masonry. Noting it here for future reference.

Process — Leave a comment
15
Mar 11

Installing Mercurial

It’s been a while since I’ve posted in the Agenceum blog, but I’m now actively building new infrastructure and this is the place to post it.

Currently on the plate: using a different revision control system…Mercurial! The reason for switching to Mercurial from Subversion (SVN) was that I actually lost the old repo when moving servers; it was one of the services that didn’t automatically transfer. I have backups of everything in it, but I figure…why not start anew with the latest? Mercurial is a “distributed revision control system”, as opposed to Subversion which uses a central repo. The advantage is that Mercurial maintains a complete history of the repository, quite compactly, on each computer. You have multiple backups. You can designate one repo as the “central one”.

I was having some trouble getting my head wrapped around the differences until I came across Joel Spolsky’s HGInit website. Spolsky is one of the clearest writers on programming topics today, and thanks to this single link it all is starting to make sense.

Agency Chatter — Leave a comment
29
Nov 10

Clover

Came across Clover Sites while browsing through the advertising service known as The Deck. Clover provides pre-built websites for a flat $1000 plus $20/mo hosting. The templates are quite beautiful and the preview site itself is really wonderfully done.

Interestingly, the underlying technology is Flash. The sites are completely built in Flash, including the administration interface. The FAQ says that they use other techniques for SEO, which appears to be use of the keyword and description meta tags. This is probably adequate for the target audience: people and organizations who need simple websites who are not looking to generate massive search engine traffic for marketing purposes.

Looking through the real-world examples, I’m reminded of the drawback of simple templates: you need to keep the content simple, too. The moment you have to scroll some text, or allow the selection of a font with new metrics, is the moment where the clarity of the layout breaks a tiny bit. But that might just be me…I come from a background of interactive screen design for computer games from way back in the 1980s, and scrolling a last resort.

Still, it looks like a very nicely put-t0gether service, unlike some other Flash-based template sites. Worth passing along, I think!

Agency Chatter — Leave a comment
18
Sep 10

Simple Artist Websites

I came across a mention of Indexhibit, which is a “simple” website framework for artists that doesn’t require a lot of messing around with content management.

For people who want something even simpler, there’s Stacey, which does its file management purely through folders and files that you FTP up.

All we need is the world’s simplest FTP client, and then things would be great!

HTML Integration — 1 comment
18
Jun 10

Upgraded to WordPress 3.0!

I’ve been awfully quiet here on Agenceum, and that’s because I’ve be rethinking the whole low-cost website strategy. However, WordPress 3.0 has just come out, and I’m happy to see that my WordPress 2.x installation automatically has updated. SO EASY. Of course, I haven’t really tested it, but it makes me think that I really do need to just standardize on WordPress. Updating a CMS in other systems I use is a huge pain in the butt.

Staff Meeting — Leave a comment
11
May 10

Tuesday Staff Meeting

My efforts have moved toward tweaking additional elements of the design.davidseah.com page. My strategy is now to have two separate design services: Agenceum (for low cost templated pages) and David Seah Investigative Design (DSID). I just made up the DSID acryonym, so I’m not sure I’ll keep it. The design site is actually a nice template that I could reuse.

I’ve also started making a new template for my blog, and as an exercise I drew out a layout quickly to see how fast I could convert it to css/html.

new layout The HTML-ized layout is in the Agenceum Public Web area as 07-seah3. This took a couple of hours to work out, and it generally worked as expected. There is a minor mystery as to the best way to layer background images, and under what conditions they “pass through”.

So it goes.

The next big advertising push will be to make a much simpler “Simple Web Sites” advertisement. I need to keep things VERY simple, and at the same time be VERY CLEAR about the limits of the template approach. There is some balance to strike. I have some advertising ideas on this, and will pursue it in the coming weeks.

Development — Leave a comment
28
Apr 10

The Joy of CodeIgniter

I’ve mentioned CodeIgniter a few times in the past; it’s a PHP Framework modeled somewhat (I’m told) after Ruby On Rails, without the annoying Ruby part. I’ve downloaded it multiple times in the past and attempted to do something with it, but as usually I didn’t quite know where to start. Sure, I could have grabbed a tutorial, but there is a very specific way I learn and oftentimes I need to reformat the material to compensate for inaccuracies and ambiguities in the writing. Not efficient, usually frustrating, and so I avoid it.

I recently had the opportunity to work with someone else’s CodeIgniter project, and he gave me the 10-minute overview, which I will boil down into the following steps:

  • Installation consists of dropping the “system” folder and index.php file to your website. The index.php file is the “application start”, which points to all sorts of stuff in the system folder.
  • CodeIgniter interprets URLs as commands, starting with everything after the index.php. For example, the url http://mysite.com/index.php/hello/there/sam runs a command “hello” with the method “there” with the parameter “sam”.
  • CodeIgniter “routes” commands to a Controller (as in a Model-View-Controller pattern) . The command is the name of the controller file, in this case “hello.php”. The method corresponds to a function name in the controller file.
  • Each Controller can manipulate data through the Model class, and load web pages through the View class.
  • Controllers, Models, and Views all live in the system/application/ folder.

The rest of CodeIgniter is helpful classes to do things, like generating form data and accessing databases. What I like about it is that it provides a nice structure to develop PHP applications using some form of best practices. I just never knew where to START with these things.

My first CodeIgniter project is the “contact me” form on my design website. It does all kinds of form validation and then sends me an email in a NICE way. And, by using their provide form_validation class, it didn’t take the days it would have otherwise taken me to learn how to make this. It did take 8 hours of learning how it worked on-the-fly, but they were hours well spent figuring out how I wanted this to work.

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