February 12, 2010

Firebug for Firefox, and site improvements

Filed under: Design, Interactive Design — tr.slate @ 5:19 pm

I must admit, I have not always been a huge fan of Firefox for Mac, but the plugins available for FF are just great. Firebug in particular is a awesome tool to debug the xhtml and css on sites like this one, and if you’ve been here before you may notice small changes here and there. I really went through the site, trying as much as possible to adhere to a pretty strict grid, but the glory of xhtml and css is it’s not the same thing for all users. Firebug really helped me cut down the time of tracking down lines of css by having a great split screen UI in the FF browser that very much resembles the split screen of Adobe’s Dreamweaver.

The icing on the cake is that in addition to viewing the code, you can alter the code and see a real-time version of what that alteration would look like. Mind=Blown.

February 4, 2010

Glory to the Canon i9900

Filed under: Design — tr.slate @ 12:26 am

Back when I was attending Ringling, I held a variety  of jobs–everything from making espresso at the local opera house to mixing paint at a Home Depot. Somehow through the trials and tribulations of all these jobs I saved enough to purchase my first good quality printer, a Canon i9900. At the time I had to print on several different paper types at sizes from the very small to 13″x 19″ almost on a daily basis, and the i9900’s 8 separate ink tanks appealed to me. Also part of my choice was based on the Canon not being locked into a specific paper like many of the similarly equipped Epson models were. So I purchased the i9900, and it became a cornerstone of my computer design setup. (more…)