February 3rd, 2010
In this series of blog posts I introduce my favourite PHP libraries.
Today’s library is:
SLIR
SLIR – or ”Smart Lencioni Image Resizer” – was developed by Joe Lencioni. It’s purpose is on-the-fly scaling and cropping of images.
SLIR works by scaling the image on request, rather than on import.
The benefit is that you can change your image sizes on the fly. If your page layout changes, you can just request images with a size that fits.
It’s basically a clever PHP script that “acts” as like image, combined with a .htaccess-file, that disguises the PHP-file as an actual image file.
This …
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January 10th, 2010
The background painting on this page is by the German painter Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528).
It’s from 1503 and the title of the painting is ”Das große Rasenstück” or ”The Large Turf”.
I decided that I wanted a real painting for the background, so I browsed around the web, came across this one and loved it instantly. It has amazing details in both color and perspective. And the colors made a nice palette for the rest of my design.
Considering the paintings’ year of origin, it’s incredibly modern looking!
It does have this special pre-renaissance or late medieval feel about it, though (those …
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December 4th, 2009
The problem
Recently I was asked by an e-commerce client if I could create a banner on his website that would let visitors know whether the phone hotline of the store is currently open or closed based on store opening hours.
In a PHP-based CMS the only task involved would have been writing a function outputting some HTML for use in the banner. So this should have been a no-brainer, had it not been for the fact that my client’s website is run in a proprietary, hosted (and heavily outdated) CMS with no server-side access what so ever!
My first thought was then …
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October 12th, 2009
A good sign is unambigous. Its message is clear and its purpose immediately understandable in the context.
We’ve all seen bad signage with obscure wording or unclear use of symbols.
The kind that makes it necessary for you to stop and wonder what it means or why it’s even there.
But sometimes it’s not just lack of meaning or motivation that makes a sign bad.
Some signs convey angriness in their tone of wording thus bloating the message and risking to make recipients feel like they’re being told off. As if the sender of the message has another agenda that doesn’t really belong …
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