CYBERZOO interactive

The Look That Says Book

admin — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:40:23 +0000

Hyphenation and justification: It’s not just for print any more. Armed with good taste, a special unicode font character called the soft hyphen, and a bit o’ JavaScript jiggery, you can justify and hyphenate web pages with the best of them. Master the zero width space. Use the Hyphenator.js library to bottle fame, brew glory, and put a stopper in death. Create web pages that hyphenate and justify on the fly, even when the layout reflows in response to changes in viewport size.

Strategic Content Management

admin — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:40:21 +0000

Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the project’s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project’s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after we’ve installed and customized the CMS?

FREE Course: How to Succeed as a Creative Professional

admin — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:10:31 +0000

How to Succeed as a Creative Professional

Just this week my buddy Mark McGuinness sent over a fabulous free offer, his new course: The Creative Pathfinder.

You might remember Mark from his ebook, Time Management for Creative People. Kudos to Mark as a mention of his ebook made it to Mashable as well: 10 Essential Free E-Books for Web Designers.

If you are interested in his course, keep on reading…

FREE Course on How to Succeed as a Creative Professional

If you’d like to inject some inspiration and momentum into your creative career, feel free to enrol on my new course: The Creative Pathfinder.

It’s a 25-week programme designed to equip you with the creative and professional skills you need to succeed in your chosen career path – whether you’re an employee, freelancer or creative entrepreneur.

Things you’ll learn include:

why following your heart makes sound business sense
the four most powerful types of creative thinking
how to handle a creative block – when you’re supposed to be the creative pro
why opportunities just land in some people’s lap (and how you can be one of them)
the most effective ways to make a living from your creativity
why having a resume could handicap your career
how to turn your website into a magnet for new business and career opportunities
the weird and profitable properties of intellectual property
how to sell without selling out
what to do with all the money you earn
why other people seem so weird – and what to do about it
how to succeed in the face of overwhelming odds

Every week, you’ll receive a new lesson via e-mail, containing:

An article explaining the what, why and how of the topic
A practical worksheet for you to download and complete
Links to additional resources (articles, books, e-books etc — most of which are free)

And it won’t cost you a penny. Sign-up on the enrolment page and you will receive the entire course of 25 lessons for free.

Since I launched The Creative Pathfinder on Lateral Action last week, over 1,200 students have signed up. It would be great if you could join us on the journey…

Mark McGuinness
Lateral Action | Wishful Thinking | twitter @markmcguinness

Enjoy…

NEED MORE? Then get over to Designers who Blog to discover hundreds of blogs posting about graphic and web design, marketing, illustration, photography, advertising, branding, writing …

Budget Cuts

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:05:00 +0000

Due to recent budget cuts and the rising cost of electricity, gas and oil, as well as current market conditions, the Light at the End of the Tunnel has been turned off.

Apps vs. the Web

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 10:51:19 +0000

There’s an app for that, and you’re the folks who are creating it. But should you design a web-based application, or an iPhone app? Each approach has pluses and minuses—not to mention legions of religiously rabid supporters. Apple promotes both approaches (they even gave the web a year-long head start before beginning to sell apps in the store), and the iPhone’s Safari browser supports HTML5 and CSS3 and brags a fast JavaScript engine. Yet many companies and individuals with deep web expertise choose to create iPhone apps instead of web apps that can do the same thing. Explore both approaches and learn just about everything you’ll need to know if you choose to create an iPhone app—from the lingo, to the development process, to the tricks that can smooth the path of doing business with Apple.

Good Help is Hard to Find

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 10:51:18 +0000

Help content gets no respect. For one thing, it is content, and our horse-before-cart industry is only now beginning to seriously tackle content strategy. For another, we assume that our site is so usable, nobody will ever need the help content anyway. Typically, no one is in charge of the help content and no strategy exists to keep it up to date. On most sites, help content is hard to find, poorly written, blames the user, and turns a mildly frustrating experience into a lousy one. It’s time to rethink how we approach this part of our site. Done well, help content offers tremendous potential to earn customer loyalty. By learning to plan for and create useful help content, we can turn frustrated users into our company’s biggest fans.

No One Nos: Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas

admin — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 22:32:54 +0000

You can’t create what clients need when you’re too busy saying yes to everything they want. As a user experience designer, it’s your job to say no to bad ideas and pointless practices. But getting to no is never easy. Proven techniques that can turn vocal negatives into positive experiences for you, the client, and most importantly, the end-user include citing best practices and simple but powerful business cases; proving your point with numbers; shifting focus from what to who; using the “positive no”; and, when necessary, pricing yourself out.

Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings

admin — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 22:32:53 +0000

Too many kickoff meetings squander the busiest, most expensive people’s time reiterating what everyone already knows. If every meeting is an opportunity, why waste your first one? By asking stakeholders tough questions before the kick-off, and using the meeting itself to explore ideas and build relationships, you can turn a room of mutually suspicious turf battlers into an energetic team with shared ownership of the end-product and the kind of bond that can sustain the group through the challenges ahead.

JavaScript Minification Part II

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:59:54 +0000

Variable naming can be a source of coding angst for humans trying to understand code. Once you’re sure that a human doesn’t need to interpret your JavaScript code, variables simply become generic placeholders for values. Nicholas C. Zakas shows us how to further minify JavaScript by replacing local variable names with the YUI Compressor.

SVG with a little help from Raphaël

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:59:53 +0000

Want to make fancy, interactive, scalable vector graphics (SVGs) that look beautiful at any resolution and degrade with grace? Brian Suda urges you to consider Raphaël for your SVG heavy lifting.