Well, yeah.

My account syncs with my phone and my computer and there’s web access. Nothing else I have does that. I use it for blogging ideas, a todo list, a grocery list, a wishlist, gift ideas, and pretty much any other information I want to keep track of. It’s like what the Notes app for the iPhone should have been.

There’s a built-in interface for emailing notes to friends and several ways of organizing notes. You can put notes in different notebooks instead of categories and/or use tags. The search feature goes through the full text so organization isn’t even necessary if that’s not your thing.

Recently, I started keeping my recipes in Evernote so I could check them at the grocery store. I’ve made that notebook public because several of my friends wanted to try them. I’ve also taken the RSS feed from it and they are now shared other places as well.

Evernote has put a great deal of effort into making sure your information is available where and how you like it, which makes it the most useful web service I use (Twitter is a close second.).

I promise to post to this site more often.

If you’ve been here before, you’ve probably noticed that it’s had three different designs since it launched. It’s always hardest to design for yourself and as this site is the ultimate reflection of me and my work it’s been doubly hard to find what it needed to be. I’ve finally got a logo that is “me” and I’m confident that the rest of the design does what I want.

I haven’t been resting on my laurels though, I’m really excited by the possibilities of HTML5 so I created an new design for my Creative Librarian website based on the H5 Theme Template by Jeff Starr.

It’s really amazing how the combination of HTML5’s added semantic tags and CSS3’s advanced selectors make for cleaner code. I was so pleased with the result that now I want to redo the templates for this site in HTML5 .

That’s going to have to wait though. I’m almost finished with another project, another Wordpress theme based on the H5 Theme Template that will be freely distributed. It has 4 separate widget areas, support for the newly released post thumbnails and several color schemes. I’m so happy with it I intend to use it on one of my other sites.

With luck, 2010 is going to be a busy year for me but I’m making it a goal not to neglect this space.

Many young web designers view their craft the way I used to view pop culture. It's cool or it's crap. They mistake Style for Design, when the two things are not the same at all. Design communicates on every level. It tells you where you are, cues you to what you can do, and facilitates the doing. Style is tautological; it communicates stylishness. In visual terms, style is an aspect of design; in commercial terms, style can communicate brand attributes.

via Adobe Design Center – Columns and articles from experts on web design and motion graphics.

I know this has been linked everywhere. But that’s because it’s hits the nail right on the head.

Unlike other forms of art, graphic design is not just about taking paper and pen and letting the work flow.

Graphic designers have to help viewers get the message and help sell a service or product.

Creating a design for a client with little or no strategy just doesn’t work. Unlike traditional art, graphic design has to convey a very narrow message.

Developing a system for the graphic design process can help the designer achieve the best results.

Systematizing any sort of project, whether graphic design, web design, programming or otherwise, gets the work done faster, keeps the project organized and yields better results.

Here is a simple six-step graphic design process, which you may want to take wholesale or build on.

via Systematizing the Graphic Design Process | Webdesigner Depot.

I learned a lot of these techniques in school but a reminder never hurt.

Why Widgets?

One of the things that it seems every Wordpress theme must have these days is areas where users can use widgets or small, predefined pieces of code that users can use to add custom functionality to their site. On this site I use one to list my recent tweets and another to display design bookmarks, a third links to my recent posts. Widgets are so popular because they make personalized coding easy for users. I didn’t have to worry about any PHP or javascript to use them once I set up the widget sidebar.

How’s it Done?

1. First you create a file called functions.php in the theme folder.
2. Then you paste in the following code:

   <?php
   //Make widgets
   if ( function_exists( 'register_sidebar') )
       register_sidebar(array(
       	'name' => 'Widget Bar',
           'before_widget' => '<li>',
           'after_widget' => '</li>',
           'before_title' => '<h3>',
           'after_title' => '</h3>',
       ));?>

   • If you’re only putting in one sidebar, you don’t have to name it but it makes it easier to keep them straight if you have multiple ones. I use two. One for my index page and one for the rest of my site.
   • To make a second (or more) sidebar, just duplicate the code and give it a different name.
   • The html can be modified to whatever you need.
3. Now you just need to insert the sidebar wherever you want the widgets to show up (not strictly in the site’s sidebar). Just paste this code where you want the widgets, changing the name to the one you gave it in the functions.php file.

   <ul>
   <?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar("Widget Bar") ) : ?>
   <?php endif; ?>
   </ul>

That’s it! Just install the widgets you want as plugins and set them up under the Appearance pane.

The Original

Enter the CSS font stack. Using font-family you can specify several fonts in order so that if the user’s computer doesn’t have the first, it checks for the second and so forth. But designers have always wanted more control and variety for their projects.

Workarounds

There are a couple of ways this has been handled. The first is using images for the text. The problem with this is that is takes the pages a lot longer to download. It also makes it impossible for people with disabilities like blindness to use the website.
Another work-around is a javascript, flash combo like sIFR or cufón. The first can be tricky to set up and requires the browser to have flash installed. The second only uses a font converter and javascript but results in text that can’t be selected or copied.

The New Toy

The lowest learning curve solution and the one that doesn’t require dealing with scripts is @font-face. You load the fonts on your server and link them in your style sheet. Then you can use them as normal. To give the developers credit, this has been available in Internet Explorer for years but it’s only been available in the other two most popular browsers (Firefox and Safari) in the most recent releases.
The next stumbling block is licensing. Very few fonts have been released with licenses that allow online use (font foundries are working on this).

Font Squirrel has @font-face Kits.  You browse through a list of freely available type families with web licensing and download a kit with the fonts in regular and IE’s proprietary format. You also get a copy of the license and a CSS file with the rules needed to include the fonts in your website.
I’m using Medio for the body copy and Caviar Dreams for the headings and navigation on this site. Just load the fonts on your website, include the rules in your CSS and use them in your font stacks as normal. If you want a to use a free font not available on Font Squirrel and you have a PC, Microsoft has a free application called WEFT to create an eot file from the regular files. Just double check the license. We want font makers to stay comfortable letting their creations be used.

Design, art really, is a form of communication. Whether it’s emotions or a direct message, they are all trying to communicate something. The rules of design are like the rules of language. Line, shape, value, space, they are the constants that allow the viewer to interpret the message. Some are inborn in all humans, others are taught to us by our culture. Only once you know the rules can you break them properly without losing your viewer. An infamous example on the Internet is programmers who go back later and can’t decipher their own code. They broke the rules by not commenting properly so the message is lost.

Breaking the rules properly draws attention to a desired part of the message without obscuring the whole.

The first thing I noticed when I opened it for the first time was that the info pane is back on the right side. Yay! Having it on the bottom was hard to read. Although the wood background I’ve loved since I first got it now bothers me and I miss the option to change imagery it used to have.

There’s a link to the iPhone app on the iTunes store in the preferences. Once it’s installed on your device you get an option to use a dummy library or sync your own. Connect your phone to your computer and open the desktop application. Your device shows up in the left-hand pane on top under your list of libraries. A screen like the one in iTunes pops up and there is a code you have to enter to link the two libraries. Then you can sync and import the data from your  desktop to your device. You can import all the items or just selected shelves.

In the mobile app you get all of the content you specified plus the people you’ve loaned stuff to and what they have. There’s a built in search function but unfortunately the library content isn’t available to the iPhone’s overall search function.

There isn’t a way to add content on the go or edit the content but you can email records or follow a link to Amazon. The visual design is entirely consistent with the desktop application while also being appropriately formatted for mobile use. I’d like a little more customization ability but it’s good for a first release.