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Category: creativity

Jul3

Boulder Digital Work

Boulder Digital Work
As the internet landscape has evolved at a blistering pace, universities have been left behind and often teaching skills and concepts that are years out of date. I was excited to read about The University of Colorado’s Boulder Digital Work program. Their stated mission is, “developing today and tomorrow’s digital leaders and entrepreneurs.”

This sounds like a very forward thinking program and hopefully it will produce a lot of local talent with a much better understanding of the digital realm than most schools offer today. Courses include Interaction Design, Experience Design, Digital Branding, Social Networks, and Software Development.

I hope this program is successful and that it will help to continue the growth of Boulder as a hub for innovation.

Jun6

How to set up a sexy jQuery TextMate bundle

Here at Imulus we’re massive fans of jQuery. We use it on a lot of our projects. We’re also fans of TextMate, an awesome text editor produced by the folks at MacroMates. Over the last few years we’ve refined our TextMate bundles (code highlighting and language recognition packages) to work ideally within the Imulus process.

So, during my recent love affair with jQuery I’ve heavily relied on their documentation section to look up specific functions and commands. And while their documentation is awesome, it’s still a slow process. Luckily, an awesome guy named Karl Swedberg has put together a beautiful jQuery bundle for TextMate that has tons of snippets for common jQuery tasks. And, it’s free!

Installation

Head over to GitHub and grab the lastest version of the bundle. When you download it you’ll get a weird filename like this:

kswedberg-jquery-tmbundle-b0622e4f889112c37e03400a6a3e63241ab29c31.zip

Unzip the file and change the folder name (which is the same as above) to:

jquery.tmbundle

Open up TextMate and then double click the jQuery bundle file you’ve just created. Boom! The bundle is installed.

Making it work within HTML documents

By default the jQuery bundle is set to only work within .js files. However, if you’re planning on using it within HTML pages you’ll need to do another few steps of work. First, copy the following code to your clipboard:

{    name = 'source.js.jquery.embedded.html';
            begin = '(?:^\s+)?(<)((?i:script))\b(?![^>]*/>)';
            end = '(?<=</(script|SCRIPT))(>)(?:\s*\n)?';
            beginCaptures = {
                1 = { name = 'punctuation.definition.tag.html'; };
                2 = { name = 'entity.name.tag.script.html'; };
            };
            endCaptures = { 2 = { name = 'punctuation.definition.tag.html'; }; };
            patterns = (
                {    include = '#tag-stuff'; },
                {    begin = '(?<!</(?:script|SCRIPT))(>)';
                    end = '(</)((?i:script))';
                    captures = {
                        1 = { name = 'punctuation.definition.tag.html'; };
                        2 = { name = 'entity.name.tag.script.html'; };
                    };
                    patterns = (
                        {    name = 'comment.line.double-slash.js';
                            match = '(//).*?((?=</script)|$\n?)';
                            captures = { 1 = { name = 'punctuation.definition.comment.js'; }; };
                        },
                        {    name = 'comment.block.js';
                            begin = '/\*';
                            end = '\*/|(?=</script)';
                            captures = { 0 = { name = 'punctuation.definition.comment.js'; }; };
                        },
                        {    include = '#php'; },
                        {    include = 'source.js'; },
                    );
                },
            );
        },

Then open up the TextMate bundle editor and drop down the HTML arrow.

html-selection

You should now see a huge list of snippets, commands, and preferences. Located in this list is an HTML language icon, it looks like this html-icon. Once this is selected you should see a large amount of code to the right. Paste the above code directly in the following position after patterns = (

patterns-paste

That’s it, you’re done. How you can access tons of jQuery snippets and code examples directly inside TextMate.

Jan12

Commercials Based on Viral Videos: Cute? Or Lazy?

bluI haven’t posted a critique on motion graphics in a while, and I know how much you have all waited and pined for another so here it is. What is the deal with all these commercials stealing their ideas from viral videos? (she says in her best Seinfeld voice). I get that it’s kind of cute and funny in an inside joke sort of way. One of the funniest music videos is Weezer’s Pork and Beans. This is mainly because they’re intentionally taking the viral videos that we all know and love and using that as a media.

What bothers me are the commercials that steal concepts from viral videos and it is unclear if they’re trying to be cute and pay homage to the original or if their just blatantly ripping it off. The video “Drive Through Rap” was remade into a commercial for Taco Bell. Personally I don’t think this is an homage, this is just a rip off.

Recently I saw a stop motion commercial that looked suspiciously like the animations from BLU. In this case I’m not so sure this was a rip off, because BLU themselves may have been responsible for the commercial. I unfortunately don’t know enough about the company (or who the commercial is for) to say for sure.

If any of you know any more please let me know. I am constantly amazed by the impact that YouTube has on our culture. (Please note, I intentionally left out the sand art commercial because I wasn’t sure if that was a viral video before or after the commercials — or if it counts as a viral video.)

Nov29

Typography

Okay, I admit it… I have neglected my fonts. I’d like to blame it on the fact that I am a web designer, and web friendly fonts and extremely limited but that is a poor excuse. Good web designers would slap my hand for even thinking of such a blasphemous thing. This may be a knee jerk, ‘duh’ comment, but I pledged to myself I was going to write my blogs as I think them, so here I am.

From here on out I will dedicate a small portion of my day to really study and get to know my fonts. Even if it is something as simple as typing in a custom phrase in Font Book, rotating through each font, and writing down my favorites and their possible uses. I need to break out of my Helvetica and Univers cycle.

Nov26

Packaging You Keep Coming Back To

Something that I hear often about packaging is the idea of “catching the eye”: making the packaging stand out more than the rest. This is important because there can be a variety of different products and let’s face it, people are just plain drawn to pretty things. Well, I’ve just bought the pretty product, what now?

What makes me excited about the product that I have just purchased are the little Easter eggs waiting for me once I start to explore the packaging. One example that I have always loved is the Herbal Essences shampoo and conditioner. The back of the bottle has well laid out, well crafted copy that makes you feel good about the product. The quirkiness of the copy is the fact that it’s not the same bland thing you read on every bottle, the verbiage on the bottle is crafted towards the specialty of that particular product. For example, the volumizing line’s directions will say “massage me in. close your eyes, enjoy, then rinse. voila! you’ve got my full attention.”, or the line for added moisture reads “lather up, soak your head. rinse and repeat. let your hair drink it up.” Herbal Essences is so proud of the copy on their bottles, you can even read them on their web site.

I think my favorite part about this particular line of products is on the back of each is a trivia question. The clever part about this is the answer to the question is not given to you directly, but is on the back of the adjoining product. For example, the answer to the conditioner’s question is on the shampoo bottle and vice-versa. Though they aren’t particularly hard trivia questions, it is still a smart way of making the consumer think about buying the second product from your line. Furthermore, the shape of the bottles fit together creating a visual cue that these products belong together. Bravo, Herbal Essences.