Oodles of Doodles

Ryan and Peter put together another great art show featuring  some really fun characters they developed for the show. Held at Screen Ink, visitors could pick from three different t-shirt designs and screen print them right there. I used my HF20 to take couple of shots. Here is the video. Enjoy!

Dreamweaver: Create HTML tables from CSV files

Using Dreamweaver you can easily create HTML tables from existing—tab or comma delimited—CSV files. 

Here is an example CSV file I created using Google Docs.

Make sure to save the file as a CSV file.

Planning for Successful Web Site Redesign

Web site redesign takes a lot of time—designer and client time—and as such should be undertaken with a great deal of preparation and planning. Well prepared and planned for redesign will reduce anxiety about budgets, time-lines and make it easier for designers/developers to execute it.

1. Why do a redesign?

Nelnet team won six ADDY awards for Resume Richard

Last night at the 17th Annual ADDY awards, the Nelnet team won six Gold ADDY awards for a ResumeRichard.

And here are the categories:

1. Website, Consumer Flash, Services
2. Micro or Mini Sites
3. Internet Comercials: Sticking Out
4. Internet Comercials: What Makes the Cut
5. Internet Comercials: All About the Presentation
6. Online Campaign

The Killigans CD release photoshoot

Fellow designer Ben Swift is also a drummer for The Killigans who just last night played a show at the Knickerbockers to promote their new CD "Honor."  They sounded awesome and the crowd loved it.

jQuery UI: Add Close button to dynamically added tabs

When working with jQuery UI tabs it is really easy to dynamically add tabs. You just use UI's "add" method as specified in the documentation: .tabs( 'add' , url , label , [index] ). But there is no method for dynamically adding a close button so the tabs can be removed. Here is a quick little script I wrote to do just that.

$(function() {
		//DECLARE FUNCTION: removetab
		var removetab = function(tabselector, index) {
			$(".removetab").click(function(){
				$(tabselector).tabs('remove',index);
			});
		 };

		//create tabs
		$("#tabs").tabs({
		   add: function(event, ui) { 
		   		//select newely opened tab
				$(this).tabs('select',ui.index);
				//load function to close tab
				removetab($(this), ui.index);
		   },
		   show: function(event, ui) { 
		   		//load function to close selected tabs
				removetab($(this), ui.index);
		   }
		});
		
		//load new tab
		$(".addtab").click(function(){
			var href=$(this).attr("href");
			var title=$(this).attr("title");
			$("#tabs").tabs( 'add' , href , title+'  ');
			return false;
		});

	});

Usage is simple. Just add class ".addtab" to the links you want opened in a tab, and make sure the link has "title" attribute set as it is used for the tab label.

Add Tab

Nelnet Government Services Website

This is a small website I worked on for one of our internal clients. All functionality, except sending email, is handled on the front-end using jQuery.

Home Page

Services Page

Just got published in HOW!

I am so thrilled that team Nelnet is one of this year's winners of the In-HOWse Design Award. You can see our work in the February 2010 issue of HOW magazine.

I was involved in the interactive side of the campaign.

You can never have enough helpers

Here is a peak at my home office and my loyal helper Merki showing me what keys to press.

Photo is courtesy of my wife Khara.

Google Browser Size App: a new tool added to my toolbox

"Google Browser Size is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the "90%" contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger." Read full description here.

I am excited to use this tool as a part of design presentation. I just wish it had a heat-map option similar to 3M's Visual Attention Service, so my clients can not only see what's "above the fold", but also a heat map of what elements draw get most attention.