The Earth-Toned Pill

Link: http://csshowto.com/layout/psd-to-csshtml-in-easy-steps-part-1/

If you're a website front-end designer who is unfortunate enough to depend on others for the actual coding piece of the site development puzzle, then this tutorial is for you!

The folks at CSS How To.com have a massively-extensive 4 part series dedicated to the task that will help get your skills up to par.

Check it out by clicking on the link above!

I've never been a huge fan of Jean 'Moebius' Girard's work (if for no other reason than the fact that I came to his work later in life), but I am quite fond of his character designs and storyboard work for the failed Jodorowsky film adaptation of my favorite book, Dune.

The picture above is one of his fantastic character designs for the film of the character Liet Kynes, the Imperial Ecologist of Arrakis.

Check out this page on DuneInfo.com for more of his excellent work on this unfortunately doomed project.

The Sardukar and the Baron Harkonnen in particular are great!

Link: http://www.helpthehoneybees.com/

A friend sent me the link to this Flash site today, and I was really impressed with the complexity and simplicity of the site Häagen-Dazs® put together for their save the honey bees initiative.

The colors are soft and natural, very balanced and in tune with the subject matter. And while it has a good degree of interactivity, it doesn't overdo it on the visuals at all.

Check this great site out when you get a chance!

I'm going to try and register for at least one day of this conference, which should be well worth the money spent to register for it.

If you're a web designer and live in (or can make it to) Orlando between October 13th and 16th, you should check it out if you can.

View the schedule of events here.

One of my favorite web design sites, Web Designer Wall, has a great post you'll want to check out that lists 47 great Javascript plugins you can integrate into your web designs that you can use to enhance the user experience and functionality of your sites. As a bonus, they even include samples of the plugins in action!

Some of them, such as Lightbox and jCarousel I've used before. But the list includes many more that you'll find highly useful!

Check the list out here.

In doing my latest project for IvoryJones.net, I found that the standard CSS text-formatted list navigation just didn't quite fit right, but I was loathe to resort to using pure images as an alternative.

After searching around the web a bit I found a great CSS solution to my problem that turned out to be an wesome compromise: Matt Varone's text-based image navigation.

This solution is great because it allows you to use the power and flexibility of CSS in order to integrate images into your standard list-style nav bar. Another reason I love it is because it uses only a single image that contains all the different navigation items and states, which makes load times fast and keeps the overall file size small.

To see my slightly-modified version of his method in action, check out this.

For anyone that is interested in critiquing or having their logo work critiqued, try out LogoDesign.com.

I stumbled on the great critique section they have by way of their podcast today. They don't have a ton of traffic going through here, but what you see and read should still be quite inspirational and help get your creative juices going!

Ready for the ultimate geek peripheral guaranteed to make you an instant target for murder by all your friends and coworkers? Well feast your eyes on this:

The Optimus Maximus Keyboard.

My friends over at Thinkgeek.com began selling these recently, and went out of stock within a couple weeks. Don't worry though, more will be in stock by the time my b-day rolls around again...

So why is this bad boy so special? Let me explain:

The Art Lebedev design studio in Russia designed this bad boy some time ago and has just now managed to get it into production. This keyboard is extra-special, becuase in addition to the USB2 hub and SD card slot, each key on this keyboard is actually a tiny OLED screen that can display any gif or Quicktime video @48x48 pixel resolution.

That's right, 113 programmable OLED screens.

So what if it costs a whopping $1,600? I always wanted a really good reason to holdup a liquor store that didn't involve a crack habit...