Donna Vitan

I’m a little late to the game but I thought I would share this great little tidbit with you. Factory Girl is hosting a contest to design a poster for the movie. You’ll be able to download the contest package at FactoryGirlMovie.net which contains all you need to create your poster. And you can follow the rest of the directions on their site. I’m sharing this for all those artistically inclined so go forth and compete.
The grand prize includes the winner’s full sized poster signed by the cast of the movie, a private screening of the movie for the winner and 25 friends, and the winner’s poster advertised in their local area and on FactoryGirlMovie.net

Contest ends January 31, 2007. Good luck!

Indeed, commercial software is being offered for download for FREE at giveawayoftheday.com. Software that would otherwise cost you some hard earned cash could be available for free. Granted, you have a 24 hour window to download the software but did I mention that it would be free? It’s worth checking out, even if some of the software are obscure.

Try ResizR, a web application that will resize your image. Especially useful for those one-off resizes and you don’t have an image editor handy. There’s also Microsoft’s PowerToy Image Resizer which, after installation, will add a right click context menu that will allow you to resize one or multiple images at once.

I thought I would mention this for a friend of mine who wanted to resize an image to meet the requirements of an ad. I asked him what it was for and tried to explain resolution versus size which ended up confusing him even more. Anyway, I hope these help out anybody else that just want to straight up resize an image.

Oh god, I’m so cheese with that title. Anyhow, on with the article.

I usually start a design out by opening a new document and adding all the required text and elements I need, such headlines, details, legal and logos. Depending on the images, I need a font that will work well with the overall theme or vice versa. More often than not, people can work with a limited pool of fonts on unlimited projects. Such is the case with people I work with, and I wonder how they get on with it. Their prevailing argument is that too much time can be wasted going through the font list, which is true. Taking into account that I have 1200+ fonts at the moment, I do spend a fair amount of time trying to find that perfect font.

At this point, I have so many fonts that I haven’t had the need or inclination to find more. Whenever I’m looking for something different I pop on over to 2 great sites that offer free downloads of fonts. Granted the majority will be free but the fonts available can be freeware, shareware, demos or public domain depending on the use. The downloads often include readme files with details on what you can do with the font. SearchFreeFonts.com has a huge library of 13,000+ free fonts and 23,000+ commercial fonts. And DaFont.com offers over 7,000+ fonts which are sometimes available in both Windows and MAC. Each site has their own features with articles and tips sections, so check them out. Either way, that’s a whole lot of free fonts.

I prefer to have a variety when it comes to fonts and a great way to manage them all is to use a font manager. The Font Thing is a fantastic app that allows you to browse, install, uninstall, view, print, copy, and delete multiple TrueType fonts at once. You can also write notes for each font, categorize them by serif, sans serif, script and whatnot, preview and save sample text, and even place them collections. The best part is that it’s FREE.

Update: I have come across another site where you can download even more free fonts at UrbanFonts.com

• SearchFreeFonts.com
• DaFont.com
• UrbanFonts.com

Then, use this to manage them: The Font Thing

I’m currently working on a new site right now, www.hillpowers.com which is a non-profit organization that promotes the advancement of performance art. I hope that I give this project some justice and that the Jaimie Hill And Tammy-Lynne Powers Memorial Foundation get the attention they deserve. As of now, Hill/Powers is in its infancy and I look forward to making it grow with the addition of a gallery, events calendar, newsletter and donation system.

With every project, I make it a point to at least google similar sites in order to get a feel of what it’s all about. It also helps me to know what information, technologies, services and key elements I should include or propose to the client. For a charity site, it is definitely important to have some sort of donation system. In my initial proposal, I suggested using Paypal but I found that many of the Canadian charities that I have visited have used www.canadahelps.org. I will definitely have to look into that one more closely before I go ahead and put that on the plate. If anyone has any experience with charity donation systems, don’t be shy and let me know.

The thing that REALLY gets me excited about this is that I finally started a layout with CSS. The layout for Hill/Powers isn’t mind blowing, it’s actually quite simple but I feel that the advantage of going with CSS is that I have more power creatively without the hassle of changing tables via templates. I do realize that one should be weary of jumping on the trendy bandwagon and stick to what has worked in the past. However, you’ve got to keep up with the times, especially with Web 2.0 rolling out. I’m not saying goodbye to tables at all, I just think that this project will definitely help me explore more of what CSS can do besides formatting text.

The strange thing is, I woke up this morning thinking of the CSS possibilities with this project. I barely had my eyes open and I was thinking about what I was going to do with that left column I kept open for a possible menu/sponsor space. It was like I was coding in my mind’s eye. You could say I’m revved up about it and I know it’ll be there with me in the back of my mind until this is completed. But a project is never really complete, not for a website anyway. I often get this way when working on a new project, well, any project actually that’s why I have to turn my brain off on weekends.

Ah yes, let me enjoy my weekend then. Happy Dad’s day too!