Finamore Design

On Mon­day, Feb. 2, at 7:30pm we revived our Annual Review in the Dig­i­tal Media pro­gram at Drexel University.

At this event we high­lighted the best stu­dent work cre­ated in Dig­i­tal Media classes for the cal­en­dar year 2008.

The event was a suc­cess with approx­i­mately 125 guests, includ­ing: stu­dents, fac­ulty, fam­ily and friends.

Sam­ples from the show can be seen at http://www.digm.drexel.edu/2009_annual_review

Trig­ger­ing a back­ground audio track on and off in Action­Script 3.0 is a bit more involved than in pre­vi­ous ver­sion of the lan­guage. (more…)

I finally received my offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion cer­ti­fy­ing that I have com­pleted the Web Devel­op­ment pro­gram at New York University’s School of Con­tin­u­ing Pro­fes­sional Stud­ies. I com­pleted the pro­gram with a 4.o aver­age. The classes I took included: PHP Pro­gram­ming, MySQL with PHP, Web Devel­op­ment With XHTML and CSS, Web Archi­tec­ture and Infra­struc­ture, and Flash: Advanced Intensive.

Where We’ve Been, Where We Are Today, Where We Are Headed, and How We Will Get There.

Yes­ter­day
The WWW was released by CERN for pub­lic use in 1992. Instantly, it was used as a place where com­pa­nies put infor­ma­tion for ‘easy’ pub­lic access. Mis­sion state­ments, prod­uct lists, press releases, etc. The orig­i­nal sites were entirely tex­tual in nature, using hyper­text links to nav­i­gate from page to page.

A year later the first graphics-based web browser, Mosaic, was intro­duced. And still images started find­ing their way to the web. As con­nec­tiv­ity speeds grad­u­ally increased, graph­ics became a viable option, and web­sites started to get more and more sophisticated.

New pro­gram­ming lan­guages like PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL started appear­ing. These increased what we could do with the medium, and we started see­ing bet­ter qual­ity still images, audio, and video, and on-line purchasing.

By the mid Nineties, brand­ing started to play a big­ger role in web design. Com­pa­nies started to focus more on the user’s expe­ri­ence and how it related back to their cor­po­rate image. In order to achieve opti­mum brand­ing, some sites opted for the ‘cool fac­tor’ of tech­nolo­gies like shock­wave and flash. But this came at a price. Larger files meant slower down­load times, and there was the plug-in issue. Few peo­ple wanted to down­load a plug-in installer, run the installer, restart their browser, then go back to the site only to sit and watch a load­ing bar. File size and down­load times was a big issue when deal­ing with a 9600bps modem. Even though modems were get­ting faster, peo­ple started to move away from flash-based sites. (more…)

Adobe has launched a new ser­vice, CSS ADSVISOR, that lets you find solu­tions to CSS and browser com­pat­i­bil­ity issues, share solu­tions and workarounds you’ve dis­cov­ered with the com­mu­nity, and com­ment on and improve exist­ing solutions.

Find solu­tions for browser spe­cific bugs in Inter­net Explorer, Mozilla/Firefox, Opera or Safari or CSS prop­erty issues,including Back­grounds, Bor­ders, Col­ors, Floats, Fonts, Mar­gins, Padding, Posi­tion­ing, Text and Width/Height.

GenesisInc.TV is an inde­pen­dent dig­i­tal video net­work and on-line com­mu­nity designed to enter­tain and explore our com­mon tech­ni­cal, cor­po­rate, spir­i­tual and reli­gious his­tory. Their pro­gram “Gen­e­sis Inc.” is a sit­com that shows a light-hearted view of the inter-office pol­i­tics of cor­po­ra­tion respon­si­ble for the cre­ation of the planet Earth. Their orig­i­nal web­site was put up in a hurry to spot­light their con­tent. They soon real­ized that they were not pro­ject­ing the brand image they wanted for their program.

Chal­lenge: After dis­cus­sions with the client, the goals for the new brand image and site were as fol­lows: – Develop a cor­po­rate iden­tity that could serve the dual pur­pose of being both the iden­tity for the cor­po­ra­tion named in the show and the iden­tity for their web­site. – Develop a clear and con­sis­tent nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem for the .tv site – The design must be easy to inte­grate with their exist­ing data­base sys­tem. – Client wanted to add both a Blog, Forums, and a Store Front to the website.

Results: The web­site pro­motes the Gen­e­sis Inc. iden­tity and is now a use­ful tool for gen­er­at­ing rev­enue. The client now proudly pro­motes their con­tent and are gen­er­at­ing more and more hits every day.

I am con­stantly being asked what RSS is and how to use it. Luck­ily, my friends over getusb.info wrote an easy to under­stand arti­cle all about RSS.

Check it out…

How can I use RSS?

At GetUSB.info we receive emails from time-to-time ask­ing about the RSS feed fea­ture we pro­vide and how it can be used. Today we are tak­ing a few min­utes to cover what an RSS feed is, how you can use it, what you need and how to val­i­date the ones you sub­scribe too.

When you have decided to build a web­site, before you open dreamweaver or pho­to­shop or any other appli­ca­tion that is going to help you com­plete thiis task, there are some ques­tions you must first consider:

1. What are you going to communicate?
2. What is your cri­te­ria for success?
3. Who is the audience?
4. What tech­nolo­gies is the audi­ence using?

The answers to these ques­tions will help you stay focused on your end goal, build­ing a suc­cess­ful web­site. Once you have these answered you can then move on to decid­ing how to deve­l­ope the look and feel of your site. (more…)

Color The­ory is one of those sub­jects that takes years to fully under­stand. Some peo­ple have even turned it into a career. Here I will try to cover some of the basics the­o­ries of Color The­ory and show you some ideas you should think about when devel­op­ing designs of your own. (more…)