Bryanbell.com

Big Changes Coming

This time in my life has been the most dynamic. Everything about who I am and what I do has or is about to totally change. A huge reason for this is the new edition to my now budding family. On Jun 1st at 12:04AM, my wife gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, who for the last few weeks has continually astounded me. We named her Emily Elizabeth Bell.

So far being a dad has been a wonderful experience. Luckily, her temperament and sleeping habits have made life much easier than I expected. (knock on wood)

Adding to the transformative change having a child brings, I've also decided to leave my position at the Kern County Superintendent of Schools, to pursue new and more challenging outside opportunities. A move which I hope will allow me to grow as a designer, and coder, while at the same time give me the luxury of having a more flexible schedule. This has been a profoundly difficult decision for me to make, due to my attachment to my work, my clients, and especially to my friends and co-workers at KCSOS.

Working with good friends like Erin Clerico, Lydia Rowles, Bob Johnson, Dinah Campbell, and many others, has been a great experience. I will miss spending my days with them, but we are friends and will continue to be friends. What I think I will miss most is being cheerleader and coach for a long list of partners and clients. Not least of which is Pat Delaney who has played a very large part in the success of the KCSOS Webteam, and who documented our relationship on his blog. (thanks Pat!)

I look to the near future with some apprehension, and an ever increasing sense of optimism. Wish me luck.

Manila Theme: SimpleTabs

I'm making available a New Manila theme I call SimpleTabs. Modeled after the simple tabbed format of Basecamp. This CSS based theme is simple and easy to modify.

-Enjoy

Download Here

Zaadz and the Evanescent Design Crew

It's been a busy last few weeks. just last night Roundtwo opened it's doors with a site I designed, and today Cameron Moll did an excellent write up on the template work we did with Brian Biddle, Jared Christensen, Jason Santa Maria, Ryan Sims, for a new business-servises firm called Zaadz.

Zaadz and the Evanescent Design Crew: "Combine talent across the country with a solid project scope and short timeline and you get the following achievement. A couple months back, Zaadz, Inc. was in the process of constructing a unique site builder system for small biz owners, and they were seeking top-notch design contractors. Even better, they wanted CSS/standards-based templates to complement their top-notch technology, a far cry from the antiquated templates you’ll find in most of the other site builders. With Zaadz’s full trust in hand, I had the unique pleasure of hand-picking the crew that would build the initial templates for the system. And..."

(Via Authentic Boredom.)

I was lucky to be grouped in the same company as these designers, most of which I had previously looked to for inspiration (and still do). Working with these guys was a true learning experience for me.

Round Two, We have Lift Off!

For the last few months I've been working with a new startup called Round Two. We finally launched late this evening. Cnet is carrying an article about the new venture:

Start-up wants to improve on Firefox Start-up wants to improve on Firefox: "Former Mozilla Foundation member gives details about start-up that promises a new and improved Firefox browser." (Via CNET News.com.)

PNG Headers

My good friend and general brilliant guy (he really is) Nick Chapman clued me in on a layout technique that I think is revolutionary. To his credit he did try to get me sold on the idea a while back, for use with my old template (example), but I would have had to forgo the part of the header graphic that creeps into the content area in order to support Win/IE. Although in retrospect it's such a cool technique I should have jumped ship back then.

The technique is fairly straight forward. You layer 2 images on top of each other. The top image is a PNG with an alpha-channel that makes some areas transparent and other not transparent. The bottom image is a plain JPEG or GIF that shows through the transparent parts of the overlaying PNG file. The implication is that you can design a header for a website template (for example) that is attractive and orderly but still allows novice users/bloggers to personalize their site in a meaningful way. Upload a new image to a site and change one URL in that sites CSS and you can change the content of the banner.

The technique might be straightforward but getting it to work with Win/IE is not. Nick put together a great tutorial that explains the process.

In the future Nick promises to put together another tutorial that will show you how to combine this technique with a little JavaScript to created headers the rotate on reloads while also overlaying descriptive text, like in this example.

Finally getting around to updating my site design.

The more I learn about good CSS design the less I like some of my older designs. This was true about my previous design for bryanbell.com so I'm finally getting around to applying the knowledge i've been able to gather together over the last few month.

Stay Tuned: Nick Chapman put in a lot of work on a design concept I think is revolutionary, and I will be implementing here... soon. (hint: why do people need need photoshop to make cool banners like this one?)

Happiness is...

a backed-up hard-drive

Please, sweat the small stuff

Cammeron Moll has some good advice about sharpening images before adding them to your website. Check out his comments, because his readers have some unique and interesting tips as well.

New Icons for PodFeeder

Just completed a new icon for a Windows Podcasting application called podFeeder.