Frankly, I was never too happy with the previous design I made for this blog. And being a web designer by profession, writing on a poorly-designed blog gives me an iffy feeling. I’m not making excuses for my lack of updates—this is still mainly due to my lack of free time—but my unease with my previous creation had also something to do with it.

But thanks to my haste to upgrade my Wordpress installation, I am now forced to create a new design for this blog. I totally forgot to backup my files and the database before clicking on that ever-convenient “Automatic upgrade” button. My upgrade went bonkers, and for some reason my custom theme just disappeared. Poof! No more.

I don’t want to hassle my host in getting a backup, so I’m just creating a new theme for this one. Do watch out for it (let’s just hope I find the time to work on this during the week!).

So, what do you get out of it?

-A cash prize of Php25,000.00
-A Php 10,000 shopping spree of Volcom stuff from Aloha Boardsports.
-Plus, media mileage and bragging rights for holding the title of being a Volcom Featured Artist

You can use any art or graphics medium. Just be sure to submit it in the following formats:

-16 ½” width x 23 ½” height JPEG format with 300 dpi
*Artwork should incorporate the Volcom stone.

More details can be found at the Volcom Call for Art microsite.

I have to admit that I was never really active in the local design scene here in the Philippines—I’ve been more active in the blogosphere. Anyway, I stumbled upon this discussion about Personal Site Versus Blogs, a few months back (I think that was sometime in February). It basically asked what the difference between blogs and personal sites is, and which of those two are gaining leverage.

Sadly, most say that the two are one and the same—which I totally disagree with. The topic poster was referring to “personal sites” as those personal sites that was so “in fashion” back in the 1990’s, where the owner would put in his autobiography, favorite things, links, and of course, ever-popular guestbook.

It’s easy to confuse blogs with plain old personal sites, especially if you only consider blogs as an online diary of telling whoever cares what you did and ate that day. Blogs have already evolved into so much more. It can be a recipe center, a wedding guide, a tech news and reviews journal, or a sports reportage—all written with a personal touch. Considering blogs as simply a “Dear-Diary-this-is-what-I-did-today” aspect of a personal site is just so… outdated.

But then again, if you still think that Macromedia Flash is the new black… It isn’t really surprising that this mentality exists, doesn’t it?

Now, back to the main question, are blogs bad for web designers?

If you know how active I am in the Philippine blogosphere and that my primary line of work is web design, you’d what I’d say to this: NO. So why ask? Well, there’s this answer in the very same thread I mentioned that made me consider that question merits its own blog entry other than a reply to the post:

Conversely, the losers are the website developers and designers, like in the Philippines where potential clients are starting to choose a blog for an online presence over official websites, mainly because of the ‘free’ aspect. It is not even the knowledge that they have full control over a blog; they are starting to look at blogs as an option just because of the ‘free’ aspect, which I think is sad.

It’s not just about being “free,” dude. It’s about getting seen through a new and effective form of media.

Website developers and designers are so not losers in this innovation—that is such a bad generalization. Our business took off primarily because of blogging. Blogging is a new opportunity for designers and developers, and shouldn’t be considered as a threat. Thinking that your business will fail because of something you aren’t familiar with is just so negative. A good business man should think of ways on how to profit from a new innovation, and not think of himself on the losing end just because things change.

There are a lot of new things on the Web that could “threaten” the web developer/designer’s business, but it’s up to you how to mold it into something that would benefit you.

So this poster’s clients prefer a free blog as opposed to a Flash brochure site. Who knows? Maybe his proposal did get turned down in favor of blogging. BUT, if this client’s main purpose is to use blogging in order to make his business known, there will come a time that he will hire a designer/developer. Sure, you can get free themes. But that won’t reflect your business’ branding and identity—it’s just very generic. Unless your branding is generic, it’s very difficult to find a pre-designed theme that will truly showcase your business’ branding.

And no, that instance isn’t just a hypothetical example—we actually had a client like that. He initially wanted a plain brochure site for his product, and then asked us for advice on what’s the best way to advertise his new site. We could have suggested SEO and actually earned from it at that very moment, but we didn’t. We only “earned” from hosting his blog, which we installed for free in return for a link on his site. Bad business? Well, maybe if you don’t see the advantage in the long run, you’d say it is.

Guess what happened? We didn’t only benefit from his link, earned from the hosting, but also had another custom blog design client. He enjoyed blogging so much that he decided to forgo the brochure site idea, and just focus on improving his current blog. He eventually saw the need to “brand” himself, especially since his traffic is picking up.

See? Blogging isn’t bad for web designers. You just need to see it as an opportunity instead of a threat.

Thoof is a user-generated news and information service web site. Basically, the site shows Personalized News submitted by visitors. Kind of like Boing Boing, but Thoof has a way better Web 2.0 interface.

As a web designer, I can’t help but notice the interface first before anything else. Because for me, good design isn’t just about fancy graphics and color combinations—it’s also about how usable a site is. I don’t find Boing Boing’s layout very attractive—they should have spent a bit more time on paying attention to how important proper spacing is, it’s just so hard to read—and I think this is where Thoof is at an advantage.

The site has made a good use of colors, a refreshing combination of green and orange shades. However, the yellow mouse-over effect of the header navigation bar could use a bit of work. A lighter shade of yellow perhaps?

In terms of being user-friendly, I found it quite easy to use the “Send to a friend” link. I’m the type of viewer who doesn’t like loading new pages so much—I think it wastes my time—so I guess that’s why I really like the way they presented this feature. You just click on the link and a javascript-enabled overlay popup appears—not like the annoying adverts popups mind you, but one that’s similar to a Lightbox popup. I just wish they did the same for the Edit feature too.

Thoof also allows you to hide posts that you don’t like. Again, another one with a javascript effect.

Another thing I really like about this site is the fact that the community is encouraged to suggest improvements (this is done through their “Edit” feature). Maybe I’m biased, being a blogger myself, but I honestly think that for a site to be truly interactive, there should be reader participation.

To be honest, I basically see Thoof as improvement to Boing Boing. It’s similar, but this one’s more interactive. And that, I think, is what Thoof should capitalize on: its strengths. Boing Boing’s been around for quite some time, but if Thoof continues to capitalize its strengths and continuously improve its features with users in mind, I think this new personalized news site’s future would be promising.

I’ve done work for a variety of clients—admittedly, some really have exemplified the meaning of “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” In short, what I’m asking is the issue of whether a designer should go for quantity or quality.

Quantity can definitely be a sign of experience. It can show your transition from a newbie to a kick-ass designer. It’s like telling a prospect client, “see how much I’ve grown as a design professional.” But the thing is, do you really want the below-the-par quality work on your portfolio?

Doing outsourced work for ad agencies both here and abroad most often than not prevents me from publishing all my work. Usually, these guys ask for a non-disclosure clause in the Agreement, for the simple (and understandable) reason that they want to protect their “resources” from their competition. Sometimes, this makes the decision-making easy. If you made a crappy work because a client likes it that way, you’re safe—you can’t publish it anyway so what the heck. But what about those that you can publish?

I’ve seriously thought about this when I was collating the previous work I’ve done for the web and graphics design company that my husband and I run. If you put everything on the site, people can either get the impression that you’ve had a lot of experience in design or get an idea that some of your work is also crappy. But if you only put not-too-many but kicks-ass designs, you give the impression that your work is great OR they can also think that you may be good but have only worked for a few clients (less experience?). Either that or they could also think that you’re too expensive that’s why you only worked on a few.

I guess it would all boil down to your decision on what impression you’d like to make. I only put a few (and the recent ones I’ve made within the year) in our portfolio. So yeah, I decided to go for quality instead of quantity. If a prospect client wanted more samples, I can always send them a more comprehensive list.

How about you? Quantity or quality?

So anyway, I was invited last Wednesday with a few other bloggers at the Yehey! Office in Mandaluyong for a dinner and a sponsored podcast. It was basically to discuss their new service called, Kaban. Too bad the recording got corrupted—it had been quite a good discussion.

I was actually very interested on what Jonas and Eugene of Kaban had to say, to be honest. Why? Well, for one thing, Paypal isn’t fully functional in the Philippines. A payment gateway specific for Philippine use would be a great alternative. Besides, Marc and I have been looking for other payment gateway options that we can recommend to our clients who want shopping carts.

If you’re living in the Philippines, you can actually sign up for a Paypal account. But the thing is, you can’t do anything with it except to send money. Kind of defeats the purpose for e-commerce, don’t you think? There have been talks that Paypal Philippines would be fully functional by 2007. Well, it’s 2007 already and we still can’t do shit with our Paypal accounts.

Along came Kaban. Jonas said that it’s been around awhile now, and Kaban is basically a re-launching of the service. How it works? Well, kind of like Paypal actually, but within the confines of Philippine banking laws—your credit card info won’t be recorded. You got to input it every time you process an order using this Java app calculator thing.

Our design company uses osCommerce for shopping cart requirements—we’ve got some nastily good programmers who can customize the cart to the hilt. As of the moment, most of our Philippine-based clients who are using a cart don’t use payment gateways (they opt for cart-to-email setups) and those who do have 2checkout (2CO) accounts installed. But if you ask me, I’d honestly say that 2CO can give Kaban a run for their money.

Kaban is a payment gateway that I won’t recommend to our clients who are just starting up. The setup fee is about $1,000 (and it’s even slated to increase within the year), as opposed to 2Checkout’s $49. Pretty steep, eh?

But here’s the catch. I cannot really “put down” Kaban that easily in terms of cost. Because unlike 2CO, Kaban offers payment through ATM and G-Cash (this is a special feature of a mobile service provider here in the Philippines where users can store cash using their mobile phone account), and they do allow some of 2CO’s prohibitive products—no additional requirements are needed for “restricted products.”

Applying for a credit card here in our country is very difficult, but getting an ATM is much, much easier. Just give the balance requirement, accomplish the bank forms, and present two legal IDs—there you have it: your own ATM account. But with credit cards, to apply who have to really prove that you have the capacity to pay—the bank really investigates first before allowing you to posses that sacred credit card.

That’s why I think in the aspect of payment options, Kaban rules. They just really suck with the setup fee part But then again, these assumptions are made under the premise that if a company is serious about selling online, they’d think of it as an investment and not as an expense. $1,000 is worth a lot around here, so business-owners really ought to do some research first before jumping the gun and throwing away that amount of money. Businesses opting to use Kaban will more or less have an idea of their projected income and when they’ll get the return for this investment.

At the moment, Kaban caters only to Philippine-based companies needing payment gateways—though Jonas did say that are planning on expanding. And for your osCommerce fanatics out there, good news. Kaban provides an easy-to-install module for your cart (and I think it also works with X-Cart, which is basically a mod of osCommerce).

2CO would probably still be a “better” Paypal alternative, but I honestly think that Kaban would be a better option for business that would like a wider consumer base by being able to tap the greater ATM users—or for those companies who are paranoid about transacting with a foreign company and would rather transact with one that is bound by our restrictive banking laws.

So, to make up for it, allow me to give you a short tutorial on creating mouse-over graphics without using Javascripts. I’ve seen this effect in action through sites featured in CSS galleries. And frankly, I had some difficulty finding a tutorial on them—maybe because I just don’t know which keywords to use. Hehe

If you’ve been reading my personal blog, you’ll notice that I recently did a design make-over. I kept the mouse-over effect, but this time, I used CSS for it—not Javascript.

You’re probably used to seeing simple mouse-over effects like this. It changes color when your mouse is over it. This is a simple effect, and you can even dress it up a bit by putting a background image behind it or something. But what if you wanted to use some fancy font for your link? A fancy font that isn’t available in all computers?

Usually, the solution is Javascript. But not really It’s still possible to use CSS.

This is going to be our finished product. As you can see, the links are images. The text has a drop-shadow effect, something that can’t be done using CSS only without bleeding your brains out. This isn’t difficult, promise.

STEP 1: Create the graphics
This is very important, though self-explanatory. Obviously, you need to create the graphics! Take note though, you need to create two graphics for each button: one for the normal state, and the other for the over state:

The normal state

The over state

STEP 2: Setup the button container
You need to determine first whether you want a horizontal or vertical menu. For the purpose of this tutorial, let’s make us of a horizontal one. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Determine the width and the height of the graphic you created. In our example, the width is 200 pixels while the height is 51 pixels.
2. Take note if you want the menu to be coming from the right or from the left side. For this tutorial, we’ll pick left.
3. Setup the CSS! Pick a name for your button container. I’m corny, I’ll chose “button.”


.button {
     width:200px;
     height:51px;
     margin:0px;
     padding:0px;
     float:left;
}


What this will do is to “stack” your buttons from left to right, hence creating a horizontal menu.

STEP 3: Create the common style for links
As much as possible, I don’t like re-typing styles over and over again. Besides, it’s best to take advantage of the “cascading” feature of CSS—it applies styles on top of others. That’s what we’ll do. For this, we’ll create a common specification for all button links. And since we’re going to be using the .button style as a DIV tag, the following code will tell our CSS, “for all links contained inside the DIV with the .button class, apply these specifications.”

Here’s the code. You add this under the .button code on top on your CSS file:

.button a {
     display:block;
     width:200px;
     height:51px;
     margin:0px;;
     padding:0px;
     text-decoration:none;
     background-repeat:no-repeat;
     border-bottom:none;
}

Don’t forget to put “display:block;” It’s very important. Else, your button graphic won’t show.

STEP 4: Specify the graphic backgrounds for each of the links
Since we’ve already specified almost all of the styles we’ll be applying for each of the links, we will only need to change the Normal state graphic, and the Over state graphic. You don’t need to repeat the other styles all over again.

The thing is, you have to create a different link class for each. One for Home, another for About, etc.

Take a look, it goes like this:

a.home {background-image:url(button1.gif);}
a.home:hover {background-image:url(button1-over.gif);}


a.about {background-image:url(button2.gif);}
a.about:hover {background-image:url(button2-over.gif);}

That way, when you apply these classes on a link, it’s going to show the appropriate image background.

STEP 5: Put everything together in HTML
Once you got the CSS done, it’s time for us to write the HTML markup. Here’s how it’s going to look within the “” tag.

As you can see, we made a space into a link. That’s actually the secret behind it all Since it’s not going to show any text, the graphic used as the background image of the link will show through.

Take a look at the sample here. If you’re too lazy, I’m giving you permission to just copy the source of that page

Well, hope that helps!

A lot of people say design is art per se, but I beg to differ. Design, by definition,

…refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a new object (machine, building, product, etc.).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design)

Design, by itself, doesn’t necessarily have to have aesthetic value or emotional effect. So, per se, it’s not art. But for some reason that the design becomes beautiful (has perceived quality other than the purpose it serves), it can be considered an art. In my opinion, design can be art, but it doesn’t always follow that design is always art.

Getting that point clear brings me back to the question: can design be learned? Yes. Anybody can learn how to develop a plan for a certain object—he doesn’t need to be born with an artistic talent.

Let’s take a closer-to-home example: web design. After all, I am a web designer. Hehe.

You need to design a web site in order to post your thoughts. You can easily just install WordPress then put in something like Scott’s default Sandbox theme, no skins. You have a navigation bar, an area for posts, and a title with a tagline on top. No frills, just that. It does exactly as it was supposed to be—as it was designed. But would you call that art already? I think not.

But then, you start creating your own graphics and making your own CSS structure. You get more creative, and start using graphics as a way to convey your thoughts. You make your website look as if it’s conveying your very thoughts and emotions. When you’re sad, it’s gloomy. When you’re ecstatic, it’s sunny. That’s when it becomes an art: you go beyond the purpose and add quality to the work through creativity.

Can anybody make an “artistic” design? No. I really don’t think so. Sorry if this sounds condescending, but really, there are people who can’t make a design into a work of art. Although I don’t think it’s necessarily bad.

As my mom said, not everyone is born with the talent for the arts, but those without it is blessed with other talents that the artists aren’t good at. That is so true. I’m lucky to be born in an artistic family (both my parents are artists, so is my sister), but I can’t do calculus or any of those numeric things without bleeding my brains out. I can whip up artsy designs in less than a day, but I can never say the same for math

If your web site design is important to you, which it should be since a good web designer can make a site that, through your web page design, can encourage return visitors, then learning web site design or hiring a good firm to do it for you is a worthwhile investment.

The first reason for this is the most obvious: you’re so behind the design trends. There are some designs that are “seasonal,” kind of like clothes that can go out of fashion. But there are those that are simply “classic”—it would work whatever the current trend is. But regardless of which, even the most classic design will have to undergo a design “improvement.” It will have to adapt to the current viewers’ needs.

That is probably one of the most important things to consider when you’re thinking about getting a redesign. If your viewers matter a lot to you (well, it should actually—they’re the ones keeping your blog alive), then you would need to consider their needs. A design that worked for viewers back in the 90’s will definitely not work with those in the present. Web 2.0 isn’t just about curvey edges and cool gradients—it’s all about usability. And in order to keep up with that “usability” need, you will then have to consider getting a redesign.

Another thing that can brought about this need to change a blog’s look is an evolution in the blog’s subject. There are those who have started having a personal blog which then revolves into a tech blog—it’s pretty obvious that a “personal” look might not work well with a tech blog. This can happen you know… I myself started Kutitots as a plain old journal, but now it’s more than just a recap of my day—I prefer to think that my entries have more substance, letting other people pounder on some issues I bring up.

Anyway, whatever the reason for a redesign may be, it all just boils down to the question of “if you can handle it.” There are some people who are too attached to their current design, or just simply can’t let go because of the gazillions of modifications they did on it. Then there’s also the issue of whether you can afford it if you don’t know how to install a new theme or would like to have a custom theme designed.

The only thing to keep in mind (I guess) is that when you do decide to redesign, make sure that the old one really needs to be replaced. Let the public “absorb” the design first. I’ve already seen some blogs that change themes every week (it can get pretty annoying, and shows that you really can’t make up your mind). Besides, if you want the blog to establish a certain personality, it’s best to keep the design for some time.

I first heard the news about B5media getting a $2 million VC funding from Abe’s blog. Bloggers I know from the group are ecstatic—I mean, why wouldn’t they right? Jayvee is happy, and so are the commenters on Abe’s post about it.

Before I go on further, congratulations! Good work, B5!

I’ve been seeing a lot of “congratulations” stuff and “good work” comments within our local community, but going outside the circle, response isn’t exactly as fine and dandy. But then again, I guess that’s how life is—if you aren’t the receiving end of the $2 million funding, it’s only natural to wonder why it wasn’t you or somebody else you think “deserved it more.”

Valleywag says outright that B5media doesn’t deserve $2 million. According to Nick:

“With information overload comes opportunities on a number of fronts. The most obvious is authority.” Which b5media doesn’t have. Why not invest in someone who’s already established some of that?

There really aren’t much explanation on the post except for a few remarks on why Rick Segal “gives all the wrong reasons.” It would have been nice to see some of that though. Because right now, the impression I’m getting is a simple case of sour grapes.

B5media doesn’t have authority? The investors obviously saw something that Nick didn’t. After all, they DID invest in B5media, and not the ones he thought already “established authority.”

Pardon me for saying so, but Valleywag comes off a tad bit snooty about B5media’s $2m. A little bit elaboration on the scathing remarks would have been nice, and would justify the snooty tone

Well, that’s just MY opinion. But then again, who am I to say anything? I’m not even a B-lister in whatever list they may have out there

If you are working on a web page design and are stuck in a rut on how to do your overall web site design then step away from the project a while, show it to a web designer or two if you know any, and then come back to the web site design with a fresh mind and possibly new tips found online in your spare time.