Mark Bult Design: San Francisco, CA, Established 1988

Web design and development for small and large business, e-commerce, b2b, b2c, SAAS, and community websites. User experience design and usability testing.


Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Another very creative wedding invite by a graphic designer



Web designer Ryan Masuga produces some awesome websites, plus he's putting out some pretty good geekery too, like this AJAX star-rating widget.

As I was poking around on his personal blog I came across his cool wedding invitation and save the date postcard. Be sure to click on the link to view the popup that shows the whole inside of the booklet. It's really cool. I'm jealous.

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Posted by espd at 11:03 PM | 
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Friday, February 23, 2007

How to update your Mac for the change in Daylight Savings Time

As you may already know, beginning in 2007 daylight savings time (DST) will be extended in the United States and Canada. DST will start on March 11, 2007, which is three weeks earlier than usual, and it will end on November 4, 2007, which is one week later than usual.

Mac users who have Software Update set to automatically check for updates on a regular basis should have already been prompted to download and install new software. If you haven't, or you want to double-check, here are the steps.

For you PC users, read this.

How to update your Mac...

Apple menu > About this Mac > check your version of Mac OS X

if 10.4.6 or above:

Save all open documents and quit all apps >
Apple menu > Software Update... > run all appropriate updates > restart computer

if 10.3.x or below:

Update your OS X installation to 10.4.6. You'll probably have to purchase it.

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Posted by espd at 3:58 PM | 
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Tuesday, February 20, 2007

UrbanBaby 1.5 redesign goes live

Update (May 10, 2008):
Imagine my surprise to see a flood of comments on a single post today. And such lovely comments they are. If only these commenters had paid attention to the date of the original fucking post.

Attention all you infuriated but obviously not very observant people: I am not the current art director for UrbanBaby and the new redesign launched in May 2008 has nothing to do with me.

This was my redesign (over a year ago, in 2007):


This is the new design (not by me):


So, if you hate the new design, not my problem. If you want to offer the folks at UrbanBaby some constructive feedback, I'm sure they'd like to hear it. Constructive.


Original post (February 20, 2007):
UrbanBaby is one of the three sites for which I'm the art director.

We've been working on a redesign for a while and it launched today, but at present it has only resurfaced three pagetypes: the homepage, the local landing pages, and the registration page. Contrast those with the old site design to get an idea of just how outdated this property looked before.

I'm pretty happy with it so far, although there are some significant problems with the CSS not matching the mockups I provided. At least, they're serious to me and anyone aesthetically astute enough to notice them.

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Posted by espd at 10:11 PM | 
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"Prepare to meet your programmer!"

This one's for Will and Jason.

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Posted by espd at 8:02 PM | 
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we are all the machine

Some of you, my faithful readers, will love this video. Others of you will think it's more boring tech stuff, and you'll skip it.

But it applies to all of you, whether you realize it or not. And that's why some of you will love this video.

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Posted by espd at 1:15 PM | 
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Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Is Orson as smart as Nora?

Velma got a book from the library on clicker training your cat. She started a couple days ago on the training, and despite one setback that left her punctured and incredibly bloody, she's had a bit of success.

My guess is it's going to be slow going with our somewhat dumb vampire cat, but we'll see. I'm staying out of the clicker training for now. But I'm hoping Velma can eventually teach Orson to play chopsticks...or turn out the lights...



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Posted by espd at 5:18 PM | 
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Tuesday, February 06, 2007

"I'll block your entire subnet, ya lamerz!"

LOL, Linux gets into the mix. More Mac vs. PC spoofs from TrueNuff.

Aw, man Aaron, you’ve wasted my whole morning...

tags: Apple, video, humor

Posted by espd at 11:28 AM | 
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A different take on those "Hi I'm a Mac" and "Hi I'm a PC" commercials

These are great. [via Aaron N.]

tags: Apple, video, humor

Posted by espd at 11:15 AM | 
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Monday, February 05, 2007

Flash: Hell freezes over. How long 'til it melts?

I guess it's time to break out the vintage Van Halen T-shirts. I would dig seeing this show, but will they make it to the Shoreline before they implode? Dave Wight will probably be starting a pool on how many dates they last before a blow-up between Eddie and David Lee Roth.

When the rumors started bubbling a couple months ago that the original Van Halen might reunite for the band's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Roth commented in his characteristic manner: "A Van Halen reunion is a lot like NASCAR — are you there to see the winner or the crash? In this aspect, we're a lot closer to Jerry Springer-meets-Knots Landing which, to me, sells T-shirts."

tags: music

Posted by espd at 10:30 AM | 
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Thursday, February 01, 2007

Velma the fashion model



While Velma and I were in San Diego a few weekends ago (more on that later) we took some fashion-type photos of Velma wearing garments made with Ozark Handspun yarns. These we're using to illustrate free patterns (that's knitter's lingo for "knitting directions") available on the OzarkHandspun.com.

I'm not really a fashion photographer by any stretch of the imagination, but a few of the shots came out pretty good.

tags: Velma, family, Ozark Handspun, photo, fashion

Posted by espd at 1:13 AM | 
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