UNENDED

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m about to get my second cup a coffee. Before I do, I thought I’d play the ABC URL game. I’ve been seeing a lot others doing this and posting their results. I’ve come across some great links from others so I though I’d give it a shot and see what comes up. Here’s how it works:

Open up your favorite browser and type in a letter of the alphabet. Then record the top hit from the suggestion list. I’ve posted my list below:

• A – Approva (Client)
• B – Adobe Browserlab
• C – Creativity
• D – Designaside
• E – Ember
• F – Facebbok (Surprise!)
• G – Google
• H – Harvard Business Review
• I – IxDA
• J – Joshua Cole
• K – Kontain
• L – LogoPond
• M – Media Temple
• N – Netuitive (New client)
• O – Spotify
• P – Panera
• Q – QBN
• R – The Swedish Armed Forces Recruitment Portal (Don’t ask)
• S – Slicehost
• T – The FWA
• U – UNENDED (that’s me!)
• V – C’est vous le Boss ! Cisco Systems, Inc
• W – The Washington Post
• X – XING
• Y – YUI Blog
• Z – Tweetmeme Widget Graphic (I like to dissect things)

News, design, business, and social networks – it looks like I have a running theme here, and I’m seeing a lot of sites that I got to from the FWA.

Okay – now for that second cup of coffee.

I’ve been running a couple of tests with a new installation of Expression Engine 2.0 Public Beta. Everything has been running pretty smoothly, but I did run into an error when I tried to edit existing pages added during the installation (if you selected to have Agile Records added).

When trying to edit an entry would get:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 311296 bytes) in...

A quick workaround for this is to add the following line of code at the top of your admin index.php page.

1

ini_set('memory_limit', '32M');

I’m only running a local version on my MacBook Pro MAMP PRO setup for my own testing purposes so this is going to be pretty isolated, but I thought I’d post this in case somebody else runs into the same snag.

This morning I woke up to a downed site. I could log into the administration section of the site, but none of the public-facing pages worked. Looks like this might be specific to ExpressionEngine on Dreamhost, but I’m not completely sure about this.

Since we hadn’t made any changes to the site in a long while I was a little confused about what could be causing the issue. Turns out it ended up being a small change that was needed in the .htaccess file.

Here is a copy of line 3 in the .htaccess code before the change:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

Turns out that I just needed to add a ‘?’ right after the ‘php’ like this:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]

Once I made this little change everything was back up and running.

Again, this change looks like it was specific to Dreamhost. I checked out a few other sites that use ExpressionEngine on other hosts where I know the .htaccess file hasn’t been changed, and they are still up and running.

If somebody else knows what might have caused the change in functionality please feel free to weigh in.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been carving out a little more time for my own experimental work. Something I’ve been wanting to delve further into was dynamic abstraction. An art form made popular by the artist Joshua Davis. My platform of choice is of course Flash, and the reasons are obvious for anyone who knows me.

Now that I’m delving further into this, I’ve begun to create artwork that I would like to keep. My challenge was that I wanted to preserve the vector nature of the artwork instead of resorting to saving the work out at a bitmap. I researched the idea of using ActionScript to write out the EPS instructions to a text file so I could then change the extension to “.eps” and open it in Illustrator. After a few minutes I realized that I was overcomplicating the process. Moving from the dynamic artwork created in my SWF file to EPS is actually very easy to do.

Once the SWF file runs and generates the artwork that I was to export I can simply select “Print…” from my Flash Player menu, and select to print it out as a PDF file. This is something that you can do natively on my MacBook Pro. From here I just open the file up in Illustrator and I’m set. I have a complex rendering perfectly preserved with all its complexities in vector format. It’s a pretty low-brow process, but hey, it works perfectly for what I want to do.

I’m sure plenty of folks have already figured this out as a viable process, but I thought I’d share my approach here just in case there are others out there like me that can find themselves looking for an unnecessarily complex solution. Sometimes the answer is just sitting right there in front of you.

Last week I participated in an AIGA roundtable discussion. The roundtable was brought together to review the needs and requirements of the organization, and to discuss the overall direction AIGA should take going forward.

There was a lot of great insight, and points brought up during the meeting, but it was interesting to see how designers in all sections of the industry were agreeing a common point: there is a void when it comes to a designer’s role as business leaders. This is a concern that I also strongly share.

It’s been refreshing to see that American businesses and people are beginning to understand of the value that comes with thoughtful high-quality design. In reality we are still playing catch-up with the rest of the world, but the fact is we’re not so stagnant anymore. The problem, however, is that it’s very rare for designers to be the ones shedding light on the importance of design as it pertains to business success.

Much of our discussion revolved around the fact that designers tend to focus all of their attention around their artwork, and not the returns realized by their work and the decisions that they made. If our roundtable is any indication of the final decisions the AIGA board members make at their leadership retreat, it will be a much needed shift in the overall conversation.