Creeping closer inch by inch, 900 feet above the mighty Colorado River, the two sides of a $160 million bridge at the Hoover Dam slowly take shape.  The bridge will carry a new section of US Route 93 past the bottleneck of the old road which can be seen twisting and winding around and across the dam itself.

When complete, it will provide a new link between the states of Nevada and Arizona. In an incredible feat of engineering, the road will be supported on the two massive concrete arches which jut out of the rock face.

The arches are made up of 53 individual sections each 24 feet long which have been cast on-site and are being lifted into place using an improvised high-wire crane strung between temporary steel pylons.

The arches will eventually measure more than 1,000 feet across. At the moment, the structure looks like a traditional suspension bridge, but once the arches are complete, the suspending cables on each side will be removed. Extra vertical columns will then be installed on the arches to carry the road. The bridge has become known as the Hoover Dam bypass, although it is officially called The Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, after a former governor of Nevada and an American Football player from Arizona who joined the US Army and was killed in Afghanistan. Work on the bridge started in 2005 and should finish next year. An estimated 17,000 cars and trucks will cross it every day.

The dam was started in 1931 and used enough concrete to build a road from New York to San Francisco .. The stretch of water it created, Lake Mead , is 110 miles long and took six years to fill.  The original road was opened at the same time as the famous dam in 1936.

An extra note: The top of the white band of rock in Lake Mead is the old waterline prior to the drought and development in the Las Vegas area. It is over 100 feet above the current water level.

I was reading my daily round up of design and tutorial blogs today and came across this great article on web typography. With so many fonts out there to use, why use the same "safe" ones all the time in your design? There are countless others that come standard on both the PC and the Mac.

Here is a run down from author Amrinder Sandhu from his article Revised Font Stack. The font stacks and stats for both serif and sans serif are after the more jump.

Revised Font Stacks

* Some of the fonts, like: Garamond, Baskerville and Didot are not as readable on screen as Georgia. Feel free to make your own selection.
* Due to smaller x-height; Caslon, Didot, Garamond, Baskerville and Hoefler Text should be set at minimum of 14 pixels or above.
* Lucida Grande, Futura and Tahoma are mechanically obliqued to fake an italic.
* Geneva, Baskerville Old Face and Big Caslon has no bold and italic. They are faked to bold and italic.
* Avoid using Helvetica or Helvetica Neue for body text, especially below 14px.
* Futura, Gill Sans and Franklin Gothic Medium should be carefully stacked and used because of their unusual weight.

Continue reading

Tweener who you say? Well I gotta tell ya after getting this new job I am doing more Flash work than ever before! I do remember quite clearly letting them know I am not in any way a Flash programmer, and their response was, "Don't worry, we'll show you."

Well a 15 minute quick review shadowing a fellow designer at the corporate office while there for 2 weeks, was simply not enough for me. I am left to my own smarts and a FLA file he made on the fly to help me with the code. It's just how to get started that has had me in a quandary.

In short, instead of using the timeline and Flash's built in Tween class, Tweener is another class onto itself. It makes things so easy and if you want something to move across the screen, rotate while doing that and stop at a specific spot and then ease back like on an elastic band, Tweener is your new friend. You tell it what, when and where and it does it for you - without you having to know Action Script language and other back end Flash code. Simplistic and a God send.

All documentation, files etc. can be found by clicking on the above Tweener image! These are the guys who created this wonderful script: Zeh Fernando (Project Owner), Nate Chatellier (Project Member), and Arthur Debert (Project Member). I found the initial documentation a little vague and just needed a in-my-face tutorial to get me to visualize the way to initiate it. Here are two sites I found to help me with this:

Have fun, pass it on and be well. I need to get back to work!

A few weeks ago a designer and blogger I have been following, as well as very active Twitterer,  Graham Smith of imjustcreative,  announced a series of logo round ups he was posting. I figured I'd take a look and found these words:

This is Part 10 of the Logo Design Round-Up series. This ongoing series showcases a collection of logos and brand marks, self submitted by a bunch of freelance designers and creative folk in many creative areas. These designers use the logos to sell, promote, brand and market their various skills. If you want to be part of this logo design series, then details can be found at the bottom of this post.

Well I was excited and got to work following the specs to submit and write a quick synopsis on the the logo treatment for my personal business Anubis Creative. Hey, free advertising and a link from a well known blog site, who wouldn't, right?

After a long day at work I decided to check some email, read a few of my favorite blogs and Retweet some valuable info to the design community and... Well to my amazement Graham posted an announcement about the latest submissions! Anubis Creative was on the Part 11 blog post in living color. Excited I texted a friend and just hope people make some nice comments. Maybe even a new project would be great, the visibility is wonderful and much appreciated - hence the posting here talking him up!

Remembering though that as Graham puts it: "This is not a competition, it’s not a best of, it’s not a who has the best logo, it’s not a collection of logos that I have chosen. They are logos supplied by those that wanted to be part of this post. And a huge thank you to everyone who has submitted."

And my personal favorite: click to view larger

An Apple MacBook transforms and ... well just watch it's AWESOME!

The language is French, but the video doesn't need explaining...

MacBook Transformer!

Sitting here at my desk waiting for  XAMPP to download so I can set up a server on my iMac, I looked up at my bookshelf.

Hmmm, so much info and in an age where everything is instant, it seems so difficult to get in all the knowledge and use it daily to keep it ingrained.

This is especially true as so much changes in the web field in a nano-second!

I am re-taking a PHP class, or as Platt College likes to say, auditing.  If you don't use it you lose it I say, and I was recently overwhelmed by the files in WordPress when re-skinning a blog from a Photoshop file. It is actually my business site, Anubis Creative.

It's funny, and maybe it's just me, but I think sometimes that just because I bought a book I should know it's contents by what I term bookmosis, the fact that it is nearby... although I have not even cracked it open. Some special telepathy thing will happen because I took hard earned cash and bought it, thought about it, and got it.

It doesn't work that way and nothing is easy. I have indeed worked through many of those books, especially while I was taking the courses at Platt for my Web Development degree, but some I got from mentions on blogs, etc.  I have them handy as a reference and that I know where to go for the answers when in a stymie.

Just another random thought as XAMPP continues to download... Actually there was a glitch and I ended up using MAMP, especially for Macs instead. Works great!

For those interested, these are amazingly thorough and informative - a must have for anyone involved with web design and front end developing. And NO, I have not been approached or will receive anything for promoting these!

• HTML, XHTML & CSS by Castro

• Stylin' with CSS by Wyke-Smith

• CSS Mastery by Budd, Moll and Collison

• WordPress for Dummies. Funny name, but great info!

1. Open a File without using the Menus

Simple. Double click the grey background area of the Photoshop window and the File Open dialog appears - magic!?

2. If grey is Dull, Black is Wonderful and any Color is Better!

To change the grey inside an image window from grey to black (or a color of your choice), Control + Right Click (Command + Right Click on the Mac) on the area surrounding the image and select a color.

3. Sample Foreground and Background Colors

Instead of clicking on the foreground or background swatch to change the color to one sampled from the image, click the Eyedropper tool and click to sample a foreground color - hold Alt (Option on the Mac) to sample a new background color.

4. Position a Shape or Selection

When you’re drawing a shape or selection and the shape is fine but the position is wrong, keep hold of the mouse button and hold the spacebar as you move the shape or selection into the desired position. Let go the spacebar and continue to make your shape.

5. Get a Selection Back

If you’ve lost your selection, press Ctrl + Shift + D (Command + Shift + D on the Mac) to get it back. Ctrl + D (Command + D on the Mac) deselects the selection.

6. Hide and Keep

If the selection marquee is getting in your way, Ctrl + H (Command + H on the Mac) will hide the selection but still leave it in place. Don’t forget to turn it back on or you might wonder why things aren’t working the way you expect them to work.

7. See what you’re Working On

This is my all time biggest time saver! When you drag a large layer from one document to another you can view the entire layer and its sizing handles by Ctrl + Click (Command + Click on the Mac) on the layer thumbnail to select it. Then press Ctrl + T (Command + T on the Mac) to view the transform handles and Ctrl + 0 (zero) (or Command + 0 on the Mac) to shrink the image so the sizing handles are all visible.

8. Stack or line up Palettes

To stack palettes side by side in the same dialog, drag one palette over the others until a blue line appears around it and let go. To stack palettes one on top of the other down the screen, drag and drop one palette onto the bar just above another palette’s name.

9. No dialog Reset button? Yes there is!

You can reset most Photoshop dialogs to their original settings or at least some version of the original settings by holding the Alt key (Option on the Mac) when inside the dialog - when you do this, the Cancel button turns into a Reset button.

10. May all your Ellipses turn into Circles

To draw a circle using the Elliptical marquee or a circle shape, hold the Shift key once you’ve started drawing and the ellipse will become a circle. To draw from the center out, hold the Alt key (Option on the Mac) as you start drawing an ellipse, then add the Shift key to make it a circle - keep holding both keys until you let go the right mouse button.