Thanks UPrinting!

I have been ordering business cards from them for a while now, and have never been disappointed with what I have gotten for myself and my clients. I refuse to tell my clients how little I pay for the printing, because every where I go, I get compliments on them! (They are the 2″ square ones). So, I let them give me a box of cards for myself in return for giving a box of cards to you.

Here are the details:

Giveaway Prize: 250 Business Cards for one (1) lucky winner

Size: 2 x 3.5”, 2 x 3”, 2 x 2” (square card) or 1.5 x 3.5” (skinny card)

Paper: 14 pt gloss cardstock, 14 pt matte cardstock or 13 pt recycled uncoated cardstock

Shipping: Sponsored bloggers and Winners have to pay for shipping

Eligibility: Limited to US Residents due to shipping costs.

To enter: Comment below. For a second entry retweet the giveaway with “@purpleurbia @uprinting #giveaway” in it somewhere. Contest ends on the 18th.

Please don’t hate me for calling these folks out. There is nothing inherently bad about their sites. However, the layots & graphic elements are becoming all too common from one site to the next. These are all well put together examples, and to someone who doesn’t read 30 design blogs everyday, they look pretty darn good. But are they worthy of being showcased for their individuality? Probably not.

“3 bar” layout

Here are 5 sites with the “3 bar” layout – a top nav with a logo, a middle bar with headline content and main content below that. Usually the top nav is in a dark grey, the middle is a bright blue or green and the bottom is a light color.

http://www.solidshops.com/ – This layout has become ubiquitous with web apps. I could have filled 5 blog posts with web apps that use this style and layout. It looks clean and professional, but gets an F for layout originality.

http://niagakit.com/ – Same as above.

?http://www.proudcloud.net/

http://www.yaronschoen.com/ – At least the illustrations and breaking of the grid make up for the standard layout used.

http://www.nabru.co.uk/ – Again, it looks clean and professional and the elements add a more organic feel, but the layout is still too out-of-the-box for me.

Here is where to go to learn how to do this effect:

PSD Tuts+ – How to design a family of websites

And, here is how to do it right:

http://madebygiant.com/ – Giant Creative has taken this layot and made it their own simply by making their navigation “talk”. The bright colors contrast with the neutral background. The superb typography makes the design shine.

http://www.stanleysolutions.in/ – This site is broken into those same 3 visual sections, but the diagonal lines on the center text box as well as the lack of line dividing the nav and the feature area make this site own its design.

The pinking shear effect.

I like textured edges as much as the next guy. Heck, I probably like sewing and handmade edges more than the next guy. But it has become an over-used design trend. Evidence below:

https://epicevent.com.au/ – To me this site is overdone and Photoshop heavy. The overall effect is nice, but there is just one too many effects here.

http://www.stthomasartgallery.org/ – You cannot take pinking shears to wood. The zig-zag line makes little to no sense here. No background behind the nav and darker text would have made more sense.

Culinary Culture

http://www.culinaryculture.com/- This one has me on cute overload. This is another case where someone needed to turn off 30% of the Photoshop effects. It isn’t bad, but it isn’t terribly awesome either.

Here is where to go to learn how to do this effect:

Grafpedia – Design a unique WordPress theme

Grafpedia – Gritty website design

And here is how to do it right:

http://analog.coop/ – The effect is used sparingly. And tastefully. It adds to the design without being an over-powering element.

In conclusion, the web design world is slowly being over taken by what is “trendy”. And, yes, it can still be good design even if it is “trendy”. What you want is a site that acknowledges the trends in the industry and then takes them and makes them their own, instead of letting the trends take control.

That being said, all of the websites here are designed well (I don’t like ugly websites, and don’t want to call out people for having terrible skills, just doing what is “trendy” or “typical”), some are just more original than others. These sites were all put together by designers with tremendous skill. Some are just a little too attached to the bandwagon.

1. Listen. Listen more. Question. Understand.
2. Exercise the creative muscle. Be creative every day. And not by doing client work. Create something daily that has no restrictions.
3. Get away from the computer. It can be for a date with my oft neglected sketchbook or something of the New York Times best seller list, but even the computer needs a rest every now and then.
4. Learn new coding techniques. The more ways there are to solve a problem, the better the final solution will be.
5. Revel in accidents. Sometimes they are even happy.
6. Have a connection. Both with the creation and the audience.
7. Ignore convention. The masses are rarely right.
8. Take field trips. Change the scenery.
9. Collect inspiration. Harvest ideas. Grow creativity.
10. Stretch. Adapt. Bend.

This list is meant to guide my way through 2010 and beyond. To make it better than 2009. To aid my choices. I know that being creative takes effort and growth. I know I need to listen better to clients and myself in order to understand their needs and my ability to fulfill those needs. I know I need to create outside of the confines of client work and grad school portfolio pieces to become truly creative. I need to step away from my computer, even though it is my main tool, it should not be my only tool or my only connection to the outside world.

Development techniques are always changing, it would be stupid not to learn new techniques. I have grand plans for my skills. This year is the year that it all happens. And we all know that accidents happen. Make them happy and learn something. Or maybe they are happy and you already have something useful for them. All creation should be personal and bear a personal creation. It should never be about the money.

The masses are frequently wrong. And my friends, with websites looking so much alike in this age of infinite possibility, that is not a good thing. Grids are for breaking, trends are for ignoring.

I am going to get out of the office more this year. I am going to enjoy the view both in Chicago and around the world. The more I see, the more inspiration I can collect. I can have more ideas from which to pluck the good ones. I can grow as a designer, or “creative”.

I will adapt to the changing landscape of design and make this world my own. I will bend my designs to the limits of today’s technologies.

I will be better.

Have you written your own manifesto? Do you have professional resolutions for the new year?

Our friends at UPrinting have given us one last giveaway for 2009! This time it is 100 postcards. (Don’t want to wait, or need more than 100? Order some cards here.)

We have to tell you we only give away stuff from companies we actually do business with, and UPrinting is always fabulous. Great quality printing, low cost to get it. Now, they do give me 100 postcards myself just for giving some away.

Giveaway Prize: 100 Postcards for one (1) lucky winner
Size: 4×6; Paper: 14pt Cardstock Gloss; Printing: Full color both sides     
Shipping: Winners have to pay for shipping

To enter: Please comment below, for a second entry, tweet the giveaway to @purpleurbia and @uprinting with the #giveaway trending topic. Entries must be received by 10pm Central time on January 2, 2010.

Icons

Lovely icons in 3 styles from Smashing Magazine.

Holiday RSS icons to add a little flair to your site/blog for the remainder of the month.

Brushes

Elegant snowflake brushes from Arsgrafik.

Reindeer (ok, bucks, but they look like reindeer!) from Steven Bourelle.

Vectors

An awesome use of the gradient mesh tool to create a bow. Via Vecteezy.

A lovely background pattern from Clarice Gomez.

Lovely vector ornaments from Pehaa.com

A set of Christmas / winter illustrations from Envato

Some snowflake vectors from Spoon Graphics.

WordPress Theme

A holiday WordPress theme to decorate your site.

Send us a photo of your prize when it gets printed!

This is my new favorite content management system and I am really excited to start working with it. There are a few things about this CMS that make it truly different. First being that it runs on its own PHP framework called Sapphire. The framework is based on object oriented programming, while the CMS is based on the Model-View-Controller method. This means that all programming logic is separate from the markup and the display is separate from the other two.

Getting this CMS installed is almost easier than WordPress’ “famous 5-minute installation”. I can get this one installed in 3 minutes, max.

It requires the following to be enabled on your server:

• PHP 5.2.0+ recommended
• gd2, mysql, hash, mbstring modules
• Set the maximum memory to at least 48 mb.
• Using a PHP accelerator or opcode cache (e.g. xcache) is strongly recommended to for performance reasons – SilverStripe creates large cache files as PHP code that are quite slow to open without an opcode cache. (There is a thread on creating the SilverStripe cache on MediaTemple’s grid server here)
• Apache 1.3+/2.0+/2.2+ with mod_rewrite, and the ability to set rewriting rules in .htaccess files via “Allow Override”.
• lighttpd 1.4+ with access to the server configuration

Most of these things are included in the hosting packages that developers chose, but might not be in your client’s set-up. Please verify with the hosting company that these specs are in place before either telling your client that it will work, or that they need a better hosting company.

Getting SilverStripe installed is a very painless process that includes giving it access to create a database, or providing it with access to an empty one that you have created. The longest part is actually uploading all the files to your webserver.

After you get the CMS installed, the rest is up to you. Every time you want to create a new page type, you can tell the software what fields and options need to appear for the page. You can handle meta-information on a page by page basis.

SilverStripe uses a custom file extension .ss and it can throw your IDE for a loop. I suggest using Aptana and doing the following: Opening the eclipse preferences. Under “General” select “Editors” > “File Associations” . There you add a new File Association for “*.ss” and set the associated Editor to “Aptana HTML Editor”.

Now, why the custom file extension? It is basically your template HTML file. There are different ones based on the different page types. Each page type will have a .ss file that tells the CMS how the page should look and a PHP file that tell the CMS what content should appear on the page and what fields should appear in the editor. Pretty nifty, eh?

One of the easiest things to do with SilverStripe is to change its look, since the look is separate from the code. You can upload one of the themes from here (there are some decent ones in the mix) to get you familiar with this process. Simply upload the theme to the themes directory. Next edit the _config.php file in the mysite folder to contain the following :

[/code]Hopefully you are intrigued with the robust yet still simple to use CMS. As they are posted, I will add links to the additional SilverStripe basics series here.

Thanks to: