PHP for Designers (or Wanting to Drive Your Sister's Cadillac)

"Why use parentheses instead of brackets?" These are the types of basic questions asked by designers learning PHP. Such questions befuddle instructors and annoy developer-types in PHP classes, but making PHP accessible to designers is a huge leap toward advancing Drupal adoption. Drupal instructors are fumbling to create PHP courses that are designer-friendly and don't scare away this huge group of potential Drupal users.

And designers are hungry to learn PHP. While they've been walking down the website creation street with their bag of design, CSS and HTML tricks, their PHP-literate sister is zooming by in her shiny black Cadillac.

Five Tips for Designing Better Government Websites

I've been a designer in the Washington, DC area for about ten years now and have had some opportunities to work on federal government website projects. Here are five ideas that frequently come up during design discussions with clients.

Design for OpenPublicapp.com Evokes Revolutionary Spirit

Openpublicapp.com launched today. In creating the design for the site, we wanted the brand to convey two things:

Design Details are Worth the Effort

When there's a tight deadline, it's easy to let a design slip by without the little flourishes. But it's worth the extra effort, if possible, to create a visually pleasing, interactive site. Here are some examples.

Redesigning the Government, One Home Page at a Time

Recently, I had the happy opportunity to participate in Sunlight Lab's Design for America Challenge. Happy, because I'm gung-ho about this organization's stated mission: "To make government data more accessible and comprehensible to the American public." The five grand prize was nothing to sneeze at, either.

Thank you, Virginia.gov, for a Better User Experience

State government websites have the enormous challenge of presenting a unified presence on the web while also giving autonomy to the hundreds of organization sites within them - and on a limited budget.

Create Headlines With Cufon

For years, web designers have been faced with two choices when creating a text-element on a page: 1) Stick with web fonts: Arial, Tahoma, Georgia, et al, and use HTML text, or 2) Use text as images.

Going from Design to Cut-up Involves Switching Mental Gears

Being a user-interface designer involves two jobs: designing a comp and then turning this design into code (or as we say here at Phase2, "doing a cut-up.")

Both involve creativity and precision, but while there is some overlap, at a certain point I take off my designer hat to put on my cutter-up hat. It involves a clear switch of mental gears.

Rounded Corners on Images using CSS

Many of our clients want a photo to accompany almost every article on their site. Sometimes its necessary to offer some “styling” solutions to these photos, usually in the form of a CSS-driven frame around the photo. Here’s a quick and easy way to add rounded corners to photos on your website.

When an Avatar is your professional face

In the realm of social networking sites, anything goes when associating an avatar with one’s profile. I have seen people use as their avatar:

• A photo of their favorite presidential candidate
• A Chinese character
• Snapshot of their kid’s pet rabbit

But what if you know that those who are viewing your avatar include the president of your company or your boss?