"A love of baseball plus a love of infographics equals Flip Flop Fly Ball." Flip Flop Fly Ball has some interesting baseball-related infographics, including Green Monster (comparing the size of Fenway's left field wall), Ballpark Orientation (the direction batters face at each stadium) and Major League Fields (ballpark shapes).

Almost a full year after officially starting my own business, I've finally found the time to launch a site that's more than a single page of info.

You can visit the site at kieranchapmandesign.com and then hire me!

From an article about the revival of the exclamation mark:

"Ellipses confer gravitas on banal thoughts ..."

I actually agree with this, even though I'm quite often guilty of it. (I probably would've used an ellipsis right there, but it wouldn't have been ironic and instead I'd just be an idiot.)

What do I do on a Sunday evening after the kids are in bed? Why, optimize one of my personal websites for iPhone viewing...for fun! So now if you view a Sinko podcast on your iPhone or iPod touch, the layout will be optimized for your smaller screen.

And yes, I know:

I thought this was hilarious. Typeface humor...God, I'm a design nerd.

I wanted to officially announce that I have left my job to do consulting work full-time. So if you have a need for user experience, user interface, and/or web design, please feel free to contact me. In the coming months I'll be updating this site to better reflect my services, but in the meantime I'll be taking some much needed vacation time.

If LinkedIn is your thing, here's my page.

Jill is officially starting her business today, and her "real" website is now live at jillchapmanshiatsu.com. Have a look, and if you're in the area, sign up for a treatment!

Just a little announcement that the site I built for my friend Craig's comic book went live this week: Check out The Perhapanauts.




 

This is more of a note to self: Hex Color Picker is a useful tool that adds a web color picker to the Mac's built-in color pickers. The best feature is the magnifying glass which lets you choose any color on the screen to get the hex value (very useful to find the color on a web page).

Uni Watch is a blog all about sports uniforms, and often has some interesting articles. (It's where I learned about baseball's "futuristic" uniforms...glad I missed those games.) Anyway, there's a pretty good one about hidden elements in sports logos (inspired by a discussion of the FedEx logo's negative space arrow). In it they mention the Hartford Whalers "HW" (a fantastic logo, IMO) and also schooled me about the "MB" in the old Milwaukee Brewers glove logo.

Speaking of logos, on a trip last week I noticed at the airport that Northwest Airlines has changed their logo, which I think is a shame. The old one combined the N and W into a simple, single element: what looks like an italicized N becomes a W with the arrow in the top left -- which, of course, is pointing northwest. The new logo just makes me think of this NWA...

A new site I built is now live: Hollister Thomas Photography. The original designer sort of disappeared so I took his initial rough design, finished the details, and built the site. It was a lot of fun to do, especially adding the Lightbox 2.0 slideshow and the page load/fade-in code (which I needed to do because of the way the content is centered on the page). And Hollister's photos are great, too!

Well, unless you're reading this in an RSS reader it's pretty obvious that I launched this site's new design. Nothing earth-shattering, just a (slight) improvement over the last minimalist/unfinished black & white version. There might be some weirdness while I work out the kinks, but hopefully it's nothing too major.

The design of this site has been pretty much the same since I bought the domain in 2000, when I hastily put the site up to help with a job search. I've been wanting to redesign for years, and lately wanted to add new features and switch over to PHP. Anyway, I finally decided to do it even though the design is clearly not done. But at least I'm finally moving forward with the site and will fix it up in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, please excuse my appearance and forgive any (temporarily) broken links.

The new website I designed for ChoiceStream (where I work) is now live.

I feel exactly the same as Matt at A Whole Lotta Nothing regarding askew baseball hats and MySpace:

I always secretly hoped I'd never grow old and unhip, but every few months I'm reminded that the world is passing me by.

It all started with the askew hats. Two or three years ago I was walking down the street and saw some guys wearing baseball caps with the bills pointed off at crazy angles, like their hat was making a left turn but their head hadn't caught up. Every time I see a kid with his hat all akimbo I want to grab his arms, smack him in the face, and straighten his hat out. It's irrational, I know, but drives me crazy in a "get the hell off my lawn you crazy kids!" sort of way.

The online equivalent of this is of course, MySpace... Apple has made the iPod the most popular music player on earth, but it's clean as a whistle. How could the same people love their super sleek music player and also love the gaudy oversaturated flashing/pulsating monstrosity of their MySpace profile?

Enhance your photos by using the High Pass Filter (Veerle's blog)
This is a good tip for sharpening photos in Photoshop: rather than use the Unsharp Mask filter (my filter of choice), use High Pass on a duplicate layer of the photo, changing the Layer Mode of the duplicated layer to Overlay, Soft Light or Hard Light.

This is a great idea if you really need fine control over the amount of sharpening going on in different areas of a photo: you can simply erase parts of the High Pass layer to change the amount of sharpening.

The product manager for Yahoo's Gift Finder writes about it:

I want to take this time to discuss the Gift Finder we created along side a great Y! partner, ChoiceStream out of Cambridge, Mass. The gift finder was built as a collaboration between Yahoo! Shopping, the Yahoo! Personalization team, and ChoiceStream. It was one of the better collaborations I've been involved with and I feel lucky to be the Product Manager for this feature...

[W]e set out to make a simple, comfortable gift-giving tool that can be used to provide recommendations for products, product categories, brands, and even stores. At the very least it's a valuable brainstorming tool that does the work of weeding out millions of products. At best, it hits the nail on the head for a quick and easy gift giving experience. It's unique to the web by its breadth and depth and its ease-of-use -- we're very proud of it.

Read the whole entry here...

ChoiceStream (my employer) has launched its latest product: Yahoo Shopping's gift finder. Check it out if you need to buy a gift for someone...

A couple additions to the Portfolio section:

• Turtle Soup: MySQL and PHP development for this teen-based cooking site
• Racks For All: some quick design help to improve the home page and main products page

Typography joke for the day (from here):

Comic Sans walks into a bar and asks for a beer. Says the bartender: "Sorry, we don't serve your type here."

I think that joke is up there with the photo of someone writing "Watch your kerning" next to graffiti in a design school's bathroom. But then again, I'm a geek...