No matter how you celebrate this holiday season, you have to give some props to these supremely nerdy, yet fantastic, ideas. I’ve scoured the internet, and come up with the best of the best of all things nerdy and all things Christmas.
Check it out!
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We have been doing a lot of work with patterns in Illustrator recently and I thought I would share some of the things we learned and re-learned.
The easiest way to make a pattern is to just drag your object (perhaps a sweet Van Halen logo you made) into the ‘swatches’ pallet.
This creates a swatch that can be applied to the shape as a fill or a stroke.
A pattern does not have to be a square. It can be a rectangle, too.The pattern will repeat at the outer edges of the object (VH). If you do not want the pattern to repeat that way, draw a rectangle with no fill or stroke and move it behind the object.
Drag your object (VH) and the rectangle into the swatches pallet. Now, the pattern will repeat where the edges of the rectangle were.
You can scale or rotate the pattern within the shape. Select your pattern-filled shape and double-click on the “rotate” or “scale” tool to bring up its dialogue box. Make sure that only the pattern is selected and then enter the amount you would like scaled or rotated.
You can also move the pattern inside the shape by selecting the shape then holding down the Tilde key (the keyboard key to the right of the 1 Key), then clicking and dragging. Crazy.
It is a little more complicated to make a staggered repeating pattern. I will cover that in a new post, so stay tuned!
Happy patterning!
Well, it’s almost Thanksgiving, also known as the day before Black Friday, the day that stores lure you in to stand in freezing temperature for hours so you can fight for one of a few available units of Product X offered at a good deal, and then sell you overpriced alternatives when you refuse to leave empty handed. That’s how they go “into the black” and where the day gets its name. It’s that time of year when we thank a turkey and then go shopping. This year, many retailers are opening their doors early – really early – as in on Thanksgiving, forcing their employees (or giving their employees a valid excuse) to leave their families on this day of thanks to go in to work and deal with crazy customers.
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So, you’re burned out on Pumpkin Pie? You need a reprieve from the typical holiday desserts? Oh, please, allow me to help! I’ve decided to share a couple of my favorite treats that are pretty easy to make, taste like you spent hours baking and will be sure to please a whole plethora of preferences. Happiest Thanksgiving to you and yours!
Sopapilla Cheesecake: This is simply the BEST, emphasis on simply.
Ingredients:
Directions:
1. Preheat an oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Prepare a 9×13 inch baking dish with cooking spray.
2. Beat the cream cheese with 1 cup of sugar and the vanilla extract in a bowl until smooth.
3. Unroll the cans of crescent roll dough, and use a rolling pin to shape each piece into 9×13 inch rectangles. Press one piece into the bottom of a 9×13 inch baking dish. Evenly spread the cream cheese mixture into the baking dish, then cover with the remaining piece of crescent dough. Stir together 3/4 cup of sugar, cinnamon, and butter. Dot the mixture over the top of the cheesecake.
4. Bake in the preheated oven until the crescent dough has puffed and turned golden brown, about 30 minutes. Remove from the oven and drizzle with honey. Cool completely in the pan before cutting into 12 squares.
My obsession with goats is no secret. The truth is, I blame Georgiana, author of one of the best Little Golden Books ever published — Dr. Goat.
By Georgiana, Illustrations by Charles Clement - Published 1950 Golden Books
There is almost a twelve year age spread between me and my brother, who somehow gained access (by nefarious means, I’m sure) to all of my beloved childhood tomes. He wasn’t careful. Crayons and rending asunder decimated the formerly pristine literary collection of a fastidious child. Angry and bitter, I became withdrawn, eschewing the company of my peers and loved ones till one day, I found myself imprisoned in a foreign country.
Not really, but I was bitter about it. Several years ago, my mother and brother, weary of hearing me lament about the ruinous end of my beloved Dr. Goat book, found one on EBay and presented it to me for Christmas. I wept. Now what was I going to complain about?
Perhaps this.
Dinosaur Comes to Town - Written by Gene Darby, Illustrated by Art Seiden. 1963
The entire and extremely delightful pictorial spread for Dinosaur Comes to Town can be found here.
Books matter,
Mrs. Knightly
Ikea is putting out a cookbook, but no, you don’t need an Allen wrench to build your favorite Swedish dish. The book, however, is cleverly done with beautiful, witty, and functional imagery that makes even me want to cook. It’s called “Hembakat ar Bast” (Homemade is Best) and its’ best feature is the stark, geometric photography by Carl Kleiner. All of the ingredients are broken down into a still life image containing small piles and pieces. It definitely has the streamlined, modern appeal that keeps Ikea in business. The book is 140 pages, with 30 classic Swedish recipes. Fortunately, this book is free! Unfortunately it’s only in Swedish, and can only be found in Sweden. But wait, they have an app too! The app is called Kondis and contains the same recipes from the book. Not only that, but it will also tell you how much exercise you have to do to work off the dish! Now you can enjoy your Swedish fancies without a guilty conscience!
Another free Google tool in beta? Yep. Seems like another one comes out every week. This one in particular has been out for months, so if you haven’t given it a try yet, then you are overdue.
Do you need help configuring, testing and then easily embedding some free fonts into your web pages? Great! The Google Font Previewer lets you pick one of the open source fonts from Google’s Font Library, then tweak the size, spacing and decorations using simple sliders and buttons.
Perhaps even more exciting is the Chrome browser extension for the Google Font Previewer. Click the icon in your Chrome toolbar, and select the web font you want the page you are currently viewing to become. Zap! New fonts to preview. This can be great if you’re designing a site, but you’re just not sure which free web font to use.
These are both great tools for designers and web coders alike, so give them a shot.
Google Font Previewer (http://code.google.com/webfonts/preview)
Google Font Previewer Extension for Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/engndlnldodigdjamndkplafgmkkencc)
Also, don’t forget to go back and read Greg’s post about Google’s Library of free Web Fonts.
Putting a map on your website is pretty easy. The easiest way is to go to Google Maps and find the location you want, click embed, then copy and paste the code onto your site. This creates an iFrame on your site, which isn’t bad, but isn’t the most flexible either.
If you are feeling brave, you can put a map on your website with the API that Google provides. It’s all javascript code that works on every modern browser. The API is extremely well documented, so I won’t get down to the complete process of setting up a map, because this blog post is about using custom icons for your markers.
Click through to read how.
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Meats & Veggies in Jelly - Mmmmmmmm.
Holidays draw nigh!
Consider the Aspic, fine!
Eggs, meats and beans – keen!
Like most families, we have our Holiday Jell-O traditions. We’re a simple folk, so ours don’t include any of the more worrisome additions, like eggs and Lima beans, nor do we recreate our deity’s in gelatin. Ours is simply called:
“The Green Stuff”
1 large package lime Jell-O dissolved in 2 cups boiling water
1 package mini marshmallows (dissolve in the hot Jell-O)
1 can crushed pineapple (mix into the Jell-O/marshmallow mixture)
1 pint small curd cottage cheese (mix into the Jell-O/marshmallow/pineapple mixture)
Many halved maraschino cherries (people fight over them, so add more than you think is necessary)
Place in refrigerator and let it begin to set (about 1 hour)
1 container Cool Whip (fold this in)
Now is the time to make a critical decision. To mold, or not to mold? I have an ornate Bundt pan I use, but it tastes the same in a bowl. Before serving, garnish with more whipped topping, toasted almonds and of course, maraschino cherries.
Bon Apetit!
Mrs. Knightly
Continuing the discussion of new web typography options from our earlier posts Web Fonts and Cufon vs CSS3 vs Google Font API, I ran across this the other day: Awesome Fontstacks. And it is pretty awesome. Kurtis will back me on this.
This site allows you to “automatically match fonts based on typographical metrics, optimize the font bundles for their intended purpose, and deliver rock solid CSS for those fonts and their fallbacks to copy & paste”. Basically, you can go to this site and choose from 45 fonts (that are free and licensed for online use) to use for your headlines, body copy, decorative and monospaced needs. As you choose your font for each category, sample text in a window to the right updates to show you how it will look as copy. It only displays fonts that would be appropriate to use together so you don’t end up with, say, two similar sans serifs like Droid Sans as your headline font and Fontin Sans as your body copy font. This makes it really nice for me as a designer.
What makes it nice for web developers is that after you have chosen all your fonts, or your “fontstack”, you can conveniently download the font files and put them into a directory in your website then copy the CSS code to your stylesheets folder and link it from your website. Awesome, eh?
AND, each font stack has a back-up stack for those using browsers that don’t support @font-face.
P.S. Iron Maiden rules
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