Author Archives: Darrel Austin

IE6, Transparent PNGs, Background positioning AND hover effects.

Last month YouTube announced that they’ll no longer be supporting IE6. This is welcome news to anyone that has to still deal with IE6. Not sure if that is enough ammo to convince your team to abandon IE6 yet, but it’s a step closer. As IE6 fades into the background, I tend to use transparent [...]

New Facebook Feature

Dear Facebook: Please add this feature. Thank you.

Hire me. I'm a ROCK STAR! Woooo! ROCK ON!

As a recently laid off web builder, I’ve been keeping an eye on the Craigslist job postings on a daily basis. Sometimes this leads to interesting job leads. Sometimes it’s pure entertainment. One trend I’ve noticed… “I’m looking for a rock star freelance visual designer to work with me on several projects…” “…is seeking rock [...]

CrowdSpring for design = crappy ROI

Forbes recently ran a oxymoronishly titled article about CrowdSpring: The Creativity of Crowds. Ugh. Design contests. Whatever…I’ll roll my eyes and go on to the next link… But then a twitter conversation kicked off with someone asking for some advice on their CrowdSpring sourced logos. And that got me thinking about how these design contest [...]

Type Twin Cities

(Haven’t been posting in a while. Thought I’d clean out some old posts that were stuck in ‘draft limbo’) I thought I’d try and start a series of posts that point out interesting designers and artists around town that I’ve stumbled upon via my web travels. I thought I’d start with a list of type-related [...]

The Future of the Web Circa 1995

While digging through my pile of old dead-tree portfolio work, I came across a paper I did in 1995 titled “The Future of Graphic Design: Designing for the World Wide Web.” I can’t promise that it’ll an exciting read in all of its scanned-in-bitmap-text glory complete with typos and bad grammar, but some of you [...]

Boxee vs. Cable/Satellite

We cancelled DirecTV this past spring. We then got an HDTV. Which was nice. But, while we love PBS, after a while, we realized we missed a few of the ‘other’ channels. So, we signed up for satellite service again, this time giving DishNetwork a shot. Of course, the very week we did that, the [...]

Upcoming Type Movie

Not a sequel to Helvetica, but another type centric documentary is coming to town: Typeface. It’s a film that focuses on the Wisconsin based Hamilton Wood Type company (now Museum) and will include local letterpress printer (and my ex boss) Bill Moran from Blinc Publishing. The local screening will happen November 6 at the Walker. [...]

Is Technology Liberal?

These days, I can’t say I have a burning passion for these topics, but without a doubt, given the season and my profession, both technoloy and politics are front and center on my RADAR. However, outside of silly DMCA issues and ‘trucks in tubes’ and the like, I never really tied the two together in [...]

Al Franken Sucks

OK, maybe that title isn’t completely fair. After all, I am a pinko liberal commie who will ALWAYS watch Trading Places through to the end when I stumble upon it while channel surfing…so I don’t hate Al. Perhaps it’s fairer to say Al Franken’s Marketing team sucks. Or, at the very least, likes to piss [...]