What goes around, comes around...

I've been working with private clients for just about 10 years now, and that means that the sites I created 10 years ago are beginning to look a bit stale. For some, the biggest issue is that the older sites are not built on responsive design systems. Responsive has become the order of the day.

Monitors have changed too. You probably don't remember this, but once upon a time, most monitors were less than 800 px wide. It was a big deal if you built a website that was too wide, because your site visitors would have to scroll sideways to view the whole display - a terrible faux pas. 

So it is with a hint of nostalgia that I bid farewell to Bolcom and Morris and William Bolcom's old websites - sites I built for them myself. We built them in 2007. The layout was a screen-grabbing 800 pixels wide, flush left. The deck across the top was a scant 75 pixels high. Nowadays on my 27" iMac that leaves a lot of landscape to spare!

Here's a sneak peek at the new website for William Bolcom & Joan Morris. Go visit it in person at www.bolcomandmorris.com. We've also re-launched William Bolcom's composer site. It's at www.williambolcom.com. 

Favorite Favicons

You know... those tiny icons that show up in your browser bar when you are shuttling from one site to another? I had the hardest time coming up with a good favicon for Dakota Street Design. With only 16 x 16 square pixels to work with, it can be a challenge to come up with design. 

I was inspired by downloading a font suite from github.com -- among the fonts was an icon for a frame with crop marks. Check in the browser bar at the heading - News - Dakota Street Design. Voila! It's simple, it's sweet, and it's representative of one of my favorite types of design projects... print projects with a full "bleed" that require crop marks for the printer to trim. 

Word on the street is that the latest systems will allow for responsive design of favicons - to display differently on various monitors and browsers. We'll keep an eye out for them... and maybe someday, when the fundamental 16 px canvas is bigger, Dakota Street Design will have a bigger palette to play with.

Update: January 2019

As predicted above, favicons have gotten bigger. The recommendation is now to build them at 500px square. A typical unexpected display might be as a button on a retina-display iPhone. That calls for high resolution!

Accordingly, we’ve updated our logo and our favicon.

Mastering the art of RSS feeds

It all really comes down to feedburner. And this email is a test of that principle.