[TUTORIAL] Cropping and Resizing Images in PHP
PHP is a great script language that has many applications when it comes to web development. It is a particularly useful tool when working with images. You can create and manipulate images files in variety of different formats (JPEG, PNG, GIF). If you are interested in manipulating animated GIFs, my coworker made a great tutorial about that. Today we’ll look at cropping and resizing images in PHP.
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Office Music Picks – For the New Year
It’s another year, and that means more music, more music discovery, and more music sharing on the blog. Hopefully the Mayans weren’t right and we all have enough time to listen to it all. Enjoy.
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Art & Copy: Inside Advertising’s Creative Revolution – A Review
Over the weekend, a family member recommended that I watch at Art & Copy, the 2009 film by Doug Pray. Pray’s film is a documentary look inside the world of advertising agencies, the creative minds who have shaped them, and the world of commerce they have defined over the last fifty years.
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[TUTORIAL] Building a Database
An important step in the process of building a website or web application is the conception of the data structure. Most of the problems that come up during the development of project come from a poorly conceived database. Bad modeling will create superfluous terms, incapacity and lost data. Good modeling makes the project more flexible for possible improvements. The more robust your model is, the less issues you will run intro when you retrieve data through PHP or ASP. It also makes access to the data faster and simpler.
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Brand Archetypes 101
Advertising has always used archetypal imagery to market products. After reading “The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes,” written by Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson, I’d like to discuss brand archetypes and how marketers can leverage archetypal meanings with brands.
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Snow Crash – A Review
The border between kitschy science fiction and well-written literature is a difficult line to traverse. Some, such as Vonnegut, have done it throughout the years memorably and with precision. At the recommendation of a family member, I recently read through Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash
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Experimental Typography: “Breakfast Barrettos”
While making my morning meal the other day, I started to wonder how each ingredient I was mixing in might look on its own if it were to “spell itself.” I set out to display the contents of my favorite burrito recipe by utilizing some experimental typography. I ended up becoming excited by the results you see below, so I wrote out the instructions for preparing the foods as well and added that in. I’ve included a PDF download at the very bottom to act as the first page of an ongoing “Graphic Recipe” book. Any ideas for what recipe to create next?
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Marketing Fails: Lunch Boxes That Didn’t Make It
Collectible lunch boxes have long been a hallmark of successful movie merchandising. However, some films are better suited to carrying children’s lunches than others. Here are some of the lunch box designs from some classic movies that (thankfully) didn’t quite make it past the focus groups.
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[TUTORIAL] Making Use of APIs
When I think of APIs, I see them as magical and amazing tools. There are more and more APIs made available by services on the web such as the Google Maps API, the Facebook API, the Twitter API, the Tumblr API, to name a few.
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Color of the Year: Pantone’s Zeitgeist Chroma
Last month Pantone announced Tangerine Tango as the “color of the year” for 2012. Executive director of Pantone Leatrice Eiseman described the hue as “sophisticated but at the same time dramatic and seductive.” Great, but what made Tangerine Tango a better choice than Passionate Purple? Or Bombastic Blue? Or Requiem Red? Well according to Pantone, the chosen color is meant to act as a guide through which our culture’s current zeitgeist is being channeled.
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