Recent posts about Design

Drupal Coda Book

I'd been itching to try out Coda as my development tool, and their recent 3 day sale meant I got a copy for $45. It's pretty good so far, I have a couple of issues with it that I'll cover in a later post. One really nice thing about it is the Books feature. This allows you to add reference material to your Coda development environment and search it without having to go to a browser. I'm always needing the Drupal API, well I actually use this one http://drupalcontrib.org/, which is a brilliant Core and Contrib API, perfect for those tricky Views or Webform moments. Setting up a book is really easy, and here is a screen shot of the settings for a book for Drupal 5 and Drupal 6.

Green: The Colour of Cyberpunk?

Designers like to talk about the language of colours: the way different colours make us feel, the symbols they're linked to (e.g. purple = royalty, Easter, etc.), and how they relate to each other. Lately I've been thinking about green -- and today I noticed something about green I hadn't noticed before: It's got some serious traction in the cyberpunk world.

This morning I met with a client who is debating the use of green for their website. Green's a tricky colour, because depending on the shade, it can evoke freshness and vitality or organic earthiness -- or if you veer too far into the yellow spectrum, you hit upon tones that get pretty acidic. There are sectors where green is such an obvious choice it's almost cliche, as our environmentally-focused clients can attest; whereas in healthcare, for instance, there's resistance to anything smacking of "hospital green" or colours that might hint at sickness.