Alex Tarasiuk

Creative Mornings

Alex — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 06:13:32 +0000

I’ve currently got my hands in a lot of pots (fingers in a lot of cakes? what’s the metaphor for doing a lot at the same time?). I’m currently the pres. of a (newly founded) web club at my university. The scope of the club hasn’t yet been decided, but I came across something called “Creative Mornings”. they have a Vimeo channel, with several brilliant talks. I’ve seen three so far, but I plan to dedicate the rest of this week to watching them all. The concept is great: A monthly meeting with a 20 minute talk of something useful and creative (e.g. dealing with clients, or physical computing), then 20 minutes for Q&A. They get started at 8:30, so that by the time everything is done, people have enough time to be at work by 10:00. Their home base is in New York, and they’ve opened up chapters in Zurich, Los Angeles. The meetups have been a hit, and they’ve been able to get sponsorship from different companies. This would be a great opportunity to meet designers and developers in Miami, and benefit from the experience of really smart people.

Here’s a video to get you started:

2010/01 Michael Bierut from CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

Transparency in Objectives

Alex — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 06:37:51 +0000

Browsing through Web Design Ledger’s latest post, I noticed a link that caught my eye — it was to Mooze Design, a graphic design agency. What I noticed was their top menu navigation.

Instead of putting it in a sidebar, they decided to put the links in a paragraph that implies a flow of events. In user-centered design, when in the planning stages of a website, the designer should have a list of site objectives for the site owner (user should sign up for weekly newsletter), and site objectives for the user (user type x will want to browse photos). The owner’s objectives remain typically fairly hidden, and rarely does it show up so obviously as this site. However, it struck me as refreshing to see the level of transparency. The website is saying from the beginning “Hi, we’re Mooze, and this is what we’d like to get out of our meeting” There are no ulterior motives. It works for them.

How to embed Google Fonts on your WordPress Blog

Alex — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:22:24 +0000

Google recently put out 18 free fonts online on their Google Font Directory. Google put out an API with detailed instructions on how to embed any of those fonts in your website (more info here). Most of the fonts are pretty bland, and intended for body copy, but I hope to see Google expand on these fonts in the future.

I wanted to test drive the fonts on my blog. Here’s what I did:

1) Go to the editor.

Log in to the backend, and from the dashboard go to Appearances>Editor. You should be able to see the code of the theme you currently have active. Look on the right sidebar for “header.php”. Click on it.

2) Edit the header.

Open up a new tab and navigate over to Google’s Font Directory, and click on the font you want to use. Select the tab that says “Get the code”. It should look something like this:

You’ll find two boxes — one containing the code to insert into the HTML, and the other one contains the CSS rules. Copy the text from the first box.

Switch back over to the header.php editor, and paste your code right before the closing tag. This is because certain themes might have conditional statements, and if you happen to put in the CSS inside one of those statements, you run the risk of not having it load.

Notice that I have multiple font names there. If you want to add more than one font, add a pipe character | , and then type out the font of the second font, using plus symbols (+) instead of spaces. Do this for each new font you want to add.

3) Edit the CSS

Go back to the Google Font Directory tab, and copy the code from the second box. These are the CSS rules.

Open up your theme’s CSS in another tab (so far you’ve got three tabs open). Note that the styles might not be kept in “style.php”. For example, with the theme I’m using, the styles are kept in “css.php”.

Since all the fonts were previously loaded in the header, you only have to plug in the font that you want for that particular CSS class or id. Don’t worry about using plus signs (+) here, just use spaces like normal when declaring the fonts.

And that’s it!

New Tutorial up!

Alex — Wed, 05 May 2010 02:51:12 +0000

I’m an editor for the awesome tutorial site: actiontuts.com.

I just finished a tutorial on how to make an alarm that opens Pandora at a specific time. It’s awesome.

check it out.

Welcome

Alex — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:28:50 +0000

Welcome to my site, alextarasiuk.com. Here is where I’m going to have links to my stuff, and a format for you to get in touch with me.

Cheers,

Alex