Google has just announced a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at Netbook computers first, but will eventually port the operating system onto other computers such as laptops and desktop systems. This sort of computing is often referred to as ‘cloud-based computing‘ – meaning that your applications (and files) are not internal, but running virtually online. That means less upgrading, less software purchases. The draw-back is less control and ownership.

This new OS runs within a new ‘windowing system’ using Linux, with its key aspects being speed, simplicity and security. The software architecture is simple:

• For application developers, the web is the platform.
• All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies.
• And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.
• Designed to be fast, lightweight, you can launch and get onto the web in a few seconds.

Computers need to get better. They should just work. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files.

Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

For some fun, have a look at this Graphic Novel
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/small_00.html

Excerpts for this post taken from an article posted by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management and Linus Upson, Engineering Director for Google. Joyce Jones also contributed.

To see just how far we’ve come online, check-out the Internet Archive for a history lesson.

In the 90s, not much was possible unless you used a lot of imagery to make a page look ‘designed’. Today with the use of CSS, pages have finally begun to shape-up and mirror their paper-clad cousins in print media. You can add fonts, colors, graphics, positioning to page elements, and if done well, they will look pretty much the same on any browser (yes even IE).

Over the past few years, I’ve preferred to build my pages using ‘pixels‘ versus ‘points‘ or ‘%’. Why? For me, it was due to consistency. I could define an <h1> tag for a page headline as “16pt” and it might look fine for me, but on a Windows computer, the page might get horsey (and huge!).

On the other hand, if I said that an <h1> tag should be “16px“, I could almost always guarantee that regardless of computer or platform, the font and page would be pretty consistent.

Over the past few years using “em” has been the size designation of choice.

Web developers know that an “em” is a percentage of the body font size. So if you have a headline (<h1>) defined as “2.5em” that means the headline will be 250% larger than your body copy. Or if you have a caption and you want it to be tiny, you might define it as “.3em” (or 30% of the body size). So if you had body copy defined as “12px” as a rule, your caption would be just “4px” tall, and your headlines would be “30px” tall. Make sense?

But like all good things, there are potential problems. I recently noted that if I define my browser font settings so that all my fonts use a specific font and size in Firefox (which I tend to do), pages that show content based on a combination of “em” and “%” without a fixed “px” size, can really get small.

The CSS for BINGenuity.com uses “76%” as the designated size for body copy. For most folks this works fine. But for me, since I have designated specific fonts sizes for my page, this CSS style takes my 12pt font size, and then takes it down to 76% through the page’s cascading style sheet (CSS). So I get a rather small standard body copy size of about 8px.

Thankfully my eyes are pretty good (for now) and I can read things much smaller, but it is tough.

The point being made is that we need to consider users, like me, who like to define their own fonts and sizes. If we are using CSS that is based on “em” and “%” for fonts without a defacto size in pixels, we might end up with some strained user eyes.

But we can’t always be safe defining a page based on pixels either. If a user has a screen resolution set very high, a base font of “12px” might still be tiny.

So test and compare before deciding on what works best for you.

When new media catches on, it spreads everywhere. And fast. Conversations about YouTube! were rare at first, but once we saw how quickly these videos loaded and how well they played, we wanted to tell all our friends about them!

We’ve experienced the same phenomenon with Flash, AJAX, Google, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and nearly every type of social media you can think of. We say “ooooooh! that is COOL!” then we dive into it.

Trouble is, that while we are swimming deep in the new technology we find nifty, most of our friends are doing the same (and we all keep sharing it). The result is a saturation of media.

Ad columnist for Entrepreneur.com, Roy Williams, wrote about “Advertising Trends: Publishing Past Media Overload“. In the article, he shines a spotlight on problems we face today in advertising that have only grown worse.

The more we have to look at and react to, the harder it is to see things individually. Say we go to a sports arena and have 30-70,000 people around us … ever noticed how really tough it can be to find a buddy (or wife) in the crowd?

Flip that around: in that same arena when you leave your friends (or your husband) to go grab a bite/drink/restroom break, it’s equally hard for them to see you. Getting noticed takes a LOT of effort. (And “hey I forgot my wallet” can be a painful trek back across the crowd!)

With all the new technology we have, often being force-fed to us (see how much you get hit with on your local news station’s web site!), it is no wonder those wanting your attention (and your money), have such a difficult time reaching you.

In Roy’s article, he suggests we all spend a bit more time writing headlines to get attention, then proceed to take that reader’s attention to inform them what you can do for them.

Be fun, smart, and innovative, but make sure you can back-up your headline with reality! Find what you want to get your readers to react to, and grab their attention. They are likely reading e-mail, checking in on Facebook, sending out a Tweet, checking the team scores on ESPN and doing some online shopping. Will you be seen?

Remember, there is a lot more to advertising than a pretty picture, cool graphics, or some well-written copy. It takes a balance of it all to get noticed!

As a designer, I frequently need to Photoshop images for compositions and artwork that require removing the background in the images, so they can be combined with other images, colors, and text. When I was able to use the Eliminate White plug-in (pre Adobe Photoshop CS1), you could open an RGB image in 8-bit color mode, make a layer out of it, and then use the plug-in filter to strip all hints of white out of the image, leaving only the pixels with color and tone. Most often this was used when taking a photo of a model on a white backdrop, and getting rid of the white background so the person did not have a halo around them.

This was often a pain because models (unless they are bald) have hair, and hair is NOT easy to clone out of a background unless you leave the model looking as if they have a round head of hair!

Sadly, once Adobe started with the CS suite for Photoshop, the new software would not support the Eliminate White plug-in any longer.

However, I recently found a plug-in by Bergdesign, that is Freeware, and it does what the Eliminate White plug-in did! I contacted the Author of the plug-in, Brock Brandenberg, and and offered to send him some money for the plug-in development. He simply stated that he had used so many Freeware and Shareware plug-ins from others, he felt obligated to ‘give back’ to others. What a guy!

The images below show how the Bergdesign plug-in works, in comparison to doing background removal with Photoshop’s Magic Wand or Color Selector.

Below is a logo we recently had to remove an all-white BG from, shown here at 400% using the Magic Wand with a selection range of 15 pixels (notice how there is a white halo around the small copy and the small text characters are filled with white):

Next is the same logo, with the white BG removed, using the Color Select drop-down at 400%, set to a range of 100 pixels (again notice how the art is showing a light white halo):

Now the same logo, using the Bergdesign plug-in at 400% with all hint of the white background eliminated!:

The plug-in also removes Gray and Black backgrounds, as well as White. You can learn more at the Bergdesign.com website by clicking here. He shows additional samples of what this great, FREE, plug-in will do for you, and you can download it and try it out for yourself!

If you do happen to try this plug-in, and like it, be sure to leave some comments on this and Brock’s site! Good luck, and thanks again Brock!

Well, you can travel back in time to when you first clicked a link and saw text blink on screen!. Come on! Let’s go back to the late 1990s and see what the web looked like back then at the…

The WaybackMachine, or the Internet Archive, is an organization dedicated to the preservation of websites and web content for nearly every site ever launched since the ’90s.

About the Wayback Machine

Browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible.

If you go to http://www.archive.org/web/web.php and you want to see an old site (perhaps one you helped build), you can type the old domain name into the search field at the top of the page. Then you will be swept back in time to the early days of the internet.

Note any differences between Apple’s website from July of 1997 and today … ?

So the next time you are arguing with a coworker about what you did (or didn’t do) on a “cool” site from 1997, prove it with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Note of caution: Many, many hours may be lost in time travel! It’s potentially addicting!

What’s a smart quote? To help you understand the term, below is a compilation of correct punctuation (“smart quotes”) and a few examples of punctuation gone wrong.

Exhibit A

Quotations should be curved or “curly.” And, they should point toward the text they refer to. This error can occur on single or double quotes … and when this happens with serif fonts, it can get really unfortunate looking.

Exhibit B

This example shows how apostrophes can misbehave … In the “bad” example, a foot mark is used instead of an apostrophe. This mistake may occur by default in older software or applications – so watch out!

Exhibit C

There is a place in design for straight quotation marks and apostrophes – measurement. Use the straight punctuation to communicate inches or feet.

Exhibit D

The use of a single quote to shorten a year is an automatic “correction” completed by most software – but it’s incorrect! The curly apostrophe should curve outward, toward the numbers it replaces.

So, how can you avoid becoming a designer pet peeve or part of our exhibit hall?

• In copy, make sure your quotation marks and apostrophes take on a curly shape. If a program like Word or Quark inserts them as straight, you can easily replace them by using option keys, or use the insert character function. There are also shortcuts that we’d be happy to share.
• Make sure your single and double quotation marks point toward the copy they modify.
• Keep curly quotes in copy and straight punctuation (foot marks) in measurements.

Keep an eye out … offenders are everywhere. Be smart.

Roger reading the part of "Terrence the Tiger" - caught on camera phone. Thanks, BlackBerry.

Recently we flexed the vocal talents of our own Roger Starnes for an animated video project. Roger played the voice of “Terrence”, a fiercely brave tiger with an uncanny ability to win.

Roger’s voice over was recorded by local audio engineers at UD Media Production Group.

The Tiger mascot was introduced in a 60-second, 3D video that is streamed on our client’s intranet. Terrence will be used in the company’s internal brand from time-to-time to deliver news and updates.

We’re already hard at work on his next appearance. Which means we’ve got a “tiger” in the office for a little longer…

We’d like to thank all of your clients and vendors who were flexible during this situation. We tried our best to minimize disruptions to your projects and schedules. Ultimately, we hope you didn’t even notice that we were without power in Yellow Springs.

If you have any comments or suggestions about how we handled these circumstances, we hope you’ll share those with us. We treat every new experience as something to learn from … and “hurricane hits Ohio” fits nicely into that category.

In case you’re curious about how we “kept the lights on” for clients, see the photos below for a few of our virtual locations during “Blackout 08.”

• Todd worked from a Panera Bread in Columbus. Panera had a two-hour time limit, so he had to strategically change locations throughout the city.
• Selby worked from Wright State University where her husband is a med student.
• Joe worked from his brother’s office in downtown Dayton.
• Laura worked from her kitchen counter in Kettering, and Roger claimed dibs on her dining room table.