Seems the good people at TorrentSpy have decided to stop letting US users search the TorrentSpy site due to uncertainty around US privacy laws. While I can certainly understand TorrentSpy’s position, I don’t like the fact that our country continues to try to apply laws which are out-dated. Like many out there when I’m told I can’t have something; it makes me want it more.

So I say, if you can’t search in the US, then just move to another country, virtually. Visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org) and download their TOR Onion router. If you follow their instructions the TOR Onion will route your internet connection through several random servers in various countries, thereby giving websites like TorrentSpy the appearance that you are in another country.

It’s a simple way to bypass the system. Better yet, donate to the EFF and help them protect our freedoms online.

Today while browsing Digg I came across an interesting video presentation (shown below) that talks about next generation image resizing techniques. The primary focus for such techniques is to combat today’s wide variety of multimedia devices and screen resolutions. In essence, images today don’t degrade across different screen resolutions adequately, rather they just become smaller and harder to see. Therefore it seems more beneficial to crop and re-target the image to focus on the important elements. According to the video the most practical way to do this is by a using a complex set of algorithms. These algorithms determine what parts of the image are “important” and then snip “less-important” parts as needed.

As a designer who has been taught to never stretch an image out of scale it’s hard for me to see this technique working well and looking good. But I do have to admit the video offers some compelling evidence that, if refined, could offer an answer to resolution independent image viewing. Either way, apparently Adobe feels this could be the future because they just snapped up one of the co-creators of the project.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qadw0BRKeMk[/youtube]

Too many times has a prospective designer flopped at their chance to achieve their design potential. More often than not it is because they will jump on a computer and try to create magic with the miracle that is Photoshop and/or Illustrator.

What people so frequently forget is that design did not start on a computer, nor did many of the great designers of the past know what a computer is. Graphic Design does not solely depend on the computer, it depends on the designer.

One way to divorce yourself from this way of thinking is simple: don’t use the computer. Instead, try using a copy machine. By cutting images and type from magazines, books, fabric, or anything you can think of, and using a copier as your only mechanical tool, you can get in touch with your design concepts. Leading, kerning, focal points, balance, grid alignment, and dominate figures are only some of the things this tactic forces you to understand and use affectively.

Design by: Yurika Machida
Concept by: Chaiwat Thumsujarit and Karrie Simpson Voth of Fort Hays State University

In the last few weeks NetFlix has quietly added the ability to drag & drop the ordering of your movie queue. I inadvertently stumbled on the functionality while working on my queue. In our office of techies only 1 other person knew the functionality existed. There are likely many others out there that are unaware that NetFlix has this useful functionality.

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Occasionally when working with images in HTML it’s nice to have cool effects along the borders of the image. For instance, a nice drop shadow, rounded corners, etc. The problem is that usually to achieve these effects each and every image has to be taken into a photo application and altered. Which, even with batch actions, can be a time consuming and frustrating process. Further, if the design of the site changes in the future all the images have to be altered as well. Clearly there has to be a better way.

And there is!! By utilizing the CSS background property combined with the image tag and a few borders we get great looking image effects without ever having to alter content images! Let’s take a look at the final outcome before going further.

The key with this technique is to apply a standard background image to the background property of all “content images” in the CSS. From there we can make the effect show up by adjusting the padding of the img tag in the CSS. We’ll apply the effect width in padding.

For instance, if my drop shadow is 3px wide in the effect-image I am using (in this case thumb-bg.gif), then I would apply 3px of padding to the right and bottom of the img tag in the CSS. Or 4px if I wanted 1px of white space before the start of the content images.

In essence, every image that shows up has thumb-bg.gif appended to it as the effect. And the beauty is that thumb-bg.gif is only 1.3k, so it will load quickly and cache for all future images.

Alright, so here’s the raw CSS:

img { background: #fff url(thumb-bg.gif) no-repeat right bottom;
border-top: 1px solid #ddd;
border-left: 1px solid #ddd;
padding: 1px 4px 4px 1px;}


In this code I am applying the background effect to each image and then adding a gray border to the top and left of each image to complete the effect.

In the future as PNG’s and CSS 3 become more common this technique could be revised to be even more powerful. However, in the mean time it is a great way to save time on image editing while still adding a pop to your normal everyday images.