nice little tale for a quiet tea party...

// Theming Tumblr//

Great tips.

Over the past couple of weeks I created a custom theme for Tumblr, which you can see here if you’re reading this post via the Tumblr Dashboard or RSS.

The process was largely fun and easy. After many CMS integrations with multiple user-facing templates, it’s refreshing to work with Tumblr’s single-page approach. The Tumblr engine derives every page on a user’s tumblelog from a single XHTML and CSS template, vastly reducing not only the amount of work required to generate a custom theme, but also the quantity of repeated code (in particular compared to a default WordPress installation).

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14 / 06

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Mapnificent: spatial maps of your personal public transit connections

Cool! Mapnificent is a great little location-analysis tool that lets you map how far you can get on public transit from a single location, in any direction, based on the amount of time you’ve got.

It’s a different take on the kind of work that the WalkScore folks have been doing, sussing out how connected you are, based on your transit mode of choice.

Clean and basic Google-map base, very user-friendly interface, with handy sliders that let you see quickly see the differences between a 15-minute trip and an hour-long one.

(via Jesse T.)

06 / 06

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Pollution-detecting clothing, from a Manhattan design duo. The colours on the design change when exposed to high levels of carbon monoxide. (via GOOD)

Right now, these seem like a combo of cute and depressing — and not just because they channel the spirit of Hypercolour tshirts. They’re just not useful enough now, except to let you know that you’re standing beside traffic. Newsflash.

Maybe if they could calibrate the shirts more finely, it could be a good warning system for bikers and pedestrians? If, say, you’re have doubts about whether or not you need to put on your Respro Sportsta Mask while biking through traffic, maybe this could give you a clue.

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24 / 01

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// Colour apps-related geekery//

Colour. Oh colour, how you elude my grasp. Too many formative design years in non-profits with zero communications budget? A 21st century kind of colour-palette blindness? Whatever it is, either the data doesn’t read well with the palettes I put together, or it pulls the whole graphic into a weird early-90s high-schoolish aesthetic.

Enter ColorZilla and Kuler. ColorZilla is a great little Firefox extension that saved my butt with any web project I’ve ever done. It’s a great little tool that lets you sample a colour you like on your screen, and have it spit back the exact RGB/HEX colour values you’ll need to reproduce it on YOUR project.

Kuler is a little Adobe gem —a website which enables users to create and upload pretty colour palettes, and then to name and tag them for easy searchability. You can vote on the ones you like best, and use them as inspiration for your own projects. As far as I can tell, there are no colour values attached to the palettes, so reproducing the palettes requires some good ol’ fashioned eyeballing.

I just realized this week that I no longer have to be fettered to Internet Explorer at work, but installing Firefox is still an issue. Chrome was easy peasy, though — so here’s the one-two punch for Chrome: EyeDropper provides a very nice replacement for ColorZilla(though because it displays as a pop-up window, user interaction is not as tidy).

EyeDropper doesn’t work on flash-based sites like Kuler, which led me to ColourLovers — a similar site for palette sharing. Not as slick a design as Kuler, maybe, but I find it more usable — and more popular.

Forgot about ColorBrewer…comes up with colour palettes especially for maps and graphics. Choose from similar-spectrum palettes (to show gradations of change) and divergent palettes (to show discrete categories). PERFECT.

28 / 07

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