01/2009 Article Archive

  • January 30, 2009 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (1/30/09 Edition)

    I really enjoyed reading Horizontal Flow by 13Things this week. It presents an interesting perspective on why web design is so column-centric. But the best part of it is the introduction where the story of web design is told in a Genesis 1 style. Very funny. Also, the jQuery interactive map is fascinating. I think jQuery is really starting to give Flash a run for its money. Here's this week's 5 for Friday.

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    • 1572 Views
  • January 28, 2009 in Web Design Worldview

    Love the Lord Your God with All Your Design

    Most westerners (even non-Christians) are familiar with the famous Bible passage in which Jesus explains that the greatest commandment is to "love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. The second", he goes on to explain, "is like it: love your neighbor as yourself." Well, we're all at least familiar with the second half. It is after all the "golden rule". But without the first part, the second part is a flimsy piece of secular moralism. I suppose if your purpose in studying the Bible is to find support for a system you already have in place, ripping out the first half of Jesus' speech is perfectly satisfactory. An honest search for truth, however, could never settle for the second greatest commandment. We need the first and the second.

  • January 23, 2009 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (1/23/09 Edition)

    This week I posted the first of four articles on the basics of web design. It's a series I've been meaning to write for a long time but just couldn't seem to get around to it. Expect to see the remaining three articles released one at a time every other week. Here's this week's 5 for Friday:

    • 2 Comments
    • 1445 Views
  • January 21, 2009 in Design Tips & Tutorials

    Intro to Web Design (Part 1): Grasping the Core Concepts

    If you're a regular reader of Mirificam Press you know that most of my articles dealing with the mechanics of web design tend to focus in on very specific issues. And most of the time the issues I write about are geared toward intermediate or advanced web designers. As I recently began grouping sets of past articles together into related series, this characteristic came to the forefront. I realized that on Mirificam Press there is a lack of articles relating the core concepts and techniques of web design. With the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants nature of our unique vocation I think its important that I present a cohesive primer on the technical concepts that form the foundation of web design.

    • 22 Comments
    • 8951 Views
  • January 16, 2009 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (1/16/09 Edition)

    If you visited Mirificam Press this week you may have noticed some changes. The graphics and layout have been updated and improved but the big change is the new "study path mode". After a year of advertising a soon-to-come web design study course, I finally got serious and finished it. The study path mode transforms the website to feature the current study series and make it easier for those following the series to navigated around the related articles. Every three or four months, I'll be switching out the design on the study path mode and starting a new focus series. You can try it out by clicking the button next to the logo. The site mode can be easily toggled on and off. And now this week's 5 for Friday:

    • 3 Comments
    • 1241 Views
  • January 14, 2009 in Web Design Worldview

    The Fallen Designer: What Good Can Come from a Shipwrecked Soul?

    The question of the current state of humanity is one which penetrates to the heart of a person's worldview. Understand, when I say "current state of humanity" I'm not referring to of the current state of human affairs in time (who's fighting who, the world economy, etc.); rather I'm speaking of the natural condition into which all humans are born. Our understanding of this state is inextricably tied to the second of three foundational worldview questions: how did we get here? what went wrong? and how do we fix it? In this article I'm going to deal primarily with the question "what went wrong?" and explain how the fallen state of humanity affects designers today. Of course, I'll be focusing primarily on the the classic Christian perspective on this topic, but along the way I'll briefly discuss some other views from pop culture for the purpose of contrast.

  • January 9, 2009 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (1/9/09 Edition)

    With feet now firmly planted in the new year, I think it's time to hint at some upcoming changes to Mirificam Press. In the next few weeks I'll be unveiling a new design and layout. My gosh, the current one's been up for almost nine months now; It's practically a dinosaur. Of course, when the switch happens I'll post an article explaining the changes and new features. For now, here's this week's 5 for Friday:

    • 2 Comments
    • 1123 Views
  • January 7, 2009 in Design Tips & Tutorials

    Beautiful CSS: Organizing Your Stylesheets

    When I first took the plunge into CSS several years ago, one of my biggest frustrations was stylesheet organization. I scoured source code from popular sites trying to figure how they accomplished various layout effects. But tracking back and forth from stylesheets to HTML proved to be a difficult task. Unfortunately , that separation of style and content that makes CSS so awesome can also make it difficult to understand. Adding to that difficulty is the fact that each designer may have a different way of organizing stylesheets. If you inherit someone else's site, this can cause some problems. In a perfect world everyone's CSS would be well-organized, easy to scale, and easy to understand. We may not be able to attain such CSS Nirvana but we can at least make it easier on ourselves and those we work with by following this set of guidelines.

  • January 2, 2009 in Friday Blog Clips

    5 for Friday | The Week's Best Blogs (1/2/09 Edition)

    Well, we can cross out 2008 and look forward to great new year for web design. Despite some of the bad happenings in this last year, I feel that it's been one of my greatest years of growth and maturity in my vocation as well as life in general. Mirificam Press has come a long way from being practically a vanity press to a blog with a respectable ranking and almost 900 subscribers. I'd like to take a quick line to thank everyone who reads and comments on Mirificam Press. And I'd like to thank God for his grace and provision in 2008. Here's the first 5 for Friday of 2009:

    • 2 Comments
    • 1195 Views