No, we aren’t talking about the latest political debates - those are boring.  We’re talking about insurance - old-fashioned commercial, medical, life yadda-yadda.  Higginbotham Insurance, founded in 1948 is an institution in Fort Worth.  And, over the years, they’ve grown to be one of the largest independent insurance brokerages in the country.  They aren’t flashy, they aren’t hard-sell, rather they are a reliable, trusted advisor for many. They needed a web-based facelift combined with some pretty nifty technical magic thrown in.

We refined their messaging and presented it in a timeless design, that both updated their image while streamlining the navigation of a several hundred page site.

With multiple locations that operate under separate brand flags, we had to create a universal CMS that worked across 7 different URLS, while providing limited local content management capabilities to the field offices.  

The result is a clean site that proves that work for a conservative company - doesn’t have to be boring.

“Wee Nudge: Teach Your Clients The Mysteries of the Web”

A very helpful resource for debunking common myths in web & design. They have currated popular articles across the internet addressing common misconceptions such as white space (and why you should have it) and the nefarious 600px “fold” rule. There are some great lessons here folks for both sides of the table.
Check it out.

-Alex

decodering:

Setting a Google Map as the Background of your Web Site

So the other day I was Googling ways to “set a Google map as the background of your site” with little luck at all on finding a good solution. So I decided to create one using CSS properties and utilizing the z-index/absolute positioning of elements.

To get an idea of what I did, visit: http://wadehammes.com/dewey-beach/

I shared this on my personal blog, but I thought this was so interesting I thought I would share this little nugget of goodness with you folks as well. I’ve seen some site designs that have implemented interactive maps on their about pages, but this implementation seems like something that would be accessible to front-end-developers without too much headache.

This could be advantageous for business to consumer companies wanting to share franchise locations, or show off their location in the region in a fun way. The applications could turn into some very aesthetic web design.

-Alex

Senior student projects sure have changed since I was in college some few years ago. Nathan Godding, a senior at Academy of Art in San Francisco, is one crazy talented
stu­dent. I’m par­tic­u­larly lov­ing this play­ful iden­tity project he devel­oped for an
imag­inary, mod­ern cir­cus. I don’t really agree with circuses, but might actually think twice about going to this one if it ever came to town!

robynchell:

You’re a Comic Sans Criminal… but we’re here to help you.

(courtesy of Matt Dempsey)

A fun little web slide show with standout typography & design. Really educates youngsters on the danger of comic sans use. Very dangerous habit kids.

-Alex

So a project we’ve been working on with TTI just went live today, a very challenging trivia game with various topics covering both spy films and Christmas/Holiday facts. “A strange combination,” you might say. But I would just say back “Uh, by strange you mean AWESOME”. Christmas and Spying go together like peanut butter and jelly. Takes some serious stealth work to get those presents down the chimney. Play the game and depending on your score and how much the internet gods love you there’s a chance to win some sweet prizes. You can find out more here.

-Alex

One of the cool thing of CSS3 is that you can style even further your webdesign with customized fonts. i’ve been playing with this all day on this place and if all went fine for Chrome and Safari I spent hours struggling with the stupid Fox.

Read the rest of his article here

If you read further in the article, the author mentions the root of his frustrations with firefox and @font-face support (custom font embedding): blocked cross-domain support. Yes, firefox has an idiotic security measure that keeps you from embedding fonts from another domain as well as other certain files. It’s supposed to protect stealing fonts and hotlinking, but all it does is get in the way of delicious typographic design. He mentions a certain solution that will work around that:

So how to easily use @font-face on Tumblr? The short answer is FontSquirrel with Base64 Encode in Expert mode. Basically just upload your font(s), download and extract your kit and copy paste the heavy generated CSS code into your default stylesheet.

This will work. However, I have run into this issue a while back when I was working on the current version of my blog now. There was quite a bit of head banging and crying while drinking Shiner to dull the pain of it all. I discovered a simpler solution, and all it really requires is that you have access to your hosting space/domain.

How did I do it?

What I did was create an .htaccess file, by simply opening a new plain text document, writing in a few lines of code (see below), and literally saving it with the name “.htaccess” and nothing else. I then dropped the file in the same directory as wherever I’m storing those fonts on my server and voila! Firefox is embedding on cross domains again.

Here is the code embedded below for you to copy and paste:

This is pretty much saying “Hey, I am giving whoever permission to use these filetypes on their own domain”.

Boom. There goes the dynamite.

-Alex

(via gregbabula)

simplebits:

For the fourth time in my life, I’ve written a book. It’s titled, CSS3 For Web Designers and it’s available today in paperback and ebook formats from A Book Apart. I couldn’t be more excited, seeing this little green thing launch after months of planning, writing, editing, fretting. I certainly didn’t do it alone.

Photo by Jason Santa Maria

I wouldn’t be writing books if it weren’t for Jeffrey Zeldman, so it’s especially fantastic to have CSS3 For Web Designers be the No. 2 offering from A Book Apart—a publishing house created by Jeffrey, Mandy Brown and Jason Santa Maria. Their focus on “brief books for people who make websites” was a perfect fit for the book I wanted to write: a practical guide to portions of CSS3 that work today, usable by anyone right now. I’ve been speaking about how CSS3 can be safely and easily utilized on the experience layer of well-crafted websites over the last year, and it’s wonderful to have that research packaged up in paper and pixel form.

Following up Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers masterpiece was an impossible task. His book was the right time, the right subject and the right author. It’s an instant classic.

Daunting as it was, I set out on a similar task:

30 Examples of Big Backgrounds in Web Design

Check out this showcase of full-screen imagery incorporated (beautifully) into web pages. A lot of different types of web-sites can utilize this design trend: retail, sports, photographers, designers, and probably others you can easily rationalize. Now some web designers starting out may be wondering, “How the heck do I get this effect?” Welllll there are a number ways that include both flash, javascript, and css3.

Since the background-size css property is still largely unsupported by some major browsers (only works currently in webkit and opera), that’s not much of an option. So what about flash? Do you know actionscript? I know I don’t. I’m a designer, not a developer.

That leaves us with JavaScript, and in this case, my beloved jQuery library. I recently made a posting on my personal blog covering a helpful jQuery plugin named “Fullscreenr.js”. This plugin is probably the quickest way to achieve the effect you desire. Check out the tutorial and let me know what you think of fullscreenr. Cheers,

-Alex

(Source: smashingmagazine.com)

ialreadydontlikeyou:

Your Web Page Needs More Velociraptor.

This is EPIC; you can have a big ol’ velociraptor zoom across your website’s screen by timer or click. Zurb Playground has released a seemingly useless jquery plugin called “Raptorize.js”.

But is it useless? Yes, I know this clearly reeks of win (especially since you can have it activate by typing the konami code while on the page), but just in case Jeff Goldblum’s worries were correct and that secret island of dinosaurs broke loose, I think you would want to know the sound and look of a creature smart enough to turn door knobs. Just sayin’.

While finding content for my own blog, I found this wicked-awesome jquery plugin and thought followers here might enjoy this easter egg as well.

-Alex