Stopdesign

Underline Text in Adobe Illustrator

When creating web comps, it's not uncommon to underline some of the links on the page. Perhaps it's a technical limitation of text rendering. Or perhaps the Illustrator team is afraid that users will want much more control over underlines than capability would permit (stroke weight, offset, etc.) opening up a can of worms if they implemented the ability to underline text. Despite the fact that users have been asking how to underline text in Illustrator for several versions now, Adobe somehow manages to exclude this feature in each new release of the software. Here's how to work around that limitation.

I'm Just Sayin'...

This year is certainly my "coming out of the office" year in terms of public speaking. With three events down, and four more on the schedule so far, the year holds lots of opportunities to meet new people.

The New mp3.com

This must be the week -- if not the day -- to launch new designs of products and services under new ownership. Good friend, and former colleague at Wired, Stephen Blake played a large role in today's launch of the new CNET-owned mp3.com redesign. XHTML, CSS, Sliding Doors, and rounded corners... oh my.

The New Blogger

For those of us involved in the project, we've been waiting months for this day to come. At long last, I'm proud to announce the launch of a project representing the latest collaboration between Stopdesign and Adaptive Path: the redesign of Blogger.com. Congratulations to the entire Blogger team on completing hundreds of hours, and expending tremendous effort to fit so much into this launch. This is Blogger's first major overhaul since getting acquired by Google in February 2003, and it's a biggie.

Props to the Old School

As we approach the 6-year anniversary of the original CSS2 Specification that reached W3C Recommendation status on 12 May 1998, and as the major undertaking of CSS 2.1 rapidly nears Proposed Recommendation status, John Allsopp writes a very appropriately-timed post.

More Tech at SBC Park

If you followed my recent mention of the installed wifi at SBC Park, you'll also be interested in Michael Myser's interview with Bill Schlough (the Giants' Chief Information Officer) just published at Wired News.

Baseball + Wifi

Benny Evangelista writes an interesting article for the SF Chronicle on the recently installed wifi at SBC Park. I read about the new wifi several weeks ago before opening day, but this is the first I've seen public mention about it in local media. My reaction is positive, although I certainly see the stigma attached to opening up a laptop at a sports event...

Page 23

Peter and Keith and Greg and Jon and Shaun all told me to:

Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Old Email

After a bit of drilling down through numerous folders of mailboxes, selecting all, then marking as unread, my unread message count is back to normal levels. For the record, there were 280 .mbox files in ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes, totaling 211MB in size (without attachments). Since that's 8 years of email for me, at this rate, Gmail's current size limitations of 1GB could maintain me for about 32 years.

You've Definitely Got Mail

Ever felt like you just can't keep up with unread email?

Drag-Scrolling in Safari

One of the small, less-talked-about features of Saft (the plugin for enhancing Safari's features) has one person interested enough to write a full entry about it.

The Return

I'm sure Dave will write from his own perspective, but I thought I'd offer up some answers, information, and details about yesterday's mischief.

Time for Change

Feeling inspiration from others who've been redesigning, I finally decided it's time to take this site's design in a slightly new direction. I've been working on this one in the background for a while, whenever I've had spare time. The colors were inspired by a photo I took of the Brockton Point Lighthouse in Stanley Park while visiting Vancouver last year for the AIGA National Design Conference.

Eternal Sunshine

Last night, we went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I'll add my enthusiastic endorsement for the spectacular brilliance of this film. Whether it's Kaufman's creative screenwriting, Gondry's directing, Carrey's talented acting, or all of the above and more, I don't care. Something comes together in this film that makes for a wonderful experience.

Portal Implosion

With all due respect to any former colleagues still stuck within the organization, there's no greater satisfaction than leaving a major internet company over year ago, and now, seeing their home page turn into this.