The Good

As always from the writers, content is key.  This book touches upon most topics that are relevant for any designer focused on the web as its medium.  The topics range from taking full advantage of CSS for layouts to typography options as well as color theory.  It covers on the fundamentals of user interface design and usability concerns that may not be something we may care as much as typical graphic artists.

Besides the graphical topics it covers, the book also covers the operations and business aspects that one may neglect.  From learning pieces of good coding for optimizing SEO to optimizing performance on websites.  There is also references to utilizing the free analytical tools to track metrics and conversion rates.  Finally, it teaches you to be aware of marketing and branding.

Another highlight subject is the insight Q&A from the authors.  This definitely provided ample rations of food for thinking.  It ends with a story of the Smashing Magazine.

Its a good amount of tips and insights that you may not gain from another book.  In addition, there are the references for you to further develop and learn on the topics the books chapters touches on.

The Bad

I can’t really fault any of the content in the book.  After all, its written by some of the leading minds in this industry.  However, I would have expected the book itself to be much better constructed.

The book is smaller than what I’d like.  I mean, the content is colorful full of graphics, screen shots and examples, it just begs to be done in a proper format like a coffee  table book.

The binding of the book, as others have reviewed, is horribly constructed as you have to be extremely careful when reading or else the pages may come apart.  Add to the problem is that the page layouts are tight where padding is minimal for the amount of content crammed in.  It makes reading the content much more difficult without opening the book up.

There is definitely some errata as well in terms of spelling and reference.  Particularly of note, in the chapter on usability, they reference a website that is clearly of the Korean language but state it as Chinese.  Small error but being international; they need to recognize this.  Korean and Chinese writing is completely different.

Finally, this book took way too long to arrive.  I pre-ordered in August and hoped it would have arrived in October.  It did get to me until December, in time for Christmas.  But had I known, I could have probably picked up all the content in the book from other resources already.

Looking Forward to the Next Installment

I am fairly critical but I do look forward to the next installment from Smashing Magazine.  I hope Smashing Book Vol. 2 will be even better; from content to presentation to construction.  It’s been three months since I’ve received the book and just about the same amount of time since I’ve read through.  I guess, like their shipment problems, it just took me awhile to get to actually putting up my thoughts on book.

***I hear the book binding issue has been resolved, unfortunately, my book has not been fixed.  Perhaps they can send me a electronic .pdf version so I can actually use this wonderful book as a reference manual.***

Last time I worked on a quick header banner for my friend for his auto parts website.  Since then, the company is taking a different direction on their focus as opposed to just selling auto parts.  Truth be told, I believe this is much better because selling auto parts pulled from dismantled autos is hard to maintain a live inventory and selling on eBay just eats away your margins.

The above is a mock up and concept derived on the fact that they are in fact recyclers.  Scrapping all parts of an automobile that is no longer operational from usable parts to straight scrap metal.

Originally, I always felt that when you think of auto dismantling or junkyards you associate to those car compactor machines, a baler.  Unfortunately, I could not find many images out there of such device and it did not make for a good logo.

Moving along, I decided to go in the direction of the recycling arrows in a triangular format.  The original mock up had a bit of an obtuse angle to the arrows wrapping through the letters of LPD but it did not appear evened out but it did have the effect I was going for.

These corners need to be cleaned up a bit but for a flat image, it definitely works in my opinion.  But as I kept drafting and working away in Illustrator to find a way to wrap the arrows around the letter in a more multidimensional method.  The end result is simply using arrows that appear three-dimensional that wrapped the letter P and D and extending the L in the front.  It almost appears that the arrows are making a sphere.

The arrows were a bit strong and overpowering and took away from the lettering.  I changed the color and opacity and used the car outline combined withe the arrowing and shifted the lettering to the right for this effect.

Then adding some drop shadow effect to it, the lettering will stand out a bit.

It was good practice, not even sure if it will be used.  It appears simple enough to be used as a logo.  I’ll update if some variation takes off in the near future.

Below are a couple of other variations I created.

One of my first projects was to help a friend who wanted to start an ecommerce site to sell auto parts.  He wanted a simple shopping cart with low maintenance so I recommended Yahoo! Small Business Merchant (SBM) shopping cart solution.  I really did not help set up the website as much since Yahoo SBM is a user-friendly way of getting an online ecommerce site going without too much configuration.

My contribution is the header image and the lettering.  I used Photoshop to crop a stock image of an NSX.  Then used Illustrator to paint it two color to keep the style simple and clean.  Also was the lettering for the store name.  The letters LPD are actually initials of the owners but they do not run together as well.  I made several attempts but in the end, felt having the letters kerned so it overlapped with three different distinct tones of gray color would complement the background of the store.

Over, it was a simple project and everyone is satisfied.  From this experience I do have several pro’s and con’s I want to share in regards to the Yahoo! Small Business Merchant option:

Pros:

1. Easy set up for a shopping cart solution.
2. Reasonable pricing starting at about $30 a month.
3. Payment gateway integrated.
4. Management of inventory has numerous options.

Cons:

1. RTML – Yahoo’s own web language is a disaster and is limited in terms of providing a more appealing theme.
2. Adding modules or components to the page and changing the layout is difficult as the RTML editor is web-based and it is very slow.  There is hardly any documentation even provided from Yahoo! and the only other solution is to hire someone who actually knows this language or uses special software to develop for it in an IDE (internal development environment).

I would say if you just want a simple store, then Yahoo’s solution is not a bad choice.  However, if you a huge catalog and want to have an unique look and ability to customize the site more thoroughly, I would recommend you staying away from this option.

For a look at some the site, please visit http://lpdautoparts.com

BodyKore already had an ecommerce store online and was looking for a way to market the company’s products.  They approached us recently to help them set up a blog and the project took off a bit more ambitious than originally thought.

The end result is a blog platform powered by WordPress with a custom theme developed by me.  Some of the custom features were to use WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) so they are able to showcase product reviews, have an event schedule, feature profiles of team members or fighters and introduce gyms that are partnered with BodyKore.

The original mock-up in Photoshop involved a three column layout with recent articles on the inner sidebar and advertisement on the outside sidebar.  It became apparent that the spacing required would make the sidebars too thin for content so a two-column layout was chosen instead.

Through careful coding, the theme does not require much third party plugin’s to work with and thus keeps loading times to a minimum.  There is a combination of jQuery and Flash to add aesthetic appeal for interactivity.  The main feature content originally used the FeatPlug plugin but the plugin did not play nice with jQuery so in the actual theme is hardcoded to offer a rotating feature content without the need of a plugin.

One of the discoveries for this project was a plugin for WordPress called Pods, CMS plugin, that extends functionality for WordPress core and allows for programming in PHP.  It is a bit like CCK/Views for Drupal which you are able to create your own content types and then display it either in a page or call it from the theme’s template.  It’s quite robust and powerful.  The only downside is my current lack of knowledge of PHP and issue of Pods using a separate database.

You can visit the completed website project at http://bodykore.com.