Delta Tango Bravo

I've been lucky enough to be involved in the recent rebranding process of Mozilla's Firefox project. When my cohort Steven Garrity was asked by the Mozilla organization to gather a team of designers to work on the rebranding of Firebird to Firefox a few months ago, I managed to kind of sneak in. The whole process of the renaming and new branding has been fascinating and there has been some truly fantastic work done by the team of volunteers.

The logo, in particular, has been a process of evolution from a crappy marker-board illustration, to Stephen Desroches' pencil drawing, to Jon Hicks' great illustration guided by the feedback of the rest of the team. Jon has outlined much of the process on his own weblog with examples.

For those of you who have never heard of Firefox (or its previous version Firebird), it's a great web browser that's easy to use and is much better in most respects to Internet Explorer. If you're still using IE, give Firefox a try (it's free!) and you certainly won't be going back!

OK, today's topic is the top five greatest movie titles of all time. Like the band names, points are awarded for overall impression but also for the appropriateness of the name combined with the quality of the film.

1. Apocalypse Now!
2. Citizen Kane
3. The Grapes of Wrath
4. Full Metal Jacket
5. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

I remember seeing "Apocalypse Now!" at a video store when I was about fourteen and, not knowing a single thing about the movie, thinking I had to see the film. When I finally saw it for the first time several years later I wasn't let down at all. Now, I know that "The Grapes of Wrath" was a book first and maybe some of the others were too, but it's always been my favourite title for a novel, so it makes the list. Also, I don't care what you say, "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" was a great film and the title is perfect for it.

Browsing Boing Boing yesterday, I discovered Kirsten Johnson's fun oil paintings of sock puppets. Her collection covers the whole range of human emotion from cranky, to evasive, to foolishly optimistic, to rambunctious, to drunkenly amorous. Many of the pieces are already sold, but I think a few are still available. Gorgeously insincere might fit nicely on my wall.

About a month ago I was toying around with my laptop in my apartment and discovered that a neighbor had installed an open wi-fi access point that enabled me to get free wireless internet access right in my living room. However, only a week later the connection was gone and I figured I had lost my handy free connection for good.

Then, last night I was at Baba's Lounge with some friends, when the manager of the bar asked if I had been trying to access his wifi recently? Weird. He lives across the road from my place and had seen my computer's name 'Daniel' when I had tried to connect to his network. Strange things happen when you live in a small place and the lo-fi world of neighbors meets your online life. Anyhow, he's kindly enabling my MAC address, so I'm back in business. Thanks Ryan.

It just came to my attention that the Sloan website we developed has been featured on Adam Howell's Daily Standards. His site has consistently updated features on standards-based websites. It's a really nicely designed site itself and his content is superb (he even has RSS sydication). Really nice.

There's a good discussion going on over at Web Graphics challenging web designers to format their forms with CSS as opposed to tables. I've actually been meaning to write about this subject on this site and the discussion over there is a good catalyst.

At silverorange, we've been moving toward table-free layouts over the past year. Some sites we've done recently have been almost entirely CSS designed and some others have been hybrid layouts. However, forms is one area where we are still using tables every time. Why? Because even if they aren't semantically correct, tables work extremely well for laying out form inputs and field titles.

The few examples of CSS designed forms I've seen use fixed widths to determine the alignment of the field titles to the inputs. That works fine except when anyone resizes their fonts and you must also specify a precise width for each form you design as the title lengths are all different. Is there a way to specify the width of a <div> as a variable value? I don't care precisely how wide my <div> is, I just want all of my field title <div>s on one page to be the same width. For example, <div style="width: n;">. Has this been discussed as part of the CSS3 specification? Or maybe people have better suggestions...

The movie Bubba Ho-Tep finally arrives at City Cinema in Charlottetown on Wednesday. I haven't had this much anticipation for a movie in a very long time. Oh, the suspense is killing me. Anything this preposterous has to be good...

Elvis, confined to a Mud Creek, Texas, rest home with cancer of the penis (yes), is believed to be Sebastian Haff, the famous Elvis impersonator. Elvis, however, bored out of his mind in retirement, years earlier signed a contract with Haff that allowed Elvis to go on the road as Haff performing as Elvis. The document was lost in a freak BBQ accident, so although the proof is gone, the real Elvis is still thought of as Haff. JFK, who also happens to be in Mud Creek, was dyed black after the assassination attempt in a further piece of the larger conspiracy.

Working daily to continue to unravel the true story surrounding his shooting, he and Elvis become quick friends and team up first as co-fighters against a squad of rat-sized predatory medieval creatures that have come to Mud Creek for some reason. But soon, bigger evils are afoot, in the form of the great, lost Egyptian mummy Bubba Ho-Tep, who also finds Mud Creek a nice place to hang out. Elvis and JFK discover that a bus containing a traveling Egyptian museum roadshow was lost in a nearby lake in the 1960s. Now, the lost mummies, creatures, and other artifacts are coming to the surface, ready to kill again. The wheelchair-bound JFK and the King prepare for a battle against Bubba Ho-Tep, who is mystically drawn to Elvis. So how, you ask, can any of this be any good?

Taken from a Review by Jon Alon Walz, Box Office Magazine

This isn't revolutionary, but I figured out a nice simple way to make a shadowed box with a tiny bit of CSS. See the result and the code over at the silverorange labs.

In the past week or so I've happened to run across a number of great posters available online (some of them thanks to the great links over at Coudal Partners). Please feel free to add to this list with your own suggestions if you've seen something recently worth mentioning.

• The Computerlove poster contest is over and some of the winners are superb. The overall winning design by Marcus Ericsson is particularly good. Look carefully for the hidden words...
• DesignBoom's history of the folding chair is an interesting project in itself. The poster that accompanies the collection is equally brilliant.
• I've always really liked the style of Pearl Jam's artwork and especially their poster design. This fan site has a fairly good collection of tour posters.