Darren Hoyt Dot Com

Before mocking up new homepage designs for a client, I make sure I’ve received proper design assets such as a vector logo, text, photos, and any other digital materials they’d like to see in the layout. If the photos are coming straight from the client’s digital camera, they’re rarely received in optimal condition - they might be dark, grainy, bland or unbalanced. But if they’re the best the client has got and there’s no budget for stock photography, it’s our job as web designers to improvise.

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This was my first design for Crutchfield, who was recently ranked #1 Online Electronics Retailer by Consumer Reports this year.

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My music collection, both store-bought and digitally encoded, numbers in the thousands of albums at this point, yet I go through periods of feeling burnt out on all of it, every single song and every single album. For the past couple years I’ve been seeking alternatives - talk radio, lectures, news, comedy.

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It’s one thing when designers perpetuate trends like gradients or huge headers, but in the past year I’ve actually had clients asking for rounded corners by name. Usually it’s because they’ve seen them on a site they like and believe the softer edges make the page friendlier. No argument here, although I sometimes explain that the HTML required can cause bloat.

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Last month, I released a magazine-style theme for Wordpress called Mimbo. I’m excited to say that since then there have been over 500 downloads and at least 100 working Mimbo-enabled sites spotted around the web. I’m currently sketching some layout ideas for version 2.0…

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A year ago I bought the Canon Powershot S3 IS after comparing about ten different cameras and driving the Best Buy staff to distraction. I mainly chose the S3 for its 12x optical zoom and Stitch-Assist (panorama) function and right there ends my entire repertoire of digital camera jargon.
The Stitch-Assist has been easy to [...]

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Add ABC Chicago7 to the list of news sites to avoid on general principle. I won’t link to specific stories but go ahead, starting clicking around and don’t say I didn’t warn you if your head explodes. You’ll enjoy one Netflix popup ad, three adjacent Oprah ads, some paid links, and an indie-rock muppet in [...]

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These days, every site I build is CMS-driven, which usually means a native search utility is included. Once in awhile I still update smaller flat sites for clients who want site-search functionality but don’t care where the results are hosted. Without exception, they all ask for Google by name, maybe thinking a little Google namecheck [...]

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For designers who don’t write PHP from scratch, the Wordpress template code mentioned in past articles can be cumbersome to type out for each new project. For me, that code is a perfect candidate for Dreamweaver’s ‘Snippets’ tool which allows the code to be saved, managed and re-used with relative ease.

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I’m leaving for a one-week break tomorrow. Last year was Paris and Mont St. Michel, this year will be Montreal — this is what happens when your girlfriend’s a Francophile. My own French is microminimal while my Spanish is actually competent, though I never get to use it. My vote for next year’s vacation: Montevideo.

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Any content pulled from Wordpress qualifies as “dynamic” by definition, but there are varying degrees of how to break down and print that data. As seen in other articles, I’m a fan of exploiting Wordpress’s query_posts function for purposes other than blogging.

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If you’re keeping score, the last version of this project came to the attention of a higher-up at Snap.com who had problems with the way Snap’s functionality was being cannibalized. So I took it down, but in researching better ways to generate screenshots I stumbled upon a service called WebSnapr which accomplishes exactly what I [...]

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A fun part of customizing Wordpress themes is designing a comments format which complements the rest of the site. Here are three examples from recent projects, including code samples and downloads to the original .PSDs…

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Last week’s release of the Mimbo theme for Wordpress went a bit more quickly than I’d thought, which explains why a few key issues were overlooked…

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