Darren Hoyt Dot Com

Greetings I'm a designer, art director & strategist who blogs about client relations, trends, user experience, software, the media and more

If you watched Road Rules: Semester at Sea (you remember, when Veronica stole Pua's shirt), you'll remember that SAS is a global study program that takes place aboard a cruise ship...
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About Me

Since 1998, I've built websites of all scope and size for Category 4 where I currently serve as Art Director.

This site has been featured on Design Meltdown, Smashing Magazine, Mashable, CSS Mania and Best Web Gallery.

Get in touch if you'd like to chat or find me on these other sites.

‘Screenshots in Syndication’ Launched

May 11, 2007 ( 1 )

Over in the Sandbox section I’ve added a download page for what’s been dorkily titled Screenshots in Syndication. SiS is a tool that generates screenshot images from RSS feeds — this is especially useful for designers accustomed to bookmarking their favorite sites with services like del.icio.us. Since del.icio.us provides feeds for each discrete tag, designers [...]

Popularity: 1% [?]

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Relaunch for ‘07

April 28, 2007 ( 1 )

I decided on an idea for the relaunch back in February then set about researching it, shooting photos, laying it out and building it, all the while realizing that I am my own worst client — what an old story.

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Anniversary

March 17, 2007 ( 0 )

Today marked a year since my brother-in-law Shawn passed away. His mother Enid came up from Santa Fe, NM to commemorate, and my mother drove from Atlanta. We met up for a quiet lunch in Charlottesville then caravaned to Panorama Farms in Earlysville to let off balloons.
The balloons were my sister’s idea. Their [...]

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Rounded Corners with Minimal Markup, No Javascript

March 09, 2007 ( 0 )

I was just discussing this technique over at CSS Beauty and decided to post a link to my own version. Feel free to make suggestions or report browser bugs.
New site design coming soon(ish).
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European Vacation Now Mapped

January 23, 2007 ( 0 )

Thanks to Flickr’s not-that-recent-anymore geotagging technology that I customarily discovered in my long-after-everyone-else fashion, I’ve got all our vacation data plotted on a draggable map for…someone to enjoy? (sniff) As with similar toys, the end results may appeal more to him who posts the content, and less to those receiving it. Anyone have a favorite [...]

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CSS Sliding Doors: New Zesty Lo-Cal Recipe

December 23, 2006 ( 2 )

Back in 2003, Douglas Bowman wrote a heavily bookmarked tutorial on a CSS technique characterized as ’sliding doors’ which results in lean, clean tabbed navigation. Instead of swapping in distinct fixed-width tab images for rollovers, Bowman’s method employs slivers of images which can ’slide’ together for smaller text and alternately slide outward to make room [...]

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Portfolio & More Coming Soon

November 25, 2006 ( 0 )

For the last year or so this site has essentially been a playground for me to test software and CSS, all stored behind the root in protected folders of course, and the blog, such as it is, has been a fun and infrequent distraction.
In the next month or so I want to finally begin [...]

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CSS Frames

October 05, 2006 ( 0 )

After reading this great, but lengthy, tutorial by Stuart Nichols, I was led to an example. Based on that, I made my own ultra stripped-down version:

<!– Put IE into quirks mode –>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

<title>CSS Frames</title>

<style type="text/css">

body {
margin:0px;
border:0px;
padding:0px;
[...]

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Europe, Day VII

September 16, 2006 ( 0 )

Waking up this morning was a feat, but luckily no one was in a hurry to get moving. I’d slept in the top bunk on the top floor of our host’s apartment in Old Town, two blocks from the beach where I could hear waves rolling in and smell salt in the air.
Outside on [...]

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Europe, Day VII

September 16, 2006 ( 0 )

I was the last to wake up on Saturday, mid-morning, and while I lay in my bunk I could hear the ocean nearby and smell the smells curling up from the street and hear Wistar and her friend outside on the balcony eating breakfast and gossiping. My eyes were severely dried out from not enough [...]

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Europe, Day VI

September 15, 2006 ( 0 )

Friday morning, we woke up at the craqué of any dawn I’d ever experienced to grab a 7:00am flight. This required a complicated route from our apartment to the subway to the tiny intra-European carrier handling our flight to Barcelona.
It’s a little hazy, but among the smaller European carriers there are standards and practices [...]

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Europe, Day V

September 14, 2006 ( 0 )

We ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant lit by a huge window looking out from Mont St. Michel onto the salt flats. The tide was out and the sky was as intensely white as I’d ever seen it. The concierge mentioned it was typical Channel weather for September which would only get worse. At least [...]

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Europe, Day IV

September 13, 2006 ( 0 )

A few months before the trip, neighbors of Dad and Ann had recommended a small harbor town in Normandy called Honfleur so we made that our destination for mid-morning. The clean highways were free of billboards and gave faint views of farmhouses behind the fog.
Honfleur was a tiny, half-moon shaped town wrapping a harbor. Nice, [...]

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Europe, Day III

September 12, 2006 ( 0 )

Today the plan was to see Versailles so we first had to stop at Gare du Nord and rent a car to make the forty minute drive outside Paris.
A funny thing happened on the way to Eurocar™ offices: toward the end of our metro ride, a man leaned against Dad rather heavily in a [...]

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