http://www.farfromfearless.com Personal blog of Chris Murphy Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:00:51 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Indie artists have long since caught onto the fact that online distribution for a niche title or genre is a far more effective compared to traditional (and expensive) distribution channels. Not only that, but the appetite for indie titles, stories, and art is considerable -- such as mine, which is ... http://www.farfromfearless.com/2008/07/03/digital-art-illustration-05-focus-on-aaron-alexovich/ Web-design in all it myriad forms, can be characterized as the marriage of creative vision and technical implementation. But it is the limitations and resulting solutions for what can be achieved technically that -- to me -- is the truest definition. Understandably, this is a touchy standpoint to take depending on ... http://www.farfromfearless.com/2008/06/24/separating-the-creative-from-the-technical-in-web-design/ It has been nearly three months since I have last posted on my blog, and while traffic has not slowed much, I am starting to feel irresponsible for neglecting my site for so long. So for those of you who have been e-mailing me about feature requests for Lemon Lime ... http://www.farfromfearless.com/2008/06/19/far-from-frequent/ With all the stiff competition for limited placements in agencies, it's not difficult to understand the concern over wanting to work for the best and at the best creative agency. To confuse students further, they now have much more to choose from in terms of creative agencies -- so much ... http://www.farfromfearless.com/2008/03/18/working-at-an-advertising-agency-or-a-boutique-shop-which-option-is-better/ I've recently completed work on designing a nifty little piece of software intended for portable use (USB Key) -- and I think the application would be quite handy for creative writers, but it may not even see the light of day, or at least the glow of my laptop LCD. I ... http://www.farfromfearless.com/2008/02/13/a-small-but-great-idea-seeking-talented-open-source-developer/ Color selection can be troublesome especially when it comes to designing for yourself. WordPress themes are no exception, and the exercise itself is possibly one of the more challenging aspects of creating a new theme. When it comes to design in general, there are some basic guidelines that you can ... http://www.farfromfearless.com/2008/01/24/wordpress-theme-design-part-3-color-and-contrast/ In brief: my external storage device failed. This is not a good thing considering I the external drive was both my external storage and "backup" device. I use the term "backup" loosely as I don't actually have a consistent backup policy. You would think I would have a policy ... http://www.farfromfearless.com/2008/01/21/when-backups-fail/ In the previous installment of this series, I covered how we can harmonize and control the layout of our design by making consistent use of a strong column measure. In turn, the column measure gave us the foundation for our visual grid. With that invisible grid in mind, a designer ... http://www.farfromfearless.com/2008/01/18/wordpress-theme-design-part-2-typography/ An issue facing developers currently is compatibility. Older WordPress themes are becoming less and less popular, which is not necessarily due to design so much as the lack of support for newer features such as "Widgets", emerging "Plug-ins", and the big one: deprecated/unsupported template tags. The reality is that ... http://www.farfromfearless.com/2008/01/14/wordpress-theme-design-part-1-best-practices-when-designing-a-new-theme/ There are some significant updates to this WordPress theme, and most of the updates are intended to make the theme a little friendlier for new users to tweak and modify as they need. Some of the updates you may not notice come in the form of significant code refractoring, where ... http://www.farfromfearless.com/2008/01/11/lemon-twist-v20-updated-wordpress-theme/ One of the first things I did after getting my iTunes library cleaned up and ported over to the iPod Touch, was to develop an Touch/iPhone compatible version of my WordPress theme. I thought it would be much harder than it actually was and to be quite honest, it was ... http://www.farfromfearless.com/2008/01/02/fun-with-safari-on-the-ipod-touch/ Here it is, FFF "Lemon Twist" v1.5 available for download. This theme is quite dear to me as it's been something I've tweaked and adjusted until it's as perfect as I can manage -- I hope that you can all enjoy using it as much as I have enjoyed putting ... http://www.farfromfearless.com/2007/12/14/fff-lemon-twist-wordpress-theme-v15-released-for-download/ I developed these caricatures as little icons that I could use in place of MSN pictures or avatars on various sites. I don't really like to use photos of myself, and there are times I just want something that's a little expressive, fun, and different. I'll post more ... http://www.farfromfearless.com/2007/12/12/farfromfreakie/ I just stopped in to see the activity on my site only to find that my pages were gone, and plug-ins disabled. Mischief abound. And for no apparent reason it seems. Between last night and this morning, I've done nothing to the settings and now that I've ... http://www.farfromfearless.com/2007/12/07/wordpress-wierdness/ It seems that everyday I'm finding new and interesting applications aimed at creative writers. Up until about two years ago, this was not the case. In fact, what you might have typically found online was a bevy of bloated word-processors that attempted in many ways to mimic MS Word and ... http://www.farfromfearless.com/2007/11/29/software-for-creative-writers/