Say This, Say That! is proud to announced that we have finished up the web site for Guidon Technologies.

http://www.guidon-tech.com/

Located in both Washington and California, Guidon Technology Solutions is a Service Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business committed to excellence in the provision of rapid and flexible solutions to a broad base of customers worldwide.

Say This, Say That! created and developed a cms driven web site for them to use as a portal for potential customers.  We also redesigned their company store to fit in with their current branding.

A lot of people realize that YouTube now features the option to watch certain videos in high resolution, but what a lot of people don’t know if that you can modify the embed code used for YouTube movies so that they will play back in high resolution as well.  For instance, take this embed code for example

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/TQc5d-A6×3E”></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/TQc5d-A6×3E” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

If you add the following code to the value url and embed src, it will display the video in high resolution…

&ap=%2526fmt%3D18

Once added, the code looks something like this…

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/TQc5d-A6×3E&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/TQc5d-A6×3E&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

Heres an example of it in action on one of my animations…

This is a very nifty find for people who post a lot of video blogs, podcasts, and such.

I’m pleased to announce the opening of the brand new web site for the Olympia Film Society.  The site was designed with the needs of the society in mind.  They requested an easy way to create and manage news/films/events.  We hooked them up with a fully custom Wordpress integrated web site and event calendar to display upcoming events/showtimes.

The design of the site is easy on the eyes and is fairly simple to navigate.  It also offers a lot more functions for society members.

Feel free to check out the web site here…

http://www.olympiafilmsociety.org/

Photoshop is an essential tool for good web design. You can use Photoshop for rendering high quality images from scratch, color correcting and enhancing photos, really the sky is the limit. Rather than provide you with a specific tutorial that walks you through the creation of a specific style or design, my goal is to show you several tools that you may not know about that can be used many different ways:

1. Copy Merged
   This one’s really a no-brainer. Make a selection, go to Edit > Copy Merged and voila, you’ve copied a a composite of all visible layers and effects, blended, merged and ready to paste. Open a new document and paste it in. I never slice anything anymore.

   Note: If you’re Photoshop is older than CS2 you will need to have a visible layer selected or nothing will happen! This can be very confusing, so if you can afford an upgrade, do so!
    

2. Fade…
   The mysterious menu item that seems to never be enabled. Go ahead. Open up a photo, go to the Edit menu. See Fade…? It’s grayed out so that you can’t select it. Now scale your image down to a width of 120px. It probably got a bit fuzzy so let’s sharpen it a bit. Select Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen. Before you do anything else, go to the Edit menu. Now you’ll see Fade Sharpen… is available. Select it. Sharpen is a powerful filter. Too powerful if you ask me. Set the opacity fader in the Fade window to 30%. Depending on your image, you may need less or more, but 30% is about as high as you’ll ever need to go with Sharpen. 

   Fade can be used with pretty much any action in Photoshop, and in addition to the opacity fader, you can use it to change the blending mode. Think of fade as taking the current state of the highlighted layer and blending it with the immediate previous version. This can be a great tool for softening or changing the way that Photoshop renders anything raster based.
    

3. Levels
   Levels is a quick and easy way to improve the depth of color of your photos. This one is also very powerful, and has some tricks you may or may not know about. One that I’ve found invaluable is setting your black point and white point in an image. Open up a photo that is too dark, low contrast or generally poorly lit, and select Image > Adjustments > Levels. You’ll notice there are there three little eye droppers on the lower right portion of this dialog. If your image’s blacks are to light, select the one with black in the dropper. Now click on the pixel in your image that should appear to be black. If there isn’t any area that should appear fully black, don’t use it. If your images white areas are too gray, select the eye dropper with white in it, then choose the whitest point on your image. Make sure you have the Preview box checked so that you can see what the effect will be. If it comes out too harsh, you can always Fade it.
    
4. Curves
   Curves is pretty tricky to do well, but if you’ve never used it, give it a shot. It’s a much finer control over color and value than you can get with the more basic Hue/Saturation or Levels adjustments. Go to Image > Adjustments > Curves and check it out. A little goes a long way.

Our good friends over at Merchant OS recently asked us to help design their new look. The new layout is now live. Go check it out, and be sure to look into their amazing web-based point of sale system. 

Firefox 3 is here! Go to spreadfirefox.com and pledge to download it on June 17th.

Generally, we don’t much like table-based layouts around these parts. As I like to put it, tables are for boring data, not beautiful design. Sometimes however, working to make a quick change to a site designed elsewhere can require a comprimise.

In this case, I’m referring to a table layout I inherited that I wanted to make centered in the browser window, and only by changing the CSS (and without adding a new id on every single page) Here’s how I did it:

First I tried the idealistic (proper) method, fingers crossed:

body > table {
	margin: 0 auto;
}

It worked… almost. It worked on the usual suspects - Safari 3, FireFox 2 Mac/PC, IE 7. But of course, IE 6 doesn’t recognize child selectors.

Next, I tried a less pretty but ultimately effective method that utilizes the C in CSS… “Cascading.” That’s right, it can be used to your advantage! For this method I made two definitions in my CSS:

First, I styled every table within the body tag:

body table {

	margin: 0 auto;

}

Then, I reset the margins of any tables nested within the first table.

body table table {

	margin: 0;

}

And that worked on all mentioned browsers, and it’s pretty much just long hand for the child selector version I tried first. Outside of looking a little like myspace code, I can live with it. After all, we’re talking about a table layout! Dirty CSS is the least of its problems.

I’m proud to announce that the design made and developed by Say This, Say That! for Locust Street Taxi, is now officially up and live!

http://www.locuststreettaxi.com

Locust Street Taxi is a Pacific Northwest band. They deliver an infectiously fun and energetic live show the likes of which no musicologist or behavioral scientist would dare to analyze!

The site is built on Wordpress and gives them the ability to update the site dynamically, as well as blog about their band.  Hopefully their fans enjoy the new site and good luck to the band in the future!

Rhapsody and Mac haven’t always played nice. In fact, I think Real Networks doesn’t care much about Mac as a platform at all. Sure, these days Intel Mac owners can run Rhapsody natively with Parallels or Boot Camp, with all the bells and whistles. (downloads, offline listening, Rhapsody To Go, etc.) But I’ve been happy to just run it in my browser on my MacBook. Sometimes though, web apps can crash your browser unexpectedly, so that’s not ideal.

Just yesterday, I found a solution:

Fluid is a free Mac Application that you can use to build site specific web browser “applications.” I used it to create my own Rhapsody.app. I enjoyed it so much, I had to make my own icon for it too, which I’ll share here too. Here’s a screenshot of my Fluid built app:

**Edit: Now with Browsa! More on that in the comments.

And my icon in the dock:

If this appeals to you, give it a try:

1. Download My Icon or make your own, if you feel like it. Gotta have one, or else you’re stuck with the favicon from rhapsody.com.
2. Go Get Fluid, it’s great for your other favorite web apps too.
3. Make your app and start listening. If you’re not already a Rhapsody web user, you’ll need to install a plugin, and if you’ve never used Rhapsody before you’ll need to create an account.

Say This, Say That! is pleased to announce the launch of Eros Arabian & Hackney Horses.  Eros Arabian & Hackney Horses is a local Olympia, WA based ranch that specializes in raising and breeding.

Say This, Say That! set out to recreate the companies web site. The site now offers a cleaner navigation and more functionality. Viewers of the site can check out dynamic horse portfolios which feature information, pictures, and even videos about each horse. The site also features a news module for easy updates.

 So, feel free to check out our work here…

 http://www.erosarabhacks.com/