WP 2.5.1 Media Gallery

Okay, so I’m having some funky issues going on with Wordpress 2.5.1. I’ve been doing a lot of blog developments lately and one of the blogs I’m working on was having issues inserting images through the Media Gallery. Now, the really weird thing is that it’s only happening in Firefox. I can insert images through Camino and Safari with absolutely no problem. Essentially, what happens though is that when I click “Insert Into Post” from my browser, the Media Gallery pop-up goes completely blank white and I can do nothing but click the “x” to close the window. Additionally, in Firefox (I’m on version 2.0.0.14), the lightbox-style black overlay in the background of the Media Gallery doesn’t show up whereas it does in both Camino and Safari. Bizarre, will edit this when I figure out wtf is going wrong.

Additionally, here’s the error that Firebug caught if anyone knows what the hell it means or it might help fix the issue:

uncaught exception: Permission denied to get property Window.send_to_editor
tb_show("", "[URL REMOVED FOR PRIVACY]“, false)thickbox.js (line 230)
tb_init()thickbox.js (line 26)
e(Object type=click target=img currentTarget=a.thickbox)jquery.js (line 11)
e()

[edit]

Okay, it appears that there’s a cross-domain issue caused by the “www” in front of WordPress domains. For example:

http://www.domainname.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=28 and
http://domainsname.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=28

are treated different and that’s why the error was showing up in Firefox. If I had just domainsname.com, then Insert Image works, but with the www. in front it did the blank white screen thing. Safari also went blank with the www in front of it. Camino though, for some reason, appears to go to the www-free domain automatically. That is, I tried entering “www” in front of the domain and it would convert it back to the www-free domain. Weird.

It appears that the WordPress URL/Blog Url under the “General” tab in “Settings” determines which domain it is that you can upload images from, so if you’re having these issues, make sure you double-check the domain that your WordPress blog is configured to and that might fix the issues.

Tagged in: Interactive
Category: Client Work

The Devji Group

The Devji Group is a group of Edmonton brothers who own seven different clothing boutiques in Edmonton. Their stores cover the gamut from high men’s and women’s fashion to classic rock tees and motocross brands over to hip hop, skate and urban culture for both genders. In summer 2006 they were looking to enhance their online presence for all seven of their clothing companies to better inform their customers as well as promote the rather diverse selection of top-quality brand names that their stores carry.

I worked in co-ordination with Zaar Marketing to create designs to accurately capture the various target markets of each clothing company and help thematically separate each store from one another. I was responsible for logo revisions for many of the stores, the design of all of the websites as well as development of xhtml-strict templates for integration with the WordPress Blogging Platform.

Project Link: Soular Clothing

Project Link: Method Streetwea

Project Link: Queue Clothing

Project Link: Sophia’s Clothing

Tagged in: Design, Devji, Identity, Illustration, Interactive, Zaar
Category: Client Work

Misc. Identities

Just a small collection of some of the various identities I’ve done for various reasons over the last couple years that don’t have enough background to make their own separate posts about.

Tagged in: Design, Identity
Category: Client Work

The Bank Ultra Lounge

In fall of September 2005, I was contacted about working with a local entertainment industry company about designing a branding scheme for a new lounge/nightclub they were opening up in downtown Edmonton, AB. The owners were designing the club to appeal to an older, wealthier crowd who treated the clubs they go to as an extension of their personality and lifestyle. The project involved designing a logo for the club, all print collateral from launch through the first six months of business, as well as designing/developing a website on MediaShaker’s Shout content management system.

The logo utilized LettError’s Federal font, currently the most accurate representation of the American bill’s typeface, to provide a subconscious indication of money. The thick, bold characters of Federal were then contrasted by the heavily kerned, lowercase tagline composed in Univers Ultra Thin Condensed. The typography was supplemented by the development of a secondary branding mark, a dollar sign enclosed in a thickly outlined circle, integrated into the logo as well as much of the club’s branding collateral. Finally, the brown utilized throughout the club’s interior design was carried through to all print and interactive collateral.

Tagged in: Flash, Identity, Interactive, Print, The Bank
Category: Client Work

DJ Junior Brown

DJ Junior Brown is an extremely well-known, Edmonton-based DJ. He was preparing to release a new cd of mixes and was in need of a new website as well as cd cover/insert artwork. Working in co-ordination with Zaar Marketing, I designed the logo, all of the cd artwork and then integrated these visual themes into the Flash-based website. The website was driven by Actionscript 2.0 and featured an XML-driven photo gallery for ease of maintenance by DJJB.

Project Link: djjuniorbrown.com

Tagged in: Flash, Identity, Interactive, Print, Zaar
Category: Client Work

Headplay

Headplay is a high-definition personal cinema system that integrates with just about every media type and system available today including iPod, usb drives, flash media, xbox/xbox360, pc, nintendo wii, and sony playstation 1/2/3.

Headplay approached me in the spring of 2006 about helping integrate some Flash functionality into their website to maximize their website’s point of sale potential. This included developing flash video players, mini-games, as well as interactive sales pitch and tutorial videos. All graphics for this project were supplied by Headplay’s internal design team.

Project Link: Headplay

Tagged in: Flash, Headplay, Interactive
Category: Client Work

Edgeworth Properties

Edgeworth Properties Inc. is a multi-million dollar land investment company that sources, evaluates and purchases undeveloped land in the direct path of urban growth. Edgeworth approached me in early 2006 about developing a presentation and sales pitch utility for their meetings with potential clients and investors. With satellite offices around the globe, the utility had to be easy to use, driven completely through the keyboard’s arrow + enter keys (for further integration with wireless pointers), as well as maintain a certain amount of flexibility for changing or developing new presentations as the company grew and acquired new projects.

For example, Chapter 2 of the first presentation contains about 12 slides of graphs about Alberta and it’s economic boom, some of which Edgeworth would remove depending on where they were presenting and to whom they were presenting to. To maintain the ease of this type of maintenance, the entire presentation engine is driven through XML and Actionscript 2.

The presentations were a resounding success and have helped Edgeworth amass well over $22 000 000 in sales.

Tagged in: Edgeworth Properties, Flash, Interactive
Category: Client Work

Bridal Fantasy

Bridal Fantasy is one of the largest bridal shows in Alberta and has been wowing brides since 1980. Featuring the latest trends in flowers, formals, gowns, destination wear, hair and make-up, a fashion show, lifestyle stage, sections on home decorating, cooking, career management and preparing for the wedded life, Bridal Fantasy is a great resource for all couples looking at marriage. In early 2006, Bridal Fantasy was looking for a website to match their nationally launched Bridal Fantasy magazine.

In coordination with Zaar Marketing, the bright colors and strong photography of the magazine were utilized to develop a template of aesthetics that could be used to brand the website while maintaining harmony between their offline and online media. These aesthetics were then paired with a standards-compliant, xhtml-strict code-base to create a visually stunning, search engine optimized website.

Project Link: Bridal Fantasy

Tagged in: Bridal Fantasy, Interactive, Standards, Zaar
Category: Client Work

IABC Edmonton

For both 2006 and 2007, I donated my time to help the International Association of Business Communicators’ Edmonton branch design small print booklets for their yearly summer awards gala.

For 2006, the theme of the party was “Magnetic Poetry” and each of the pages featured a selection of images styled like the poetry magnets you find on your fridge. If you organized the words together for each section group, they formed an inspirational quote related to design and marketing.

For 2007, the theme was “iCommunicate” so I developed a highly tech-stylized background elements and cover for the booklet.

Tagged in: IABC, Print
Category: Client Work

LucentDreams Animation

Kai Pedersen, a traditionally trained animator and widely acknowledged 3D artist, approached me a few years ago about developing a logo for the animation company he was starting up.

Utilizing this juxtaposition of his traditional skills with his 3D talent for the basis of the identity concept, I tried to portray a very dream-like scene with the logotype via the swirling, cloudy shapes. Representing the idea behind lucid dreaming, the eye is open, observing everything around it. To enhance the symbolism of his 3D/classical animation talents, I juxtaposed the sharp, clean lines (typical of 3D rendered elements) of the blue with those of the jagged, rough areas of grey (typical of hand-rendered elements). The combination creates a feeling of shapes forming and dissolving before your eyes, as if walking through a dream.

I continued the use of the above mentioned juxtaposition into the logotype where I used a very clean, rigid font (Trajan Pro) and combined it with the rough-sketch underline below the name. The small arm on the top of the “A” in Dreams and the jagged underline is simply a throwback to the free-form, hand-rendered elements found throughout the logo.

Tagged in: Identity, LucentDreams
Category: Client Work

FS Skate and Snow Brochure

FS Skate and Snow was remodelling their store in West Edmonton Mall to better serve their customers by more effectively displaying their large volumes of merchandise better. With this in mind, they set about to design a brochure to highlight their new store layout, highlight the benefits of dealing with FS Skate and Snow and attract a few premium brands that they had yet to acquire to their roster of merchandisers.

Coordinating with Zaar Marketing to produce the brochure under an extremely tight deadline, the 24-page collateral piece met and exceeded all of the client’s needs and expectations while helping to strengthen the FS brand with their distributors.

Tagged in: Devji, FS Skate and Snow, Print, Zaar
Category: Client Work

One of those Moments that Makes You Go “Duh”

Rendered with sIFR 3, revision 407

I spent probably 20 or 30 minutes scowering the internet trying to find information on this damn error and couldn’t find anything that fit exactly the problem I was having.

I was working on integrating sIFR 3.0 into a website for a client. Now this client happened to utilize the same fonts that I had used for another recent client job, so I just copy>pasted the sIFR info that I had used on the old client site into the new client site, adjusted the domains in the css/js and figured I’d be done ahead of time. However, no matter what I did I would get that damn error above with stupid amounts of padding below each of the elements using that style.

Turns out I had set the domains in the first sIFR export so that it wouldn’t work on any domain but it’s own, which was of course the smart thing to do. I definitely didn’t REMEMBER that though when I was fighting with this dumb thing, at least not till about half an hour after the fact. Duh.

So if you’re here because you had a similar problem, fix your domains in the Options.as file and re-export. That is, if you’re not trying to greedily steal someone else’s bandwidth and fonts :P

Tagged in: sIFR 3, Stupid Moments
Category: Client Work, Life