I happened across Budnitz Bicycles on 37signals' blog and I was really impressed with the branding that Budnitz Bicycles have. It was designed by a two-man design studio in Colorado, Berger & Fohr (check out their work on their website, it's all great).

The branding has been designed to go across several mediums, even bicycle frames, and it works so well. The three elements that I think form the guts of the branding are the logotype (Paul Budnitz Bicycles), the logo mark and the stretched hexagon crest (which reminds me of the vintage bike companies, especially when on the frames) enclosing the logo mark.

The real genius is how the logo mark, the 'b' from the logotype, looks completely natural in the stretched hexagon and in the text-based logotype. I have tried this before and it is near impossible to achieve. A single letter taken from a logotype can look unbalanced on its own, or a single letter logo mark can look forced when it's shoe-horned into a logotype. 

A really nice piece of work, kudos to Berger & Fohr.

(Image taken from bergerfohr.com. I, of course, lay no claim to ownership)

As a public service, I'm recording this issue and solution here, rather than a throwaway tweet.

I've noticed in the past couple of months that the shift, alt (or opton if you're an old school Mac user) and spacebar functionality within Adobe Illustrator had stopped working. Examples would include when I use the alt key to duplicate selected content whilst moving it, or when I hold the shift button down to move content at 90 or 45 degree angles to its original position. Or even the old 'move the artboard' trick by holding down the spacebar.

The behaviour was sporadic and when they weren't working, holding the keys down had no effect- even holding down the spacebar did not change the cursor to the grab-hand.

After much forum searching, and going through many suggested solutions, I spotted that people were claiming that quitting Firefox solved the problem. I wasn't using Firefox but I had started to use Chrome a whole lot more.

The solution was to quit both Chrome and Illustrator, but restart Illustrator first. There seems to be a conflict with key commands between the two and I think whichever app opens first gets precedence.

I hope this helps someone with similar issues, as it is so frustrating. It makes it very difficult to be productive with one metaphorical-hand, tied behind your back.

An example of brilliant design- the Lego brick. The patents below are dated 1961, but the design was finalised in 1958 (also on patent)- since then, all Lego pieces conform to these dimensions. Lego pieces from 1958 can be used with Lego produced today. The genius of the design can be seen both in the success of the product and the fact that the fundamental details of the design are still used today.

Tangentially, I'm aware that people from the US tend to say 'Legos' as in 'I have ten Legos', 'can I play with your Legos' etcetera. This is wrong, very wrong. You can have 'Lego sets', 'Lego bricks', 'Lego pieces' and 'Lego Minifigures' but not Legos. Sort it out.

As seen on Swiss-Miss.com

When I was in my teens, I was an avid comic book reader, specifically the British 2000ad. It always seemed darker than it's American cousins. Around the mid-to-late-1990s, there was a surge in computer-aided comic art. Artists were not just using computers to colour their art, they were using Photoshop, Poser, Bryce and Color It (remember those latter apps?) to apply textures and arrange artwork. One such artist, Mark Harrison, was a sort of pioneer in the movement, he created the artwork for Durham Red and co-created Glimmer Rats and used a Macintosh heavily, to create his art.

MacFormat, my Mac magazine of choice at the time, ran a series about comic art and Macs, and part of this was two tutorial movies created by Mark Harrison.

I found these movies so inspiring that I felt I simply must become a comic book artist, using these techniques. So taken by these movies that I have kept them safe since about 1999, moving them from computer to computer (about eight different machines and at least five different storage mediums, I reckon) and it was only today, when I was trying to explain to my nephew how to create realistic gore using Photoshop (long story) that I decided to post them to YouTube.

I did a search and they don't seem to be online already. I also did a search for contact details for Mark Harrison, to ask permission to upload them. I didn't find any, so he'll have to accept my apologies for going ahead anyway. I've embedded the two parts below.

Sadly, shortly after trying, I realised that this wasn't the path for me- I just didn't have the artistic ability. What was becoming a stronger influence on me though, was the design in 2000ad- especially the typefaces, which were created by a guy called Rian Hughes, who was a big influence on me and is still one of my favourite designers today.

Happy New Year! The last few days I've seen a number of articles written, regarding the PHP date() function, which can be used to ensure the copyright date on the footer of your website (assuming you have a website written in PHP) is always the current year. I'm sure you'll agree that there is nothing worse than seeing 'Copyright © 2009 SomeCompany.com' when it's the sparkly year of 2012.

Currently

If you are unaware of the date() function, it basically allows you to output the current date on your PHP website. For example, if you wanted to display todays date, you could use this:

<?php echo date('l, jS F Y'); ?>

This will output Tuesday, 3rd January 2012. Due to my CMS, I can't inject PHP into this content, so please take my word for it. The l, j, S, F, Y all refer to different date aspects- in this case, l is the day of the month, j is the date, S is the ordinal suffix, F is the full name of the month and Y is the four digit year. You're not limited to just these elements, you can mix it up. I've included some links at the bottom for more information.

Anyway, in relation to updating your copyright date, to produce the current year you could simply stick in <?php echo date('Y'); ?> in the appropriate place. Depending on how long the site is up, you could do something like:

<p>Contents &copy; 2009 - <?php echo date('Y'); ?> SomeCompany.com</p>

This will output 'Contents © 2009 - 2012 SomeCompany.com'. However, there is one issue that may cause you hassle, which I have not seen addressed in any of the articles I have read.

The Issue

Sometimes, the servers that host your website do not have a timezone set. If this is the case, PHP throws an error which can either stop the website from loading correctly, or just not display the date- depending on the server settings. I do not have this problem with my preferred hosting company, Blacknight, as they have their timezones set at the php.ini document on the server.

I do, however, have this problem on my local hosting environment- I haven't set the timezone on my local development machine. It's a subtle reminder to always declare the timezone on the websites I'm working on- I like my sites to be self contained, able to be moved from hosting company to hosting company, with minimum hassle, should the need arise.

Declaring timezones

Aside from avoiding potential errors popping up, declaring a timezone is essential if you are doing delicate date/time related work. For instance, I have on the Pixelcode contact page a script that displays the current local time and shows whether I am open or closed for business. This would be useless if the timezone was set to New York or California. As it happens, my host is in the same timezone as me, but why take the risk when the solution is so simple?

The solution

I use the following, before any date function is used:

ini_set('date.timezone', 'Europe/Dublin');

So, in full, to output the current year (or any day and date):

<?php ini_set('date.timezone', 'Europe/Dublin'); echo date('Y'); ?>

I have linked to the full timezone list below. I personally use the above method in the footers of websites I make, or else I include it in the bootstrap files of the site, declaring it once to save a bit of time.

Resources and Links

PHP Solutions - David Power. I would be lost and useless without this book, now in it's second edition. Highly recommended.

php.net Full date() function format characters

php.net Timezones