Author Archives: Brian

Future of Web Design

I am very much look­ing for­ward to the Future of Web Design con­fer­ence in New York, which will be tak­ing place in November. I’ve been kick­ing myself for miss­ing Event Apart, Boston since June, so when the oppor­tu­nity arose to hit up FOWD, I jumped on it quickly.
Through the magic of twit­ter microblog­ging, I found out about […]

Why Oh Why Did They Change To SyFy?

Yesterday marked the tran­si­tion for SciFi  —  a sci­ence fic­tion based cable chan­nel for those that don’t know  —  from its old iden­tity to a new one. This has caused some­thing of a stir since they first broke the news of this change back in March. The rea­son? Well, you can prob­a­bly tell by now from the large image directly above this […]

Fontified

I tend to be some­what weary of “DIY” web­sites or appli­ca­tions as they per­tain to all things design. There are tons of apps out there that allow peo­ple to do all sorts of things that they have no for­mal train­ing in. While this can cer­tainly be con­ve­nient and fun for the non-designers out there, the […]

Fun With Photoshop Brushes

In my spare time lately, I’ve been exper­i­ment­ing with cre­at­ing art­work in Photoshop and Illustrator. I finally took the time to down­load updated dri­vers for my Wacom Tablet (Graphire4 4×5  —  a nice entry-level tablet for the price) and have been hav­ing a blast get­ting reac­quainted with it.
I’ve never been over­flow­ing with raw illus­tra­tion tal­ent, and lately I’ve been play­ing a lot […]

Great Scott!

I am a bit of a com­pul­sive lender. If I’m into some­thing, there’s a good chance I’ll try to even­tu­ally hand it over to a friend in hopes of get­ting them into it too. The only prob­lem with this is every so often, I for­get what exactly I’ve lent out and end up los­ing some of my favorite books, DVDs, […]

(Mast)Heads Up!

As our reg­u­lar read­ers will undoubt­edly notice, the mast­head for our blog con­sists of rotat­ing designs cre­ated by mem­bers of Leibowitz Communications. The design restric­tions were min­i­mal; each design must con­tain the blog word­mark, and the tagline, both in our sig­na­ture green boxes. Beyond that, it was com­pletely open ended, and as you have seen, […]

Original Comic Art

Runaways Issue 1, Page 3
Nehal beat me to the punch a few days ago with her Watchmen Post. I am eagerly antic­i­pat­ing the movie’s release this week­end, and will be in the same IMAX as Nehal on Sunday, which can’t arrive soon enough. In the spirit of the movie’s release, I thought about post­ing a bit about some of the […]

The Campaign Trail

I know I’ve plugged these guys in a pre­vi­ous post, but any­one that is inter­ested in email mar­ket­ing should check out Campaign Monitor for both their excel­lent ser­vices, and their inter­est­ing and infor­ma­tive blog. One of their recent posts, “Smart Ways to use Custom Fields” got me think­ing of quite a few great ways to enhance html […]

Design Duty

When I recently pur­chased the newly released Call of Duty: World at War game for my Xbox 360, I was pretty well-prepared for the high qual­ity graph­ics, sound, and gen­eral game­play. I had down­loaded a demo of the game to make sure it was the one for me, so my expec­ta­tions were pretty much set at that point.
What came as […]

Excel(lent) Fix

I’m sure many Leibowit read­ers have some inter­ac­tion with spread­sheets, most likely via Microsoft Excel. Whether you are a bit of a novice, or a reg­u­lar spreadsheet-jockey, there’s a good chance that the Magic/Replace web app over at cleanup​data​.com will inter­est you. It allows you to upload a few com­mon file types: .xls  –  Excel’s native file type, .csv  –  comma sep­a­rated file, and […]