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As the “Batman Fever” is setting in again with the looming release of The Dark Knight currently set for July 17 in Australia and the production of the film finally complete, I’ve noticed a high standard of quality in the design of the film’s posters. I haven’t done my research on who the designer behind them is due to a lack of free time, but I have to say I’m impressed with their work.

Anyone that has visited the site regularly and or recently may have noticed that the design was changing slightly every now and then. I was never 100% happy with the feeling of 3.1, so I have decided to go for a darker, grungier appearance. This brings the site up to version 3.2, with the same colour scheme as 3.1 but using black as the primary colour rather than the off-tone white.

FontStruct is my vote for the best free design tool this year. I was blown away by this web application. FontStruct is an online tool, where you can basically design your own fonts - for free. You go to the site, create an account and you’re set. From there, you can launch the FontStructor and start designing. The FontStructor was built so that anyone, without any type design or technical experience, can get started right away. However if you’re a design professional, do not ignore this tool. Building fonts is a breeze, and you’d be amazed how well they turn out if you put a bit of time into them. 

In my last post I revealed that this site was finally 100% functional in Internet Explorer after many hours of re-coding and re-working the back-end structure. In this post, I’d like to give a shout-out to the tool that helped me achieve this. IES4OSX is an absolute must have for any Mac based web designer. I’d never heard of this tool until a couple of days ago, but am I happy I found it. Basically, it emulates Internet Explorer, versions 5 through 7 as though they were running on a PC, on your Mac.

That’s right! I spent most of today rebuilding the code of the site and editing the CSS tags to get this site to work in IE. The amazing fact is, that in the end it was only 11 additional lines of CSS required to get it to work (26 lines when each attribute is returned). I did have to make a few adjustments to the actually template (especially the footer) but not once did I have to resort to using tables thankfully. Of course, there are a few little bugs here and there that I would like to adjust over time, but as far as functionality goes the site is 100% IE compliant. What a load off my shoulders that is.

Fonts can be expensive. Sure, there are a couple of websites that offer free fonts - but they are in most cases rather poorly designed and really should never be used in any professional work, unless modified.

I’d like to link to a couple of websites that I’ve discovered to be very helpful in regards to typography.

Trent Reznor has never ceased to amaze me with his extremely tight connection with his fanbase and what he gives back to them for their continual support. Today, he gives us a brand new, DRM-free Nine Inch Nails album absolutely free of charge and available for download directly from nin.com. The album was released an hour and a half before this post, and I’ve just finished hearing it for my second time.