The recent trend of companies with classic logo designs poorly re-branding themselves has hit the Dallas Independent School District with some “American Idol” style. The district accepted 275 designs from students and staff and then voted upon those designs to give themselves their new identity. I saw the result on Brand New this morning and it boiled my blood so much I had to spread the word. The original logo was designed by an excellent firm here in Dallas called RBMM, a powerhouse in logo design, and the consensus here is that the original logo is excellent and possibly needed at most a color update.

There is more information about the logo redesign on the Dallas Morning News site. The design didn’t go over too well with the DISD School Board seeing as how they were not even aware of a need for a new logo. It was critiqued as being “real busy”, “a little goofy”, and other such truths. My personal opinion is that it reminds me too much of the FedEx logo in color and layout.

This re-design is taking the user generated content idea a bit too far when you base your organization’s identity off of a competition that took entries from 3rd graders. It’s time to roll up the collective newspaper and give DISD a nice hard slap on the nose. NO DISD, That’s a BAD DISD!!!!

I started riding to the office because I was fortunate to find a house close to work and my commute is about 3 miles each way. I didn’t start riding in until the beginning of the year so I’m one of the new guys. I had just finished up school in December and for graduation my parents wanted to get me a present so I asked for a bike, they were quite surprised by my request. I got the bike from Richardson Bike Mart, I was quite nervous about buying the bike since I had not ridden on one since I was in middle school, but the staff there was very helpful and nice. Since I’m so close I chose to go with a commuter bike by Electra bikes called the Townie. Needless to say since it was on my parents dime I pimped my ride, I got a luggage rack, nice lights, a trip computer, helmet, gloves, and my favorite a bell. I decided to try and ride the bike home, about a 3 mile ride and I got halfway through and almost passed out because I was so out of shape. I’ve been riding in for about a month and I’ve vastly improved.

On Superbowl Sunday Brandon and I decided to get together to ride around and just hangout before the game. We rode around downtown for about an hour and found some really cool buildings. On our way back to my house we hit a flat patch of open road with no traffic, so we decide to start pedaling hard and we got up to about 20mph. Unfortunately we came upon some traffic and had to either stop or continue at our pace to beat the traffic. We decided to keep going and Brandon made an unexpected turn and I tried to follow. Unfortunately my bike is the equivalent to a Chevy Belaire and I didn’t exactly make the turn. I got about a quarter way through the turn and was about to hit a curb so I hit the brakes and skidded out, and hit the ground hard. I slid a couple of feet my elbow and knee scrapping against the asphalt and mid slide rolled over and slammed my other hand onto the ground to stop myself. I had just experienced my first crash, I hurt pretty bad but I got up and got out of the road and took a breather. I fortunately didn’t do much damage to my bike. We straightened out my handlebars and my front wheel wasn’t really turning well so we stopped by White Rock Cycles which was just down the road and had Kevin fix my bike up.

Overall it was a great ride and I had fun. I had a nice case of road rash on my elbow / forearm that hurt a good amount, but it didn’t stop me from riding in the next morning.

In case you were wondering here is my route to and from work:

Recently, Microsoft changed the way Flash and anything else that uses <object>, <embed>, or the <applet> method of accessing ActiveX controls. This is a result of the Eolas versus Microsoft patent case regarding the way Microsoft was accessing the ActiveX controls to handle those tags. On February 28th, Microsoft released a patch which changed the way Internet Explorer works with ActiveX.

I paid attention to this case closely. I don’t do the Flash work around here, but I do implement it on many of our sites, so I wanted to be sure we had our bases covered.

Last year, RD2 Best Practices called for the use of the Satay Method for including valid Flash objects in a web site. Unfortunately, using this method triggers the patch and the new “click or hit spacebar for activation” comes up.

In a recent update to our Best Practices, we switched to the use of Unobtrusive Flash Objects, or “UFO”, as our method of implementing Flash.

How exactly does using UFO solve this wonderful problem? Through plain old trickery, my friends.

UFO swaps content through Javascript dynamically. The page has normal searchable text inside of an element with a specific ID. That element is then swapped for the Flash content when the page is loaded. The cool thing is that the text content is still searchable and valid and shows up even if Javascript is turned off. You can have cool Flash content without sacrificing your SEO or site accessibility.

Since UFO works dynamically, it falls under Microsoft’s preferred method for fixing your ActiveX controls, which basically says that any ActiveX controls dynamically written to the screen are automatically activated for user interaction.

No grey borders, no “click or hit spacebar for activation” — just Flash working properly.

Last Friday was a pretty exciting day at RD2, and, having only been with the company for a month and this being my first “real” job in the web design world, it probably made it that much more exciting.

We are very close to launching a site, so we are finishing up the Quality Assurance process. Some very interesting issues arose Friday. I wasn’t directly involved in the team that built the site, as it was already in progress when I came here about a month ago, but I helped on occasion when an extra hand was needed, and was involved in the QA team.

In the morning we had a couple of issues with WordPress and how it handled a link to a category with no posts in it. When choosing a category with no posts, WordPress returned a 404 page that had no style or information about the error. So Chris Griego did some surgery on the PHP that handles 404 errors and fixed it to look and see if the category is present and send it to the category page saying there aren’t any posts in this category yet. Thinking that was the end, we felt good and went to lunch. (more…)