Buro – Design & Code – Vancouver, British Columbia

Q Hall of Fame

gagnew — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:19:10 +0000

The Q Hall of Fame is a national resource created to house and commemorate the diverse history of the LGBT Community. Buro was instrumental in helping the Q Hall of Fame develop a website that satisfied a great diversity of requirements. Naturally, the site was to function as an online repository for past inductees. In addition to its archival purpose, the site includes easy-to-use submission forms, providing a direct channel for those interested in participating in the nomination process. Lastly, the website plays a vital role in communications, keeping community members up-to-date with recent news and the organizations annual gala, The QBall.

Gentle Chortle

gagnew — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:32:43 +0000

Gentle Chortle is a personal blog project created to display my illustration and comics. It’s not intended as an outlet for polished work – though that is included – but rather a domain for the various doodles, half-baked sketches and random ideas that otherwise have no home.

Detroit Wildlife

gagnew — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:49:43 +0000

A friend linked me to this great video about Detroit’s transformation from industrial boom town to ghost city called Detroit Wildlife. Images of high rise buildings sitting vacant and desolate street corners leave you with a post-apocalyptic sensation (the shots of Michigan Central Station in particular) like something out of 28 Days Later.

A month ago I would have assumed Detroit’s situation is a rarity on the American landscape. Surprisingly though, on trip through California last August I discovered a similar scenario in Fresno. Sunday afternoon in the middle of July and downtown Fresno was absolutely dead. No one on the streets, businesses were closed (many were shuttered completely) and an unshakable feeling of abandonment lingered in the air. You could perhaps chalk it up to the 114 degree heat, but when we left the core in search of food and supplies, we found a very active suburban area on the periphery of downtown. Walking around the desolate core left me feeling very anxious and vulnerable, as if Mad Max himself was going to rise up and rob me of my precious petrol and worldly belongings.

Detroit Wildlife from florent tillon on Vimeo.

Introducing Speedball. A clean and simple Wordpress theme

gagnew — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:37:37 +0000

Originally conceived as a Wordpress photoblog, Speedball quickly morphed into a stripped down, type-centric design that puts content front and center. The name is a nod to my cat, Speedball. I’ve been looking for a way to immortalize him – so until I can string together enough cash to get a bronze statue made, this theme will have to suffice.

Speedball is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. Feel free to download and modify as you see fit. All I ask is that you credit Buro at the top of the CSS file (or better yet, leave the credit in the footer).

View the demo

Download Speedball

Installation instruction

Download and unzip speedball.zip
Upload speedball folder into your wp-content/themes/ directory
Login into Wordpress, click Appearance – Themes – to activate speedball

If using the contact page with the contact form plugin

Go to Pages – Add new. Create a new page called Contact
Download modified wp-contact-form plugin and unzip. The original plugin can be found here. If you want the contact forms to look as they do in the demo, you have to download the modified plugin, as I’ve added a div and shuffled some of the items.
Upload wp-contact-form folder into your wp-content/plugins directory
Click plugins – activate the WP-ContactForm plugin
Go to Settings – Contact Form – set form preferences and DELETE ALL OF THE CODE IN THE STYLE BOX. If you do not delete the style code, it will interfere with the styles specified in the css file. Hit Update Options
Go to Pages – Contact. Enter this code – %%wpcontactform%% – in the text field. Remember to save it.

Congrats, the contact page and contact form should be working properly now.

Widgets

The sidebar is 100% widgetized, which you can control by clicking Appearance – Widgets, from within your Wordpress admin panel. If you elect to use the widgets, you will loose the nifty styling that is default for the pages nav (light grey/blue tab behind the about, contact buttons). Also, I recommend you use the configurable-tag-cloud-widget (Wordpress 2.3+ only — found here) instead of the default Wordpress cloud widget. The default cloud widget offers very little in the way of customization and displays poorly.

Images

The main content column is 470px wide. We need to set up your default image size to allow for easy posting and consistent design structure.

Click Settings – Media and set your large size images to 470px wide and 700px tall (the height can be any number really – use your discretion). Thumbnail size and Medium size can be set to whatever you like, so long as they don’t exceed 470px in width.

Browser Support

Speedball has been tested in the following browsers:

FF 2+3
Safari 3
Chrome
Opera 9
IE 7

NOTE: This theme does not support IE6 (or anything below 7 for that matter). Supporting IE6 would only encourage its existence – it should have died long ago. If you’re looking for a theme that works with IE6, I suggest you look elsewhere.

Questions, Comments, Support

This is the 1.0 release of speedball. Feel free to email me if you have any questions/suggestions. That said, this is a free theme and as such support is not guaranteed.

SXSW podcasts

gagnew — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:36:03 +0000

Podcasts are now available from some of the panel discussions at this years SXSW. I’ve only listened to a few so far, from which I recommend this one. It’s an interesting conversation between a collection of agency owners and freelancers (Jeffrey Zeldman, Roger Black, Kristina Halvorson and Whitney Hess) about their experiences as independent designers/writers and how to effectively manage growth (if and when it comes).

A gentle reminder to IE6 users: please move on.

gagnew — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:12:56 +0000

Discussions about the seemingly immortal IE6 are common on the internet these days. Visit any web development forum and you’re likely to find at least one thread full of designers complaining about IE6’s refusal to die. I for one enjoy these verbal beat-downs because they provide a place to vent my frustrations with a product that has caused me many, many hours of agony. Unfortunately, what these group therapy sessions don’t provide is a pro-active solution to the problem.

A lot of people will simply drop support for IE6 entirely. While I do think this is a good idea if you’re in a position to do so, it doesn’t provide IE6 users with an explicit explanation as to why they should upgrade. It’s fair to assume many IE6 users may not even realize their browser is outdated. They stumble across a site that breaks and more than likely they will blame the site itself – not IE6. The problem persists.

Along comes Adrian Pelletier’s neat little script called Attention IE. The script uses a conditional comment to identify the browser and version, and if appropriate, deploys a friendly message alerting the visitor that they’re using an outdated browser and need to upgrade. So simple, so great.

At this rate maybe we can hope IE6 usage will drop below 10% by the beginning of 2010.

AFRICAD

gagnew — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:00:51 +0000

AFRICAD is a conservation-oriented research initiative located within the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia. Buro was asked to design and build the website for both AFRICAD and its parent program FACT. The site had to be fully scalable, load quickly and allow the researchers to update it themselves. The system allows researchers to not only control all written content, but also page imagery and file downloads.

Atomic Racing Club

gagnew — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:00:03 +0000

Faced with fierce competition from other GVRD cycling clubs, Atomic knew their website needed a face lift if they were to stay current. I redesigned the entire site from top-to-bottom, adding a news feed for club updates and an events calendar to keep members (and non-members) up-to-date on local races. Also included is a password protected members only section for confidential club information. The site is built on an open source CMS, enabling the club executive to update and maintain the site themselves.

Coup Salon

gagnew — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:00:24 +0000

Looking for a cozy place to get a stylish chop? Look no further. Nestled beneath the gates of Vancouver’s Chinatown, Coup offers up exceptional service in a warm, inviting space. I had the pleasure of working with the talented young ladies behind Coup, aiding in the development of their new identity and designing and building their website.

FACT

gagnew — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:00:36 +0000

FACT is a UBC research initiative dedicated to assisting forest-dependent communities in transition. Buro was asked to design and build the websites for both FACT, and its child program AFRICAD. The site had to be fully scalable, load quickly and allow the researchers to update it themselves. The system allows researchers to not only control all written content, but also page imagery and file downloads.