Jeff Sarmiento is Feeling the Love
In early May of 2008 I released this website to showcase some of my work, start blogging and just be my little space on the web. Since it’s release, I’ve received a bunch of feedback from my visitors on the design, with most of it being positive. Everything from “Cool website design” to “Very inspirational, love your work” to “Great site, when shall we team up and dominate the web?!?” (that comment was great by the way, muwahahaha). So I’d just like to say a big THANK YOU to my visitors, for all the love, wherever you are from. Keep the feedback coming, I love hearing from you guys. And sorry if I don’t respond to all the feedback you guys are sending my way, you guys sure are keeping me on my toes.
This website has also recently been recognized on different design communities, showcases and CSS galleries across the web. A couple notable commendations include being featured on Wed Designer Wall’s 2008 Design Trends and Smashing Magazine’s Hand-Drawing Style In Modern Web Design - Volume 2. Some other showcases I’ve recently been featured on:
For a more complete but not entirely up to date list of websites I’ve been mentioned on, visit my About page. So I also want to give a shout out and thank you to all of these websites for the love they have given me. I truly feel honoured to be amongst some of the best designed websites on the web.
Golly, this Website Sure Does Look Familiar
I’ve recently been notified by some of my sites visitors that the design I made for the mesh Conference website was ripped. I’ve had a design ripped before but never as blatant and close to my original design as this one. Here’s the mesh Conference website and below is the rip:
My initial reaction was “Whoa!” Everything from the images to the source code was lifted right from the original mesh Conference website. They even left id=meshu in the source code. I have not contacted them directly but I have been told that they have been notified.
jQuery Image Replacement
While I was building this website I ran into the question of whether or not to use an image replacement technique for its graphical headers. I wanted a technique that kept my web pages accessible, search engine friendly and of course awesome looking. Here is a simple image replacement technique that I whipped up which uses jQuery to replace text with an image. Example and code below:
Bomb Diggity
$(document).ready(function() {
if($('#logo')[0].offsetWidth == 288) {
$('h2.img').each(function() {
string = $(this).text();
filename = string.toLowerCase().replace(/ /g, '-').replace(/([^0-9a-z-])/g,'');
$(this).html('<img src="/images/' + filename + '.gif" alt="' + string + '" />');
});
}
});
meshU Afterthoughts
I was able to attend meshU yesterday, which is a one day event held in Toronto, Canada, that runs best practice and how-to workshops for designers, developers, project managers or anyone in the web technology industry.
During my day at meshU I was able to catch great presentations by Kevin Hale of Wufoo, Daniel Burka of Digg, Jon Lax of Teehan+Lax and John Resig of jQuery. I was intrigued by what each had to say during their workshop and I was able to take back something from each one. Especially Daniel Burka’s workshop on “Iterative Design Strategies” which hit on some design practices that I think every designer should try to adhere to, some of which I follow already. You can view the slides Daniel used in his presentation here. You can also download the slides used in Kevin Hale’s workshop, “How to Design for Love” here.
All in all, I had a great time at meshU. Met some really cool people and also got a free t-shirt with my logo on the front.
