Patty Ho Design | Web Interactive Designer

Interesting, I was just checking CSS vault for their update on the CSS galleries. I saw this  Organic Food supermarket, it caught my attention due to it’s richness in terms of layout and color.

What I find intersting is that their navigation and headings are replaced with images right after the page is loaded.

After just sniffing through codes to find out how they did it. This is the site I came across.  “Facelift image replacement” A nifty script that turns your fonts into display types as image format.

So far I am not quite sure how reliable of this script is although you actually pay for “premium” service for $1 a month.

I can see they have came out with FIR wordpress plugin for this script.

So has anyone wondered about the SEO for this script? I haven’t found any documentation or anything states on the website indicating if Google will crawl those text that had been replaced with images.

Another images replace technique that has been implemented in our new ourfaves.com website is sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement).

What sIFR does is to replace the text with Swf that has been created dynamically. It overlays on top of the original text and the text can be selected and copied. And if the user doesn’t have flash player installed. The text just simply won’t get replaced.

Sometimes I wonder if I should use those script to enhance the look of my design. Sometimes I also wonder if adding those script will increase the load time for the users?  Sure, it makes the site look so much nicer, but do I really want to sacrifice the response time? Another great post that I read the other day is Speed in Software design. It mentioned how we should cut down response time and eliminate steps.  It emphasize that we should “Design for responsiveness!”

I typically kept my design flexible and easy to update without going through so much trouble. That’s why I kept everything system fonts and scalable backgrounds.

And please keep in mind, those image replacements are only good for short and large display fonts. It’s always better to keep the body fonts to either Verdana (if it’s under 11pixel in size) or Arial, Helvetica (if it’s over 12 pixel in size), just for the sake of legibility.

Luc from Spicywebdesigner.com sent me an email the other day that he would like to interview me about how I get to be who I am today.

Take a look of the interview here:

http://spicywebdesigners.com/2009/01/spicy-web-designer-interview-with-patty-ho/

We finally launched the biggest event of the summer – Best in the City.

The campaign is about getting user to vote on the best of toronto including restaurants, bars & clubs, attractions, hotels, shopping and odds & ends.

I work closely with Bessy, our marketing manager, to come out all the creative for this campaign.

Logo Development

I started with 3 different logo ideas

Somehow everyone loves the badge, however, they want to see other option for the badge logo. Tweaking the badge so that it will look more modern. They want to see the logo as trophy as well. So I mocked two logo up, and showing the color options when the logo represents different categories.

Soon after this mock was sent out, they feel like the badge would be the best for this campaign. Now they want to see the options of folded badge, or non folded badge, and also the rounded edge or corner edge…

Final Logo – after doing a survey, everyone prefer the one with no flap and keep it simple as badge

I was quite happy to see the result, we used the logo on the website, on newspaper ads, on t-shirts, bookmarks and all the online media.

toronto.com at Taste of Italy weekend – showing the t-shirts and the bookmark that we were giving out

Ad on toronto star newspaper…

The whole project was quite smooth, and everyone worked together to make it happen.

Now we’ll just have to see how the results come in after couple weeks…

Vote on!! go to http://www.toronto.com/best

Ever since I joined toronto.com, I had been working on tons of print media. OurFave.com is a sister site of toronto.com, it’s a user generated review site for things/places for Toronto. This weekend is toronto’s Taste of Little Italy. The stretch goes from College St. & Bathurst St. to College St. & Shaw St. All the vendors on the street will set up stands for everyone to taste their food, or try their product.

This is actually a short turn around. I had to trace the google map with illustrator and then working with the OurFaves content coordinator to put everything together.

And then it went through couple revisions, and finally this morning it got sent to the printer! woot! Click on the thumbnail below to see the final version

Any Harry Potter fan here?

my friend Adam Finley sent me this online interactive done by Organic. Good stuff.

This is site for AXE products in Japan. It features “axercise” microsite, news, lesson and ad gallery.

It is pretty funny to see they put a white chick for their “axercise” microsite, and then dub in Japanese, and then in Japanese caption. lol  The video is just hilarious! I love it!