WANKEN - The blog of Shelby White » Miscellaneous

Minimalist Icon Sets

Shelby White — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:23:30 +0000

As Alex Koplin and I have discussed in the past, coming up with new and unique icons can be a real challenge. Lucky for us, Mashable.com has come up with the Top 10 Beautiful Minimalist Icon Sets.

Read the full post here on Mashable.com.

How A Web Design Goes Straight To Hell

Shelby White — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:39:16 +0000

So you’re about to start the best project in the world and are thrilled to have it in your portfolio. Fast-forward twenty days and you’re now wishing that you’d never agreed to do this project because your client has forgotten why they hired you as a designer–to build something really great. It’s safe to say that that most of us in the industry have experienced a similar situation. Feel free to vent your story in the comments.

Hit the jump to read the comic and have a good laugh.

Comic strip via TheOatmeal

Follow on Twitter @wanken

Shelby White — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:06:58 +0000

Over the last few weeks my network on Twitter has grown larger enabling me to give away a bunch of t-shirts to lucky followers. I have plans to do more in the near future. Thing that I like to do on Twitter include: posting interesting photos from my iPhone, links to interesting articles, links to awesome videos, links to websites, and shoutouts at follows/designers/photographers.

Quite a few of my readers are already on Twitter, but for the rest, sign up and follow @Wanken!

Change is Coming

Shelby White — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:42:06 +0000

This election has been one of the largest elections in history with a huge turnout in both the youth and middle-age groups. Leading up to the election there was a lot of skepticism to which candidate would be the best choice to lead and be the president.

With Obama having 338 Electoral votes to McCain’s 156, this election was nearly a landslide. You can still see the voting polls at Cnn.com.

Two speeches were made tonight, one from McCain and one from Obama. McCain’s speech came before Obama’s and was, in my opinion, one of his strongest and best speeches that he has done in all of his campaigning this year. It was straight forward and supportive of Obama’s election despite the booing of his very own supporters. Here is a quote of what McCain said:

“Senator Obama has achieved a great thing for himself and his country…” and continued on to call Obama a “good man.” I do really think that this was an outstanding gesture to not only Obama, but to the McCain’s supporters. It hopefully gives them faith to support Obama through McCain’s support for him.

After McCain’s speech, Obama spoke at Grant Park in Chicago where he spoke a great and welcoming speech that included this:

“The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America–I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you–we as a people will get there.”

Congratulations to our new President, Barack Obama. We will all be supporting and awaiting the new changes to come.

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A day of Substance: Moving Day & Nacho Challenge

Shelby White — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:02:43 +0000

Our Friends over at Substance seem to be having some fun. They just moved into the new Substance Head Quarters. Some of their moving day was captured via flip cam.

Substance Moving Day from Substance on Vimeo.

Nacho Challenge
All moved in and now they’re off to the Substance Nacho Challenge. I’m not sure if this was fun in the end, or if this was torture, but some things to know before you watch:
- Cory, Shaun and Erin are the competitors.
- Each container of nachos was from 711.
- There is no way these nachos tasted great.

The Nacho Challenge from Substance on Vimeo.

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Canon goes Avril

Shelby White — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:36:39 +0000

Canon Canada seems to be taking a new approach by teaming up with Avril Lavigne. Why Avril? There are so many other well known people that would appeal to a larger audience. Go to http://shootlikeastar.ca and you can sign up for their photo contest and possibly win some goods. Related posts:Pike Place Pillow Fight Canon Service Center & [...] Related posts:

Adobe CS4 Suite Now Shipping

Shelby White — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:27:21 +0000

Photoshop CS4’s new Adjustments panel (Screenshot courtesy Adobe)

Today Adobe has announced the availability of Photoshop CS 4 and the entire Creative Suite 4. It features a tabbed interface, enhanced color correction and non-destructive editing tools. After using Photoshop CS4, I noticed quite a bit of areas where they speed things up. The interface is also much smoother and fluid than CS3.

Here are a list of things to look for in Photoshop CS4:
-Smoother panning and zooming and fluid canvas rotation
-Adjustments panel
-Auto-blending of images
-Improved Adobe Photoshop Lightroom workflow
-Masks panel
-Better raw image processing (for us Photogs)
-Extended depth of field
-Content-Aware Scaling (this is very cool)
-Ability to work with 3D objects with one Click

Check out all of these features and more.

Also available today are the following: Photoshop® CS4, Photoshop CS4 Extended, InDesign® CS4, Illustrator® CS4, Flash CS4 Professional, Dreamweaver®CS4, Fireworks® CS4, Contribute® CS4, After Effects® CS4, Adobe Premiere® Pro CS4, Encore® CS4, Soundbooth® CS4 and Adobe OnLocation™ CS4. Pricing for the new programs is available at Adobe’s online store.

Chase Jarvis + Book Signing

Shelby White — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:13:08 +0000

To those who didn’t make this event, shame on you, it was awesome. Besides Chase’s two Hangar photo events he hasn’t made a public speaking event like this since 2001. This was my first of his events that I’ve been to since living in Seattle. The book signing took place at REI in one of the conference centers on the top floor.

The purpose of the event was to sort of launch Chase’s new Stevens Pass photo book. You can visit the microsite for the book, here. Unsurprisingly the book sold very well and there were about 200+ people in attendance. If you have a few bucks, snag a book before they go out of stock.

With there being quite a few people and each having their book autographed, I was only able to sneak in two questions for Chase. The first concerning the amount of web traffic that his site gets and the second one was asking him who is doing the design end of things for the business. After the questions, I snagged a few pictures of the crowd and Chase’s assistant/right hand man Scott, raffling off items. Along with the raffle, there was a silent auction of Stevens Pass season passes to benefit the Northwest Avalanche Center. I’ve posted some pictures from the event and also one of the videos that was played during the presentation.

Nearly every chair was filled–picture was taken right before everything was wrapped up.

There were 3954 still frames were used in this video, pretty cool right? Here are some words from industry known professionals:

“Chase’s images have always had that certain intangible quality that set them apart. It takes a photographer who really knows skiing and snowboarding to document it well, and Stevens Pass captures this beautifully… What I also love about this book is that the photos go beyond cliff hucks and deep powder. By including some beautiful scenics, some quiet moments, and images of little tykes learning to ski, Chase has made this book something that everyone can enjoy.”
- Chris Jerard Associate Publisher | Freeskier and Snowboard Magazines

“Images and moments from one of Washington’s classic ski areas, Chase’s photos provide an intimate look at contemporary NW ski and snowboard culture.”
- Jeff Galbriath, Publisher, The Ski Journal & frequency: The Snowboarder’s Journal

“If a picture really is worth a thousand words than Chase Jarvis’ images from Stevens Pass go a long way toward putting us writers out of business.”
- Crai S Bower, 2008 Northern Lights Award Winning Writer

Xrite Color & Hue Test

Shelby White — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:32:27 +0000

Prior to taking this test I was unsure if I could distinguish between some of the color chips. Now that I know I’m able to see the hues correctly, I’m curious who else can.

Take the Test

Post your results in the comments.

ColorSync Calibration

Search & Ride

Shelby White — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 23:12:37 +0000

You tend to not realize how large a city is until you can’t find what you’re looking for. These past two weekends a friend and myself have been looking for some bmx trails/jumps that I was told were on Queen Anne. Well needless to say, we didn’t find the trails, but we did stumbled upon quite a few great locations to shoot photos and some interesting vantage points looking over Seattle as well as a more northern look towards the University of Washington.

This shot has nothing to do with the search except for the fact that you can see just how large Queen Anne is. Check out the Map print out below.

The darkened area is the area that we covered twice. The area where the lines are drawn is the area that we only passed through. If anyone knows the whereabouts of these so-called trails, please leave a comment or send me an email.

An MPeck Original

Shelby White — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:13:32 +0000

I just got my beautiful 3 x 8 frame from Mike. The frame is way awesome and am glad I finally got one of these. If you want one of these frames, contact him right away through his website! Now all I have to do is order twenty-four 5×7’s. Mpix here I come.

*3 x 8 = Three 4×6’s across and Eight 4×6’s down.
**5×7’s will also fit but are more bubbled out.

There will be a follow up post with the frame decorated with pictures.

Creative Gap

Shelby White — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 21:02:32 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

This afternoon I was cruising the net and found this video on two blogs. The video talks about the creative gap—something that we’ve all been through at one point in time, and to close the gap we have to push ourselves to do more. The video is part of a storytelling series by Ira Glass:

Pike Place Pillow Fight

ColorSync Calibration

Shelby White — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 07:05:14 +0000

ColorSync is a great thing to have built into an OS. The first time that I ever tried to calibrate my monitors using this App, I failed miserably and had to borrow an Eye-One system from Dave. I definitely succeeded this time around and have a few charts to show the difference.

Take note that there is a large difference in brightness/contrast of objects on white backgrounds. The monitor had a tendency to over comphensate the brightness and would result in blow outs. I noticed this largely when opening Safari or Firefox.

Part of the reason that these monitors were largely off calibre was because of my recent reformat of the Mac Pro Quad workstation. Things had been running a little slow and the main drive was getting congested. There is bound to be a full network format here in the next week as well as the addition of a Time Capsule. It never hurts to make sure all machines are up-to-date and running full speed.

If you’re interested in using this method of Calibration, just remember these few things:

1. Make sure you sit back at least 2.5-3 feet from your monitor (depending on how large it is).
2. Set your Brightness control to 100%.
3. It won’t be a perfect calibration. I’d still recommend getting a Calibration device such as EyeOne.

EyeOne can be purchased online at X-Rite.

Pike Place Pillow Fight

Shelby White — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:27:05 +0000

Today was the day of the huge Pillow Fight. All went well down there, minus the Seattle police patrolling the area. That certainly made heads turn and attracted people down into the area.

The whole purpose of this improv project was to get people to laugh and possibly spark interest to do more projects/events. I donâ€™t have much else to say about this except that the police and the market maintenance workers were not pleased. If youâ€™ve ever been in a pillow fight, you know that the feathers stick to everything–there were feathers everywhere in the street and on people.

Here is the link to the Seattle P.I.â€™s photographers shots–some great ones as well.

We actually got some coverage in The Stranger-a Seattle Newspaper-for an HD video that friend Arzhang took at the Pillow Fight. I had a few repetitive words and a mini interview with a police officer–very funny.

Ikea Madness

Shelby White — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:20:28 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

These past couple weeks have been fairly busy–from moving into a new building to trying to navigate Ikea’s crazy store. I spent a solid two hours in the store just looking at different things. I ended up getting quite a few things from the store in Renton, WA. For anyone who hasn’t assembled Ikea furniture, its a blast and very fun to do. Everything is pre-drilled and fits perfectly. The only problem I had was that I didn’t start out by reading the directions. It made things difficult so I’d suggest reading them first or at least as you go along.

After putting together two tables, I decided to make a time lapse video of a dresser being built. I used iMovie so of course the quality is low and only a few cuts were made but here it is.

Music by Ferry Corsten – Into the Dark.

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