Popularity: 4% [?]

Let’s say, hypothetically, that you are a designer, and are working on a design comp for a Christian Science church or reading room, and you wanted a high resolution vector version of the logo to use in your mock-up so you didn’t have to chop out background garbage out of some low-resolution version of the logo you found on the web somewhere. What should you do?

In the Cross and Crown trademark licensing documentation, you will find the following instructions:

Two approvals are necessary:
(1) for your type of use (sign, etc.) and
(2) for the actual form of your use (how the sign appears).
Therefore, if you already have a sample or mock-up of the proposed use, please send it by e-mail or regular mail along with the Request Form, so both approvals can be done simultaneously. It will save you time later.

Unfortunately, they do not currently provide any links to a high-resolution version of their logo for purposes of laying out a design, which would be very helpful to all the designers out there trying to help their clients prepare a mock-up of the proposed usage.

Or do they!??

Interestingly, they do happen to include the logo in their announcement PDF about the licensing terms. If you are a designer, and are in need of a vector version of the logo, you should have no problem saving the linked PDF, opening it up in Illustrator and copying the high-resolution logo artwork contained therein for use in your comps.

Once you’ve copied it out into a new document you may need to release two clipping paths to get at the actual logo paths, which you can then change the color of as needed, resize, save as an .EPS or .PDF, place in Photoshop, etc.

You still need to get their permission to use the logo in a final production setting, but now when you submit your design mock-up at least the logo will look as crisp and correct as it can.

Popularity: 15% [?]

In preparation for upgrading a whole mess of sites to using the latest version of WordPress I decided it was time to finally upgrade my own site and to implement the new design I’d been working on for a while (for over a year now).

Check it out: www.gabrielserafini.com

Popularity: 38% [?]

Google’s new Charts API is very cool. I am interested to see how we might possibly use that with Collabofit to do additional charting.

Here’s the code used to generate that graph above:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
cht=lc
&chs=500x300
&chd=s:GabrielSerafini2007
&chtt='Gabriel%20Serafini%202007'%20Using%20the%20New%20Google%20Charts%20API
&chxt=x,y
&chxl=0:|1976|1986|1996|2007|1:||Cool||Amazing||Awesome


Very simple, clean, elegant and neat.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Our kitchen now has a website (using WordPress of course). Lots more content to come soon, including the secret story of how the river came to be, the inspiration behind the pipes and the amazing triumph of getting everything finally finished.

Visit the site: Serafini Studios Kitchen - Welcome to Kristin and Gabriel’s kitchen.

Popularity: 42% [?]

UPDATE: I _AM_ going to this.

Cut & Paste: Chicago

When:
Saturday, October 6th, 2007
Doors open at 7PM
Competition from 8 - 11PM

After party from 11PM - 4AM

Where
Logan Square Auditorium
2539 North Kedzie Blvd #15
773 252 6179
http://www.lsachicago.com/

General Admission
$10 advanced tickets / $15 at the door
Must be 21

We’re excited to be back in Chi-town this year.

Popularity: 29% [?]

When we came up with the final design for our kitchen range hood, we did a fair amount of research into finding someone in St. Louis who could build what we had designed. Eric called lots of people, and kept on getting recommendations to talk with Ron over at Benton Sheet Metal. Eric got in touch with him, and explained the job. Once we delivered final drawings, work got underway.

The final product came out so excellent. The craftsmanship is outstanding. I would recommend using Benton Sheet Metal for any sheet metal fabrication work you ever need to have done. They do work for people all over the country.

They don’t have a website (yet) however. Most of their work comes through word of mouth.

Here’s their contact info if you ever need some work done:

Benton Sheet Metal
2519 S. Jefferson Ave
St. Louis, MO 63104-2307

Phone: (314) 771-4647
Fax: (314) 771-9524

Popularity: 35% [?]

Portrait of Kristin and the Kitchen, originally uploaded by gserafini.

Kristin and Kuma posed for this lengthy timed exposure to capture the blue glowing light from the countertop. Illumination was provided by the dining room light (the overhead kitchen lights were off). This lets the river show up properly.

See all of the kitchen pictures here: http://flickr.com/photos/gserafini/sets/72157594153594016/ (they start at the beginning).

Popularity: 32% [?]

Voting is now enabled on the Miro one-click subscribe button design contest. Voting is by leaving comments. Please leave a comment and vote for my buttons if you like them.

Click here to go view the entries and vote: Design Contest: Judgement Day(s)

Thanks!

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who voted for my submissions to the contest. I won first place. What did I win? Four t-shirts! Yay! Now who’s an “award winning” designer now? hah! Thanks again.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Miro (the open source video player formerly known as Democracy) is running a contest right now to design a revised one-click subscribe button.

A Fun Little Design Contest
Design up to three buttons and submit them as links in the comments. On August 20th, we’ll create a blog post with all of the submissions.
There aren’t a lot of constraints on what you can submit. Our goal is to have a selection of buttons that would look nice on a blog sidebar or myspace page. We hope to see a variety of sizes and colors.

Here are my three submissions, shown on different backgrounds. My goal for this is to create simple, clean, and usable buttons.

	#FFFFFF	#666666	#000000
Option #1
Option #2
Option #3

I’ll update this post once voting is started so you can vote for my submissions if you like them

Update: Thanks to everyone who voted for my submissions. (I won the grand prize. )

Popularity: 10% [?]