An inspiring look at some really cool pixel-based designs.

Found a nice color tool this morning - it extracts multiple color palettes from any image you upload or from a random image it pulls from Flickr.

I found a nice online color tool today - a full Pantone chart with RGB and HTML conversions.

I’ve tried various clunky fixes for the IE6 PNG transparency problem, but yesterday ran across a wonderful little script from Angus Turnbull (from 2005, but no matter).

I tried it yesterday on a CSS background image and it works like a charm, but ran into some problems today trying to use it on a floated image.

Here’s the thing: when using it for a background image, follow the directions under ‘Transparent Backgrounds’ here and it works perfectly. But when you use it for a foreground image, you have to have a blank .gif file on the server, and you have to edit one line in Angus’ .htc file to point to that blank .gif.

This info is not obvious at all and I was really confused until I read Angus’ page thoroughly. But after loading the blank .gif and editing the iepngfix.htc file, all was well.

This is one of the easier implementations of a PNG fix I’ve seen. It uses the ‘behavior’ property in CSS, a Microsoft-proprietary thing and won’t affect browsers that already support PNG’s correctly.

I’m working on a site for a client and was having trouble getting my PNG’s working right in IE6 - I tried several methods but for some reason wasn’t able to get any of them (including the MS alpha image filter) to work right. I’m sure I was doing something wrong in the way it was being implemented, but anyway I did finally find something that worked for me on Bob Osola’s site.

Here’s the reference. Actually I failed to get his primary Javascript-based solution to ever work and gave up on it. But on his ‘more info’ page, I did get one of the variant methods to work (’JS Code on Individual PNG’s’). It works very nicely, in fact…. but the JS is sitting in my head section of the page; when I try externalizing it, it stops working completely.

If someone reads this and can tell me how to successfully take the script out of the page and get it working in a separate file, I would be very happy. Otherwise, this is a fast and simple method.

I also ran into another issue - I’ll talk about this in the next post…

I started using Jewelboxing’s fantastic CD/DVD packaging system a month or so ago and I was really pleased with how professional my little production CD’s look now in the heavy plastic boxes and nicely perforated template sets. I sent a .jpg of my system to them and today I got a post on their blog. Kudos to Jewelboxing for a very nice product.

I found a neat article today on Colourlovers.com’s site - a nice extensive set of color palettes taken from the art of da Vinci, Monet, Matisse, van Gogh and many more. This is fun because a lot of the commenters posted their own palettes.

I was looking for scripts for compact, on-page image galleries this morning and came across this great post on scripts for galleries and slideshows. Mostly I’m looking for a CSS version and there are a number of really good-looking ones here. I need something for a new photography client, but I’ll also want to use one of these for my web portfolio maybe on my new site.