It’s hard to believe it’s been 4 months since I’ve posted any kind of update to this site. A lot has happened since May: I’ve landed some sweet freelance gigs, took a trip to San Francisco, but most importantly, I left Moxy Media after a year’s time to pursue an amazing opportunity with Semantic Design.

I’m not exactly sure when this actually happened, but on Tuesday I decided to stop by Big Spaceship to see what new stuff they were putting out, and lo-and behold, I’m greeted by a completely new web presence. The Big Spaceship I’ve known over the last 4 years has gotten a major overhaul.

Vectorthis V4.4 has been online for about 7 months and it’s been performing great. In that time I’ve seen and done a lot of wordpress hacking to improve functionality, SEO and user interactivity and it’s about time I start implementing some of my tricks into my own site. I don’t plan on doing any heavy redesigning, just some quick realigning.

The .PNG (Portable Network Graphics, PNGs not GIFs) has been around for years. Over a decade actually. Mid 1990’s (95-96) discussions arose revolving around the replacement for the popular .GIF format for various reasons: the 256 colour limit, the Unisys and LZW patent enforcement, among others. As of 2004 .PNG has been recognized as an International Standard (ISO/IEC 15948:2003).

With the web2.0 boom and exponential increase in popularity with xhtml/css in 2006/2006 the .PNG has also been embraced by the web development community. The shortcoming. however: IE6. IE6’s final release was in the summer of 2001, years before .PNG was adopted as a standard, thus IE6 does not support 24bit. As of January 2009 an astonishing 18.5% of Internet surfers are still browsing with 8 year old IE6, which handcuff’s many web developers who are not allowed to drop support for such a percentage (still 1/5th of the market). The Solution: IE6 .PNG transparency hacks.

Over the last couple weeks I’ve gotten a few requests for design advice from a few friends regarding layout/structure and the common thing I noticed with each is that no strict margin/grid system was being implemented.

I wrote up an explanation illustrating the process I follow to get my structures in place, so I’ve decided to throw it up in the blog for anyone else who might stumble upon it.

When I launched the latest version of Vectorthis.com a few weeks ago I incorporated a lot of SEO techniques we were experimenting with while I was working as the full time web designer for Hockey.com. Last night I decided to see if any of these techniques had any effect on my placement in google searches and to my delight I found out I’m placing #2 in google for hockey.com graphic designer.

IE6 is trash. IE7 fixed most of IE6’s bugs, but they broke everything IE6 could do properly.

Welcome to the new and improved Vectorthis.com! I’ve introduced a few new things this time around:

• I’ve integrated a blog into the web site
• I’ve unified the brand canvas across all mediums: stationery, portoflio and web site
• improved seo strategies
• New work in the portfolio!