Year: 2009

insistence of his teacher. Despite not having finished his training, the lessons have made him cocky and through a

Michael Joseph Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009) was an American recording artist, entertainer and businessman. The seventh child of the Jackson family, he made his début to the professional music scene at the age of 11 as a member of The Jackson 5 in 1969, and began a solo career in 1971 while still a member of the group. Referred to as the "King of Pop"[2] in subsequent years, his 1982 album Thriller is the world's best-selling record of all time[3] and four other solo studio albums are also among the world's best-selling records: Off the Wall (1979), Bad (1987), Dangerous (1991) and HIStory (1995).

Summer is here, the kids are out of school, and everyone is counting down the days until the summer trip. No matter where you’re going — the beach, the mountains, a foreign country or a town just down the road — you’ll be snapping photos.

CSS-design is not easy. We need to find workaround across browser inconsistencies, not that easy CSS-concepts and quite counterintuitive CSS-solutions. However, there are effective and useful CSS-tools and Smashing Magazine reviewed many of them in our previous posts. Now it’s time to present you with some fresh (or not mentioned earlier) tools that can assist designers in their work. Today, we will look at 35 new and useful CSS tools, generators and resources that can significantly improve your workflow and reduce your time efforts for CSS-coding. Whether you’re writing, compiling, refining or experimenting with CSS code – or all of the above – these tools can help you get the job done faster and better than ever before.

You could be like everyone else and buy a boxy USB hub that was designed by an engineer. A by-the-book engineer who wears a polyvinyl pocket protector that holds exactly five Energel 0.5mm ballpoint pens. You could also pay tribute to your Star Wars inner geek by snagging an R2-D2 or Darth Vader USB Hub. If you should opt for the R2-D2 version, you'll get four USB ports to plug devices into and a little droid which swivels its dome and makes beep-boop sounds. Purchasers of the Darth Vader USB Hub will also get four USB ports but instead of a little droid, they'll get the ominous visage of the dark Jedi Knight with blinking red eyes.

Star Wars is the most important thing ever to happen on this or any other planet. It brought together people from all walks of life, taught them to live in perfect harmony and bought them all a Coke. Okay, maybe not. It was a pretty big deal though. In the late 1970s, the demand for anything and everything Star Wars meant that you simply could not escape the film. From fast food restaurants to newsstands, Han, Luke, Chewie and the rest of the Star Warriors were everywhere. The flick was even marketed in doctor's offices thanks to the classic R2-D2 and C-3PO immunization poster that was to prepubers what the Farrah Fawcett one was to older folks of the era. Inevitably, Star Wars fever spread to the pop charts quicker than Chlamydia at Plato's Retreat. After Meco released his disco version of the movie's theme, aspiring musicians around the world decided that Star Wars was their ticket to fame too…with various results. A flood of quickie records peripherally and/or explicitly related t

With the power of the Web, and more eyes watching than ever, it’s important for a business to communicate its unique message clearly. The easiest way to recognize a company and distinguish it from others is by its logo. Below, we go through 10 common logo design mistakes that you should avoid if you want to create a successful and professional logo.

Welcome to BlueTrip CSS Framework. A full featured and beautiful CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) framework which combined the best of Blueprint, Tripoli (hence the name), Hartija's print stylesheet, 960.gs's simplicity, and Elements' icons, and has now found a life of its own. What Can BlueTrip Do For You? BlueTrip gives you a sensible set of styles and a common way to build a website so that you can skip past the grunt work and get right to designing. Download the package, include the images and stylesheets in your site structure, and get going!

Reinforce your business' brand identity and strengthen customer loyalty with a professional logo design created especially for you by an expert graphic designer. * Work one-on-one with a professional graphic designer * Choose your favorite of 3 custom logo concepts * Collaborate with your designer on 2 rounds of revisions to your chosen business logo design * View our Logo Portfolio for sample designs All Custom Logo Design Packages include: * Direct interaction with an expert graphic designer * Multiple opportunities to revise your business logo design to ensure that the final version meets your needs * An efficient, user-friendly five-step process * Final logo file delivery in multiple, high-quality formats — .JPG, .EPS, and .TIF — so you can use your new company logo on the Web or in print materials such as brochures and advertisements

A good statement of work can take time to create. This Statement of Work Builder reduces that time considerably. Answer a few simple questions and receive a detailed Statement of Work. Use the output to receive bids from contractors and attract the appropriate talent for your job. Get Started! Answer the questions in the wizard then save, print or copy and paste your statement of work into a document that you may then share with your contractor.

What if you built a site and all the right people showed up, but none of them bought anything? What if you looked at your traffic reports and analytics and you saw traffic streaming in in droves for all the keywords that perfectly describe what you do? What if you had killer content and tens of thousands of links, but sales were flat? What if you knew you had the best prices or the most unique offerings in town and STILL no one was buying? What would you do? Would you realize you probably had some usability issues? Hopefully. (If not, let's hope I just clued you in.) So what do you do about it?

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Larry Page should have been in a good mood. It was the fall of 2007, and Google's cofounder was in the middle of a five-day tour of his company's European operations in Zurich, London, Oxford, and Dublin. The trip had been fun, a chance to get a ground-floor look at Google's ever-expanding empire. But this week had been particularly exciting, for reasons that had nothing to do with Europe; Google was planning a major investment in Facebook, the hottest new company in Silicon Valley. Originally Google had considered acquiring Facebook—a prospect that held no interest for Facebook's executives—but an investment was another enticing option, aligning the Internet's two most important companies. Facebook was more than a fast-growing social network. It was, potentially, an enormous source of personal data. Internet users behaved differently on Facebook than anywhere else online: They used their real names, connected with their real friends, linked to their real email addresses, and shared t

MegaZine 3 is a powerful pageflip/flashbook engine, written completely in AS3. It boasts many features, ranging from dynamic page loading to a fully integrated zoom and gallery mode. For a more in-depth listing of capabilities see the features section. What is this? MegaZine 3 is a pageflip engine. There are many like it, but this one is… free. And open source, too. This means two things, basically: you don't have to pay for it, and you can even modify it in any way you see fit. That said, if you use it commercially, you are strongly encouraged to donate! Of course, feel free to donate if you're not using it commercially, too. 😉

Scott Ginsberg, aka "The Nametag Guy," offers 13 phrases for better customer-service relations.

Where do you go normally when you are planning to start your new web design project and you are curiously finding for a mind blowing web design inspiration or just want yourself to bring up with some amazing creative ideas which can help you to create your web design project like it will make a trend or inspiration for others. But sometimes, your mouse is not moving around as you want or your hand is not in your creative control or maybe when you are just tired and do not have creative mood to work. Today, We are listing down 23 Colorful And Inspiring Web Designs Where Textures Are In Full Action. This list is not long in numbers but I promise you that when you start browsing them in details it will must boost your creative web design ideas professionally and motivate you for design your web design something which people will never forget that you have made it!

The font stack builder will help you build a better font stack from scratch, but what if you need a jump start, inspiration, or want to build on tried and trusted CSS font stacks? Start with this selection of pre-built font stacks and customise with your own preferred fonts. Use the font stack builder links below to preview and adjust the initial font selection, then copy and paste the finished CSS font family declaration into your style sheet.

Infographics can be a great way to quickly reference information. Instead of pouring over figures and long reports to decipher data, an infographic can immediately make apparent exactly what a dataset actually means. Below are more than 25 infographics that can be useful to web designers. Some are incredibly practical, some provide information that might be of interest to designers and some just present data that might be interesting to those who design websites all day. If you know of any good ones that we may have missed, please add them in the comments section below.

Great page for testing the style guide for a website.

Building websites by hand with all html/css pages was fine a couple years ago, but these days there are a ton of awesome Content Management System options out there that make our jobs as developers and website publishers SO much easier!

Without argument, one of the most important things to consider when creating a website is that it be accessible to everyone who wants to view it. Does your website play nice with screen readers? Can a user override your style sheet with a more accessible one and still see everything your website has to offer? Would another Web developer be embarrassed if they saw your code? If your website is standards-compliant, you could more confidently answer these questions.

(PNG, GIF, JPG only. Files cannot be larger than 500k) Pictaculous works with your phone!

Chris Akunda was a loving son, brother, grandson, cousin, and nephew, and a friend to all who knew him. Chris' time with us was short ? only 12 years, but boy did he make every day of those 12 years count. Chris just finished 7th grade at Hamilton Southeastern Junior High where he was in advanced classes and excelled as a student, math being his favorite subject. He had recently developed a real love for writing, becoming very particular about grammar and the use of proper language. Chris was full of life, had a contagious smile, great sense of humor, and a love for soccer. He had a tremendous amount of dedication and skill for the sport and played in a travel program for Fishers Soccer Club in the U13 boys' age division. His life-long dream was to play in one of the European soccer leagues and he constantly worked toward that goal.

Dan Gilbert presents research and data from his exploration of happiness — sharing some surprising tests and experiments that you can also try on yourself. Watch through to the end for a sparkling Q&A with some familiar TED faces.

After he lost his other arm, Luke began to see his father's point of view.