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Relay for Life

Posted by Mike in Mike's Opinions, Uncategorized on: May 1st, 2009

This year, hundreds of thousands of people will hear the words “You have cancer,” and there’s a good chance that some of them will be people we know and love. Most of us have been touched by cancer in some way… and we all have the power to make a difference. That’s why I have chosen to fight back right here in my own community by participating in the American Cancer Society Relay For Life®.

My girlfriend Maria is an employee at the Wilton, CT branch of the American Cancer Society, and has been actively involved in Relay for Life (and other cancer awareness programs) for over 5 years. Last summer her and I volunteered at several local relays, and were participants in another by forming a team of family and friends. It’s a night full of fun, hope, and remembrance. It’s a great event and one that should be experienced by any one who has been touched by this horrible disease.

Relay for Life logoRelay For Life is the American Cancer Society’s signature activity. It offers everyone in a community an opportunity to participate in the fight against cancer. Teams of people camp out at a local high school, park, or fairground and take turns walking or running around a track or path. Each team is asked to have a representative on the track at all times during the event. Relays are an overnight event, up to 24 hours in length.

The American Cancer Society sponsors Relay events across the country and chances are there is an event in your own town or nearby community. I encourage everyone to Find Your Nearest Event and get involved. While donations are always appreciated, these are free events, so even if you just choose to go and walk a few laps to show your support, Relay for Life is a wonderful event.

If you would like more information or help with forming your own team, please contact Maria DeCarlo at maria.decarlo@cancer.org or visit her Team Page for the Monroe, CT relay. Maria will be happy to help you find your closest relay and get you started as a team captain.

From Maria:

I Relay because cancer has touched too many people in my life… so I decided to do something about it. I formed a team (for the Monroe, CT Relay) last year, just to get family and friends to come and see what it was all about. To my surprise, we raised close to $2,000.00, and had the best time doing it. So, we’re back for a second season. If you’d like to check out my team page, make a donation or get involved, click here or email maria.decarlo@cancer.org

Thanks for reading, and I encourage everyone to get involved in your local Relay For Life event!

12 Useful Web Tools for Designers

Posted by Mike in Graphic design, Mike's Opinions, Print Design, Tools, Tutorials, resources on: January 16th, 2009

Came across a nice list of 12 Useful Web Tools for Designers on SixRevisions.com. A few of these I’ve used before.

Some of the ones that I’ve used include:

kuler Create is a nice tool to from Adobe that helps create color themes. You can select your own colors and see what are complimentary colors, or you can create custom themes (and browse user submitted custom themes) to see how colors look when used together. Neat little tool.

FontStruct is a neat little tool by font retailer FontShop for creating, editing and sharing fonts. While the tool is very user intuitive and pretty powerful for a free access application, creating a full font family is still a long, tedious job. But, if you have a nice font style in mind that you want to create, a great tool to allow you to do it.

Dummy Text Generator is an extremely useful tool (especially when doing print mockups or proof of concepts) that creates dummy text (i.e. “lorem ipsum plorem”) for placement in mockups. It allows you to select a number of words or characters as well as the number of paragraphs to create a simple block of copy. Great for comping jobs when you don’t have final writing. It also allows you to go back to a writer with information about how much copy is needed for a job.

I’ll have to explore some of the other listed resources when I have more time, but I’ve found some great stuff from on SixRevisions.com, so I trust that this is another great list.

CSS Articles and Resources

Posted by Mike in CSS Resources, Graphic design, Mike's Opinions, Tutorials, Web Design on: January 12th, 2009

In an effort to start posting to this site again, and also to start adding more non-Flash related posts, I’ve been keeping an eye out on the Web for helpful articles that my readers may be intrested in. In my search, I came across a nice list for toxel.com titled Top 50 Best CSS Articles and Resources.

Lot’s of great info here for all levels of CSS. I’ll be honest, I haven’t read all of these, I’m putting some faith in the guys at toxel that this list is legit, but I do visit a lot of the sources sited here (Smashing Magazine, Noupe, NetTuts among others) and have always found some great information.

Hope you all find this info helpful!

Logo Inspiration

Posted by Mike in Graphic design, Mike's Opinions, Print Design, Web Design, logo design on: January 9th, 2009

Came across a  nice list of some Logo Design Resources from designcubicle.com.

Some of them on the list I use as my first stop when trying to get logo ideas (LogoPond, LogoSauce, LogoLounge) and others I’ve come across before, but not overly familiar with (LogoLog, SpoonFed, SpeckyBoy) but most are new to me, so definitely a lot of stuff here to check out.

A really great thing about these logo galleries is that they contain user submitted logos that are sometimes still in the design process, which other designers comment give feedback on. It’s a great way to get objective opinions from other professionals on logos you are working on to know if you are heading in the right direction. Even if you don’t submit your own logos, reading the comments on others can really teach you how to look at ALL logos.

Thank you K!

Posted by Mike in Mike's Opinions on: August 1st, 2008

I’ve written close to 20 Flash tutorials so far, and I really enjoy writing them. I try to explain things clearly, and hope that the readers understand them and can easily complete the tutorial, and learn something in the process. I like that I can teach something to people around the world and whom I’ve never even met.

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New Flash Tutorial Site

Posted by Mike in ActionScript tutorials, Flash, Flash Resources, Flash Tutorial, Mike's Opinions, Tutorials on: July 26th, 2008

I’ve been working in my (very limited) free time on a new site for Flash tutorials. About a month ago, I did a soft-launch of www.gotoandlearnflash.com.

The goal of gotoAndLearnFlash is to have users find the Flash tutorials they want, and write their own reviews to let future readers of this site know whether the tutorial was really helpful or not. While my goal here is to find the best free online Flash tutorials the net has to offer, I simply don’t have the time to review each and every tutorial I come across. That is why I encourage users to check out the tutorials, come back and rate or review them for future readers.

Currently, there are only a few tutorials listed, but I try to add more and more when I can. The biggest hurdle is I really would like to review any tutorials that I post, but I simply don’t have the time. So, I’ve been posting some Flash tutorials without an editorial review in hopes that users will add their own reviews in the comments section. Better than a rating system, I believe a user review will help gauge whether the tutorial is really worth checking out. If you enjoy my tutorials, check out www.gotoandlearn.com to find more Flash tutorials from other authors that I found helpful.

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