A week or two ago, my band’s guitarist Steve contacted me and said he was making stickers for our band, As Judgement Day Approaches, and he asked what link to put below or logo, so that people could find us. I immediately thought of just putting our Facebook link, but then we both agreed that we needed something a bit more professional. And that’s how asjudgementdayapproaches.com came to exist. I’m pretty damn proud of how it came out, so check it out.

It’s not for a client, it’s for my band. I can’t reveal too many details about it yet, because the grand opening for it is this Sunday. What I do want to show is a little sneak preview of it, much like what people do on dribbble (my dribbble account if anybody wants to invite me, hint hint).

It’s a list of band members in my band, with some custom icons I made. I figured, instead of just writing [nickname] – [name] – [instrument], I’d use an icon to indicate the instrument. I based it off the round social icon set, except using my own vector shapes for the instruments. Working at such a small size and still maintaining clarity was quite tricky, especially with the drumset. However, I’m pretty happy with how this came out.

It’s taken me nearly forever to finally get Z-Up redesigned, so long that I actually forgot what the old design looked like. It was fully functional the whole time, just not entirely pretty. The new design stays fairly true to the rather well-received old design, while introducing some more modern features like CSS3 and a cleaner design. Pictures and geeky bits after the jump.
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As you may have all noticed, this site frequently got listed as a malware site, and several readers complained on Twitter about it, so I finally looked into the issue. After thoroughly scanning the site and server for malware, I used the Theme Authenticity Checker, which checks for malicious bits and all, and it found a link in base64. Now on its own, base64 isn’t harmful, but it’s often used to disguise malicious links without them being visible in the code. Turns out the “malicious links” were from the TNX ads I had been using. Now, TNX is a good service and it’s already paid me around five bucks, but I can’t have it scaring away people, so I ditched the TNX ads and switched to Google Ads. While they’re not as easy to style or make unobtrusive, I’ve done what I could with them, and it doesn’t look too bad. Probably won’t pay as much, but at least I can trust Google to not do anything evil to my blog.

Tumblr’s most recent outage lasted for over a day, and while that may not seem to be very long, a day on the internet is an eternity of bad PR. It highlights the main problem with a “cloud” system— it’s quite vulnerable and can screw everyone over if not managed properly.
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In one of Facebook’s recent design tweaks, the text for the statuses has been bumped down a size or two. I’m still puzzled as to why the designers at Facebook chose to do this. They do realize that users know how to scroll, that it’s not necessary to cram lots of information above the fold. I’m thinking it was one of those cases of using small text just because it looks “prettier,” and I thought we designers have agreed that we’re all past that stage? 
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