Simian Design, by Tony Stephens

All 120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts

Crayola crayons currently come in 120 colors including 23 reds, 20 greens, 19 blues, 16 purples, 14 oranges, 11 browns, 8 yellows, 2 grays, 2 coppers, 2 blacks, 1 white, 1 gold and 1 silver.

Aaron at ColorSchemer.com created a fun list of all 120 Crayon Colors with their hex codes and RGB values.  COLOURlovers reproduced this list along with several fun facts.

“the scent of Crayola crayons is among the 20 most recognizable to American adults. Coffee and peanut butter are 1 and 2.”

“Crayola crayon colour names rarely change. However, there are exceptions. In 1958, Prussian blue was changed to midnight blue in response to teacher recommendations that children could no longer relate to Prussian history. In 1962, the colour flesh was changed to peach recognizing that not everyone’s flesh is the same shade.”

But the real gem of this article is the color and hex listing.  Midnight blue (formerly Prussian blue) is the hex code of: #1A4876.   Peach (formerly flesh) is #FFCFAB.

What a great list.

Stain Removal

A very useful Stain Removal Chart.  Has a ton of information.

For example to get rid of Blood, you soak in cold salted water 1 teaspoonful to 1 pint for at least an hour. Wash in warm soapy water.

How to create Advertising the really Sells.

38 things that Ogilvy & Mather have found that helps when creating Advertising that just flat-out SELLS.  Ogilvy & Mather have been giants in the advertising world for a while, and they know what they are talking about.  David Ogilvy has written us this gem of an article that articulates these 38 things.  It’s a great read if you’re at all interested in advertising.  Highlights are listed below.

1. How should you position your product?  This is by far the most important decision.
2. Create a large promise, a benefit for the customer.
3. Brand image.
4. Big Ideas.  Big ideas are usually simple ideas.  “THe problem, when solved, will be simple”.
5. First-class Ticket.
6. Don’t be a bore.
7. Innovate.
8. Be suspicious of awards.
9. Psychological segmentation.
10. Don’t bury news.
11. Go the whole hog.  This is a great point.  Don’t attempt too many things, you’ll achieve nothing.  Boil your strategy down to one simple promise, and go the whole hog in delivering that promise.

They also have 12 points in what works well in television, and 13 for print. It’s a great list, and I’m just loving digging through this genius.

32. Yes, people read long copy.  Readership falls off rapidly up to fifty words, but drops very little between fifty and five hundred words.(!)  “The more your tell, the more you sell”.  This is fascinating.  That’s a HUGE number, fifty and five hundred with a minor drop-off.

Pixels to Ems Conversion

A really great chart to determine the Pixels to Ems Conversion Table for CSS. Thank you Jon Tan.  A quick over-view/sampling below.

What this chart allows you to do is determine the em width of something. Say you have something that is 770px wide, and using a font-size of 1em. You know then that the em-width of the layout is: 1 ÷ 16 × 770 = 48.125em.

Vertical Text

I’m working on a project that requires some vertical text.  But I was unsure as to the “correct” way for the vertical text to be set, 90 degrees clockwise or counter-clockwise.  Luckily, I didn’t have to do a lot of research, as it’s been done for me. Robust Vertical Text Layout outlines the basic rules for vertical text for me.

In a purely physical layout scheme, each of these text layout properties would be given as an absolute: The inline progression of this run of English is top to bottom, its glyph orientation is 90 degrees clockwise, its block progression is from right to left.

But absolutes don’t hold much water.

For scripts in a non-native orientation, the natural inline text flow depends on the direction of line stacking: the text is most comfortably laid out as if the whole text block were merely rotated from the horizontal. For example, English text in vertical lines that stack from left to right will face with the glyphs’ tops towards the left and the text direction running from bottom to top. The same text, by the same logic, would in a right-to-left line stacking context face right and flow within each line from top to bottom.

Basically it boils down to this from what I can determine: Have the bottom of the text point in the direction of the block progression.

10 best CSS hacks

The 10 best CSS hacks is a great list. Defintely worth checking out.

1. Vertical align div
2. Min-height
3. PNG Transparency
4. Autoclear
5. Reset CSS (incredibly important)
6. Scrolling Render IE
7. Opacity
8. PRE Tag
9. LI Background Repeat IE
10. Targeting Browsers

Good stuff.

Reset CSS

Eric Meyers Reset CSS has found a permanent home now. Reset CSS is a useful tool to help you default a lot of generic styles built into browsers.

” The reset styles given here are intentionally very generic. There isn’t any default color or background set for the body element, for example. I don’t particularly recommend that you just use this in its unaltered state in your own projects. It should be tweaked, edited, extended, and otherwise tuned to match your specific reset baseline. Fill in your preferred colors for the page, links, and so on.”

Also be sure to check out his diagnositic css file as well.

“With a diagnostic stylesheet, you can quickly see where your markup might have some trouble. If you want to see this in action, there are two demos to check out:”

Incredibly useful tools, check them out.

A simple, homemade Van de Graff Generator.

Create your own simple homemade Van de Graaff generator.

This project will show you how to build a device that can generate 12,000 volts from an empty soda can and a rubber band. This is capable of drawing 1/2 inch sparks from the soda can to my finger. The spark is harmless, and similar to the jolt you get from a doorknob after scuffing your feet on the carpet.

To build the toy, you need:

* An empty soda can
* A small nail
* A rubber band, 1/4 inch by 3 or 4 inches
* A 5×20 millimeter GMA-Type electrical fuse (such as Radio Shack #270-1062)
* A small DC motor (such as Radio Shack #273-223)
* A battery clip (Radio Shack #270-324)
* A battery holder (Radio Shack #270-382)
* A styrofoam cup (a paper cup will also work)
* A hot glue gun (or regular glue if you don’t mind waiting)
* Two 6 inch long stranded electrical wires (such as from an extension cord)
* Two pieces of 3/4 inch PVC plumbing pipe, each about 2 or 3 inches long
* One 3/4 inch PVC coupler
* One 3/4 inch PVC T connector
* Some electrical tape
* A block of wood