Brandon Wang

StSi 1.2.5 Coming Soon, Affinity 1.0 Coming Soon

Updates on Stunning Silence: Stunning Silence 1.2.5 is coming soon and will be released as soon as possible. Fixes in this version include support for centering images as well as general fixes. There are no security fixes, and you are not required to upgrade (but you are recommended).

Stunning Silence 1.3 will come sometime in the future and will include support for more color schemes, multiple sidebar support, as well as other fixes and features.

Updates on Affinity: Affinity is a brand-new WordPress theme to be released soon after I finish working on a client’s work, release Stunning Silence 1.2.5. It’s super-elegant and has a layout sure to be tasty and pleasing.

Once again, I’m being bogged down by work, and I have way too many things to take care of. If you want updates on any work, please subscribe to my feed. Thanks!

HTML5 for the good?

HTML5 is a huge step forward in terms of web usability, of web coding, and web design. It makes things incredibly easy to do, clean, and makes websites suddenly have a no-frills attitude. How easy is it to type in a simple code line <video src=”blah.avi”> on your website? That wasn’t hard, right?

So I suppose you’re happy, right? And in a way, you should be happy. Because instead of hours of work, bam, that took three seconds, right? You didn’t need to convert it to .flv to watch, heck, you didn’t even need a video player to come with it. Just pow, one line of code.

But is this too easy? Continued »

Firefox 3.5 Color Profiles Not That Great

I know, I know, color profiles are great for photographers, but here’s a quick rant: although colors are richer and prettier, when users mess around with the default controls in their browser and they enable color profiles, backgrounds and images that designers have color-matched to fit in are suddenly mismatched.

It’s easy to tell where a background image picks up and starts off suddenly. This is a huge problem, because a lot of people are going to want to mess around with their settings and enable color profiles. Designers will now need to save to PNGs and forfeit IE6 support (which wasn’t that important to begin with, but still).

Instead of enabling it for everything, each photograph should have a specific setting saying “yes” or “no”, and browsers should obey it. It makes sense that the developers for Firefox have turned it off on default.

[http://www.dria.org/wordpress/archives/2008/04/29/633/]

Stunning Silence v1.2.3 [WordPress theme]

Update: v1.2.3 has been released, thanks to some requests by Blair. Links across the template are now highlighted on hover, and the RSS feed icon has been moved to the left. The text “RSS Feed” displays on hover.

Update: v1.2.4 has been released, thanks to suggestions. A fluer-de-lis now displays default to the left of the title; users can modify this logo to change it to their own.

Stunning Silence has had amazing reception with the WordPress community so far. Thank you so much, guys! I loved every single bit of feedback and all the compliments.

This new release of Stunning Silence adds some more features and options to the Stunning Silence WordPress theme including new color schemes (detailed in the picture) and other effects.

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Stunning Silence v.1.1.2 [WordPress theme]

Note: this version has been deprecated.

Stunning Silence: a WordPress theme with alluding beauty and a beauty all around, from the backend to the front-end. This is a theme you will want on your blog. Featuring a huge options page for hard-core customizing and a simple modern look on the outside, it is great for your blog.

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The Battle Of Fonts, and the Future of Typography

For what has seemed to be the longest time, I had no care for fonts. Words were words, and nobody cared about how they were spaced or whether there were orphans or not.

Then I came across two magazines: one with incredible text, and one with the most ugliest layout I had ever seen. And by the layout, I mean the typography: ligatures weren’t used, line height was horrible… from that point on, I realized the importance of typography.

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[Portfolio] Brandon Wang, version 5.1

(click above for larger version) It’s version five point one of my portfolio home page: my presence on the Internet. In more ways than one, a home page is like a first glance at you, when someone sees this page, they will review you on your work.

Are you a good designer? They’ll look at your home page to find out. Do you know what you’re talking about? They’ll look for qualifications. I made this page with these questions in mind.

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[Portfolio] Brandon Wang, version 5.0

Yet another redesign of my personal portfolio: the highlights that made it such a great design (at least in my opinion), and why I unfortunately discontinued the design.

This web page made use of intensive colors, dark backgrounds, and visually stunning effects. It really pushed out the fact that, this person here is a designer.

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5 Life Lessons Coding has Taught Me

Coding is a passion, a joy, and a love to me. Although it’s extremely nerdy of me, sometimes I just love to sit down and code for an afternoon. But coding hasn’t just been lines of parentheses and exclamation marks. It has taught or reminded me of many things in life.

From mistakes to rushing, I think that coding as well as the rest of my life (school, sports, music) have pretty much placed me more prepared for the real world than I was a year ago. But I still have a lot to learn.

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Time Constraints and New Projects

Lately, a lot of things have been going on in my life. Frequently I forget that I’m still a student, and that I still have to keep my grades up, my parents happy, my teachers happy, my friends happy, and pretty much everyone happy.

What is going on with my life? Well, a few things. End-of-year finals and TAKS testing are mandated for my grade level right now, and there’s no way to not take it, and there’s no reason to not take it either.

I also participate in several out-of-school activities, including swimming and Chinese school (as part of my mission to be bilingual), and please don’t forget I’m almost out of my mind trying to keep up with several blogs at once: this blog, my literature blog, my technology blog, as well as the evil little project I’m trying to do.

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[Project] Sleek: A Free CSS Template

I had some excess time the other day, and with this extra time I had, I decided that I would make a contribution to the community by releasing a free CSS template: sleek.

Sleek is true to its name. It has a monochrome layout that gives heavy emphasis to its content, which is beautiful as a photo blog or a single page portfolio.
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Fiddling Around With Photoshop

I do have to admit that sometimes, fiddling around with Adobe Photoshop is immensely fun. Especially when it is raining outside, you can’t do much in the weather, and of course there’s nothing like whipping up something nice and sleek and then feeling proud of it.

I had some excess time the other day, and I decided that I was going to learn some new Photoshop skills. I went on the Internet, looked around for some great designs (and how to do them), and finally, tried them out for myself.

I do have to say that the results were more than pleasing, and I loved the time it took to make the designs themselves. To me, Photoshopping is not work (yet), but rather a joy.

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