What a refreshing site!

I love innovative work like this.

While cleaning up some old posts from 2003, I noticed a translation of an old page I wrote on inheritance (back in Flash 5 days) by the folks at Bascule in Japan. Revisiting their site was a nice surprise.

Although the page took awhile to load, the result is worth the wait.

The long page is all Flash with nice sound effects. As one scrolls down the page, different sections are activated when they come into view. Love how they did the video guides from three different locations to their office (wait for loading to finish next to the map), and the “matrix effect” when the guides meet. There are many little surprises along the way – just scroll and explore.

At the bottom of the page, click on the “genie” to literally wrap up the visit. Amazing work!

Check out the Bascule site. I think it’s time to visit Japan again!

Yang Rutherford

Congratulations to the launch of the Yang Rutherford website – a branding, design, and media firm based in London and Hong Kong.

This is a new company formed by my brother Jimmy Yang (founder of Y-Associates in London), and Andrew Rutherford (in Hong Kong).

Useful color tool

Thought I’d share this useful color scheme tool: Color Schemer Studio. Especially useful are the harmony color wheel, the color picker (from any application), and the quick copy of RGB / Hex code.

Programmer art can now be color coordinated too!

CSS and font size

I just wished that people who are designing HTML/CSS content use relative font sizes instead of fixed pixel font sizes.

For example, Macromedia’s new Help content uses relative font sizes (such as x-small or xx-small), instead of fixed point sizes (such as 8-pt or 6-pt). Why is this good? Because if I find the font size too small, I can bump it up easily by Ctrl-scrolling my mouse wheel (you can try it on this page if you’re using Windows(?) Internet Explorer)! However, if the font sizes are fixed in points, this doesn’t work.

Many sites/blogs I visit use fixed point sizes, some text are so tiny (especially if they’re using the <code> tag), that it makes reading difficult (especially at my 1920×1200 laptop screen). Sites such as Macromedia.com or Microsoft.com use relative font size – makes sense for everyone, including those of us who are not visually-challenged (yet).