When Greenpeace launched their Green my Apple campaign site a year ago I had a hard time keeping my mouth shut, but I think I managed reasonably well. Now that Veerle Pieters has posted an article about the Greenpeace Green my Apple project I can let everyone know that I did part of the front-end coding for the site.

I've been a huge Apple fan for a long time, so I was a bit disturbed when I found out that they weren't doing their very best to protect the environment. If I could do anything to improve that situation, I thought I should. Being an Apple fan does not mean I will ignore problems.

Just like Veerle I had my doubts about the whole thing at first, mostly because the project involved copying (or ripping off, if you prefer that term) Apple's design. It was for a good cause though, so morally I didn't feel that it was a problem. It was Apple sending their lawyers after us that had me worried. But after Veerle told me that Greenpeace would take full responsibility if anything like that should happen I jumped on board. Besides, I only did the coding, not the graphic design.

Coding-wise this project isn't very complicated, though there were a couple of accessibility challenges. I managed to find what I think are reasonable solutions to most of these challenges, but if I redid the project today I would probably do some things a little differently.

If you look at the code and find strange things like unescaped ampersands or images with no alt attributes, rest assured that those were not in the markup I handed over ;-). For more details on part of the coding as well as the story behind the graphic design, read Veerle's post Greenpeace Green my Apple project, which I co-authored with her.

The campaign is over now but the site, which won a Webby award in the activism category, is still online.

Finally, like Veerle I'm asking you to please not turn the comments area into a political discussion about Apple vs. Greenpeace vs. the environment.

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Following my FTF images a few weeks ago Anne, a graphic designer in Baltimore, sent me a link to one of her Flickr sets: lots of fantastic images taken at the Museum of Transport in St. Louis.

Big thanks to Anne. All contributions welcome.

It’s Friday! I can’t believe it. We made it through another week! That means it’s time for a caption contest!

Also, don’t miss our recent soft-launch of captionfridays.com, where we have a new caption contest every Friday (different from the one on BrainFuel).

I was granted an exclusive interview with none other than the one and only renowned web designer Sigmund Gnoskrept. This is the man who is the mastermind behind the concept of a -- and the one who coined the term -- "web site" in the late eighties, if that means anything to you. What follows is a transcript of that interview, my questions, followed by his answers. I was surprised by some of his responses, and you may be, too.

Here’s a screenshot I took in 2001 of The Apple Store.

And here’s what it looks like today.

A lot has changed, and then, not much has changed.

As you might be able to tell by the title, this isn’t an advanced feature, but because of the wildly popular “Illustrator Quick Tips” I’ve been publishing, I’m starting a new series of simple, yet very useful tips aptly named “Illustrator 101.” (I will also be doing this for Photoshop, so keep an eye out for “Photoshop 101″ tips coming soon as well) Sometimes the simplest things can be the most helpful, so to kick of the Illustrator 101 series, we’re going to save ourselves some transforming headaches, and harness a simple scaling option in the Transform palette.

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quintessential "little boxes" photos and info

Cape Town in South Africa is a very beautiful place, as I said before in the One week in South Africa post. While I was there I took lots of pictures, basically everything I thought would be useful or inspiring.

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