design

I recently had the first of, I hope, many columns on Catholic online evangelization in the St. Louis Review. I will post the column here for archival purposes, but you can read the column on the Review website as well:

The Digital Continent | Catholics should become leaders in online communications

by Jeff Geerling

The status quo is no longer acceptable.

That was the gist of the two keynote talks during this year's Catholic New Media Celebration in Boston. The Catholic Church needs to become a leader in online communications and social media — and it needs to do so now.

Father Robert Reed, director of CatholicTV, an online and broadcast television network, suggested Catholics practice the craft of media production and web development as a skilled craftsman would fabricate a chalice: As the craftsman labors over every detail and creates a work of art, which leads the priest and those present at Mass to ponder the mysterious and divine Presence within, so should we communicate and design our websites so as to allow Christ's love and beauty shine.

There must be a professionalism to our craft. We cannot settle for anything less than the best, most useful, functional and interactive websites and service on the Internet.

Today Google announced they'd help advance web typography by hosting open-sourced fonts on their CDN, and by giving the code to easily embed fonts on websites on a new website, the Google Font Directory.

It was amazingly simple: just copy the <link> code and paste it in your template's header, then set any element on your page to use the Google-provided font(s). I started using OFL Sorts Mill Goudy TT, and I like the look (except for the lower-case y, which seems to be cut off).

(The code simply adds an @font-face declaration via a Google-hosted CSS file... I wonder if it's legit to self-host the CSS and font file; I haven't read through the terms and conditions yet).

I'm thinking of using this library for a few other projects on which I'm working. Much easier than Typekit, and it doesn't require any javascript or flash overhead, like alternatives such as Cufon and sIFR do.

Creighton model NFP students will recognize the dancing baby above. I am starting work on a project related to NFP, and I was in need of the image. So, being handy in Illustrator, I snapped a shot of my fiancée's chart, zoomed in on one of the dancing baby stickers, and hand-traced the lines in Illustrator.

I might clean it up a little more sometime, but for now, this will do. After a second glance, it almost looks like a cage-fighting baby. Hmm...

While I was attending Kenrick-Glennon Seminary, a few brother seminarians and I had a long run of Monopoly tournaments, and we became quite adept at the game. Of course, my winning strategy was to always give up any and all properties to get Boardwalk and Park Place, buy a hotel, and hope someone hit the hotel before I went bankrupt...

I created this vector file (below) in Illustrator after many hours of path-tracing original Monopoly board art, my own hand-drawn designs, and some clipart. I was intending to print it on some cardstock and mold some actual pieces (like a biretta, a Liturgy of the Hours book, a pipe organ, etc.) to play the game, but never got around to that part before leaving.

(Click image to view larger).

These images speak for themselves, but I will offer a few asides to help explain why I was saddened after visiting the Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago a few months ago.

What... the... I think they might reserve the Body of Christ somewhere in that mess.

To think that, before the fire, there was probably very beautiful, meaningful and symbolic imagery in that stained glass. Now it's an abstract, and dare I say, boring sight. My eyes grew tired trying to see what was up there.

The Archdiocese of Saint Louis today upgraded its entire website to a new design and a new platform, allowing offices and agencies to more quickly and more easily communicate with the faithful in the Archdiocese (and around the world!).

I've been working on this project (with a lot of help from Palantir, a web development company in Chicago) and some local developers for the past year, and I am pleased with the result (I hope you are, too!). I've written up more information about the technical aspects of the site on Open Source Catholic (read more about the Archdiocese of Saint Louis' Upgraded Website), and I will continue writing some posts about specific details on the Open Source Catholic website.

Some of the highlights of the redesign:

A couple days ago, when building a quick site with limited functionality (basically a pretty front end to a database website), I ran into a hiccup with my custom module/theme for the site, which caused me to scratch my head for a few minutes.

In my custom module (called 'idcards'), I added a stylesheet for a couple forms on the site using the drupal_add_css() function:

/**
 * Implementation of drupal_add_css()
 */
drupal_add_css(drupal_get_path('module', 'idcards') .'/idcards.css');

Later on in the development, I added a custom theme (based off a Zen subtheme I use for many smaller sites), and in that custom theme's .info file, I added a stylesheet named idcards.css.

When I cleared all the caches, I noticed the custom form styling (added by the module's idcards.css file) was missing, and on further investigation, I found that the module's idcards.css file was not being added to the pages!