Mac Musings

A Refreshed Look at Low End Mac for 2006

Dan Knight - 2006.01.02 - Tip Jar

Low End Mac Reader Specials

Memory To Go Special: New 2008 iMac 2GB $42 / iMac Intel Core2 DUO & MacBook Pro 2GB $36 - 1GB $20. MacPro 8 Core Memory 8GB kit $286 / 4GB kit $143 / 2GB kit $93 -- Free shipping available. LIfetime warranty.

Download Typestyler, still the Ultimate Styling Tool for Internet, Print and Video Graphics. Works great in Classic with a Native OS X Version on the way. Free Tryout: www.typestyler.com

LA Computer Company: Specials on AppleCare, iMac's, Apple Batteries and Apple A/C Adapters. Also Great prices on Used Apple Computers. Call 1-800-941-7654 Click Here.

OWC: Top Quality Memory for Faster Mac Performance 1GB/2GB/4GB Kits from $23.99/$47.99/$94.99 Expert Support, Free Installation Videos & Guides, Lifetime Advance Replacement Warranty - www.MacSales.com

Mac users can finally play Party Poker for Mac. Not only that, they can also learn how to play PokerStars for Mac.

Laptop Hardware Provided by TechRestore - Overnight Mac & iPod Repairs.

Compare products like desktop computers, laptops, and LCD TVs side by side! All the information and reviews to make the best purchasing decision for a new cell phone GPS products or MP3 players. The Ciao network makes searching products easy for you.

Welcome to 2006. We've enjoyed our week off, and we've updated our graphics.

Myriad, the font Apple uses for almost everything these days, is so 2003, as is running words together with alternating colors or boldregular text. With the new year, we're introducing a new typeface for our logo and other headers: Eaglefeather.

Eaglefeather is based on an alphabet designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Eaglerock project in 1922. Although the project was never built, P22 adapted Wright's lettering to create the Eaglefeather font, which is available through Type Foundry.

I'd never seen this font before, but I noticed a box marked Frank Lloyd Wright on a shelf in my brother's den. I was helping him with some Photoshop work for his new business and just had to check out the typeface. It was still factory sealed - and I understood why when I saw the Mac OS label on top of the box.

He's a Windows user.

From Floppy Disk to OS X Mac

And we're not just looking at a Macintosh font, but one on a floppy disk. That was a challenge in and of itself. None of my modern Macs have floppy drives, and I don't own a USB floppy drive.

Fortunately, I recently acquired a pair of PowerBook 1400s - more on them later this week - and a pair of floppy drives for them. These nice old 'Books don't support OS X, don't have CD burners, don't come with built-in ethernet.

Eaglefather in Font BookI finally figured out how to move the fonts to my OS X Macs. One of the two floppy drives could read the floppy disk, so I copied the files from the disk to a Compact Flash card in a PCMCIA adapter in the 1400. Then I plugged the CF card into the USB card reader on my eMac and Power Mac.

This was the first time I'd tried to install fonts on OS X, and I wondered just how difficult it would be. I double-clicked on the font suitcase to see what Eaglefeather looked like, and Font Book offered an Install Font button (right).

Very nice! You can't get any easier than that.

Photoshop 5 and Later

If you work with type and images, Adobe introduced one of the most useful features ever with Photoshop 5.0 - editable text. That's why I bought a previously owned copy of Photoshop 5.5 a couple years ago, and I've used it to make the headers for our computer profiles and columns (such as Mac Musings at the top of this page).

I started with our site logo, which has a very simplified representation of a compact Mac and our name in Myriad Bold and two shades of blue (right). We've used this graphic, font, and color scheme since our 8th birthday last April, and I wondered how Eaglefeather would work with our graphic.

Eaglefeather is a much lighter typeface - even the bold version. As I experimented with type size and color, I concluded that our old graphic was too heavy for the new font. In the end, I blew up the graphic by 50% so I could use Eaglefeather at a large size, and then I made the lines in the logo thinner.

Logo tip: When working with a logo with strong graphical elements and solid colors, convert your image mode from RGB Color to Indexed Color before you resize it. When you resize it, Photoshop (or any other graphics program) will only use colors in your original graphic instead of introducing additional shades and making your simple graphic fuzzy.

I really like the new look. It's lighter, brighter, and friendlier than our old logo and font. Because most of our header graphics had already been created in Photoshop 5.5, it was fairly easy to change the font from Myriad Bold to Eaglefeather Bold (usually 60 pt or 66 pt) and resize the image to fit the new typeface using either Photoshop 5.5 (one of my holdout classic Mac apps) or Photoshop Elements 3.0.

Design Evolution

We've been through a lot of design changes over the years, and last year's big change was moving from a table-based design to one that uses Cascading Style Sheets, at the same time switching from a 3-column layout to 2 columns and eliminating the gray behind the column on the left.

Another change came later in the year, and it was one I'd resisted for a long time. I really liked the idea of a fluid design that would adjust to the size of your browser window, but to really make ouor new design work across platforms (read: to accomodated IE 6 on Windows), we ended up with a fixed width design. Our pages are now 730 pixels wide with a 140 pixel column on the left side of the page.

In some ways, that simplifies a lot of things for us. We can now have graphics up to about 590 pixels wide, something we didn't allow before, since we wanted to work with a wide variety of window sizes. The factors that determined our size:

  1. Banner ads up to 720 pixels wide.
  2. A design that works on an 800 x 600 display.
  3. The main body narrow enough (590 pixels) so visitors with a 640 x 480 display can see the whole width of the text.

We are Low End Mac, after all, and even though only 6% of our visitors have 800 x 600 displays and less than 1% 640 x 480, we want to accommodate them. I even verified that our design is usable in Cyberdog recently, thanks to the PB 1400.

Content Is King

I may get a bit excited about graphics and fonts. I used to work as a book designer, after all. But for most of you, the question is, "What's in it for me?"

Content is king at Low End Mac, and our design takes a back seat to clear presentation of information, whether that's a computer profile or speculation about Macintel hardware. But design never really take a back seat - it enhances presentation. The best design is one you never notice. It's just there and feels natural.

That's something I've always tried to do, and that won't change in 2006. Neither will our commitment to helping you get the most out of your Mac, new or old.  LEM

Dan Knight has been using Macs since 1986, sold Macs for several years, supported them for many more years, and has been publishing Low End Mac since April 1997. If you find Dan's articles helpful, please consider making a donation to his tip jar.

Recent Mac Musings

Links for the Day

Recent Content on Low End Mac

About LEM | Support | Usage | Privacy | Contacts

Entire Low End Mac website copyright ©1997-2008 by Cobweb Publishing, Inc., unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Advice presented in good faith, but what works for one may not work for all. Please report errors to .
  LINKS: We allow and encourage links to any public page as long as the linked page does not appear within a frame that prevents bookmarking it.
  Access our RSS news feed at http://lowendmac.com/feed.xml.
  Email may be published at our discretion; email addresses will not be published without permission, and we will encrypt them in hopes of avoiding spammers. If you prefer your message not be published, mark it "not for publication." Letters may be edited for length, context, and to match house style.
  PRIVACY: We don't collect personal information unless you explicitly provide it. For more details, see our Terms of Use.
  Low End Mac is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iBook, iMac, eMac, iPod, iPhone, PowerBook, MacBook, MagSafe, Mac Pro, Apple TV, and AirPort are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby acknowledged.


Have a question?
Ask an expert!

Navigation

Used Mac Dealers
Apple History
Best Used Macs
Video Cards
Email Lists
InfoMac's Low
End Mac Forum

Favorite Sites

MacSurfer
MacMinute
MacInTouch
MyAppleMenu
InfoMac
Macs Only!
The Mac Observer
Accelerate Your Mac
RetroMacCast
PB Central
MacWindows
The Vintage Mac
   Museum
DealMac
DealsOnTheWeb
Mac2Sell
ramseeker
Mac Driver Museum
JAG's House
System 6 Heaven
System 7 Today
the pickle's Low-End
   Mac FAQ
Abandonware
   Petition
Mac vs. PC Info

Affiliates

The Apple Store
Mac Connection
MacMall
TechRestore
MacResQ
ExperCom
Crucial Memory
batteries.com

Advertise

All of our advertising is handled by BackBeat Media. For price quotes and advertising information, please contact at BackBeat Media (646-546-5194). This number is for advertising only.

Open Link

Problems viewing this page with Internet Explorer 5.5 or 6? It works fine in other browsers, including IE 7. We recommend Firefox for those using Windows, as it is standards based and more secure than IE 6 (and earlier). More LEM visitors use Firefox than any other browser.