The Big Ten Conference will have a new member for the 2011-12 football season, respectively, the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers a.k.a. the Huskers. If your a college football fan this is great news and this addition should be exciting for the future of the Big 10 Football Conference.

(By the way, can Notre Dame, Kansas, Syracuse and Missouri hurry up and join the Big Ten before next season. Please?)

The Big Ten And It’s Logo
The Big Ten Conference is a prestigious conference that’s made up of 11 universities primarily located in the Midwest. The Big Ten Conference has a ton of history and it may also boast perhaps the most prestigious and creative sports logo design to date. The Big 10 Conference logo uses negative space to depict the actual number of members in the conference, which is 11. A nicely designed negative space logo is classic.

College Football Season Is Almost Here
The start of the college football season is coming up in a few weeks and I have been thinking about what the Big Ten will do with it’s logo in 2011-12 season when Nebraska joins. I am in absolutely no way affiliated with the Big Ten but I have decided to whip up a new version of the Big Ten logo for the 2011-12 school year.

UPDATE: Official New Look Big Ten Conference Logo has been released, check it out.
The New Look Big Ten Conference Logo

Variations of the new Big Ten Conference Logo

The New Big 10 Legends and Leaders Division Logos

The New Big Ten Legends Division Logo

The New Big Ten Leaders Division Logo

Official Legends and Leaders Division Video Announcement

Other Big 10 Logo Sources

• The New Big Ten Logo Designers
• The New Big 10 Logo – Official Press Release from the Big Ten Conference
• http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/logo/big-ten-conference
• Big Ten Logo – Vector Download
• BigTen with addition of Nebraska

Please note:

• This post features 11 free iPhone 4 HD wallpapers created by me, and all of them can be downloaded free.
• The wallpaper looks way better once downloaded and viewed from your iPhone 4!
• Wallpaper was made specifically for the iPhone 4 (640×960) HD resolution.
• From your iPhone 4′s Safari browser you may tap and hold until prompted to save images directly to the camera roll on your iPhone 4.

Free iPhone 4 Wallpaper Downloads

• Brown Leather

  
  Download

• Dirt

  
  Download

• Weave

  
  Download

• Ancient Metal

  
  Download

• Black Wood

  
  Download

• Wired Honeycomb

  
  Download

• Brown

  
  Download

• Green Grass

  
  Download

• Metallic Fiber

  
  Download

• Ancient Wood

  
  Download

• Driftwood

  
  Download

Please add some comments below with screen shots (Power button + Home Button) of your iPhone’s home or lock screen, It would be great to see these wallpapers put to good use!

Animation on the Web

First there was the ancient era of the epic Animated GIF which ruled the web with often laggy yet sometimes humorous-like animations. Then came the great renaissance / pre-modern period. Introducing the almighty Adobe Flash Movie (Macromedia at the time) that was allowing web designers to build not only simple animations, but complete animations from beginning to end experiences never seen before on the interwebs. (A series of tubes connecting people through computers.) Currently, modern day, we all know how Adobe Flash has evolved and are witness to the herculean JavaScript libraries that has revolutionized the speed in which we can develop pure HTML/CSS animations.

As you know, companies such as Apple, Inc. have refused to allow the Adobe Flash Player plug-in to be used in any of its phone’s. Many of you are probably reading up on all the latest buzz surrounding HTML 5 and CSS 3 and all that it promises. Now, I am not one to say that Adobe Flash will ever die out in lieu of the newly adopted HTML 5 Canvas this simply just will not happen. Market share and development time are huge factors when it comes to web designers with large audiences. Adobe Flash and its market saturation, file compression, vector scalability, and development framework are clear winners going against pure html mixed in with a little 8-bit transparent lossless bitmap controlled from JavaScript commands, I do believe though that in the future HTML 5 , CSS 3, Animated PNG’s, and Adobe Flash will co-exist together harmoniously. Now the real question is… what does all this mean for Flash Banner Advertising?

Perhaps Animated PNG’s can help the supplement the load of Flash banners for non-Flash platforms. PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is an awesome format when it comes to a solution for raw transparency on the web static or not. Many 3D authoring tools have taken advantage of PNG animation for years, Adobe Fireworks has native support for PNG, and the Animated PNG format is completely backwards compatible. If modern browsers are going to support the HTML 5 and CSS 3 standards why not Animated PNG’s?

One major drawback is the compression. File sizes are very large in comparison to Flash movies and even though the future outlook of bandwidth looks amazing we still have to cater to the lesser. Can we find a way to compress these PNG’s, and be a little less CPU-bound? If we can, the sky is the limit! In today’s modern-era static transparent PNG’s are commonly used in conjunction with JavaScript/HTML/CSS to create stunning animations (Check this out!), why not 100% pure Animated PNG’s too?

Animated GIF versus Animated PNG

Supported browsers

Firefox 3 +
Opera 9.5 +

Sources

Development
http://wiki.mozilla.org/APNG_Specification
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG
http://littlesvr.ca/apng/
http://philip.html5.org/tests/apng/tests.html
http://eligrey.com/blog/post/apng-feature-detection
http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/08/better-animations-in-firefox-3/
http://animatedpng.com

Other Links
PNG image file format
W3C PNG Specification – Second Edition
PNG (Portable Network Graphics) Specification, Version 1.2
W3C GIF specification
GIF image file format

If you’re a web designer from Detroit you might ask yourself: “Who is the biggest, baddest, most awesome web design company in Detroit?”, or If you’re looking to hire a web design and development company based in Detroit, you may also be asking yourself this same question.

If you’re heading over to Google right now to do a search for “web design company detroit“. You will get tough to sort results and something like choice paralysis. Let me tell you that just like avocados there are some things that you can’t find on Google.

Here are some web designer hiring tips. First, be extremely careful. If you call a web design company and nobody answers the phone, you get the answering machine, or you don’t receive a prompt call back take this web design company off your list of potential web design companies immediately. If you are scouring the web for web design companies, remember that some web design companies may appear bigger than they actually are.

Alright so you may want to hire the “Rolls Royce” of web design companies, but not know who they are. This is why I have compiled this list of the leading web design companies in Detroit. The order of this list bears no relevance to the best or biggest web design company it’s entirely random. So here you have it:

Metro Detroit’s Top 13 Web Design Companies

• Organic – Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
• 352 Media Group – Ann Arbor, Michigan
• RingSide Creative – Oak Park, Michigan
• Hook Interactive -Ann Arbor, Michigan
• Sapient Nitro – Birmingham, Michigan
• Vectorform – Royal Oak, Michigan
• Stone Interactive Group – Ann Arbor, Michigan
• Media Genesis – Troy, Michigan
• Pluto – Birmingham, Michigan
• Enlighten – Ann Arbor, Michigan
• Trademark Productions – Royal Oak, Michigan
• Martin J Digital – Troy, Michigan
• Team Detroit – Dearborn, Michigan
• Fry – Ann Arbor, Michigan

Please contact me if you think there are any other Detroit web design companies worthy of being on this list.