I got listed on another site : Wooki.es – Css & Web Gallery
Very proud of it. Thanks!
Wooki.es
February 24th, 2009 - Posted categories : BlogDaily 5 from February 20, 2009
February 20th, 2009 - Posted categories : Daily Top 5Logo design inspiration at Logo Design Love
You can find some more interesting logo design inspiration over here.
Typography toolbox at DesignM.ag
A massive resource on all stuff typo related.
Facelift
Don’t like to use sIFR for font replacement? Try Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR).
Quoting the site, an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors.
Frank Chimero
I like his work. Have a look yourself.
Smooth animated menu with jQuery
At Build Internet! you can find this nice tutorial on how to create a fancy animated menu with jQuery. Worth a look if you need such a menu.
Daily 5 from February 19, 2009
February 19th, 2009 - Posted categories : Daily Top 5More typographical inspiration
Designflavr put together a nice list of typographical artworks found on Deviantart. Over here.
Patterns for your website
Seamless patterns can be great as subtle background for websites and other designs. Web Design Ledger has put together a grout resource of beautiful patterns.
Minimalist inspiration at Vandelay Design
Less is more. Take a look at some of these nice minimalistic designs.
Twitter on your website
Today, a website or blog can’t be without a link to Twitter. Nettuts shows 10 ways to integrate Twitter into you website.
Alfonso Brezmes
For your inspiration, nice design and artwork by Spanish artist Alfonso Brezmes.
StartAhead site featured on TND media!
February 18th, 2009 - Posted categories : BlogI was quite surprised to see my site featured in the ‘49 Beautiful Webdesigns: Made in Belgium!‘ list at TND media.
Too much honour really to be in a list with Veerle’s blog, GoodBytes, Bene and some others I admire.
Daily 5 from February 17, 2009
February 17th, 2009 - Posted categories : Daily Top 5Lovely Charts
Lovely Charts is an online diagramming application, that allows you to create professional looking diagrams of all kinds, such as flowcharts, sitemaps, organisation charts, wireframes, and many more… For free.
Vladstudio
Vladstudio is the project of Russian digital artist Vlad Gerasimov. His illustrations are wonderfull. You can also download a lot of beautiful wallpapers from his site.
3d vector icon tutorial
Tutorials are a good way of learning some new tricks. This one at monofactor is a very good one. For me especially because of the subtle finishing touches that are explained.
webleeddesign
Just scroll down on this site of webleeddesign, and beware that your lower jaw doesn’t drop on the floor… . The effect that is created with only transparent images is a real work of art.
List of 40 promotional sites at 1stwebdesigner
Struggling to get more traffic to your site? Who isn’t. This lis of promotional sites might help.
Daily 5 from February 16, 2009
February 16th, 2009 - Posted categories : Daily Top 5Illustrator tutorial at Spoongraphics
Good Illustrator tutorial. Some parts I couldn’t follow exactly as described but the good thing about that is that you try to get it done in your own way.
Typography designs
Once again some really amazing examples of typography in design. Some of these I hadn’t seen before.
Photographing textures tips at DesignM.ag
On the internet there are loads of high quality textures you can download for free. But if you need something original and you can not find it online, then you have to go and take the picture yourself.
Here are some good tips on how to photograph textures.
104 free fonts for web or logo
A list of free fonts for web designers or logo artists at instantShift.
Typechart
As quoted from their site, Typechart lets you flip through, preview and compare web typography while retrieving the CSS.
Daily 5 from February 14, 2009
February 14th, 2009 - Posted categories : Daily Top 5Aviary
Aviary features some great online tools for image manipulation. The tools are Flash based, so they run in your browser. No installations needed.
Currently these are available:
- Phoenix (image editor)
- Peacock (filter editor)
- Toucan (color manager)
- Raven (vector editor)
They are working on some other tools to be published later.
Better in Pink
I put Better in Pink here because I like the design of this website, and I like the stuff she produces. Have a look yourself.
Soho Gothic
Soho Gothic is a great new font. Besides that this site features a commercial movie to promote the font. Worth a look.
Vintage textures
Some more vintage textures for your web designs at Web Design Ledger.
Illustrator tutorials, brushes and other resources at Noupe
Another great and extensive list of resources for Adobe Illustrator.
Photoshop action – screenshot with caption
February 14th, 2009 - Posted categories : BlogUntil recently I never touched actions in Photoshop. But as with most great features, they are often overlooked thinking it is way to difficult or advanced. Well, using (and creating) actions is so easy that I now realize that they probably would have saved me already a lot of hours of repetitive work.
The final result of the action I created here, is an image of a screenshot with a little perspective, a background with some lighting effect and a little blur on the sides. Also a caption with title and description is added.
See the image below.
It is very easy to use this action.
- Download the action file Screenshot actions.atn and copy it in your Photoshop actions folder.
- Take a screenshot (print screen) of the screen you want to capture.
- Open Photoshop and create a new document. By default the size of the new document will match the size of the screenshot. You can see this in the ‘New’ document dialog box, where preset is set to clipboard.
- Paste the screenshot in your document. This will automatically put it on a new layer.
- Open the actions palette (windows->actions).
- Open the actions folder named ‘Screenshot actions’ and select the ’screenshot with caption’ action.
- Now click the little ‘play’ button on the bottom of the actions palette.
- Enjoy the action in action…
When the action has finished, you are able to change the text of the caption to whatever you want. The nice thing about actions is that it leaves you with all the layers that where originally created when the action was recorded. So you just select the text layer(s) and change to text. You can also change the font or colors.
To get a more in depth view on Photoshop actions, go to this great tutorial at My Ink Blog.
Daily 5 from February 13, 2009
February 13th, 2009 - Posted categories : Daily Top 51. Package design
Have a look at these lovely package designs, listed at Abduzeedo.
2. Easy type art with Wordle
Wordle allows you to create beautiful typographical art with the texts of your choice. You can tweak it by using parameters like typeface, color schemes, orientation etc.
The results are often amazing.
3. Effective communication in Web design
This article at Smashing Magazine points out what it takes to achieve clear and effective communication in Web design. Quite an extensive list, very interesting read.
4. Free wordpress personal blog themes
For your inspiration, or for using it for your blog, here is a list of 50 free wordpress themes at WPZOOM.
5. Color shift in Photoshop
This article at Viget Labs is a must read! I have struggled with the The Mysterious “Save For Web” Color Shift myself many times.
They provide a (more or less working) solution to this nasty issue.
To IE6 or not to IE6, that is the question (or not?)
February 12th, 2009 - Posted categories : Blog
Until now I always tried to test my websites in IE6 (using W2K). And tried to make them work correctly too.
But lately I am wondering if I should keep doing this. I’m clearly not the only one struggling with this question. Some boldly make a statement and don’t bother at all anymore. Some even mention explicitly on their website that they don’t support IE6 anymore.
Some even take this a step further, and warn their visitors if they are using IE6. Hell there even exists a Wordpress plugin for this : Shockingly Big IE6 Warning.
For me the most important issues with IE6 are misplaced elements (because of the box model bug) and no support for transparent PNG’s. There are PNG hacks, but in some situations they don’t work.
These are probably the most problematic for every web designer.
So I decided to take following approach. Two approaches in fact :-)
I want to keep supporting IE6 for client websites. The idea of clients loosing potential clients because of a screwed up website, is not what I want.
For my personal sites, I ditch IE6. I don’t bother anymore. It’s not worth the effort.
That was my bold statement… until I had a quick look at most recent browser statistics from the W3C.
It shows that IE6 still has a market share of 18,5%. That’s a considerable amount. I must say that I was surprised. Almost 1 out 5.
Now I wonder: to IE6 or not to IE6, is that still the question?
