Simple things can be a lot of fun.
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“Simplicity” images collection
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Author Archives: IdeaMonster
Tutorial: Stylish blue Grunge + Gradient background in Photoshop
Here’s a quick little tutorial showing how to make a combination of gradient and grunge that can look stylish in any color (blue is just an example, feel free to experiment). What you need to know is only the basic tools of photoshop that are available from the left toolbar. And some basic layer skills (blending modes, opacities). This tutorial ALSO works in Pixelmator and works exactly the same so you can duplicate all the steps. Enjoy!
Quick review : The Smashing Book
I have before me a beautiful example od DIY creativity. The Smashing Book is a compilation (but made apparently especially for the book) made by the nice people from SmashingMagazine.com . Why are they nice? Well they’re nice because they share what they know, and in the modern world information is money, so it’s nice of the to share. Sure the book costs 30 bucks + postage but after giving it a brief shuffle it’s worth it! Definitely. It doesn’t matter if you’re an experienced designer with a portfolio that when printed would have more pages than this book. It doesn’t matter if you’re a complete beginner who hearing “text-kerning” says “WTF mate?”. There’s only one group of people that won’t find this useful. The rest will love it regardless of their experience and knowledge.
So let’s pop the question
Who are those people that won’t need it though? Well the people who will not find it useful are people who don’t really learn anything by themselves. People who rely on knowledge and learning before attempting ANY tries at a subject. People that will have a full typography course before they type in their first Aa’s. These people might only benefit from the nice, easy to understand language. But they probably won’t learn much, because what Smashing Magazine did is organized the most commonly “asked questions” and answered them with both the scientific precision and clarity for the “normal” people who don’t spend their life buried in a textbook.
Is it worth the 30$?
Definitely. It’s a quick read for the first time, and then you might keep it handy since it’s almost like a bible of design, usability, productivity and more down to earth stuff like CSS and coding. That makes it universal in a way that anyone who wants to do more with their projects will want to have it somewhere close to the computer. Good job guys! Thumbs up!
Flash gradient mask / reflection tutorial using actionscript 2.0
Ok, you’ve probably always wondered, why photoshop and other apps (like pixelmator for example) allow you to use gradient masks and Flash doesn’t? You probably blamed it on some vector mambo-jumbo and decided to live with it somehow. Well that’s not needed anymore, because with some clever techniques we can achieve this effect in Flash from version 8 and up. It works in actionscript 2.0, but it should be easy to achieve in 3.0 as well. This is a simple, quick effect that we can make having a basketball and it’s reflection underneath. What’s cool is that you can also animate the mask so the ball will bounce for example.
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The 960 grid system
So you’re designing a website and thinking : are there any universal proportions for columns, element placement and such things? Why do some websites look so good, while others don’t even though there’s nothing visibly wrong with them? Well the devil is in the details as usual, but lucky for us we have the internets and we can use the knowledge other people learned the hard way. The 960 grid system is one of those things. It’s a set of templates for both coders and designers (pretty much a template for any major software). It was initially designed as the my-own-design-aid kit like most of us do, but it has spread and that is because of two things:
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ease of use
Our show has slowly gained momentum thanks to many nice bloggers and webmasters who shared it. Ok now we got that topic out of the way let’s talk serious.
The web is slowly dividing between a google found, self made brochures (barely interactive) and the facebookalistic social revolutions on any scale. Did you know that there’s a fairly large (and growing) group that thinks facebook IS the whole internet? scary?
In a social media frenzy the regular sites will go aside for a while but they’ll be back, since terminator2 was better than #4. And while online we might want to be alone from time to time, right?
All the perspectives and prospects of the social cannot ibviously be underestimated – this is an important part of the upcomin web 4.0
Let’s just hope for some competition (buzz? orkut? myspace?) or there will only be facebook to compete. ;)
Creation Machine Show – Episode 1 online!
It’s on ! :)
Pixelmator 1.5.1 released!
The guys from “Pixelmator team” are back! And after the long wait they present the next, 1.5.1 version of this supercool raster design software. This is a small update as it only fixes most bugs and adds some nice little features. But finally you can organize your brushes and the way this is done shows, that they don’t want to copy others, instead creating very usable workflows on their own. There’s also the announcement of the next, 1.6 version called Nucleus that they have started working on and that just adds to the overall excitement! Only three more functions (a proper text tool, layer styles and groups) and I’m dumping photoshop forever :)
You can check the software out (Mac only!) at pixelmator.com
Photoshop, pixelmator, Flash, Illustrator, Vector Designer and many more
We have started a main category for our tutorial section. At the start there are only 6 of them, but there will be more added in time. Both small, tweaky things that can redefine routine tasks, little tips and tricks and bigger, more complex stuff. Stay tuned to our channel to see all the new, exciting tutorials and how to’s being added. Cheeri’o!
Rotate and duplicate photoshop tutorial
A quick little tutorial for photoshop this time (sorry, doesn’t work in pixelmator yet, but let’s hope they add this function in some time as well).
Here’s what we’re gonna do with just one shape, without manually rotating and positioning them.
Read more to find out how we do it!
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Let’s think outside of the box
We are bound to repeat something someone else did before one day or another. Actually it’s more often than we think. Sometimes we do it knowingly, and that’s called being inspired (or stealing, the line is thin) and sometimes we simply think of something very, very similar to someone else’s work without knowing the person or the work. Maybe there’s an universal mind somewhere up there that’s sending in ideas and has mixups from time to time. But even aside from all that, it’s important to try and rethink how we can do things that CAN be done creatively. Some things are supposed to be just useful and standard, so the end user won’t get lost in them. But sometimes we can run wild and unleash all our ideas on the world. So which type of projects should we do? I believe doing a bit of both balances both the worlds and keeps the wit sharp. Soon we will post some new textures, tutorials and insights into the web 3.0.
Iphone music app development
We’re starting to work on a little project for the iphone – a simple 5 octave keyboard with combining two synth patches playing at once + an optional drum pattern underneath. You can see the first version of the GUI here.
Podcast episode 0 goes Live!
The first episode is still not entirely defined but the next ones will rock your socks off for sure. Stay tuned for more and watch the first, introductory episode of the podcast called :
Episode 0 – Let’s get this party started
the really, really last iPad spoof
The one before was supposed to be the last one, but we couldn’t help it ;)
iPad : how to make one
Tonight we’ll post a short video on how to make yourself an iPad ahead of the original shipping date. And it’s gonna be much cheaper + the multitasking works pretty well too.
Here’s the video :
Is it the end of Flash online?
It seems like Apple is trying to kill Flash in it’s mobile devices, and looking at the percentages it seems almost as if flash already IS dying on the web. But the truth is, apple selling millions of those portable devices changed the scales a little bit. But do we really miss flash ? Bloated, slow and cpu heavy websites? Well sometimes they’re a must, like in web games, animation, cartoons, children games etc. But in many, many cases the initial overexposure of flash it slowly starts disappearing from many sites in which it was used as an addition. Sure there are those big, in-site banners communicating stuff and that sometimes is still useful, but sites totally in flash? Nope, thanks. They’re sluggish, with poor text support and weird anti-aliasing. So yeah, maybe it should just be limited to those cartoonish-game things and stay out of serious sites. And then maybe adobe would get off the couch and do some work on a plugin that works well on a mac. The windows version of the flash plugin is very stable and reliable, can’t be said about the same thing they made for the mac tho. Will Flash go away? Tell us what you think.