Pixelmator 2.0 release today!

Posted on October 26, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Today, on October 26th the Pixelmator team is set to release the 2.0 version of their popular (and cheap) image editor! We’ve been covering pixelmator for quite a while now and while we think the app is really well made, it still lacks a lot of simpler features that are necessary for day to day work. We’re not saying it has to copy photoshop 1to1, it’s more about simple refinements – like an improved type tool, because the current one is dreadful.

2.0 is supposedly bringing a lot of the requested features (along with simple vector tools too!) so let’s keep our fingers crossed. We’ll test the App and tell you if you can delete that 30-day photoshop trial you’ve used for the last couple of years ;) Just kidding! But hopefully this release will at least drive a couple more people to forget about the bloated, over-priced hog that PS has become. Now we play the waiting game…

We’ll let you know when it hits the App Store!

Another resolution shift in design? Designing for high DPI screens

Posted on October 21, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Retina display revolution

When Apple introduced the retina display, we found out that 960×640 pixels is a nice resolution for a small, 3.5 inch screen and decided to embrace it right away. The retina iPad didn’t come this year, so when designing for mobile devices we’re still lower than 1280 x 800 pixels, with the iPad being 1024×768.

Is Retina not enough?

Apparently though Toshiba is planning to change that and introduce a 498 ppi, 6″ screen sometime in the near future. I don’t really see a reason (maybe I’d have to see the screen live to notice if there’s any difference), but isn’t retina display about high enough ppi, so the eye can’t distinguish the pixels? So why making anything higher than 320/360 ppi at all? The only thing that comes to mind is – to be “better” than apple on billboards and in ads. Well if the trend catches on, or if the iPad gets retina display, we’ll be designing for mobile at 2,560 x 1,600, which is mind blowing because a couple of years ago that resolution wasn’t even in high end desktop computers (and it’s still rare in most desktops).

So what’s next?

That may actually lead to move digital design a little bit closer to print design – having a resolution that is almost pixel-independent and really looks like a fine print will encourage new ideas for design. Exciting times ahead!

non-Adobe HTML 5 animation tools – Purple vs Hype

Posted on October 20, 2011 by IdeaMonster

We can’t complain for the lack of tools to create rich HTML5 animated content. Even Adobe finally decided that flash is better for other things (like creating cartoons) than web site animations and transitions. Their “Edge” is actually a sign that they gave in to Steve Jobs’ and realized there IS a market for non-flash web animation after all. So it was the iPhone that changed the way we look at the web and influenced the new standards. Good.

We covered Hype a while ago, and now it seems that there’s another tool to create rich HTML5 content and now Mac App Store is promoting “Purple” – another pro tool for HTML5 animation. It seems that the interface is a little bit more refined visually than in Hype. Think – Pixelmator – with all those dark windows and panels it looks quite nice. As far as the performance goes though, I checked out the Purple gallery on my 2011 Macbook Air (core i5) and it performed pretty slow. Hype is much better in that regard, but Purple was just introduced so I hope they’ll work on performance in future releases. Aside from that it seems that as far as functionality goes both Apps are pretty similar, so it doesn’t really matter which one you buy, but Purple is now half the price (introductory) of Hype, so if you buy it now it will be a bargain at 15 Eur.

You can download Hype for 30 Eur here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hype/id436931759?mt=12
And Purple is available here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/purple/id433132196?mt=12

iOS 5 GUI for iPhone (PSD) – a free download from TeehanLax.com!

Posted on October 17, 2011 by IdeaMonster

The guys that brought us all the previous iPhone OS GUI’s are at it again. What stands out in their work is both attention to detail and a very nice organization of the content. Everything is sorted in groups (including nested groups for smaller elements). This is priceless for UX people, who can now design the interfaces for their own apps with the right elements. It’s more of a drag&drop of lego bricks into place, than anything and we like it here.

Go to teehanlax.com/blog to download your free PSD of the iPhone GUI!

Adobe Announces Photoshop Touch!

Posted on October 4, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Don’t worry it’s not the crippled Photoshop mobile version, that didn’t even had enough functionality to compete with Photo Forge. It’s a completely new thing and it’s as close to real photoshop, as it ever was. There are layers of course, painting tools, patterns and blending modes. So apparently it’s set for some serious (as far as it can go) photo editing and content creation. That’s a smart move on Adobe’s part, and we’re eager to see when it comes out. Photoshop Touch should be available for iPads soon, Androids a little bit later (even though the demo is on an Android slate). It was announced along a few other apps (including a nice prototyping app, that’s an attempt to take on OmniGraffle I guess) at the annual Adobe MAX conference.

Video by the 9to5mac team

Pixelmator, Vector Designer and Hype as a Budget creative suite?

Posted on October 3, 2011 by IdeaMonster

We have covered the alternatives to Adobe’s expensive suite many times yet, but since the release of Hype, there’s a lot more options for a web designer, to have an almost fully functional set of apps, for a fraction of the price. Sure, Pixelmator is not yet in 2.0 version, which will bring it even closer to Photoshop, but it’s gonna happen soon, and an improved type tool plus many other additions (vectors!) will make many people to seriously consider it. At 40$ it’s a steal. Same with vector designer – sure it’s simpler, but only a small percent of users (those alleged power-users) are actually taking advantage of all that illustrator has to offer. Most of us just want to design a logo quickly and efficiently. Another 40$ and it’s yours.

Flash is nearly gone from the web altogether (even Adobe now has it’s own HTML5 authoring tool), and Hype can do a lot of the things flash did, only with better battery/processor performance on mobile devices (that includes laptops). All of those Apps combined cost less than 150$. And sure they’re underpowered sometimes, and not as feature packed as their Adobe counterparts. But almost 80% of designers use the same tools all the time, the same filters and the same elements. Pixelmator is really close to being able to successfuly replace Photoshop, and both Vector Designer and Hype are constantly being improved as well. We may see a big split in the design community in a year or two, with Adobe loosing a lot of market share towards cheaper options.

I’ve been using those three apps alongside CS5, and I’m sure that I won’t buy the CS 6 update anytime soon. Monopoly is never a good thing, and it led Adobe to the high prices they have today.

Is it the end of Adobe Flash? Here comes “Hype!”

Posted on May 22, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Steve Jobs never really loved Adobe Flash. The omission of the technology from Apple’s mobile iOS platform was one of the examples of that. Flash was slow and hard on battery, so Apple decided to start pushing HTML5 technology, that could achieve the same goals, but without the CPU and battery strain. And they somehow succeeded because flash is less and less popular every day. Designers either don’t do animations at all anymore, preferring simpler, more usable sites,or make them in jQuery and HTML5.

The only problem so far has been the fact, that to make anything “moving” with those tools you needed to be a programmer, while Flash had a nice little 700$ application, that any designer can use to create. Well now that has all changed – A small company called Tumultco has released Hype – HTML5 authoring tool, that’s easy to use and you don’t need to put in ANY lines of code for the animations to work.

You can buy it (mac version) in the Mac App Store for the introductory price of just 29$!! That’s 660$ cheaper than Flash! Get it while the price tag lasts!

Here are some examples of the technology in use:
Gallery

WordPress index.html vs index.php struggle

Posted on April 20, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Usually when we make wordpress websites we don’t really want people to see the website in the making – so we create an index.html splash page with “under construction” or something of that sort and then we go back to tweaking index.php

Well for a while now (since wordpress 2.7) that’s not really possible because if you access www.mydomain.com it’ll in fact show the splash page, but when you go to www.mydomain.com/index.php it’ll also redirect itself to that splash index.html file.
All the other wordpress pages and permalinks work, but without the main page it’s kinda hard to edit now isn’t it?

I was searching for an answer for a LONG time and it turns out there is one.
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/9203 – here it is. If it’s all black magic to you or you’re just lazy (who isn’t?) I’ll simply tell you what to do :

Go to wp-includes folder on your server, find the canonical.php file and then find a line that goes something like that:

$redirect['path'] = preg_replace('|/index.php/*?$|', '/', $redirect['path']);

and replace it with

$redirect['path'] = preg_replace('|/index.php/$|', '/', $redirect['path']);

It’s just removing two characters but the result is a working splash page and a working index.php

Ain’t it just great?

Print design – bleeds, safe areas, margins, a0 / a1 / a2 / a3 / a4 / a5

Posted on February 26, 2011 by IdeaMonster

Sure it sounds kinda easy, but when we design for print it’s important to keep some basic rules in mind. If you never did any print designs read on to find out what to do, to avoid instant failure. The most important thing is – modern printers are pretty precise, but still not as precise as your screen. That means that if you make an A4 sized paper and print it on a bigger one, the cutting and printing process together can result in your design being actually less than a4. And most clients don’t really want that.

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Typography Inspirations #6

Posted on February 1, 2011 by IdeaMonster

All of the images were found on flickr. Click on an image to go to it’s flickr page and if you like it let it’s author know!

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Photoshop quick tip – how to fake HDR

Posted on December 6, 2010 by IdeaMonster

To achieve a HDR-kinda look you can either play with RAW images, various software, filters or do a similar effect MUCH much easier. See how.

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Make your own font.

Posted on November 4, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Well not exactly “make” but it’s more of an exercise to better understand the relations between letters and it also helps a bit in future logo creation. I made this one by taking the letter “o” from Arial Black and then cutting into it, modifying the edges and such, to create a whole typeface. This is not a finished piece as some of the letters need a little tweaking, but it’s surely getting there. Go on, try and make a font yourself!

The web is moving away from Flash

Posted on October 27, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Many people were skeptical at first about the Flash VS html5 war, but it seems like HTML5 has already won, as after 6 months from apple’s decision to ban flash, HTML5 has now over half of the online video. Which leads to a simple conclusion, that in a year we won’t be seeing flash all that often. Maybe it’s start to learn some new tools?

Photoshop quick tip #2 – clone stamp tool

Posted on October 22, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Sure we now have a content aware fill in photoshop and it works well for removing small elements from a surface, like wrinkles on the skin and such. But it’s still good to use the Clone Stamp tool (S key) to retouch some things by hand. We all know that, but some people recently asked me – why is this a good way if you can’t really undo it after you save the psd ? Well that’s not entirely true and this info is mostly for those people. It’s such a big piece of software that sometimes there are options that are easily overlooked. If you’re retouching a photograph you can create a layer on top of it, and in the Clone Stamp tool’s options change the sampling mode to current layer and below, so the changes will appear only on the new layer. That makes it easier to revert to the original if you ever choose so.

Photoshop and Illustrator on a budget

Posted on September 21, 2010 by IdeaMonster

If you own a mac you’ve probably already spent a lot of cash on it. So digging deep in your pockets you might not find another hundreds of dollars for photoshop and illustrator right off the bat. But fear not as there are alternatives that are getting closer to the moment in which they can become substitutes. Sure they lack a lot of functions of the big brothers, but for most tasks they do just fine and are both around 60 dollars. So you can get a whole package for a little over a hundred. Which wouldn’t get you even the cardboard box for photoshop CS5.

Limited functionality is being worked on constantly so if something’s missing that you need in these apps it’ll probably come up pretty soon in the next version anyway. Of course if you need Adobe you’ll have to go with adobe. But it’s good to know that there are alternatives, maybe not for all tasks but still alternatives.

For raster graphics you have the beautifully designed Pixelmator and for vectors there’s Vector Designer . Both cheap but pretty capable. Abduzeedo promotes pixelmator and have quite a lot of tutorials for it, but there’s also a “Learn” section on their website that you can check out to see for yourself if the app is good enough for you.

Cool little thing : “Line art” iPad app

Posted on September 21, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Well it also works on iPhones and iPods, but on the iPad it truly shows it’s potential. Now imagine that as a VJ app with a couple more elements and mixing techniques and you get yourself something truly remarkable. It’s also pretty cool for making backgrounds / website elements that are a little bit random. And it’s 100% free! Screens below:

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