5 Simple Tricks To Bring Light and Shadow Into Your Designs 1. Using A Light Source 2. Gradients 3. Highlights (horizontal rules) 4. Basic Shadows 5. Advanced Shadows 16 Great Photoshop Light Effect Tutorials Examples: the splash screens from Linux Ubuntu 9.x and 10.x. These type of abstract screens can be made to be very…
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34: Julia Mumford .com Continued Decorating Philosophy
In entry 15, I rebuilt Julia’s site for speed making it 17K with a 50K background image = 67K. The Original (where we left off. Boring!) I decided to apply the “tradeshow booth” formula I described in entry 27. The simple elements are 1) color, 2) foliage, 3) lighting, and 4) legibility. ColorThe color theme…
33: Helping The Client
A significant amount of my time is spent in educating, coaching, or hand-holding the client and gleaning web content from their “on-hand resources.” Building the site is the easy part. My focus is producing forms and shortcuts to help clients quickly assemble material (reduce the learning curve.) Of a 6-week website production period, about 2…
32: HTML Frames Strength– PRESENTATION
Molly Holzschlag’s book titled “250 HTML and Web Design Secrets.” She said: page 265 “Part of the problems with Frames is they go against the premise of markup –there job is presentational.” (Used $0.30 on Amazon. Save your money!) PRESENTATION TOOL While she was explaining why to “never use frames”, she inadvertently also explained one…
31: Quotation from Marty Neumeier about Simplification of Websites
AN INTERVIEW WITH MARTY NEUMEIER by Brian AlveyExcerpted from Meet the Makers, April 20, 2003http://www.meet-the-makers.com Alvey: How does online branding differ from offline branding? Neumeier: Online branding is still in its infancy, so practitioners are still groping for the answer to that question. Of course, the experience we have with a website will contribute to…
30: Web Images: How good is “good enough?”
“Image quality” isn’t even in the top 10 most important functions or features of a website. I see web design and stage set design as having a lot in common. It’s the view from the back-row theater seats that count –not the up-close details. Tools for image processing include: Adobe ImageReady –which comes with most…
29: Modifying Blogger Environmental Sections
I’ve been showing the incremental process of designing “The Virtual Repository” for environmental biophysics .org. Above are two Blogger sections out of four. Each section has a header now to tie back the “feeling” of the Landing page on the main site. I’ve pushed the headers pretty hard for file size reduction. They are 15K…
28: Designing portfolio websites
A portfolio website for photography or fine art works best if it contains the following seven sections: Landing Page Design [branding — theming] Image Gallery About Page [The Interview] The Testimonial The Blog The Process Page [how you work] The Call to Action [ contact page and location of Galleries] Example link.
27: Respository Site continued
The Repository Splash was very fast (10K) –but boring. The sectional page was loading fast enough (23K) that the SPLASH page could be dumped and everything moved up a layer. Also the large full-screen images were modified in Photoshop to give more depth using Render > Lighting and Render > Lens Flare –two simple filters.…
26: More experimental highspeed testing: Speed Strategy
Three layers deep: Speed StrategyScreen resolution 1024 x 768 px minimum size shown. 1. SPLASH page: 10K (0.21 second load time with cached screen.)There are only two string-background tiling GIFs on this page. One in each frame. Everything else is “pure” HTML. 2. Sectional INTRO page: Dynamic resizing image and text placeholder in a nested…
