07 Dec 2008 • [4]
Often when a client sends over photographs they’d like to use for their websites, they were taken with a less-than-professional camera and the colors, in a word, suck. Over or under-exposed, a bad picture can really diminish the beautiful website you’ve designed.
This weekend I helped a friend put a couple snapshots of her Thanksgiving party into a simple online photo gallery to share with her friends & family, but the colors in her pics were just terrible. So I showed her this quick technique I picked up way back in a Black and White Photography class I took in college that you can use to spice up your photos in Photoshop
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06 Oct 2008 • [5]
Context is something that we web and graphic designers deal with on a daily basis. We juggle color, typeface, imagery, C.R.A.P.(Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity) to convey a particular message or tone.
Our clients aren’t watching as we sift through two hundred pages on iStock or play with seemingly indiscernible color variations in kuler to find just the right photo or palette to set the mood of their homepage. We don’t do it to run up the hours, we do it because we care, because we understand how powerful a single image or choice of color can impact people. Yes, I’m going somewhere with this.
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22 Jul 2008 • [26]
It’s no secret that those of us who do professional web design/development despise Internet Explorer 6. With IE 7 out for a while and IE 8 on the horizon, more and more leading companies and web folk are pressing ahead and dropping / degrading support for the ancient browser.
With Firefox share steadily rising and standards-champions Opera and Safari readily available, is it time for us as modern web designers/developers to press the issue and speed up adoption of modern browsers by no longer supporting Internet Explorer 6?
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09 Jan 2008 • [11]
Getting started with Adobe Photoshop can be a pretty daunting task. Encountering all those pallettes, menus, filters and tools for the first time can be intimidating and downright frustrating.
Recently I realized that come August, I’ll have been working with Photoshop for 10 years (the sound you hear is my own horn tooting). In that time, it’s the one piece of software I’ve used consistently and have developed some rather good (and plenty bad) habits that might come in handy for people firing it up for the first time.
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04 Jan 2008 • [10]
A few days ago Greg Storey wrote a little something discussing the lack of available talent in the web design/development industry. To summarize, agencies and freelancers alike are swamped to the point of being “slightly crippled“, and there’s just not enough workers to go around.
Going by the reaction in the comments, and from some of my own friends in the web design world around Cleveland, this does seems to be the case. Overflow work abounds and it seems to be a good time to be an experienced web developer. But what if you’re not?
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