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: Design BlogFREE PDF Download: The Photoshop Anthology
With thanks to 99designs, we’re very pleased to announce that for the next 30 days our book, The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques, is free to download (normally worth $29.95).
That’s right, the entire 278 page book, yours to keep, forever!
The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques is the ultimate Photoshop compendium for web designers.
It’s brimming with tried and tested real-world Photoshop solutions that will add impact to your next web design project. If you’ve ever been stuck for inspiration, have puzzled over just how to create a shiny aqua-style button, or wanted to create that seamlessly tiling background image you saw on a site recently, you need to download this book.
Download it now!
This book is free to download thanks to the generous support of 99designs. If you’re looking for a place to give your new-found Photoshop skills a run, why not earn some extra cash along the way?
The team at 99designs are giving away a shiny new MacBook for the best logo design or web design, so be sure to check them out.
Meet Richard the Designer. Richard Loves Design Contests.
The article that we published today on SitePoint is an interview I conducted with 99designs addict Richard Scott called Design Contests Made Me A Better Designer.
In the interview, Richard talks about why he chooses to enter design contests, how he uses contests to solicit follow-up work, the process he follows when tackling a brief and his thoughts on the NO!SPEC philosophy. Here’s a choice snippet:
I have to confess that quite often the follow-up work is not as exciting. If I’ve been given a brief, and it’s just for me… there’s no thrill of the win, you know? Of course, it’s a safer option, because you know you’re going to get paid. But it’s not really about the money for me. It’s become more about the competition, and the excitement of competing against so many other talented designers.
It was definitely interesting hearing an alternate take on the concept of design contests and how they affect a designer’s livelihood — in Richard’s case, in a positive way.
Read the interview and have your say. There are bound to be plenty of different opinions!
WCAG 2 Requirements at Risk
Since April 30, when the WCAG 2.0 Candidate Recommendation (CR) was released, there has been a ton of posts across the web telling us the WCAG 2 is almost, almost complete.
I’m not here to do that. The news is 5 days old and I have no intention of clogging up your RSS by regurgitating the same content… as important as it is.
What I do want to highlight is that there are a number of WCAG 2 requirements at risk.
It is important to note that some WCAG 2.0 requirements are at risk; that is, they may not be included if there are not sufficient implementations [By 30 June 2008].
- Web Accessibility Initiative Interest Group mail list
Get Involved
I would urge you to take a look at each of the At Risk requirements to see if there are any relevant to your area of expertise that you are able to implement over the next couple of months. Alternatively, there may be someone with complementary skills that requires your assistance in implementing one of the at risk requirements.
The primary purpose of this CR stage is for developers and designers to “test drive” WCAG 2.0 to demonstrate that WCAG 2.0 can be implemented …
The Open Letter Initiative and the Mobile Web
One of the things I find absolutely frustrating about the web community in Sydney is the lack of information at industry nights and other local web events about mobile accessibility and, in particular, anything related to the W3C and Mobile Web Best Practices.
For the most part seminars and industry nights hosted by the Mobile Monday guys or AIMIA focus on marketing, advertising, gaming and identifying ways of further monetising the mobile industry. BORING. I’ve even stopped attending the Mobile Monday events because they appear to have such little interest in promoting any discussion around best practices or mobile accessibility.
Given that these are the two most prominent Australian industry groups hosting discussions on mobile technology at the moment, it seems pretty obvious that there’s little interest in this area for either group. Even the Web Standards Group has had very few mobile related events.
Mobile Means Mobility
Mobile use is at an all time high globally and it offers affordable access to the web for a huge proportion of people including many users with disabilities. It’s time for industry groups to get back on track and deliver informative sessions on how we can produce accessible, usable web content.
The W3C WAI Mobile pages …
You can stick your em-dash up your dot dot dot
So once again I find myself intensely irritated by a growing wave of practice that is touted as correct when its correctness is entirely arbitrary. I’m talking about the finer points of typography.
A recent post by Christopher Phin, called Top Ten Typographic Mistakes Everyone Makes really exemplified that for me (sorry Chris, nothing personal!) with remarks like this:
there’s little chance that using a period instead of an interpunct will obscure or confuse your meaning – but they are nevertheless wrong
And this:
those aren’t proper quote marks; they should be sixty-six and ninety-nine quotes
The use of interpunct is not more correct than period, the use of straight quotes is not wrong, and (my personal bugbear) the use of three dots instead of ellipses is perfectly fine. Exactly as with grammar, the details we’re talking about here are not rules, they are conventions, and no more right or wrong than the collective will that made them conventional.
We see similar examples in grammar, for example over split-infinitives. According to the prescribed rules of grammar it’s wrong to split an English infinitive: to go boldly rather than to boldly go. But language is a living thing and it changes all the time. Really, the finer …
Twitter’s turning me to drink
About a year and a half ago I was totally over Twitter. When I say “over it”, I mean So Over It that I couldn’t even get Into It. Twitter was new, I didn’t know many people using it, and all the twits and tweets seemed so utterly self indulgent… some would say, many still are. To make matters worse, my husband is an EEO (early, early, adopter); if he can beta test something, he will. So when Twitter came along, he was pretty excited.
Like many others, I didn’t really get the relevance of Twitter. To some extent I thought it was a prime display of insecurity via the Look at Me channel. As someone who really struggled with the decision of whether or not I should even enable comments on my blog, Twitter was a real challenge.
I saw it as a one-on-one activity (i.e. person - device) rather than a one-to-many relationship via the device. Face to face conversations were interrupted by regular mobile beeps alerting a DM (not a Deep and Meaningful, but rather a Direct Message), and in one instance I was even woken up at 3am no less, by a message alert on my partners …
Real-world Gloss Effects in Fireworks
The internet — particularly its Web 2.0 version — is a very glossy place. In fact, I think if far-away aliens ever eavesdropped on our wireless internet transmissions, they’d conclude that humans must live in a hard world of polished marble, wet glass and high-gloss plastic.
While the gloss effect is probably getting a little ‘long in the tooth’, the main problem I have with it is the overall boring perfectness of the reflections. On the web, wet floors are always laser-cut mirrors, and glossy buttons always seem to exist in a perfect, evenly-lit vaccuum.
In the dirty, scratched and smudged real world, wet floors have dull spots and distortions in them and glossy surfaces warp, blur and reflect the patchy, organic world they inhabit.
Without wanting to wind the fashion clock back to the ‘distressed 90’s look’, you can give your reflections a bit more character without too much more work.
The Method
1). Let’s start with a rounded rectangle — it’s …
Adobe Photoshop Express Launches
Well, we’ve known is been in the wings for quite a while, but the beta for Photoshop Express — Adobe’s first online application — finally touched down this morning. Although they undoubtedly bring a mammoth graphics reputation to the table, they may not have it all their own way as there are already some well-established and classy competitors in this new arena — specifically speaking Picnik, Pixer, Phixer , Pixenate and Fotoflexer.
First impressions:
1) The sign-up process wanted to know which country I came from — as long as it was the US. Come on guys! Are you FedExing the app to us? DO computers use a different gauge of Interweb in Europe?? Have the terrorists been waiting to use Photoshop Express to make particularly visually attractive evil plans?
Silly stuff. Don’t ask questions that only have one answer.
2) The interface is a basically an online Adobe Bridge, with lots of blacks and charcoals making your imagery appear richer. If you’re a Bridge fan, Express will feel very familiar, although being a consumer-level product, you would have to question how many users could draw on Bridge experience.
Even if you’re not a Bridge fan (like me), you’d probably still have to …
Making ‘IE6-friendly’ PNG8 Images
For all the recent buzz and bubble generated by the IE8 beta, the slightly depressing reality is that IE6 is still going to be occupying more of our thoughts (and nightmares) for the foreseeable future. Even as IE7 has begun to gain marketshare, I can’t say I’m spending any less time writing IE6-specific code than I was, say, two years ago. Sad but true.
Likewise, if we ever thought we’d encountered all demons IE6 had to offer, we were mistaken there too, as George Reilly recounted in an interesting read last week.
Despite the fact that George draws upon seven years of ‘Microsoft insider’ experience, he spent 5 months trying to eliminate persistent, ‘app-killing’ IE6 browser hangs when using the garden-variety PNG32 alpha-transparency hack.
The fact that even he eventually admitted defeat and converted his images to PNG8 could be viewed as a sobering lesson for us all. Can you be 100% sure your PNG32s aren’t locking up at least some of your IE6 users’ browsers?
Of course, these things are often a trade off.
- Do you go for higher quality PNG32 images for most IE6 users, and …
PNG32 hacks and IE6. Is it worth it?
Last year you might remember me running through what I thought were the under-appreciated qualities of an image file format that seems to slip under the radar — the PNG8.
Namely:
- Small files sizes
- Graded alpha-transparency in all current browsers
- No requirement for potentially brittle hacks requiring JavaScript, ActiveX and/or other proprietary technologies.
Although, admittedly, you had to be prepared to slightly lower your expectations of the render in IE6, we considered the trade-off generally worthwhile — particularly as you begin to hone your skill for producing PNG8 images that degrade nicely in IE6. Personally I haven’t ruled out using PNG32 in certain situations, but PNG8 is certainly my weapon of choice.
Bearing this in mind, it was great to read a really interesting post on PNG32 hacks and IE6 by George Reilly on the new Cozi Tech Blog. For a little background, George spent seven years working on IIS at Microsoft, and as such has two things most of us can’t claim:
- an array of hard won Microsoft ninja debugging skills
- a black book of Microsoft contacts to quiz about nonsensical IE6 voodoo
Nevertheless after deploying the time-honored IE6 PNG32 hack in a project, …
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