web

App Review: Gradient by Jumpzero

AoiroStudio — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:59:44 +0000

Today I wanna share a review about an app I tried a couple days ago and I truly enjoyed it. It's the Gradient App from Jumpzero, the app is the opportunity to create gradients for web browsers. It's a really good app for the web designers and also for designers that wants a useful colour app at hand.

The Look

As I first noticed, the look is really simple, one window with straight-forward options. We can clearly see that the purpose is to create the gradients.

The Options

The Gradient App is coming with three different main functions to make gradients. You have selecting the colours which is pretty common. You have also by setting the gradient appears or by creating it in CSS. The use of the Custom Color Picker is very recommended also.

More Options

You can also select the type of gradients, either is direction and centre position. Choosing “linear” type, you will choose one of four directions; down, right, diagonally down and diagonally up. If you select a radial gradient then you have a few more choices as to where you want the gradient to centre. I think it's a good option to make some variations.

Get the Code

The CSS button will give you a Live Preview of the code you chose. If you're happy happy with it, you can just copy to clipboard and paste it into your design, or go back and make some modifications.

Final Words

I truly enjoyed the simplicity and efficiency of the Gradient App. For the price of 4.99 (US - Canada), you get a simple useful app packed with great features. Get it now on iTunes.

For more information about the Gradient App and Jumpzero, you can check out the gradient website at GradientApp.com or simply follow them on Twitter @jumpzero .

About the author

My name's François Hoang and my alias's Aoiro Studio. I am a self-taught freelance graphic designer from Montreal, Canada. I've been designing for the last 4 years and really have a huge passion for creative work that makes a difference in our world. If you wanna requests some posts; I can be found on Twitter or feel free to contact me.

Sponsored Links:

Corporate Identity Work by David Arias

amanda — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 17:57:38 +0000

David Arias is an independent graphic designer based in Vancouver, BC, Canada. David dabbles in a variety of different things including print, web, packaging design, information graphics, signage, marketing communications, but it was mostly his corporate identity work in particular that caught my attention on Behance.

Swing on over to his portfolio for more and let me know what you think via twitter.

About the author

Amanda Macedo is a designer and blogger by passion and profession. Living and working out of her backpack, she can now be found in San Francisco, CA, biking, writing, dancing, and tweeting .

Sponsored Links:

9 Awesome Web Comic Series

Francisco — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 21:02:27 +0000

The internet is a wonderful and beautiful thing. It used to be that if you had the talent to draw your own comics you were still limited by the avenues of distribution like newspapers and magazines. Now all you need is a computer and a small chunk of change (some web design skills wouldn't hurt.). Here are 9 of my favorite web comics that I think you will also like.

Diesel Sweeties

You 8-bit graphic lovers out there will like this one because it's illustrated in an 8-bit style, but the videogame nostalgia ends there. It takes place in a world were robots exist and even have relationships with humans. It's very witty and fun to read.

Cyanide & Happiness

This is one of my favorite web comic series. It's very simply drawn and so dark in its humor. They also produce animated versions of their comics which are incredible as well

Freak Angels

A very popular web comic written by Warren Ellis, an experienced writer who has worked with Marvel, DC, Image, and others, and an amazing illustrator named Paul Duffield. It's a more classic comic-book style.

The Brads

Brad Colbow is web designer and illustrator. He also releases a web comic series titled "The Brads" which is about two web designers making fun of the issues that some designers face with their clients and technology. If you're a designer you will certainly enjoy this comic. You might have seen his work in Smashing Magazine or Vector Tuts.

Octopus Pie

Octopus Pie is an ongoing comic series about two women living in Brooklyn, NY - their jobs, social circles, and some problems.

Ctrl+Alt+Del

A sci-fi/geek/videogame culture comic in the same vein as Penny Arcade. One awesome thing that they do is a choose-your-own-adventure style mini-series where they ask readers to email which decision should the character make.

Antics Comics

This one is similar to Cyanide & Happiness. Dark humor and simple drawing style.

Creased Comics

It's really a bunch of comics and video-comics in one. They are weird, dark, and funny.

Penny Arcade

And last but not least, Penny Arcade, the godfathers of web comics. A geek-culture comic strip about videos games, role playing games, movies, and even fatherhood. They've expanded into a little geek empire with an online TV series, an animation series, and 3-day gaming festivals held on both coasts of the U.S. WIRED magazine even did a nice profile on them in 2009, read it here.

About the author

Hi readers!
I'm a Graphic Designer in New York City (Brooklyn!). NY is a hub for design and my posts will try to focus on, but will not be limited to, design related things happening in NY, such as museum exhibits, architecture, events, local artist interviews, galleries, etc. I'm very much into technology and art and how they intersect to make multimedia art installations. Hope you enjoy my posts!
Check out my blog Distracticon.com
My site: www.franciscog.com
Follow me on Twitter

Sponsored Links:

The Future of Web Design - New York City 2009

paul0v2 — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:41:19 +0000

Next week the famous Carsonified Event "Future of Web Design" takes place in New York City and here you will see what to expect from this great event. The best web designers in the world will take place to talk about different topics that will bring up your web game to the next level. Check it out!

First you need to visit the event page http://events.carsonified.com/ to get a good felling of what's going on.

This year FOWD will take place in NYC on November 16th and 17th.

To Find out about Event Location and Schedule visit http://events.carsonified.com/fowd/2009/nyc

On November 16th you can choose from 8 different workshops to attend, here is what's on the list.

Open Web Standards for the Rich Web - Molly Holzschalag

Real World Accessibility for Web Designers - Derek Featherstone

WordPress Theme Development for Web Designers - Elliot Jay Stocks

How to Design Effective Web Content - Kristina Halvorson

How to build a HTML5/CSS3 Website Today - Steve Smith

Design Secrets of digg.com's User Interface - Daniel Burka

How to use JQuery to Enhance your Web Design - Karl Swedberg

Best Practices in Web Typography - Dan Rubin

On November 17th, the Conference will take place and this is what will go on:

Progressive Enrichment with CSS3 - Dan Cederhom

Feedback informing design: Listening, really listening, to your users - Daniel Burka

3 Dimensional thinking for web designers - Mike Kus

Accessibility in a Web 2.0 World - Derek Featherstone

Stop Worrying & Get On With It: Tips and Tricks for designing for the Modern Web - Elliot Jay Stocks

Partner Presentation - Bill Buxton

New York Shorts: Vimeo - Blake Whiteman

Familiar Futures: Making Mars Feel Like Home - Kyle Sollenberger

The Long and Short of It: Panel Discussion - Liz Danzico, Jason Santa Maria, Paul Ford, and Kristina Halvorson.

HTML5 Killed XHTML2: And the Mysterious Future of Markup - Molly Hozschlag

FOWD Keynote: "Space: What does it mean?" Joshua Davis

Meet the Speakers

We’ve got some awesome speakers lined up for you this year at FOWD. Here's who we've got lined up so far. Don't forget to check back for updates to the speaker list. Click here to check the list.

For all the abduzeedo users, I will be attending the event and would like to meet up with all our users that are going, leave a comment and will set it up.

Last year FOWD was in New York as well and here you can watch all the content:

Dan Mall

The Experience Layer: Using Flash, JavaScript, and other technologies to engage users.

Derek Powazek

The future of community and crowd-sourced design

Hillman Curtis

Then minutes of Design Inspiration

Mike Kus

Whatever happened to the Art in Design?

Nicholas Felton

Charting Daily Data

Nick La

Finding Inspiration from your Environment

Patrick Haney

Web Design Fundamentals: Learning from the past to the better future

Paul Boag

Educating clients to say yes

About the author

Hi there! I'm Paulo Canabarro, 26 year old web designer - paulocanabarro.com I'm from Brazil currently living and working out of Providence RI, USA. I'm truly passionate about design of all kinds, finding and sharing inspiration here has become part of my life. If you like to know more about me or get in touch visit my website paulocanabarro.com Stock me at Twitter and Dribbble

Sponsored Links:

10 Impressive Portfolio/Blog Websites

paul0v2 — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:36:49 +0000

Everyone tries to be different when creating their own website where their portfolio will be displayed, and lately it seem that more and more people have been choosing to have a little blog together with their portfolio. The trend of blogging got to designers and artists and here are some great samples of it.

Having a blog on your portfolio website can help in many ways, you can use it just as a 'news' so every time you want to let your visitors know about something you have that little blog there to tell them, you can use it as just a simple blog to share your thoughts with your visitor, or even go further and boost up the blog content to attract people that will fortunately end up looking at your portfolio.

No matter what reason fits you, it's always a good option to have it. Here are some good samples with really good use of it. Enjoy!

About the author

Sponsored Links:

Web Inspiration: Video Backgrounds

Francisco — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:56:51 +0000

Hello, it's been a long long time since I've posted something but I'm happy to be back and I hope to post more often. I've had this idea for a post for a while, it's something I've seen only a handful of times but I really like it. It's about websites that use full page videos as their backgrounds. Similar to the idea of using full page photos that we talked about here on abduzeedo last summer.

I totally dig this design style. Can't say it's a trend yet because I haven't seen too many. Here are some examples of sites that do this. The first used to automatically start when you loaded the page but then he changed so you have to click on the image to start it. If you know of anymore sites like this, please post the links in the comments.

Electrick Suicide

This one (IDEAL) is my favorite out of all them. The look of it is awesome, you can control the video just by the move of your mouse or you could just let it play on it's own.
IDEAL

I'm sure many of you already know of this site since they are a pretty big international agency.
Razorfish

And if you are interested in doing this for yourself, I've found this website that you can buy a pre-made flash file. I'm in no way affiliated with this site, it just turned up in my search. I like how you can choose how many scan lines your video could have. Lets you give your site that old found video feeling.

Flash Den

About the author

Sponsored Links:

CSS Quick Tricks #1 - Where to put your CSS

Daan — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 22:24:29 +0000

Apart from the awesome design you get fed with here, it is time to start a new series! CSS Quick Tricks!
To be honest, I didn't really know where to start, so I thought I'd start at something simple, and then, as we move on, we get in to more advanced topics on CSS.
For this quick trick, I'm going to teach you where you can place your CSS, the most efficient way.

Where to place your CSS

In CSS, there are different ways to put it in function; Inline, Internal (or "Embedded") and External.
You've probably used them all, at least one time.

What's the difference?

How can this question better be answered than with some pieces of code?

With an external stylesheet, you create a link to a stylesheet. This is by far the most efficient way when you have multiple pages, running on 1 CSS file.
To do this, in the head section of your html document, place this line of code:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" link="directory/file.css" />

As you can see, we've literally created a link to a stylesheet, that is not located in the HTML, or in other words; Is external.

With an internal stylesheet, you place the whole stylesheet inside the HTML. This is again done inside the head tag, but in a different way.
The reason you might want to put styles inside your HTML, may be, because one page in particular may need some seperate styling, which can cause problems on other pages, or if you just don't want to increase the file size of your CSS document.
The right way to place a style(sheet) internally is:

<style rel="stylesheet">
* { margin: 0px; padding: 0px; }
</style>

Left over is the inline way, the reason you use this may be, that just a certain element needs f.e. a red color. However, take my advice; When styling a page, do NOT use this to style your whole page, but just for the little pieces that you couldn't be bothered about in your stylesheet.
The way you use this way of CSS styling (some may not even call it CSS) is as follows:

<div style="background-color: #fff;">

NOTE: This is just an example. Every CSS selector in here, and you can use it with every HTML element.

But what way, is the best way?

Well, there's no real answer to this question, because it depends on the way you are going to use it. But when you want to use CSS most efficiently, I suggest using the followng guidelines:

If you are going to style multiple pages with one stylesheet, use the external way, and you may even want to use this way on a single page.
This may prevent having issues, when the website needs a style update, or some little tweaking.

If you just need to style a few elements that were left out on the original stylesheet, for whatever reason, use the embedded way. Like this, you won't increase the total file size of other pages not needing the additional styling, and thus decrease loading time for other pages.

If you just need to style a single paragraph tag (or something similar), that neither external nor embedded stylesheets are worth mentioning, use the inline way.
And again, take my advice, do NOT use this to style whole pages, it will give a lot of unnecessary code, and when updating/tweaking a page, you will be busy for ages.

Conclusion

I hope you liked this first one in the new series, so I can do many more!
Also, suggestions or questions are always welcome, so I have some inspiration to write about.
Thanks!

About the author

Hey There! I´m Daan Weijers, I come from Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
I enjoy design and drawing very much, also, I play guitar, play soccer and hang out with friends.
Please don't be mad if you miss my posts, but it's mainly due to a personal project, called iPaperr

Sponsored Links:

Interview with Stephane Munnier aka Goanna

paul0v2 — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:21:08 +0000

Check out this interview with the Flash Masters Stephane Munnier aka Goanna, the French designer who lives in Brazil and does work for all parts of the globe. Plus, he gives us all access to his recent project vouDo! Design.

Who is Goanna?

Stephane Munnier aka Goana, 35 year old born in France, now lives in Rio de Janeiro Brazil Flash Designer/ Web Art Director. Work as a freelancer since 2004.
www.goanna-webdesign.com

Goana is a Flash masters making his designs very unique and definitely very interesting as you can see:

For more visit www.goanna-webdesign.com

Tell us about your project "vouDo! Design".

The project besides anything is a experimentation, I can be defined as a virtual studio, A collective of 5 designers, all freelancers.

And the formation goes like this:
Stéphane Munnier - Founder and Flash Designer (Rio de Janeiro)
Sébastien Larreur - Motion Designer (New York)
Jean Christophe Quillez - Sound Designer (Paris)
Sylvain Briand -Action script 3 Programmer and 3D Flash (Lyon)
Florent Jean -Action Script 3 Programmer (Lyon)

The Idea was to be united so we could present ourselves to our clients with more competence, and complement any needs in different areas, like mobile and other types of multimedia productions, but the biggest challenge was to have everybody working together being so far away from each other.

For more visit www.voudodesign.com

How long you guys been together now and is the distance still a challenge for the team?

The team was created in April 2008, when I started looking for someone to work with me in some projects and I ended up hiring Sebastien, our motion designer, after he presented to me a video about stop motion on the web that got him a place on the team ...

After that we Sylvain got on the team, me and him worked before back in 2007 on a web project www.restez-motard-a-moto.com where I did the animation and he did the programming.

Then we started getting proposals of a lot of different designers that would like to be part of the team, Florent got in when he helped me to make the vouDo! Design website, after that It became more official. And Jean-Christophe came in to complete the team.

Now days we don't have a lot of problems communicating anymore, we use skype and emails, sometimes I even forget that telephones exist. The only problem is the time difference between some of us but we try to get around that.

And with the clients is the same process. Sometimes the clients feel a need of meeting with someone and when that happens I have to explain the way we work and showing our references they end up understanding and trusting us to go futher with the project our ways.

Now show us some work that you guys done together.

So far we haven't done a lot of projects together but we use the team to gather up our portfolios and get more jobs for ourselves, here are the latest web work we've done, if you check on the website there is a some motion design, sound design, animation and more, we cover all design areas you can imagine.

I hope everyone like my stuff, check out my websites for more work and more inspirations, if anything needed you know where to find me, Thank you.

About the author

Sponsored Links:

WebTech#4 - Installing Wordpress

cartab — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 22:20:02 +0000

In my last article we discussed installing a web server (Apache), PHP, MySQL and securing your server for live environment. This time around, I would like to go even further and talk about setting up a Wordpress Blog. Wordpress is probably the most popular blogging tool on the web, but the setup steps given on the Wordpress site can be a little unclear for a novice user. So let's jump right in and start setting up the blog.

Before doing anything, we have to set up the database Wordpress will use to store content. Since MySQL is already installed we can connect to the monitor and use is to create the database. The alternative would be to use a database administration tool such as phpMyAdmin. Start by connecting to MySQL as root using the password you specified during MySQL installation

# mysql -u root -p

You will get a new prompt that will let you perform MySQL operations. Go ahead and create a new database and a new user that will have privileges to access and modify it

mysql> CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'wpadmin'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'somepassword‚Äô WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> exit;

After your database is created and configured, download and extract the latest version from the Wordpress site

# wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
# tar -xvf latest.tar.gz

Move into the Wordpress directory and rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.

# cd wordpress
# mv wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php

Edit wp-config.php and change the login information to match your database

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'wpadmin');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'somepassword');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

Now move your wordpress directory to your web root

# mv * /var/www/

You can now access your blog from your server's IP or domain name, if you registered one. You will be prompted with a short configuration wizard that will let you name your blog and set your email address, as well as give you a temporary password. After the wizard is completed you can log in and create content. Also, don't forget to change your password. You're all set, now go out there and start blogging!

About the author

Carlos Taborda, is Founder and CEO of Webbynode a Hosting Provider for Developers, and StackFu a Social Hub for Server Stacks.

You can follow me on Twitter @cartab.

Sponsored Links:

Web Picks #3: GRASS

aloa — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:33:47 +0000

Web Picks is a new series here on Abduzeedo. The idea of the articles is to choose a subject, and present photography, artwork, designs, illustrations and tutorials we find on the topic; and put them together. When designing we tend to forget to look at mediums other than the one we are currently working in. We hope this series will illustrate the many dimensions a single subject can have, and provide cross-format insight for each subject

Im sorry, I figured out that It takes more time than i thought, to finish the web picks. That's why I doing these articles now together with Paul0v2, so we can be faster with the coming topic. This time I picked "grass" and i found some really amazing stuff. And for the first time I started posting brushes. Enjoy these.

PHOTOGRAPHY

DESIGNS

BRUSHES

6 HIGH DEFINITION GRASS BRUSHES

EIGHT GRASS BRUSHES

FOUR GRASS BRUSHES

GRASS BRUSHES

TUTORIALS

CREATE REALISTIC GRASS BRUSH

ADD GRASS TO A 3D SCENE

CREATE A SPECTACULAR GRASS TEXT EFFECT

PAINTING GRASS

CREATE AN AWESOME GRASS TEXTURE IN PHOTOSHOP

NATURAL GRASS - DAY OR NIGHT

SPLASHY LEAF WALLPAPER

CREATE A FANTSY PHOTO MANIPULATION

Web Picks is going to continue and we need your help. If you want to add designs, illustrations, photography or any kind of art send me an email: aloa[at]abduzeedo.com

Next topic: WOOD

About the author

Aloa is the moniker of the german/greek graphic designer/filmmaker & musician Alexis Papageorgiou. Im glad to share great artistic work with the readers on Abduzeedo. Contact me on aloa@abduzeedo.com or follow my Twitter and Facebook page

Sponsored Links:

Web Design Inspiration: Bacardi Mojito

aloa — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:05:09 +0000

When I looked for artists for the Web Pick's Water article I found this awesome water website but forgot to post it. It's the polish website for Bacardi Mojito.

The website was created by Bartek Rozbicki and Peter Jaworowski

Click here for the website.

About the author

Sponsored Links:

Wood in Web Design

PauloGabriel — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:23:46 +0000

Another day I was talking to a friend of my, and he told me that he would love to see more posts about web design here at Abduzeedo. When he told me that, I totally understood that we're kind of posting just about photography and illustration... and only Fabiano is doing something about web with his tutorials and links in the Best of the Week series. So today, web design it is! :D

When making a new site design, most of us try to figure out what kind of theme to go with... and there are plenty: space (lol), water, wood, colorish, glowing and shinning stuff, etc, etc. The list is just endless. One of my favorite design elements is wood! It's really great how you can manage to make a sweet design with wood background, static or not (I do prefer static). Anyways, here are some hand picked websites that got plenty of wood for your design needs.

About the author

Hello, everyone! I'm Paulo Gabriel, designer from Porto Alegre, Brazil, born in 1984. I have worked as a webdesigner since 2006, but websites and blogs have been a hobby for me since 1999. Here in Abduzeedo, I try to bring only the hot stuff for you... and hope that all of you enjoy my posts! For more cool stuff, you may also follow me on Twitter.

Sponsored Links:

Cool Web Image Editor: Sumopaint

PauloGabriel — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:00:21 +0000

We've seen some cool web apps come out this year, like Aviary, and now I've came to know a new one: Sumopaint. It's simpler than Aviary, but you can still make some cool stuff there.

Most of the images in their gallery remind me a lot of the expressionism school, which Van Gogh was part of. I recommend to you all to visit there and play around with it. As our friend Mikko suggested, try out the symmetry tool with the gravity on. I must say, the results are really cool. Cheers!

About the author

Sponsored Links:

Inspiration: Diego Zambrano

PauloGabriel — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:19:47 +0000

Diego Zambrano is a Brazilian designer who's been doing some great work. He's worked with big Brazilian companies, such as Skol, Claro, Sadia and Fiat.

It's just great to see some awesome designs such as these... and I wonder how many people have visited the sites he developed. Probably millions. That's freakin' awesome. Visit him at Work for Food.