I've Released A New Site

Hey

This is just a quick post to say that I have released a new site. Its call Mac Tricks And Tips, and if you havn't already guessed is all about Mac Tricks And Tips.



I have spent a lot of time developing and messing about with the design and layout of the blog. It took me a long time getting the composition of the design right. The result have come out great. I've decided to do a Mac on since I love Mac's and use them all the time. I wanted to post and share all the tips and tricks I have found and developed over time and share them with people.

In the mean time expect a cool tutorial on designing a magazine cover. I was planning on doing it today, but it took a lot longer than planned. As a result I am going to have to push it back.

Amazing Blogger Design

Hey

I like blogger, it is simple, easy to use and very easy to implement designs. Anyway, I was really impressed by this blogger design. Its simple clean and has a couple of cool little features which make it stand out. Anyway if you head over to jackbook, you can check out the details about the "iWork" theme. I like it and I thought I would share.

Cool Place To Get Labels

Hey There

While searching the web as usually during a small period of free time I have, I came across a really neat website. Since this website is all about design I thought I would share something that could hopefully help your design skills and products. The website I am talking about is Frontier Label. This website has two great things that made me write a post about it. One the cool product, which are labels and two the website.

If you don't know the process you create your own artwork, upload it and then send it off to be turned into a label. I must say the prices are expensive, around $250. But these are about 2x3 inches minimum sizes. So you do get what you pay for, for your $250 you do get around 250-300 labels, so the price does work out. But you don't have to stick with your basic 2x3 inches. You can make a label that can be any size, this will of course be really cool to stick on places. You could make a funky design to advertise your services or just make people laugh. You could make the next viral image on the internet with your label on it. Better yet you could get your own bumper sticker for $658 for 1000 and do something like I Park Like An Idiot.com. The possibilities of labels are endless.

Another cool part of this site is the layout design. I usually like two things when I want to buy from a site. The products (duh!) and the site. I don't know why but this site just feels cool and well made. It has a lot of cool things such as online quoting which you can mess about with an really see how cheap (or how expensive) you can make it and I really like the colour scheme, it just seems to work well.

Anyway I just thought I would share it with you. These do seem like quality printers, which use quality stock. I don't think they will let you down. You could go for a cheaper place, but then you may not get the best quality and a quick next day delivery if you chose to opt for it.

Cool Website Feature - Lightbox - And Implemented

Hey

I always like cool little features that are present on websites. It makes them uniques or very cool when they are implemented correctly. One of theses such things is a bit of CSS and javascript that is used to create a "lightbox". You may have seen it on your internet travels. lightbox is a bit of code that opens an image on the page in its own little div elements. As well as this the background is blacked out to a certain level. I think it is really cool, so I decided to share it with you. An example of the lightbox is shown in the image below.


If you want to try it out you can go to the lightbox webpage and download the all the code. There is an earlier version that can be used but it doesn't look as cool. I have also added the code on this website and if you click on the image below you should be able to see the test in all its glory. It takes a couple of seconds for the image to load. If you do get impatient just click the loading icon and it should close the image overlay.


I am not going to be able to make every image lightbox compatible as I would have to go through every single page and image and change some of the code. But I will do it on most of the images I post from now on.

Just as a final note I would like to say kudos to GeckoandFly and some page.

Elite By Design - A Website To Check Out

Hey There

While search the internet I came across this cool website Elite By Design. It is a simple website, updated regularly, which gives you loads of different tips and tricks, on nearly everything. I like visiting it, I have found some really cool tricks from viewing the articles he has written. It is a really clean website and I think it is great. He also wrote about me, so its good to return the favor.

HavenWorks - The Worlds Best Designed Website

Hey

I've meant to do this post for a long while, it was only recently by looking through my post-it notes have I remembered to do it ( I should have used a task manager). This little website gem is probably one of the worst design websites on the internet. I was being sarcastic by the title if you haven't realized. HavenWorks, I think, by the massive amount of information on one page, is about something to do with politics especially stuff about elections.

To make this post longer and to point out the fact that there is many areas that could be improved, I will do a short list of the problems with HavenWorks.

1) It seems to be one page. There might be more, there is slightly to many links to find out.
2) They clearly don't have a sidebar. Many web design guru's would be having a fit.
3) Slight over use of web safe colours. People monitors, I think, can cope with the 16 million colours that are available.
4) Overuse of mini-icons.

Anyway, enough bashing of HavenWorks. This post was design to be a little light comic relief. Below is attached an image of the website. I wanted to do the whole page using screen-grab, but for some reason it never wanted to save. The page must have been to large.