Recently by Jarrod Medrano
The Magic Number If you have ever had any interest in the art of graphic design, chances are you have heard of the golden ratio. Throughout history, artists, mathematicians and musicians alike have studied this peculiar number. Some say that it is the most aesthetically pleasing of all proportions, while others contend that this has merely been ingrained into our collective consciousness through centuries of overuse. It is said that Leonardo Da Vinci used the golden ratio to construct his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa. It can be found in subjects as diverse as seashells, hurricanes, galaxies, and even the path
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Continue reading The Golden Rule of Graphic Design
When designing a website for a business, it’s easy to overlook the little things. A lot of time is spent on design, layout, and development. Other, less glamorous things like image file size and product images are often overlooked. Attention to the little details in a website can make all the difference in the world when it comes to catching a customer’s eye. In less than five minutes I’ll teach you how to spruce up your product images in Photoshop. Keep in mind you can do this with any jpg. I start with a nice high res photograph of a
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Continue reading Quick Photoshop Tip: Make your product images shine.
Web 2.0 was sighted at a local party last evening. Many who attended expressed that he was ‘Not as cool as we remembered.’ Recently I was poking around a few design blogs and noticed something interesting. It seems like the trends and styles that were so popular only a year ago are starting to fall out of favor. Smashing Magazine and Web Designer Wall have all but declared web 2.0’s glossy style dead. Last year, or maybe two years ago, I got a lot of inspiration from this page, as I’m sure many others did. If you’re wondering what I
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Continue reading Does Web 2.0 still look good? Did it ever?
When I was making some updates to the Portent Blog, I came across a strange problem. Whenever I highlighted the text with my cursor, I would get no visual feedback showing me what I had highlighted. I’ve actually run across this on a couple of other sites, which is why I thought I should share it. My coworker Anna discovered the solution, but since she doesn’t write blog posts I’m going to pretend it was me. Viewing copyblogger.com in Firefox 3 on Windows. If you go to copyblogger.com, using Firefox on the Windows platform, you can see what I’m talking
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Continue reading A Firefox Quirk You May Not Be Aware Of
The internet today is filled with tutorials on how to design your web site 'web 2.0' style. I thought it would be fun to teach you some of the horrible design trends from the past. So I invite you to return to a simpler time, a time when people still listened to TLC's 'No Scrubs' (not me) and terrorism was something that only happened in Steven Seagal movies. Here's how to design your website like it's 1999. Use a lot of Stock Photography This is a website convention that never seems to go out of style. The idea seems to
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Continue reading How to Design Your Site Like It's 1999
Recently I was looking for a way to make some cool rusted metal text in Photoshop, and after searching through a few tutorials on Google I decided that all of them were garbage. So I messed around for a while and created my own.
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Continue reading Create Rusty Metal Text in Photoshop: Tutorial
In order to view the content on this page, you will need the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player. Click here to download it. // Today I’m going to show you how to do something a little more fun than usual. We’re going to be making a simple particle system in Flash CS3. Example Files fun_with_particles.zip Subscribe to my RSS feed on Veoh
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Continue reading Actionscript 3 Particles Tutorial
Watch me do my best Bob Ross impression while teaching you how to create a preloader in Actionscript 3. No happy trees included.Download the example files here. Video after the jump!
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Continue reading Advanced Actionscript 3 Preloader
There are several ways to embed Flash on a web page - some are better than others. Here’s the one we’ve found to work best: First, you’ll need to go to the SWFObject home page to download the javascript. You can also read up on SWFObject here. The example html included inside the zip file should be enough for you to figure it out, but in case you have a short attention-span (like me); I’m going to walk you through it, step by step.
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Continue reading Embedding Flash the Smart Way with SWFObject
