Tag Archives: Adobe Creative Suite

Backyard Booty Segment: Natural Progressions

Under - Inspiration, Media, Nature, Photography

Natural Progressions by Ryan Flett

This impressive video by Ryan Flett basically demonstrates what one can do with a DSLR – provided a creative flare is in place. From video footage to 3D photos and timelapses, everything is shot with Canon 7D and then processed with Photoshop and After Effects.

My segment for KMC’s Backyard Booty in Nelson BC. The segment is about the transition everyone in Kootenays make from Fall into Winter. From the moment the season ends we are waiting for it to return.

Adobe Creative Suite, Canon EOS 7D, Digital photography, Inspiration, Kootenays, Media, Nature, Nelson British Columbia, Photography, Ryan Flett, Time-lapse, timelapse

12 September Share your
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Odosketch by Odopod

Under - Art, Design, Illustration, Resources, Technology

Love sketching? There’s an app for you … online and for free!

Odosketch is a Flash drawing application that is developed by Odopod and was first launched in August of 2006 for an Adobe Design Gallery feature on Odopod. The tool is available online and open for anyone to use.

Odosketch - Gardening Time by moogleymog

19 April 3
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Here comes (Digital) Circlism!

Under - Art, Illustration

Bob Marley - Digital Circlism by Ben Hein

A modern artistic expression or a mix of Pop Art and Pointillism? Ben Hein developing this technique in Photoshop by understanding the dynamic movement of facial contours.

27 January 9
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20 this and 10 that … 5 best of this and top 100 of that!

Under - Design, Miscellaneous, My Musings, Resources

Sorry, didn’t have anything to write today so I thought of a cliché post title. I don’t know who exactly started this trend but I started noticing it on MSN few years back on their homepage and Yahoo followed soon after. This kind of articles appeared after logging out from email accounts such as Hotmail and Yahoo when you are automatically redirected to MSN or Yahoo homepages with some attention-grabbing top stories.

Those everyday articles used to be interesting, catchy and somewhat spicy. I bet they helped cutting down bounce rate and increased visitor retention on those sites but, the practice of such an approach within online creative community has now gone beyond acceptable. Smashing Magazine could be called trend setter within the creative industry and sort of sole responsible for the influx of such a nonsense that we have to deal with on everyday bases.

Just look at the article/post titles below that I accumulated from just one design resource:

130+ Awesome Photoshop Tutorials
7 Online Form Creation Solutions
14 Great Posts on jQuery Plugins
75+ Top jQuery Plugins to improve Your HTML Forms
22 Stunning Free Download E-Commerce Icon Sets
10 Amazing Avatar movie Photoshop Tutorials
23 sites where to download free icons
Top 31 Most Creative and Interesting Movie Websites Designs
20 Amazing Creature Illustrations by Imaginism
35 Amazing Fantasy Art 3D Wallpapers
10 Tips to Create a Motivating Working Environment at Home
10 Beautiful Video Blogging WordPress Themes
50+ Amazing Creatiive & Original Logos
30 Cutting Edge Examples Of CSS Navigation
60 Extremely Creative Movie Posters
50+ Essential Techniques and Tools for Visualizing your Data
40 Mind Blowing Surreal Photo Manipulations
111 Best Online Web Design Tools
27 hilarious stuff you wish, were Photoshopped
27 Outstanding Car HDR Photos
40 best photoshop tutorials for web layouts

Is there any number or combination of mind boggling words left? There were indeed hundreds of such posts/articles on that particular resource but I only picked a few to give an example here. The good thing about Smashing Magazine articles was that they were original, but the SEO orientated minds soon picked up the hidden benefit in such content and the rest is history now.

The type of material seen these days on lots of design/creative resources is meaningless. Although some of such posts provide valuable information (a tiny fraction may be) but most of the time their content is nowhere near to whatever claimed in their titles. Such posts are mostly used as fillers. It is also disrespectful and derogatory to senior designers, artists and creative people when their work is labelled and reviewed under 150 websites with beautiful background or something.

Having such content is supposedly one of the easiest ways to grab user attention and to generate content without much effort – and perhaps earning big plus from SEO point of view. I can generate at least five new articles, or may be more, out of the list above just by shuffling their content but is this what we really want to give to our audience or is this what people really want to see all the time?

16 August Share your
thoughts

Grids, grids and more grids

Under - Design, My Musings, Resources

A while ago I mentioned Grid Designer for web page layouts that I used as Photoshop overlay. I just discovered two more apps that can do the same with some advance features.

Gridmaker

Developed by Paul Holliday, Gridmaker is a free plugin to create grid layers within Photoshop CS4. Gridmaker offers almost the same functionalities as Grid Designer apart from grid export to CSS. With real-time grid formation (online only) and export to a PNG, this utility is quite handy for web layouts.

Gridmaker by Paul Holliday

In my tests the online version appears to be more flexible as Photoshop plugin simply adds a new layer every time you update grid and render it. The best way to work with this tool is to layout grid online and exports it as PNG to use in Photoshop.

Boks

This visual grid editor based on blueprint CSS appears to be the most advance grid solution yet. Built by Quentin T with Adobe Air, the application has a very simple interface to layout grid with PNG and CSS export. You can in fact create a basic HTML structure in Boks and it generates the script for you.

It handles grid configuration, baseline rhythm pimpin’, CSS (with or without compression) and grid.png export, HTML layout and much more goodie-goodie!