Monthly Archives: February 2009

Do you remember the days of 56k modems and surfing the net with images ‘turned off’ so the page didn’t take a year to load?

This really cool rug by Richard Hutton is inspired by old school browsers which would download a picture one line at a time. I like the rug but i love the idea! Shame it’s a one off..

This little composition was created from a series of pictures I took when I went to see Arsenal take on Newcastle in the Carling Cup 2007. It inspired me to edit it into something a little bit different. I experimented with colour and photoshop filters to create this dynamic effect.

I came across this fantastic portfolio site, Jennifer Maestre.com, where the gallery displays an array of creatures and scupltures made entirely out of coloured pencils!

New York magazine recently had an article about how we are all walking badly and it’s affecting out feet.
The article makes for an interesting read but what caught my eye was the amazing painted feet. Someone has took a great deal of time and effort to create realistic shoes on naked feet. I can only admire the skill it must have taken. They really are a work of art!

This is Nike’s new tv advert! It’s really well shot, fantastic composition, superb colour and it’s a great story line all directed by Guy Richie!

If you write CSS then you will be aware how bulky it can become and, more importantly, difficult to read. Using shorthand CSS you can cut through a lot of the bulk by removing excessive property declarations and with a quick scan you can find a property to change or update.

I recently stumbled across a few 100% fullscreen interactive flash websites. Now, if there was an award for the ‘Best Interactive Flash Websites’ out there, these would have to be contenders!

I just stumbled across this site while googling for a loader bar. I admit i just couldn’t be bothered to make one and planned to steal one..

Thanks to the creator of ajaxload.info i never have to again! Simply choose your style, foreground colour , background colour then download your loader gif.

Loader bar.. Done!

Your browser homepage is more important than you think. The days of the old Google are long gone. You can personalise a homepage to include many optional extras such as email, RSS aggregators, calendars, ebay listings and even weather forecasts. Not only that but there are a multitude of similar solutions available. Live.com, yahoo, netvibes to name a few. I have experimented with netvibes and live.com but every time I find myself back with Google.

Today I stumbled across a cool new online Web 2.0 application. It’s called ‘CSS Frame Generator‘ but I think that title is a little bit confusing to what it actually does..

Since CSS is hierarchical and semantic you can greatly condense your style sheets by cutting out the over use of classes and id’s. For example, if I were to have a list within a div, you only have to give the containing div and id name to style all the contents.

This is where the CSS Frame Generator comes in. Basically you enter your (x)html, with the main elements given id’s, and the application will create a stylesheet full of empty CSS attributes. You can then start filling in the style attributes and finally delete the ones you don’t use!

So, to sum up, it doesn’t help with design but could just save you some time and make your code better!