Learning a language has many gains. Imagine being able to speak to friends in another culture, or easily communicate in the destination of your holidays. But learning a language also takes a lot of effort, or doesn’t it? In this article, I want to share some of the (online) language services which can help you to quickly learn the basics of a language. The gains of learning a new language Besides the obvious gains of being able to speak and read a new language, there are many advantages attributed to the adventure of learning a new language. Language is greatly […]
You might have a lot of products for sale. And you might want to sell them. In other words, you might want to have a certain product you want to photograph. There is only one problem: you are limited in your budget to rent a professional product photographer. However, with some conventional home equipment, you can make some proper product photographs easily at home. Why should I be able to do this? Imagine you are having a certain product which you want to sell on an online marketplace. Now chances are that there are many like you selling the same […]
Did you know you can become creative? In this article I want to propose some very basic design techniques which can help you to be creative during problem solving. Creativity is said to be composed of one’s expertise, motivation and creative thinking skills (as defined by Amabile). And it is in the latter area of thinking skills where creativity and design tricks come in. In other words, I believe you can train (some components of) creativity by applying the right techniques. The techniques are ordered into three categories: Knowing what to solve before starting to solve Generating ideas from internal […]
A while ago, I tend to use Adobe Photoshop a lot. This was in the era that Adobe Experience Design did not even exist, and Adobe Photoshop was used to create websites. I also used Adobe Photoshop to design various posters, such as the ones displayed here in my portfolio. Now for that, I was often on the hunt to take photographs of elements that I could use in my poster designs. And there we go. Some of these photographs had elements that were quite useful for creating Photoshop Brush sets. A brush set is a selection of brushes that […]
For computer graphics artists, our lovely world-wide-web is a great place to find quality content such as textures, which are used in 2D and 3D graphics applications. In this article, six great texture sites are discussed. Obviously, these websites offer their textures for free. What are textures? In visual art, a texture is the perceived surface quality of an artwork. We see something same with digital art, where textures can influence the surface enormously. Textures are in short images of (often) repeatable patterns as stones, bricks, wood, metal, etc. But remember, they are not always repeatable, as they also can […]
It is always a joy to play with a digital camera, shutter times and a fire. It is amazing to see what shapes fire can have. This little experiment ended into 60 fire textures which you can download and see here. These textures can be freely used, also in commercial context. However, they can not be redistributed or sold. They can be downloaded below as a zip file. Download Fire Textures
Some years ago, I had the common classic keyboard which was somewhat hard to clean. I had some spare hours left, and a keyboard that wasn’t cleaned for 5 years. What to do next? Right, cleaning my keyboard. And the amount of dirt, it was shocking. That’s why I want to introduce three keyboards that are easy to clean, but are also harder to get dirty. Three dust-proof keyboards Logitech Washable Keyboard K310 › This is the keyboard I am personally using, and I really love it. Besides that the design is looking quite good, the keys are stacked upon […]
The way users experience your website is greatly influenced by the interactions users have with your website and how these interactions are perceived. These interactions span from page-loading interactions to just small effects when following conventional links. The following article how CSS Transitions can enhance the experience for visiting links. CSS3 covers a nifty property which enables smooth transitions between different states of a styled element. Let’s say you have a certain div element which changes it background on hovering. Normally, there would be no transition and the background would be immediately changed on hovering. Using transition, we can have […]
Dropdown menus can almost be considered a web standard, and occur for example in many WordPress Themes. Now I’ve worked some times with Superfish plugin, which makes the transition between drop-down menu’s smoother, but it did not work optimal in all cases. Well, with CSS3, it is fairly easy to make a smoothly animated dropdown menu! The good thing is, that we don’t need Javascript. The bad thing is, the animation will not work in older versions of IE. Well, I guess you would have expected that. Nevertheless, it saves a whole piece of Javascript and rewards users of normal […]
Website optimization is an important aspect of a web developers life, as website speed is a determining factor if visitors will stay. In this tutorial, we will look to one small aspect of website optimization, namely the use of image sprites. This will be done with the example of social media icons in svg, which we will render retina compatible with a .png fallback for IE8. What is an image sprite? Image sprites combine reusable images into one single image, thereby reducing the amount of http requests that have to be made. Using CSS and elements with a fixed height […]
