Uncle Tais Hunan Yuan
About Uncle Tai's: Uncle Tai's Hunan Yuan is a Chinese restaurant located in Boca Raton, FL. With over 30 years of experience, the Tai family serves high quality Chinese cuisine…
How I Roll
Project Details: Through educational how-to videos and blog posts, site founder Jacob Sharff shares his experience of living life in a wheelchair. The How I Roll website is an informative…
Font Discovery Services for Designers
As web and graphic designers, fonts play an increasingly bigger role in our work. Sometimes, a client gives us a logo that’s really just a 200 pixel wide jpeg image rather than a true vector based logo. The task of figuring out what font is used in that logo used to be tricky, if not impossible.
Thankfully, the surge of web based design tools benefits this situation, and there are a few font discovery services available online that can save hours of work looking for a specific font.
First, let’s talk about how these sites work. Usually a file of with your font is uploaded (or linked via a url) to the site, then scanned to find glyphs that match a font. This only works with letters with spacing, so sometimes a bit of Photoshop work needs to be done to separate letters that have been kerned and tracked very closely together. (more…)
Parallax Effect in Web Design
A little seen effect in modern web design is the parallax effect or parallax scrolling. Parallax involves layered images that move at different speeds from background to foreground, creating depth and if designed cleverly enough, the illusion of 3D space. The effect can be achieved with plain old CSS and HTML, as well as with jquery powered javascript application jparallax.
One of the most well known individual examples of CSS within the web design community of CSS-based parallax is on Clearleft’s landing page for their Silver Back App. The vines at the top of the page are set as parallax layers.
The images look great as a set of layered static images but there is no mouse interactivity, and the effect can only been seen “in action” while the browser window is being re-sized. Designer Paul Annett says using parallax in such a subtle way where not everybody sees it is “like a hidden Easter egg for those who do.” You can view a full explanation of the css that Paul used for the effect on his article here.
Online Portfolios for Creatives
Every creative professional needs an online portfolio. This used to mean having your own website, which for some people was a lot of work. Today, there’s no excuse. There are many online portfolios available for free that give illustrators, web designers, photographers, developers, and animators an easy solution to getting their work online. This article introduces several great creative online portfolio solutions.
Behance
Behance is one of the top online portfolio options for creatives. It offers support for images, audio, video, flash as well as embedded content from Vimeo, Youtube, Flickr and more. Social sharing is supported with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Behance portfolios are organized by project, which requires a description of the project itself and related content. Available template options are a blank canvas, image grid and a featured frame layout specifically for video and motion projects. (more…)