Psyked*

it’s easy once you know how.

Wordpress design competition…

Posted by James - 07/06/07 at 02:06:22 pm

Apparently, there hasn’t been one like it since 2004, but now Scott of plaintxt.org is holding a “Sandbox design competition” (Sandbox being the name of the Wordpress theme that it’ll all be based around)

Sandbox is, as you’ll see if you read the about section, a highly semantic theme for wordpress, dynamically generating a wealth of useful variations and classes, and effectively puts an unprecidented level of visual control into the CSS. Unprecidented vs. your normal Wordpress theme, that is. 24,000 possible class selectors, apparently. Not that you’d use that many, I hope.

The competition runs until July 29th, with judgements made on the 6th August (when all of the entries will be released)

I’m gonna do my best to enter this one, and even if I don’t, the theme sounds like a promising new base for a redesign…

BittBox!

Posted by James - 06/06/07 at 10:06:26 pm

BittBox exploded onto the scene in January* and has quickly established itself. It always looks stunning, has high quality content, covering topics related to Graphics and Web design, and often with a smattering of nice freebies and tutorials. It’s quite inspirational, and I like to watch the RSS. So, umm… check it out.

Continue reading BittBox!…

Website screenshots made easy.

Posted by James - 05/06/07 at 01:06:50 pm

Really easy, in fact. www.websitescreenshots.com has a downloadable program by Nathan Moinvaziri which is simply awesome. It ties into Internet Explorer, and uses it to capture a full or part screenshot of any website. It has all the native features your own Internet Explorer has, so Flash and Javascript and the like, all the features you need (cropping, resizing, resampling) and even full-page view. It’s also free. (but without command line abilities) I found it while searching for some sort of wordpress plugin to replace my reliance on the Snapshots rollovers. Oh, I know such a plugin could exist, but it doesn’t. Even so, getting screenshots on the web is now as easy as Open WebShot > Enter URL > Capture > Upload > Send to Editor > Publish.

Flash, 16bit colour, blendModes and cacheAsBitmap. A recipie for disaster?

Posted by James - 05/06/07 at 01:06:12 pm

Apparently so. Continue reading Flash, 16bit colour, blendModes and cacheAsBitmap. A recipie for disaster?…

EveryStockPhoto

Posted by James - 04/06/07 at 04:06:17 pm

Following up on yesterdays’ post, there’s perhaps an even better way to find yourself some free stock imagery. Everystockphoto is a search engine that pulls its images from a range of online imagebanks, all free of course. Amongst them are sites like Stock.xchng and flickr. It even utilizes OpenSearch to make it even more useful.

The downside of using EveryStockPhoto however, is that you can’t instantly be sure of the liscensing permissions of the images, and you have to look into it yourself, which can take a little longer than simply searching on places like Stock.xchng. Plus, the search results are often full of amateur photography results pulled from flickr (most of which are tagged in some stupid way for a stock repository) But, where there’s volume, there’s more of a chance that your obscure search results will dredge up something.

Stock Exchange

Posted by James - 03/06/07 at 03:06:02 pm

Free stock photos? Easy. Stock.xchng (www.sxc.hu) is a lovely little website that offers you just that. There’s a little bit of liscensing on some images, and you have to register (for free, however) to view the full-size images, but that’s all. It’s cunningly tied into their sister site, stock.xpert, which is of course, stuff you have to pay for.

GeekWithLaptop

Posted by James - 02/06/07 at 10:06:39 am

I’m always pleased when I stumble across a website that inspires me, and today I stumbled across geekwithlaptop. The articles are nice, loosely related to what I’d normally read, but the main inspiration was the design. It’s very bright & clean, although it’s not the kind of stuff I’d steal and add into my own designs. The main element I like is the clarity of the navigation, the funky icons, and the options for RSS. Yes, options. One for plain RSS, and one for Feedburner RSS. - That’s a concept I can steal without going back on my words…