Ivan's blog

One thing that can help your enlarged images to look better is increased contrast for the blury details. One of the best ways to do it is to use the high-pass filter.

You've probably been told hundred times that you shouldn't copy others work and that you should always do original stuff. This is something I stand by as well generally. However there is at least one very good reason to imitate a certain style and recreate a certain look by yourself.

Imitation is an excellent exercise for your brain. I think subconsciously one learns so much beyond the obvious when copying other's great work. The skills one learns may benefit much later however.

Dust & Scratches filter is for cleaning the imperfections in your image that are usually a result of of film development and scanning. You may ask, what's to write about this filter? You just select it from Filter/ Noise and done.

It's a collection of 37 images from a wallpainting competition. Surprisingly naive and colorful. Although you can recognize various influences, like cubism and abstract expressionism the collection is quite coherrent in style. Enjoy!

First check out this sample page. Notice the variety of fonts?

Following up on this previous post. Here are some more links to find those ocassional vector logos you need urgently:

There is an ongoing dispute between designers: which is better, fixed width sites or liquid (flexible) layout sites? In my opinion a good rule of thumb for the present and near future should be this: Text heavy sites should be fixed width and everything else can be fluid.

However, the future holds some interesting new options.

Fixed width layout

Some say that designers prefer fixed width layouts because they have better control over the looks of the site. But fixed width is only good to show-off and isn't functional. I would argue this. I think fixed layout sites generally don't look as good as liquid layout sites, because usually they have big empty areas on the sides. But it's a price I'm ready to pay for better legibility. Looks should be secondary for text heavy sites.

It has been proven by many researchers that the longer the lines the more difficult to read long paragraphs of text. Of course too short isn't good either. There is an optimal 10-12 words per line rule with different researches showing slight differences depending on testing conditions.

Regardless if you are learning CSS or you're an active web developer you will greatly benefit from three Firefox extensions.

Most designers wanting to learn CSS, start by modifying existing templates and CSS styles, rather than writing a whole new stylesheet from scratch. That's a good way to learn in my opinion, but the biggest problem is usually understanding the relationship between the elements and how different styles effect the whole page. If you're a student these extensions will accellerate your understanding of how CSS works. And if you are an experienced developer they will speed up your everyday tasks especially when sorting out bugs.

Aardvark

The first extension can be installed by clicking here if you're using Firefox. You can start it from the Firefox tools menu.

It's the simplest help out there. You just hover over the elements on the page and it shows you the names of the different elements. Great tool to give you a quick overview of a web page structure. There some cool keystroke features available with this extension. For example try pressing "C" to set the element's background to a random color. More keystrokes here.

Blocks are the little boxes in the sidebar. They give you different kind of information about what's going on at cb. Now you have the option to choose which ones you want to show or hide. There are 12 now and we will add more in the future. Go to my account/edit/block configuration to set up your preference.