Let’s get this straight – I absolutely hate graffiti/tag fonts that you can download from the web. In this short post I’ll try to explain why I hate them and why using them does not make you cool in the graffiti scene.
Monthly Archive for March, 2009
When someone says “Norway”, some people see colorful cottages, historical heritage and fjords. Other see country full of sleek and clean design, expensive boutiques and modern interiors, so typical for scandinavian countries. The fact is – both are true. Norway is a rich, modern, tech-savvy country based on very firm and solid historical base. As we all know – when you’re moderately rich, you can afford designer stuff which almost always looks great, so you can see design almost everywhere (especially in big cities).
I’ve been in Norway for a brief period of time as a front-end developer for my former employer who sent me to Oslo for release-party of the project I’ve worked on. When there, I did some research alongside with some long evening walks thru the Oslo streets to find design inspiration which could be used later for different projects I’ll be working on during my life. Here’s some inspiration from what logos surround Norwegians.
I’ll be honest – since Safari 4 beta came out, I totally forgot about Firefox even though I’ve been known Firefox evangelist for a long time. Why I left it then? Simple thing – Safari is much faster and now it has the features I require from my browser of choice (del.icio.us integration and working, friendly and effective web inspector, which wasn’t so good in Safari3/Webkit).
There was just one thing that I found absolutely annoying about Safari – every ‘incoming’ link I clicked in my Adium, Twitterrific or whatever else, was opened in a new window, which led to very cluttered desktop in a while. Firefox used to open new links in new tab, which was much more efficient in my opinion. As a guy who always has to hack something in his operating system, I learnt that on Mac you can do everything, but it requires one of those two – either you have to buy a $5 app that will do it for you cause it is in the API, just not in the OS *or* you have to type some weird command in the Mac Terminal to make it work. I was right. Luckily, Garcya has a fix that doesn’t require to buy a five-dollar-app, just requires you to use Terminal. Ready? Here we go!
First, quit your Safari. And by quit, I mean Command+Q, not the red button in the top-left corner. Done? Great. Now open your Terminal (if you never used before, it’s in your Spotlight, or in Applications » Utilities). When you’re in your terminal, paste in following command:
defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true
Hit enter, run Safari and voila – you can now enjoy a screen-efficient incoming links handling in Safari.
Sooo… If the blog’s back, the (hopefully weekly) Design Finds column will be back too. For all of you who haven’t seen my blog before, Design Finds is a column dedicated to interesting and inspiring things I find while browsing the web. I hope to post weekly, but sometimes I simply do not have enough time to do it. Anyway, finds for this week…
- The Creative (Re)Touch by Brain Pickings
- 45+ Best Icon Design Tutorials by Dzine Blog
- Cool sculptures by Jessica Fortner by Abduzeedo
- 20 outrageous, over the top and incredible websites by Webdesign.fm
- Inspiration: Emigre Magazine by Abduzeedo
- 30 Photo Manipulation Tutorials by Vandelay Design
As promised, the mini-tutorial / reference about how my blog’s mascot, the cute robot I-404 a.k.a. “Eye” was born. If you’re looking for detailed tutorial about how to do digital painting of a robot like I-404, you might not find everything you would like to see here, because I won’t cover the whole process in details, but I’ll show you my workflow and how everything was put together.
Small disclaimer, before we start — I’m also a beginning illustrator, I mean, I always drawn something on paper, but just recently I started to digitalize my works, so if you’re a illustrator with experience and want to give me some tips on how to improve my workflow or the tools I use, feel free to drop me a line in the comments. Thanks in advance!
Grasp the idea
The idea behind I-404 was simply getting a mascot for the site, just to put some more life than just plain text in it. The I-404 is the robot which tells you when you gone wrong way on my blog and allows you to go back where you were before or suggests you the different exit. I-404 is currently visible only on the ‘File not found’ page, but I hope to incorporate him here and there in my blog’s layout so you can get familiar with him.
I wanted it to be a robot, because I simply love robots. I love the whole idea of anthropomorphic androids that will be dedicated to help people where they can’t help themselves. As a kid I watched Star Wars and Stargate with my father, who’s a science-fiction geek since when I remember. As a teenager I read enough S-F novels by P. K. Dick, S. Lem etc. not to b influenced by futuristic visions of androids. Also, robots have become a big part of popculture around us and we can’t help it. That’s why I decided a robot will be an icon of my site.
