Hello, my name is Mariusz Cieśla and my job is to make the web a better place.

Tag Archive for 'tutorial'

How to get unfollowed (by me) on Twitter 101

Published on May 10, 2009 in Daily, Personal and Twitter; 2 Comments

I use Twitter for quite a while now, mostly for professional reasons – I hardly write about things not related to my design work or any other work I’m currently doing, mostly because I treat Twitter as just another way to promote what I do. I cannot say (yet) if I’m successful in promoting my brand around “the interwebs”, but so far I really like the way that Twitter allows you to network.

Still, I seen some things on Twitter that guarantee 100% that you will get unfollowed by me even if I’m the one that you decided to follow. Here’s the list.

  1. Use reply-bots – that’s an absolute no-no. Receiving “Thanks for following me!” notice from a bot does not show that you care about me following you. Honestly, it shows the exact opposite of that – it shows that you don’t give a crap to the point that you can’t even write few words. If you want to bot-reply me, don’t reply at all.
  2. Be a frenzied fanatic – don’t get me wrong. I love people with passion. I hate people who are so blinded with it that they don’t see arguments against it. Whatever you’re tweeting about, don’t go all out to the extent that makes me think that not agreeing with you will make you burn a cross in my garden.
  3. Spam – and I do not mean only XXX pictures or Viagra. If you’re tweeting in name of your company and you have this awesome product feel free to advertise it, yeah. But don’t do it every day using the same tweet! I know it’s awesome and stuff, but I get it, right? I don’t need to be hammered with it every day and I will not buy it if you spam me with it, okay? Thanks in advance!
  4. Be a liar – if your description tells me that you love bringing ideas into life, you love bringing value to the world and stuff, and then you tweet mostly like “Just woke up” or “Just had a huge dump” – that’s not bringing value. That’s bringing noise. I don’t like noise, so we’ll have to say goodbye.
  5. Teach me how to make money/followers on Twitter – seriously. I don’t care if you made $100.000 on Twitter by following all Ashton’s followers and for just few dollars you can tell me how to do it. You made your $100.000 because there are people that actually believe in stuff like this. I follow people who have something interesting to say or show and I won’t follow blindly just to get more followers, ergo, more “money”.
  6. Hashtag inappropriately – hashtags are great thing, especially with EventBox allowing me to follow everyone using them, which makes them more IRC channel style. Still, if you’re promoting your blog post about 101 ways to mate rabbits and tag it with #design, I feel urge to get a rusty screwdriver and go berserk. Since killing people with rusty objects probably won’t be widely accepted, I’ll probably stick to putting you on my blocked list without hesitation.

Well, that’s basically it. If you are followed by me but you don’t like me and want to get rid of me, feel free to use any combination from the list above. ;)

Tutorial: How “Eye” was born

Published on March 17, 2009 in Daily; 1 Comment

intro-screen

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.

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