1. Design is never easy and I’m not running my business like an automobile assembly line where production is of the up most importance and you have to reach an everyday target. My motto is quality over quantity and I have difficulty to let things go because I obsess over details. I consider that to be an asset instead of a flaw. To be honest I’ve thought about it to lower the bar a bit and start thinking that I could earn more by finishing things more quickly but that’s just not me. Personal satisfaction is really important and it helps in bringing out the best in you.

    — I obsess over details too and I often thought of it as a weakness. I struggled with expressing what am I doing or thinking about for so long and why that is any good. Now I’ll find it easier to explain to clients why too much deadline pressure might affect my inspiration and the way I like to work. These posts by Veerle are worth reading and are helpful to those who want a different (maybe) perspective on the deadlines and design.

  2. Real Estate Theme

    (Click for a full size). View all pages.

    I finished this work quite a while ago and decided to write about it and show a bit of the process. This design was intended for a drupal real estate theme for real estate agents selling middle price to luxury homes. It had to support different logos, hence the “Real Estate Inc” name is a placeholder. The development wasn’t finished for some reason, from what I know. But I like how this work turned out and the opportunity I had designing it.

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  3. Fonts and The Web

    I’ve been using a bunch of known web safe fonts for my designs for a very long time, as most of us web designers did. Recently I decided to research the font choices I have when designing for the web, besides the old “text as image” technique. I knew that the @font-face CSS rule is supported by current major browers, but it turns out that there are some legal limitations involved, a lot of font foundries do not allow their fonts to be embedded this way, since putting a font on a website allows everyone on the web to download it.

    Thankfully, some helpful resources exist to help purchase and embed commercial and free fonts to a website.

    Free fonts

    FontSquirrel.com - If you’re interested in free fonts that are licenced for font-face use or just any free fonts, this is a great resource to visit, I think it’s pretty much the only resource you’ll need for free fonts, but maybe I’m mistaken. All fonts can be downloaded and previewed through @font-face right on the site.
    Kernest.com - Nice font directory and web font serving engine, where you can find free and commercial fonts and get an html code to embed them into your site right away.
    Webfonts.info - This site lists fonts that are available for @font-face embedding, commercial foundries which allow such embedding and some other useful information.
    Google font directory - Google provides high-quality web fonts that you can include in your pages using the Google Font API.

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  4. The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, of like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details.

    — 

    Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style.

    It is considered to be “the finest book ever written about typography” by some people. I’ve read Russian translation not so long ago and I liked it too.

    But it made me think that at the end of the day books like this don’t give as much knowledge as I would expect after hearing about how great the book is from many people. It will help to avoid mistakes and teach many useful things, but there’s no hard rule that would say which font works good with which other font. Which is not a bad thing for me since I’ve always been on the “going by feel” side anyway, minus the conviction.

    If you didn’t see a movie Kung Fu Panda, there’s (spoiler) no secret knowledge in a “dragon scroll”. And if you saw it, you know what I’m talking about. (:

  5. How many concepts to present to a client?

    I’ve read an article called The Magic Number in a new Cognition blog.

    Author believes that the magic number is 3 and it’s the number of concepts the Happy Cog studio is presenting to its clients. Jeff Croft tweeted his opinion about it and had a little discussion on twitter that inspired me to think a bit. 

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  6. The next time you feel inspired, don’t wait for tomorrow to get going, by then you may have already lost. Get going right away, go home and then stay awake until your eyes bleed but at least when you wake up the next day you will have carried through on that moment of excitement.

    — Nicely phrased advice by David Perel. I’ll try to live by these words from now on.

  7. Advanced Photoshop Techniques for UI on Vimeo →

    Some good PS techniques here. I found a useful thing or two, beginners may find much more.

  8. Web Design Podcasts Which Will Improve Your Life  →

    I have yet to find out how to listen to these podcasts without iTunes.

    One “podcast” (more like a video show) I liked so far is The Big Web Show. It it’s a fun show with known guests from web industry and at least one very known host for me — Jeffrey Zeldman, the founder of Happy Cog and A List Apart, which is pretty big, although I’m not a big fan of his design skills. I look up to other things he does more.

    I liked the episode with Jason Fried (CEO and co-founder of 37 Signals) the most, where he talks about 37 Signals, how he came up with the product names like Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire and about the productivity at work. One thought I had while listening to this is that people are allowing too much distractions in their workspaces, not realising how it interferes with the productive work. Personally I’m very sensitive to distractions of all sorts.

  9. Welcome to my blog

    Originaly I created this tumblr to collect art and designs I like, which tumblr does great. Now I’ll turn it into my blog about web design. I plan to post here mostly things related to this subject. Things I learn, my thoughts and things that inspire me. I’ll try to write more, as I need to practice my writing, English, leading and thought sharing skills. :)

    You can read some things about me.