If you’ve ever had trouble establishing a naming standard for your CSS classes, or if you work closely with a developer who demands uniformity when assigning IDs elements, here are some conventions (as well as some of my personal preferences on usage) that should help you form effective, easy-to-remember and predictable names.
Sticky notes are little pieces of bright-colored paper with an adhesive strip on the back, allowing you to jot down reminders, checklists, or *gasp* passwords and post them onto a surface. This Adobe® Fireworks® tutorial will show you how to recreate them digitally, with a certain degree of realism, for your own design projects.
Over the course of several recent projects, I’ve been experimenting with some alternatives to the usual cast of web fonts (Arial, Verdana, Georgia, etc.). I know this is nothing new, as countless other designers have had other fonts grace their designs. While the results of my experiments often prove less than successful, I proceed to share my experiences in pursuit of documenting web font knowledge. After all, what’s a designer’s job without a little challenge every now and then?
For those living in the comfort of Arial & Co., do not take this as a discouragement from exploring the outer limits of web fonts, but as a warning of what lies ahead.
Continue reading ‘(There Is Hardship) Beyond Arial & Verdana’
We conclude our two-part Rapid Fire special with a technique that will save you from manual-erase horrors that come with placing one photo over another. Using vector shapes and the Multiply blend mode in Adobe® Fireworks® allows us to create adjustable superimpositions and preserve the shadows of the superimposed image. This works best with photos of objects with a flat white background, standard among stock photos.
Continue reading ‘Rapid Fire #5: Image Editing Tricks Part II’
This dual serving of Rapid Fire demonstrates some basic image compositing techniques in Adobe® Fireworks®. This is the first of two parts, and will serve as a simple intro showing how to create and match perspectives using the Distort Tool. And what better example than putting a screenshot over an empty screen?
Continue reading ‘Rapid Fire #4: Image Editing Tricks Part I’