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February 28, 2007
by
dave
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I have to admit, choosing well balanced, web safe colours for projects is not my strong point. Even for those who do it often will no doubt admit it can take time, time you would prefer to spend doing something else. You can imagine my joy when I found resources on the net for assisting the colour choosing process. I have used a few sites and these are my favourite ones:
- Colorblender - This site was given a 5* award by Practical Web Design. Colour blends can be downloaded as a small file that can be imported into Adobe Photoshop. If you visit the site click on the ‘Browse Blends’ link to see colour blends that others have saved.
- Both Color Scheme and Color Scheme 2are very useful for deciding colour schemes. Both of them allow you to select the different accessibility rules to see how how vision can affect the way colours are seen. Color Scheme 2 has the additional feature of being able to select different colour schemes e.g. Monochromatic, contrast, traide etc. Displaying the nearest web-safe alternative to the colours selected is an option.
- HTML color code tool is based on classic color theory pioneered 1900s. The wheel uses yellow, red and blue as its primary colors.
There have been times when I have not wanted to use an interactive colour designer, I have found the colour charts on Lynda very useful.
The charts are listed by either hue or value.
While I was searching the net (which you may have noticed I do fairly often) recently if came across econsultant. At the time of writing they list 29 Online colour tools, some of those I have mentioned above are included in the list. There are many more other colour tools which are well worth a look.
Using the right colours is critical for successful design projects and hopefully these resources will help you as much as they have helped me.
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February 27, 2007
by
dave
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Featured image from http://www.idigitalemotion.com/tutorials/images/pixelart.jpg
I have been looking at different types of art lately which caused me to read a post on the Media 1oh1 blog More Pixel Art - Pixelmuseum.com « Media 1oh1 about pixelart. I have always been fascinated how so much detail can be included by just using blocks of colour. I started looking into pixelart on the internet with a mission of finding out how it is done. I came across a portfolio site by Rhys Davies. On his home page he has a link to a very detailed and descriptive tutorial called The Complete Guide to Isometric Pixel Art. I like it because it is complete and well suited to noddy artists like me and it can be downloaded, so you can have a copy with you where ever you go.
This got me searching google for other sites on pixelart. In fact just putting ’pixelart’ as the search brought up about 2,000,000 (two million for the numerically challenged) results, so it is more common than I first realised. There was no way I was going to manage looking through them all, if you are reading this post some time after I originally posted it I guarantee you will get more results, but there are a few which stuck out to me.
Image results for pixelart
http://www.pixeljoint.com/
Portfolio of Gary J Lucken
Other pages tagged with ‘pixelart on del.icio.us
One way to learn pixelart is to look at other artists work, see how they form the isometric shapes and how they manage to give the artwork a 3D look by shading. If there is one thing you will need it is patience, painting pixel by pixel takes time.
To prove that last point about time, take a look at this link. You have got to have almost no personal life at all in order to spend as much time as this artist has obviously done is creating such a large piece of work.
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February 25, 2007
by
dave
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The say art is all around us and in everything, you just have to look. Well I sure did not see this. I have travelled the London tubes and never have I seen animals on the maps.
I wonder how long the artist stared at the underground maps before the animals were spotted. The animal pictures are not limited to those in the image above. If you visit the site and you will see, more elaborate, full colour version. You will also be able to download the animal maps for to be used as your desktop wallpaper. There you will also find games and epostcards.
Of those above I kinda like the scooby doo one (bottom right). I am sure there are more animals to be found than those you can see above, you never know, you may see some yourself.
animalsontheunderground.com came to my attention after reading this post; Pay Attention To Me! www.animalsontheunderground.com «
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February 24, 2007
by
dave
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Reported on Sky news: http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-1251530,00.html
A 70 year old welsh pensioner has recently married a 43 woman from Southern China. They made contact after he responded to an advert in a local paper for Chinese women looking for western husbands.
He doesn’t speak hardly a word of Mandarin and she doesn’t speak hardly a word of English, not exactly off to a good start.
I saw this news article at the sky new site and was quite gobsmacked. I knew people from other easthern countries, usually women, try to snatch up a western companion but to choose one from a totally different culture, different language and guaranteed to be totally different background seems just too far. What got me was the comments to one of the Chinses women;
“My impression of Western men is that they are very happy. They’re like big children. They’re quite simple and they like children.”
I would like to agree with the ‘Very happy’ but the ‘Quite Simple’, How can I argue with that after events like this. Don’t get me wrong, the chinese woman was reported to say how she loved this man. Everyone deserves to, and should, find a life long partner, settle down and get married but there are other ways.
You can read the full story here
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February 23, 2007
by
dave
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In Manchester they have put automatic bollards around the city centre to prevent vehicles entering streets they shouldn’t. The bollards are up by default and lower when either a bus or a post office vehicle approaches, there are some people who think they can follow buses sneak in behind them through the bollards. I have one thing to say to them
DON’T DO IT!
To see why watch this video, it had me rolling on the floor (almost).
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