March 10, 2008 — Applied carefully, High Dynamic Range-technique (HDR) can create incredibly beautiful pictures which blur our sense of the difference between reality and illusion. In graphics HDR imaging is a set of techniques that allow a far greater dynamic range of exposures than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to the deepest shadows. Read more…

March 5, 2008 — This post presents the results of the contest — 45 beautiful blog header designs you can use for free. Below the designers have described their themes, intentions and shown us some examples of how header graphics can be used. Read more…

March 4, 2008 — Your portfolio is the showcase of your work, your skills and your potential for your future employers. The more time and effort you dedicate for a usable and nice-looking design, the higher are your chances for getting better account balance in the end of the month. So how can you make sure your portfolio is better than the portfolios of your competitors? How can you point employer’s attention to your works? Read more…

March 3, 2008 — Animated short movies are excellent for tedious coffee breaks and uninspiring monday mornings. To put some beautiful story in a short 2-5 minutes sequence isn’t easy, but even in this case designers and artists are quite creative and manage to come up with very surprising and unusual results. The selection below is supposed to make you cry, laugh, feel bizarre or even shocked — in every case being absolutely smashed. Read more…

February 26, 2008 — Navigation is the most significant element in web design. Since web-layouts don’t have any physical representation a user can stick to, consistent navigation menu is one of the few design elements which provide users with some sense of orientation and guide them through the site. Users should be able to rely on it which is why designers shouldn’t mess around with it. Read more…

February 25, 2008 — You can’t design without type. However, yon can use only type (or mostly only type) to create breath-taking designs. In fact, many graphic designers and artists take exactly this route to communicate their ideas through their works. The results are sometimes crazy, sometimes artsy, sometimes beautiful, but often just different from things we’re used to. Thus designers explore new horizons and we explore new viewing perspectives which is what inspiration is all about. Read more…

February 21, 2008 — Sometimes being a web-developer is just damn hard. Particularly coding is often responsible for slowing down our workflow, reducing the quality of our work and sleepless nights with pizza and coffee laying around the laptop. Reason: with a number of incompatibility issues and quite creative rendering engines it sometimes takes too much time to find a workaround for some problem without addressing browsers with quirky hacks. And that’s where ready-to-use solutions developed by other designers come in handy. Read more…

February 20, 2008 — We, designers, are creative folks. And being creative, we permanently strive for inspiration — innovative approaches, crazy ideas, smashing concepts and, in general, unique designs which can help us to observe a given problem from a fresh perspective. This is why we always have some fancy design books laying around on our desk, and this is why we enjoy observing other people’s work — basically just because we can learn a hell of a lot from them. Read more…

February 18, 2008 — Few weeks ago we’ve presented a number of innovative gadgets, devices, designs and concepts. Unless explicitly specified, none of them has been officially released or produced yet, and none of them is currently available for end-users. But what about existing products? What about innovative designs which are already available in stores and can be bought straight away? Read more…

February 13, 2008 — In this article I will explain step-by-step how I’ve designed an attractive character in one of our recent projects, namely for the company “Drunken Monkey Collectibles”. I will review the entire design process, from the first sketches and drafts to the final touches with Adobe Photoshop. In the post you’ll find further references to different articles published in my blog SOSNewbie; you might want to check them out as they cover more details of each phase of the process. Read more…