behance professional portfolio site

Just received this as a behance notification and it does seem worth sharing:

http://prosite.com/home

Admittedly, the price for this (11USD per month) is rather on the steep side, considering that you could get a fully hosted site for about half the price at places like Bluehost, or indeed that with a bit of ingenuity you could very easily set up a similar site right here on blogspot for free.

However, on the upside, you do get the considerable professional design expertise of the behance team in the shape of some beautiful and fully customizable templates, which could save a lot of time. And, probably most importantly, given that behance is one of the highest regarded design portals online my guess would be that having a site hosted by them would be likely to get you exposure you might not get all too easily through a standalone site.

.................................................................................................................................

embedding a flipbook into a blog with issuu

Last time I looked into this (which was a few months ago) it still wasn't possible to do so but I just found out that you can now embed flipbooks which you create with issuu into other domains! Gave it a try just now and as you can see above it works beautifully!

So, all you need to do is create a free account with issuu, make your flipbook by following the instructions on the site which involve combining the images of your left/right pages into a pdf which you then upload into your issuu library. Once the book has been crunched by the system it will be published, at which point you will find the embed icon (looks like this < >) under the thumbnail of the book. Make sure you have all the correct things checked on the menu which appears when you click on the tags (such as having the double page view as default!), then copy and paste everything into the HTML tab of the post editor and you are done! You can also change the height and width of whatever appears on your blog by playing with the values inside the embed code. If you do so remember to use a calculator so that the aspect ratio remains correct.

 Tip:  When you publish this there will be several text links which appear under the small flipbook on your site. If (like me) you do not want these text links simply delete the bottom part of the code, which will look something like this:

<div style="text-align: left; width: 420px;">
<a href="http://issuu.com/elifayiter/docs/ctrl_xyv?mode=embed&amp;viewMode=presentation&amp;layout=http%3A%2F%2Fskin.issuu.com%2Fv%2Flight%2Flayout.xml&amp;showFlipBtn=true" target="_blank">Open publication</a> - Free <a href="http://issuu.com/" target="_blank">publishing</a> - <a href="http://issuu.com/search?q=computer" target="_blank">More computer</a></div>

.................................................................................................................................

splashup - another great online image editor

Beautiful dark, elegant interface. Makes one feel good just to look at it. You can edit and save images from and to various online domains, including Flickr and Facebook, as well as from and to your own hard drive, of course. And it seems to have quite a few of the necessary bells and whistles - such as layers, layer effects, filters and so forth...

Check it out here: http://www.splashup.com/

.................................................................................................................................

being "resource-ful": site layout with ready made visual components

Read all about it here ;-)

Get the photoshop file here:
http://www.citrinitas.com/easy-peasy/geek-folk.zip

.................................................................................................................................

HTML codes for the ASCII

or simply put, how to get any symbol, letter etc. to show up properly on your website.

Writing simple blocks of text into your site is no problem at all, but what happens if you want to use symbols or letters such as; ¢, ¥, ¼, æ...

On some platforms such as Blogspot, you are in luck, you can open your character map or search the web for the symbol you want to use (which is a huge waste of time) copy/paste it and there it is. However you won't be so lucky if you decide to hard-code your website which will result in these symbols appearing jumbled up when you put them online. So here is the solution for both coders and those who don't want to waste precious time looking up the symbol.

Go to this link: http://www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm

Look up the symbol you want and copy either the html-name or html-number (both works) and paste it into your code to wherever you want it to be.

This next part is for those who will use it on Blogspot: While you are on the "New Post" or "Edit Post" Screen, where you have the title box and the text box, there are 2 options towards the top-right end of the text box; originally you always have Compose selected. Whenever you are going to paste one of these codes, select Edit HTML and paste it, then return to Compose and it should be there. You can keep on writing normally back in Compose and switch back and forth whenever you want.

.................................................................................................................................

ajax/javascript/flash image galleries

Here are some really good and popular image galleries that you can use in your web pages. All of them are free, however some do have Creative Commons licenses, so read carefully if you are thinking of monetizing your sites in future. All websites contain step by step tutorials on how to setup and customize the galleries, however most of them will require you to get your hands dirty, meaning you have to go into the code.

Ajax Galleries 

MiniShowCase

GreyBox

Lightbox (most popular, slick and cool design)

Javascript Galleries

Highslide (personal favorite, very customizable, probably requires the most coding among these)

Flash Galleries

DF Gallery

Flash XML Gallery

FlShow

Will be updated... Check back for more soon.

.................................................................................................................................

creating a good color scheme

A color scheme is a number of colors which are expected to work together as a unit. A scheme can be pure black and white, can be made up of gray tones, of different values of one hue, or it could be made up of many different hues.

A widely held (and hugely mistaken) assumption is that this is a random thing, based upon personal preferences. In truth there are physical laws which determine the harmonic relationships between hues and these involve the color wheel:

The above screenshots come from one of the greatest online applications around, the Color Scheme Designer, which lets you work with the color wheel - for free!

There are three tabs on this: The first one shows you the full spectrum of hues and lets you make your initial choice, based upon the relationships between the hues. These are monochromatic, complimentary, triadic, tetradic, analogic and accented analogic (which is actually just a variant of complimentary). Of these, my advise to all beginners is to use pure analogic relationships. This works with hues which are closely grouped upon the wheel and this set up will usually give you the easiest results to work with. 

The second tab lets you adjust the contrast and the saturation and brightness values of your scheme. Again, if you are a novice stay away from high contrasts for now and go with saturation and lightness values only - trust me, much much easier...

The third tab will then let you copy paste all of the hex codes of your colors into an image editor or into a CSS/HTML code. And if you look on the top menu there is even an export option which will create different things like a photoshop palette or a CSS list.

 (Suggestion:  Color wheel apps for designers (which, in the end, do the exact same job) usually cost a fortune whereas this hugely useful service is provided for free. So, why not make a donation also?   ;-) 
http://colorschemedesigner.com/

And then, another cool place for color is colorlovers, a social networking community revolving around color and patterns. Here you can download/upload color schemes and patterns to share with others. Very nice too! 

.................................................................................................................................

huge big GUI elements pack

There are some really nice people out there: All WebAlys asks of you is that you link back to the page from where you got these elements. This is a mega pack, containing icons, various types of GUI components, and a styles library for Adobe Illustrator.

The download page is here:
http://www.webalys.com/design-interface-application-framework.php

 (Important:  Once again, remember that if you use any of this the author will have to be credited through a link-back to the above URL.  ) 

...............................................................................................................................

a very nice set of buttons

For those of you who want to build a website from scratch, these are crisp and clean vector files which you can download in Illustrator format, as a JPEG or as an SVG file. And bloggers might also make good usage of them inside posts or even with custom created widgets on the sidebar. 

So, go get them while they are hot: http://www.gosquared.com/liquidicity/archives/96

free vector editor

Speaking of free software, this seems very nice also. An opesourced vector editor called inkscape: http://inkscape.org/

Not an online application by the way, has to be downloaded and installed. But still definitely worth checking out!

.................................................................................................................................

free online image editors

You may or may not have a state of the art image editor such as photoshop installed on your computer. While I cannot say that the alternatives will do just as well, the following may still work as good stop gaps, especially for basic tasks.

Pixlr claims to be the most sophisticated online image editor and it certainly lets you do a lot with your images, including working with layer masks and so on. You can also import images from flickr, picasa and facebook,  edit them and save them back to their original locations. Very nice!

The same also goes for FotoFlexer, again you can import images from various web domains and then play with a lot of effects, as well as add type and shapes to them.

Sumo (my favorite after pixlr) is a free online image editor with some very nice plugins and a very easy to learn interface.

Phoenix is less sophisticated as far as plugins go however the company which puts out this image editor also has an online procedural filter creator which allows you to create some very impressive filters of your own. One of the really cool online image manipulators is Lunapic, which lets you also add animations to still images which you can then save onto your harddrive.

And finally, although not online applications, gimp and paint.net are completely free and very close contenders to costly image editors such as photoshop.

.................................................................................................................................

webtreats...

... is so nice that it deserves a post of it's own. You can get all sorts of things from here, including background patterns - but much more as well: Photoshop presets for one thing - brushes, custom shapes, really cool layer styles - and then even layered photoshop files for web sites and themes. Check it out - you will love it!

http://webtreats.mysitemyway.com/

................................................................................................................................