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.

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Senior Visual Designer - MIH Internet - Dubai

MIH Internet Africa currently has a vacancy for a Senior Visual Designer in their incubation team based in Dubai. The Sr. Visual Designer will be responsible for the development and implementation of the company product’s visual strategy. We are looking for a senior designer with extensive experience in visual design for the web, with a particular focus in the e-commerce field preferred. The Senior Visual Designer will simultaneously be working on standardizing front-end elements across multiple platforms, as well as being involved in the design and implementation of changes to the existing user experience on the relevant products. The person in this position needs to have a deep understanding of the role design plays in the business needs and user experience of e-commerce web sites; be able to articulate the principles of good design; and defend design decisions with clarity and a solid theoretical foundation.

- Develop the visual strategy to bring the company brand to life consistently throughout the user experience.
- Develop visual style guide and UI pattern library to standardize as much of the brand front-end as possible (e.g., grids and page types, button design and behavior, form standards, etc.).
- Partner with product managers, UI designers, and engineering to design compelling and engaging user experiences that drive business results.
- Bring a strong focus on user experience design to the product development process.
- Develop HTML prototypes of visual design explorations.

Requirements
- Strong knowledge of the theoretical principles of good visual design.
- Strong proficiency in Adobe CS products.
- Experienced in HTML and CSS, as well as cross-browser support.
- Ability to visualize vision and strategy, but at the same time have an immense attention to every detail of design.
- Able to adapt rapidly to change
- Show initiative in main roles & responsibilities
- Demonstrate a sustained desire to learn and work hard
- Apply problem solving/solution focused approach to work
- 5+ years experience in visual design for the web.
- Extensive knowledge of and experience with user experience design and usability principles.

fkeepers@mih.com

Senior Graphic Designer - Prinsdesign - South Africa

Description
Looking for an independent minded graphic designer that’s excellent in idea generation, presentation and design for print and web. You have to have multiple creative skills and be interested in art, illustration, brand creation, collaboration and business, and networking. Candidates should be willing to work on a 3-4 day a week basis in the office in Braamfontein.

Skills & Experience
- A degree in Graphic design or information Design
- At least 4 - 10 years design experience in Print and Web. Skills in Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Dreamweaver (or similar) and other related programs. (On Mac only)
- Looking for a responsible, independent thinker with initiative.
- A wide knowledge of production, Litho and Digital Printing is required. (Getting jobs print ready etc.)

Please provide us with an email PDF of your portfolio or a link to a website.

adele@prinsdesign.co.za

semi-transparent and/or image background for all posts in blogspot

This is a step by step tutorial for creating a transparent/image background for the entire main posts section.

1- Creating a transparent .png:

Create a new photoshop (or whichever program you are using) file with 16x16 or 32x32 size, 72 resolution and tranparent background. Fill it with the color you wish to use, then change the opacity of the layer to a desired amount (a value between 70 to 90 is optimal). Save it for Web & Devices, making sure you have png24 and transparency selected. Now, upload it to somewhere (picasa etc.), so that you can have an url of the image which we will need later.

2- Template Designer:

Navigate to your blogger account's template designer tab. Select Advanced, here depending on your blogger template you will either have "Post Background" or "Background", first look for Post Background if you don't have it, select the other one.

For people with Post Background

From the color picker of Background Color, put a tick to transparent. If you don't want borders, do the same for Border Color.

For people with Background

From the color picker of Main Background, put a tick to transparent.

Finally apply to blog.

3- Edit HTML

Under the Edit HTML tab, look for this piece of code,

For people with Post Background in the previous step,

find,

.date-outer {

in it there is a line like this,

background-color: $(post.background.color);

replace it with this line changing the "image_url" with the actual url of your image

background: url(image_url) repeat;

For people with Background in the previous step,

find,

$(content.background.color.selector) {

in it there is a line like this,

background-color: $(content.background.color);

replace it with the following changing the "image_url" with the actual url of your image

background: url(image_url) repeat;

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how to get google to be totally in love with you... ;-)

What we were talking about just before the class broke up today, made into a little blog post for you:

1) Good, focused, (and if at all possible) original content. This is the one and only and penultimate thing that counts! Without good content, forget it, it just won't happen. What you have on your site simply has to be of interest to others - either specialist groups or general entertainment, but it has to be really good stuff! And my general hunch with this is that specialty sites are far more likely targets to get hits, since there is bound to be more search engine activity related to a specific topic, than there will be to general chit chat.

2) A large site will have more material for the search engine to find. Very simple logic really. If you have 100 posts it is far more likely that you wrote about something that somebody out there is searching for than if you have only 10. The larger the easypeasy site gets the more search engine results we get, no doubt about it. When we had only 10 posts, we had none. Nowadays with over 100 posts under our belts we have at least 5 or 6 a day and very often many more, sometimes as many as 20 even...

3) Make sure your site is structured well in terms of navigation. Even the best content in the world is useless if folk have to work too hard to get to it, they will simply not bother and leave and never come back. And needless to say, forget about them recommending it to anyone else... Read Selim's excellent post on navigation to get more insight on the matter here >>>

4) Post often and consistently. In other words, not silence for a whole month and then 10 posts all at once, but more like 3 posts a week, and every week. Remember that you can also write a whole batch and then pre-date them. I am not exactly sure how or why this makes a difference but a site which is consistently active seems to draw more traffic, a thing which I can tell very easily from the site stats of my own blogs. 

5) Make sure your meta tags are in perfect order. More on this here >>>

6) Make sure your post title comes before your blog title. More on this here >>>

7) Make sure you have a lot of links to other sites, either inside the posts or as sidebar elements: Your courtesy to others is likely to generate courtesy in return by them linking back to you - after all, this is how the internet works...

8) Use social networks efficiently. Tweet your blog and also post it on facebook, linkedin etc. Also if your site's content is at all relevant, start creative network accounts such as on youtube, Flickr, deviantart, vimeo etc. Use the groups within these domains to put out videos and photos and link these back to your site. 

9) Finally, be patient! It will take some time for people to find you - anything up to 6 months to even a year, depending on how fast your site is growing and on how good your content is. Usually you will hit the really big visitor numbers only after one of the major portals or blogs, one that covers the same area of interest on which you are focused, spots you and blogs you. This will take time. Just keep on posting and once you have enough good stuff it will happen - count on it.

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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>

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Multimedia Designer - Visual Interactive Media - Lebanon

VIM is looking to hire a Multimedia Flash Designer for its offices in Beirut to:
- Design and create custom, innovative, and effective web designs
- Develop content into dynamic multimedia pages
- Create interactive Flash design, functionality, custom solutions
- Publish updates and changes to web pages efficiently and accurately
- Develop internal design & marketing material

hr@v-imedia.com