What I Talk About
- 3ds Max
- 3ds Max Tutorials
- Books
- Brave New Network
- Clarion Media
- Clients
- CSS
- Design
- Design 101
- Design Tutorials
- Hardware
- Internet
- Java
- Java Tutorials
- JavaScript
- JavaScript Tutorials
- Life
- Making Money
- Meta
- Movies/TV
- Music
- Networking
- OOP
- PHP
- PHP Tutorials
- Programming
- Software
- Technology
- Tutorials
- Tweets
- Video Games
- wapClix
- Web Development
- Windows 7
- XHTML
- XHTML/CSS Tutorials
When I’ve Posted
- December 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
What I’ve Posted
What I’m Doing
Thauwald Funeral Homes, Inc.
Here’s another project I recently finished for a client. Thauwald Funeral Homes, Inc. is a funeral home service that dates back to 1952. They were looking for a website that would be easy to update, so I made a nice design that’s built on the Joomla CMS. Click here to see the live website.
Wetball Nation
I’m going to start spotlighting my clients as I finish work for them. I’ll begin with a logo I just finished designing for “Wetball Nation.” Wetball Nation is an intramural basketball team at Iowa State University. They needed a logo for printing on shirts, etc. so I created a vector graphic which can be blown up infinitely big without pixelation. They loved the design I came up with. I created it with Adobe Illustrator.
Design 101: Creating a Website
So you want to make a website? Anyone can throw together a simple site using a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web, but that usually results in non-valid code and a very “cheap-looking” website. Taking a design and turning it into raw, standards-compliant code may seem like a daunting task, but after you get through this tutorial, you’ll be using “DIV”s and styling with CSS like you’ve known it your whole life! That’s right, I said DIVs, no tables here (don’t worry if you don’t know what a div is)! This is a massive 4-part tutorial that will teach you the very fundamentals of design and give you the tools you need to make professional, high-caliber websites. It will walk you through conceptualizing the website, designing it, turning it into valid XHTML/CSS and lastly coding it to the blogging software WordPress. We’ll make a web designer out of you yet!
Creating a Website (Part 4: The Coding)
Congratulations, you’ve made it to the final segment of this tutorial series. In the first part, we conceptualized our website. Then we designed it. After that, we wrote the XHTML and CSS for it. Now it’s time to turn it into a WordPress template using some PHP.
Clarion Media, Black Jack, and Zombies
We scratched the new design for Clarion Media last minute. It sucks, but the reality was that it just wasn’t flexible enough for our needs. The good news is that we’ve already got a design we’re going to move forward with, and it should actually see the light of day (fingers crossed). The funny thing is is that it’s a design I whipped up in about an hour. It was not refined whatsoever whereas the previous design–the one we canned–I labored over for about a week making adjustments. Hopefully we’ll see this thing live by the end of this month around the time wapClix launches. We also may begin work on programming a new client interface where clients can manage projects and other parts of their account, but that’s for another post. (more…)
Creating a Website (Part 2: The Design)
In the previous part of this tutorial, we conceptualized our website, which is a travel blog, by deciding on a color scheme and structure and by brainstorming some ideas. Now it’s time for the fun part, designing! Open up Photoshop and let’s start. (more…)
Creating a Website (Part 1: The Concept)
Before a designer jumps straight into designing, it’s generally good practice to first understand what direction you want to take with your website. What goal is the website trying to achieve? What’s the site’s theme? What will it look like? How will it be structured? These are some of the questions you should ask yourself before you even touch Photoshop. This is what I call the conceptualizing process. Thinking about these questions will help us in our design decisions and give us focus. Otherwise, the design process becomes, more or less, a series of trial and error (although trial and error is still very much a part of designing). (more…)
Favorite Design Resources
The web is a great resource for designers. There are TONS of websites out there that offer free stuff like brushes, icons, textures, vector graphics, and other awesome stuff. That being said, I wanted to share with you some of the sites that I go to for design resources. I’m sure you’ll find these places very helpful to your designing. Let me know what you think and if there are any site you think I should add! (more…)
Recommended Reading
That’s right, as in those things that are filled with pages that have words on them. Books. I’ve been starting to accumulate a good collection of coding, design and UI (user-interface) books, and I thought I might share with you a list of some of my favorites or perhaps the ones that I have learned the most from. There’s no doubt in my mind that the publishers of these books will include my acclaim for them in future editions (just for the record, I’m not getting any kickbacks for this, but wouldn’t it be awesome if I was?!). (more…)
Design 101: Giving Text Weight
This is the first in a series I plan on doing called “Design 101.” It will consist of tutorials aimed at designers who are more at a beginner skill level. Steps will be in great detail, explanations will be given, screenshots will be added, and source graphics will be provided (Note: I will be using Adobe Photoshop mostly, but the walkthroughs can be applicable to any design software. Source downloads are always at the very end of the tutorial). (more…)
