A great little video I hope you enjoy it like I did! I love the style and sound used in this video they are so similar. It may be funny but it is true, the sound is the perfect match with the animation style.

With every website that I make the thing that I value the most is practically and usability. Even though I know how to code and make websites I always design my own websites so that even someone with no knowledge can use it. This makes it so much easier for me in the long run. This is why I have found using my blog is an easy way to create pages for things like products in my online store, summaries of my projects and even my FAQ.

I am not sold on only using a blog. That may be okay for some but it is a great tool to use. You are only limited by your imagination so if you are using a blog for something that is not exactly normal please post and comment and a link below.

Started working on a social network. There is a lot of work to do however it is going to be an awesome site once finished. My goal is to create a real social next work. Not to sound all hipster and pessimistic but I really do not see how sites like facebook are that social. Social in the sense of creating connections and interactions in the “real world”. Collaborativee isn’t a final destination like Facebook, it is a niche site that allows you to see what is going on in your community and then get involved. This is a quote from the front page that will be up soon,

I’ll post some more information on the blog soon about Collaborativee and how far we are through it. The next post that I will do will be on the features that are new to Collaborativee.

This is a fantastic little video that you should watch right now! The graphics are so smooth and seamless. It is an example of how animation should be done using after effects to make effortless entertainment.

I thought I should post this. I have seen a lot of designed resumes, A lot of good ones and a lot of bad ones. The good ones show how design can work to take a lot of information and display it fast. They are also the ones that remember that a resume is still a professional document and do not get carried away with busy and complicated layouts.

Here is one that I made recently, I hope you like it and get some ideas about what you could do with your own resume (the bars are where I have covered up contact information that I do not really want to post online).

I recently caught a documentary on the history channel about Florence Nightingale and it talked about a graph that she made that revolutionized how statistics are presented. Until she drew the above image all graphs were bar graphs or one value plotted against another. When looking at this image it is amazing to realise that it still has power today over 160 years after the fact.

It took the subject of sanitation which was not very well understood by the general public and presented it in not only a radically new radial pattern but also in a before and after fashion that is still used when selling makeup and fat loss systems today! It is an awesome example of design in practice that ended up bringing about real change in the living conditions of soldiers on campaign. You can see the full sized image if you click here!

I just spent a few hours looking for a reason why my website seemed to zoom in when viewed in chrome only to realise that it was not a bug in my code. It was the the browser that had the zoom setting set to 110%. I am glad that i figured out what it was however it is still rather anoying that i spent so long looking for a solution to a problem that did not exist.

As the diversity of devices that access the internet continues to expand we need to make sure that the websites we create give the best possible browsing experience no matter what device the user is on. Mobile internet browsing has exploded in the last five years or so and even with the great advances in mobile browsing there is no getting around the screen size difference. A website that looks great on a desktop can often be non-navigable and non-legible. If you take your website design seriously you need to make sure that everyone gets a good experience when visiting your website.

Before we get to the coding it is also important to take a second and think. What is the difference between the person who is looking at your website on a screen and a person looking at your website on a mobile? The general rule of thumb is that the mobile user is in a hurry and often looking for something in particular. Where as the desktop visitor has more time and is often doing a lot more browsing.

My website is rather simple so I did not bother changing the content depending on what device it was being used on. However if you think that there will be a large difference in useage you can tailor it to those purposes. That is just something the to think about and consider before you do to much work.

Redirecting

First we are going to redirect the user based on the screen dimension on the device that they are visiting the website on. We can do this by putting the following code at the top of the web page.

Now before I go any further I should explain how my website is set up. I have the home page with is ‘index.php’. This is the template for every page on my website, which i use to load other document into using varibles. So for example ‘index.php?page=home’ loads the home page and ‘index.php?page=projects’ loads the projects page. Therefore when i used this code all i needed to do was recreate this ‘index.php’ page in a new folder with a new thin layout without a sidebar and save it in a folder called ‘m’. I could then load the same content into a different layout.

You can design the mobile version of your website however you want it to look. I just went for a width of 300px and focused on readability. You can do what ever you want however you have to make sure that readability is in the front of your mind when create it.

Resizing

If you open this on your phone it will now look like a very thin strip. What we want to do to it is make the device realise that this is a website designed for a mobile and not a normal website. Therefore we have to add the following meta tags to the mobile version on the website.

The second one is the important thing here however you might aswell include the iphone web app capablility for shits and giggles while you’re at it. So that is it you have a website that will display two different designs depending the screen width of the device that is viewing it. I hope you found it useful.

I found this tutorial on youtube and I thought I should share it. I have been looking for an easy way to make 3D text in after effects and after countless attempts at plugins and what not I turns out it is a very easy thing to do. This tutorial also goes over lighting and changing colour tones. If you have not been using cameras and lighting in your projects then you should start looking into it. They really do add a whole new dimension of coolest to your work.

I have been looking into do 2d cartoon rigging in after effects. I will make a video showing what I have come up with later however for now have a look that this. This is what I am aiming for.