I really need to find a good book regarding the art of wielding stylesheets to their full extent. I’ve only used them for basic formatting, I admit, and this is a shame, since there’s just so much I could do with them if taking the time to dive deeper into it.

Recently, I was flipping the pages of an old computer arts-related magazine that I had grabbed at the office (or was it at school?) and never finished; that’s when I stumbled upon an article mentioning effects that could be created on images through the use of stylesheets. The image on the right is a screenshot of what I obtained in my browser thanks to the Alpha filter, and to do so, a simple line of code did the trick. No need to fire off Photoshop or any other graphic tool. This is the reason why I want—no, I need—to learn more. I don’t want to remain standing here with the feeling that I’m brushing past something interesting, when I could in fact embrace it with both my arms.

Of course, there’s the problem of browser compatibility, but this is where all the fun lies, isn’t it?

Y Tags: css | internet | stylesheet | webdesign

And I didn’t put any Flash into it.

Not much got written nor prepared today, since most of my free time has been put into finishing the redesign for Paradygma. It’s not totally done yet—I may decide later on to add some more information to the pictures, among other things—but at least, it’s now rid of the blah-blah, the frames and the iframes, as well as of the guestbook and news-with-comments that were attracting spammers and spambots faster than a porn mag does a teenager. Who needs these toys on a portfolio, anyway? I like simplicity.

PS - It’s in such moments that you realize that a Spam Karma or an Akismet is a two-clicks blessing.

Y Tags: internet | webdesign

As I was working on a redesign for Paradygma—among other things, I want to make it more of a portfolio, not a showcase for every tiny bit of an illustration I’ve done—I realized that I’m really not fond of Flash. Not fond at all.

Every graphic-designer, illustrator and their dog seems to have this liking to creating their webpages in Flash. Alright, it’s pretty. The first thirty seconds. After this, I start to grow tired of not being able to open links into a new tab/window, of having to cope with intros and images displaying square by square or line by line only, in other words: all the bling-bling. I’m not really for the tacky stuff, and my, some of these are tackier than the deco of all of our five local Chinese restaurants put together.

A quick link for today, but one I’ve found useful when it comes to web-design and picking the right color schemes: Wellstyled’s Color Scheme Generator.

Through the use of a wheel of colors, you can pick a color dominant, and see how other colors fare against it. Different options are available; whether you wish to prioritize the view of simple contrasts or to see how multiple color schemes are rendered against the chosen background, it’ll be easy to get a first idea of what a webpage will look like. A whole set of options also allows you to check how the displayed scheme will appear to color blind people (protanopy, full color blindness…). There’s much more you can do with it, but these are already a good preview of what this color picker lets you do.

I keep a stack of such little tools nearby. I always find them useful to see in a few clicks if the idea I have in mind can work or if it’ll be a visual aggression all by itself, this without demanding me to modify my stylesheets and upload them first.

Y Tags: colors | color+scheme | web-design

It’s only today that I’ve discovered this site, which is still in it beta version, but looks pretty interesting all the same: Storyright. From what I’ve seen of it, it’s a story planner that lets you write about your story, its themes, its plots and subplots, as well as fill out “character sheets” (the latter including various data fields: physical description, role in the story, education, likes&dislikes, etc). I’ve signed up for an account, although I haven’t toyed with all the functions yet, but all in all, this seems like a nice and free alternative to the expensive software out there such as Power Writer (which is good in my opinion, but I really don’t have 190$ to shell out for a planning software right now). Story outlines can also be exported as Word documents, so that your work isn’t totally dependent on the state of the server on which the site is hosted.

So far, what bothers me with it is that it only seems to work as intended under IE, and that, well, you need to have an Internet connection to use it. For the rest, I haven’t tested it enough to tell. It looks like it refreshes fast, at the least.

Y Tags: outline | planning | story | storyright | writing