Today I’m going to teach you a simple tutorial on creating a simple light stripes effect in Photoshop. The tutorial is simple and I think it’s suitable for Photoshop beginners too. Before getting into the steps, please take a look at the final result below. This light stripes effect looks cool in both dark and bright, hot and cold background too, so I think it’s a really cool and useful effect.
Besides that, you can also learn how you can add magic to your graphic designs with Photoshop.
Coffee drinking culture is certainly very popular in the world, Malaysia is no exception too. Coffee houses sprung up in many places and everyone just love to get a cup of coffee when on and off working hour. Perhaps coffee culture gave certain kind of lifestyle definition or maybe the designer loves to drink coffee very much, so they decided to put a cup of coffee on the web design.
It’s a very unique trend in web design as, many examples shown below they not only show coffee but working tools and gadgets as well, for example laptop, drawing tablet, media player and more. This is a way to show the site owner’s personality, and his desire to expand his personal space to web, and to get personal with visitors too. And another similarity is, the site designs also often feature wood texture background too.
Well, actually that is not coffee but tea called “Teh C Peng”, a very famous tea in East Malaysia. More info about the tea here.
Last month I bought an 8GB iPod Touch in order to listen to Learning Japanese podcast when riding train to go work or away from keyboard. I’m absolutely love my iPod Touch very much but certainly it needs cool wallpaper to accompany with. So I stumbled upon this cool site from Pixel Lab, where they release these awesome looking wallpapers for iPhone and iPod Touch, and it’s really perfect for me! š
The wallpaper artworks are actually from their various works, for example the Hard Typographic Artwork Series. I like particularly the third series which is Tree, the treatment of the visual manipulation and playfulness of typography just lovely. The first series: Human and second: Flower are cool too.
Surfing into Pixel Lab’s blog is truly an eye opener to me. Pixel Lab is a very creative team from Japan and they are focused on Flash technology, ActionScript3, 3D, design, photography, visual, original tool and artwork. For most of the work, they use Flash and Fireworks, including the Hard Typographic Artwork Series mentioned above. Like me, you might think those are Photoshop powered, but actually it’s not.
You can view their archives to take a look in their awesome Draw Tools where they built it to construct those such unique visuals. And the good thing is they are so kind that they put it up for us to try it out! I personally tried this DRAW HardMotionBlur, and it was fun! Pixel Lab is cool! š
In January this year, I posted up Dotted World Map vector resource for download, and it became very popular! It has being featured and introduced in many popular sites like Vecteezy, WebAppers, Smashing Magazines, Spoon Graphics, etc.. and even went to the front page of Delicious. Well, now it also appeared as printed format in Hyphen Magazine! š
Don’t you think it looks good on the spread shown above? Hyphen is a national magazine for urban, in-the-know Asian Americans. Covering arts, culture and politics with substance, style and sass, Hyphen has become a media must for one of the fastest growing populations in America. Plus, Hyphen is a nonprofit mag with an all-volunteer staff that does it all for the love. You can support them by subscribing the magazine too.
The Beijing Olympic 2008 has begun and I feel very excited about it! The best athletes from all around the world gathers in Beijing to compete for the best and at the same time, promoting friendship and harmony. “One World, One Dream” is the slogan for this edition of Olympic, I think is very meaningful and beautiful. Besides that, you can too celebrate the Olympic fever at home by set the Olympic 2008 wallpapers on your desktop!
By accessing this download page, you can download a sets of beautiful wallpapers as well as screensavers. I think the wallpapers and screensavers are really nicely done and beautiful. So, head on the page to download! š Plus, if you are interested in Beijing Olympic Image and Look, like the emblem, mascots, pictogram and so on you can go to this page to view too.
Do you know that the image above was made out of Japanese characters? Recently I stumbled upon a very interesting flash site FONTPARK 2.0 by font foundry Morisawa. In FONTPARK 2.0, you can create interesting artwork by using only typography. It’s absolutely freedom on the creation and the only limit is your creativity and imagination!
The interface is totally intuitive and easy to use. You can start creating your artwork by dragging out the characters you want to use at the character selection at bottom of the page. You can have a selections of different beautiful Japanese fonts, and you can even use romaji too. Below shows the basic controls to manipulate the fonts.
I can say it’s a deconstruction and appreciation of the beauty of typography. No doubt you can create really interesting graphic images with type. The fun part is after you finish creating your image, you can save it and FONTPARK 2.0 will give you a permanent link so that you can see the animation process of your masterpiece creation.
The site is truly amazing and beautiful. The site is majorly in black and white color which can give more attention to the aesthetic of type. There’s a gallery shown below where you can see the artworks in thumbnail, and rate them or click it to see the artwork creation process. Some works are really well done.
I’m absolutely have fun when creating the artwork. I’m so amazed by the Japanese characters because it can create so many interesting artwork! The picture below shows my attempts: Butterfly and Carrot, Sports Shoe, Walking Man and Superman. Not bad right? I’m strongly recommend to everyone to try out this site. It’s fun! š
Certainly water plays a vital role in our normal daily life, we simply can’t live without it. Water keeps us fresh and healthy. Plus, water also giving a sense of serenity and symbols of live. Recently, I saw some site designs also incorporating the water elements into the design, which I think is really unique and refreshing.
This marks the fourth edition of the Inspired By Nature series in this blog. Well, I found this water series is very interesting and it’s quite hard to find too. Many sites using water element as background, sidebar elements or simply the whole site was full with water. As you might had guess, the websites with water are majority based on blue color scheme, maybe because of the sea. End of talking, so please have a look the 10 beautiful sites with plenty of water!
The latest site refresh by the pro design team Design Disease. All I can say is the design is just WOW. Daring color scheme and the wavy shapes are really breaking the boxy feels of web design. Brilliant design!
From the previous black and white, Stylized Web now also featuring water inspired design like Design Disease but softer color scheme. Notice that the layers of colors of the sky, sea, and ground to separate out the contents. Brilliant idea!
This is an online portfolio of Luke Larsen, and it looks like a huge aquarium tank! This fishes are really making this site to live. Clean and nice, I like it. Notice the page navigation too.
Ice is also consider as water too. So this site is utilizing the sea surface and the natural iceberg which giving a sense of chilling cold!
Certainly don’t mix up this one with the one above. Unlike Iceberg, Icebrrg’s design was beneath the sea with the sun lights shines through the water.
This is a really unique website design. The designer using the river to depict the sidebar.
Probably the most extraordinary blog design I ever seen. Kulturbanause also featuring water element like the waterfall, which falls from the top of the page to the bottom. Really awesome!
I am very fascinating about this site intro flash movie. The dancing color in the water is very special and worth a look!
It’s summer time! What a cheerful site design. In this site you can make your own screensaver with a self customized bubble character (cute!) and download for own use. It’s a full flash site and the color is really bright and cheerful!
Finally Anessa! Well when think of summer, I will think of sea… and Ebi-chan :P. Recently Oricon conducted a survey also shows that when Japanese people think of summer beauty, they will think of Yuri Ebihara.
Japanese certainly are expert in good looking and cute handwriting style fonts. So, since I wrote about this post a while back, I think it’s time to go hunt for more free Japanese fonts, and the finding was good. I found these 12 really nice handwriting style fonts that are free to use! Banzai!
All these 12 Japanese handwriting fonts here are able to write in Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, as well as Romaji characters and Numbers. There is one even can perform emoji too. So, the font files are quite huge. As usual, I will give you a screenshot of the fonts, as well as the link to the original page and a download link. Many of the fonts are zipped and some of them are zipped in .lzh format. I recommend to use WinRAR to extract it. Here we go.