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Learn Cool Japan, Kanji and Casual Japanese and more – book review part II

Book review part II

On the previous post, I have read the book Cool Japan Guide, and today I’m going to introduce four more interesting Japanese related books, published by Tuttle Publishing.

These four books are: “Making out in Japanese”, “Cool Japan Guide ~Fun in the land of manga, lucky cats and ramen~”, “Japanese Kanji Made Easy: Learn 1000 kanji and kana the fun and easy way” and “Japanese Design: Art, Aesthetics & Culture”. Without further ado, continue reading to find out more about them!

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“Tokyo: Capital of Cool” – book review part I

Cover Photo of Tokyo: Capital of Cool book by Robb Goss

Tokyo is the capital of Japan and is one of the most beautiful, bustling, busiest cities in the world. Tokyo is such a diversified destination with so many different lifestyles and cultures breathing under it, it’s difficult to describe it with just one word. But all can agree that Tokyo is the capital of Cool!

Today I want to introduce a new book called “Tokyo: Capital of Cool”, authored by Rob Goss. This book is really useful to foreigners from around the world who plan to travel to Tokyo, Japan to witness its coolness. It briefly talks about what Tokyo is about and showcasing the uniqueness of different sightseeing locations within different parts of Tokyo. Each page comes with a mix of images and text and you will be amazed at how crazy cool Japan is.

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Code4Startup – Learn to code by cloning real startup projects

Code4Startups

From time to time you will be hearing advices that if a person wants to be good, first he/she needs to imitate, copy or learn from other good examples. Yup, this is actually a very practical example. You need to learn from others in order to discover and establish your own creation.

This applies to the world of coding too. And recently, I stumbled upon this learning website Code4Startup from Product Hunt that you can learn to code with front-end and back-end technologies by cloning popular real life startup projects.

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Panic! April 21st Google Search “Mobile Optimisation” update. What should I do?

Google Malaysia HQ

So, last Wednesday I went to the Google Webmaster event, and the presenter told us that on the April 21st 2015, Google will roll out the latest update on the search engine ranking algorithm, that mobile-friendliness will become a ranking signal. What that means is that, a mobile-friendly website will rank higher than those are not when you search with Google using your mobile devices.

According to Entrepreneur Magazine, for all this while Google has not been very clear on how mobile friendliness of a website could affect the ranking, but with the April 21st update, it will become a main factor. And also by the uprising trend of mobile users surpassing the desktop users, modern websites should be mobile friendly.

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101Photography – Free Sketch & PSD Portfolio Theme for Photographers

101photography

Yay freebies! Today I want to show you the latest freebies that you can download for free! This is 101Photography, a minimalist portfolio theme for photographers. It has a total of 7 pages, created in both Adobe Photoshop (PSD) and Sketch format.

Well this is actually a proposed website design for a client, but it’s not being used. So, I decided to release it for free. The feature of this portfolio design is the picture holder effect, like those old photo album. The overall look and feel is minimal with vintage flavour, and a mix of flat and skeuomorphic design.

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It’s time to use Flexbox and here’s where to learn

Flexbox

After we said goodbye to the good old table layout, CSS float has been the go-to method when dealing with web layouts. By default, block elements are stacked from top to bottom, but with CSS float and some other useful properties, we designers are able to code the layout as according to our design. However CSS float has many shortcomings and until now there are still no easy way to achieve certain layout.

Perhaps one of the most frustrating thing is how to make a block centered horizontally and vertically. Well certainly there are many solutions to it as explained on CSS-Tricks, but there are still a lot of conditions to meet. But with the new CSS Flexbox, it will solve many problems and change the way to create layouts.

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14 sites to download high quality commercial free stock photos

14 sites to download high quality commercial free stock photos

Image plays an important role in expressing mood and setting the tone for various designs. From the past, high quality stock images are really hard to come by but in recent years, more and more photographers are sharing their photographs for free and normally under Creative Commons Zero license, which means you can do anything you want with the images, including personal and commercial projects.

Stock Snap

StockSnap is the best place on the internet to find beautiful free stock photos that does not require attribution. Hundreds of carefully picked high quality stock photos will be uploaded weekly by the site authors.

Stock Snap

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Best of 2014 and predictions for 2015

Best of 2014 and predictions for 2015

Happy New Year guys! 2014 has comes to an end and I wish everyone to have a great year 2015 ahead! As the tradition of this blog, every end of the year I will gather around the “best of” links around the web and put them into one post. This years I have gathered best links ranging from best design resources, identity redesigns, mobile apps to user experience and more.

Not only that, I also gathered a few post about trend prediction for year 2015. Continue reading this post to find out those links!

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2014: Year In Review

2014: Year In Review

Time travels like a bullet and now 2014 is coming to an end in just few more days. How was your year of 2014? Hope you enjoyed your year with happiness. For me, it was my final year before stepping into 30s in age. Lots of ups and downs but I cherished every moment of it. And you now what, I actually went to Japan again few weeks back to see the autumn leaves. Autumn leaves, are indeed very beautiful.

This year, many big tech companies published their version of Year In Review to reflect back the big things and happenings that occurred in 2014. Continue reading to find out more.

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4 sites for your flyer design inspiration fix

Flyer at abstract.jp

Today I stumbled upon a gallery that is dedicated to flyer designs: Today’s Flyer (今日のフライヤー). It has a Pinterest-like layout where you can see many good flyer designs in masonry grid layout format. The site features not only flyers from Japan but also around the world too. The flyers are tagged so you can quickly find flyer designs of the specific style.

According to the creator, @tet, he thinks that flyer designs should be treated as a work of art that reflects the society’s style of living and also the cultures, but surprisingly it was often taken for granted and normally will be just thrown to trash can. So he created this site in order to appreciate the flyer designs and to leave them as memory.

Examples of flyers featured on Abstract.jp

Besides his sites, there are many other websites and portals that you can look for cool and inspiring flyer designs, like below:

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