January 2008 - Jayhan Loves Design & Japan

Nice Japanese drama artists portrait illustration

29 Jan 08

. Japan

Japanese drama artists portrait illustration

Recently I stumbled upon this cool blog yanajun.com which contains the portrait illustrations of popular Japanese artists who acted in the drama series. It already has quite a big collection of illustration and the portraits looks really good and very close to the real person!

The owner of this blog, who has the same name as the website, Yanajun is a currently single man and his working profession involves manga and illustration. His hobby is watching dramas and tv shows so he has this idea of concentrating on illustrating the artists who appear in the dramas.

Creating opacity gradient mask in Flash 8

26 Jan 08

. Tutorial

You need Flash player to view this. Click here to proceed to download page.

I’m a flash user since version MX, it is a very great tool to create interactive web contents. But there is one effect I want to achieve but couldn’t do in Flash: creating opacity mask. But thing had changed. Opacity mask can be done in Flash since version 8! Hopefully I am not too late to know this. Here I am going to tell you how to create opacity gradient mask with just few lines of codes in Flash.

To do this tutorial, you need Macromedia Flash 8 of course and a picture to mask. Before proceed, you can try to feel the opacity mask effect by dragging the masked image in the flash above, and starts the tutorial.

DesignWalker now in English

24 Jan 08

. Resources

DESIGNwalker max: the English version of DesignWalker

DesignWalker is one of my most favorite Japanese design blog and I visit it almost every week. It serves as a diary of the web designer who worked in Los Angeles. The site is full packed with tonnes of collections of web design inspiration and resources that he found around the World Wide Web. I like DesignWalker a lot and recently I just discovered that DesignWalker has its English version. I think this is really a great news!

The English version is call DESIGNwalker max, the look and feel of the both website is almost identical. By checking the monthly archive, this site is just started in January 2008 which is this month, still fresh but it has already have quite some useful post entries. It is another recommended site to visit for web designers!

The irresistible AXE Effect!

23 Jan 08

. Inspiration, Nice Ads

The irresistible AXE Effect!

AXE (or Lynx in UK, Ireland and Australia), is a world famous grooming brand from Unilever. The product line includes deodorants, body sprays, shower gels and a wide range of seductive fragrances. Their marketing campaign is always exaggerating “boys get girls” or opposite sex attraction especially the AXE Effect campaign. It is very eye catchy, naughty, seductive and tonnes of sense of humor!

After applying Axe product on a men’s body, the seductive smell will immediately attracts a crowd of women flying towards you, this is the concept of the AXE Effect campaign. According to AXE, AXE Effect is the internationally recognized named for the increased attention AXE-wearing males receive from eager, and attractive, female pursuers. The concept is simple yet effective because it hits the male’s desire of wanted to be attractive to girls. Below are the showcases of some funny, well executed AXE Effect ads. Imagination is needed.

5 unique free Japanese fonts for download

20 Jan 08

. Typography

5 unique free Japanese fonts for download

Ever fancying of having some cool Japanese fonts instead of using the boring default system Japanese fonts? Well, you are in the right place. Here I found another 5 unique Japanese fonts that is free for download. Why another? This is because I wrote a similar post before which is “Cute Japanese font for download” and successfully helped people to find a more unique Japanese fonts.

It is quite hard to find free Japanese fonts and all the sites are written in Japanese, so if you don’t know Japanese but wish to view and download the fonts, please view my post about “3 smart tools to translate Japanese sites & words” to translate to English.

3 smart tools to translate Japanese sites & words

17 Jan 08

. Japan

3 smart tools to translate Japanese sites & words

Sometimes the good and useful websites are not available in English or any language that we know, for example Japanese language. It could be very frustrating if you think that the information could be useful but you can’t even understand the article. So, translation tools comes in handy in this kind of situation. Here I found three smart ways and tools to help you translate Japanese to English.

Batch Translation

There is several translation engine out there, and by just using one it is not sufficient because it may translate badly. With batch translation tool, you can translate a paragraph with more than one translation engine at the same time. You can compare the translation results and be more clearer on what it actually means.

Happy 23rd birthday to me

15 Jan 08

. General

Happy 23rd Birthday to me

Yes, now I am a 23 years old boy. I was suppose to write this yesterday but I was too hesitate and shy but finally I wrote this out, but edited the post time stamp. So Happy Birthday to me! O-tanjoubi omedetou! 😀

My birthday celebration is rather simple, no cakes no presents, just having a dinner with family, thats it. Maybe this suited my personality because I am a shy and quiet person and doesn’t like to make things big and complicated. I just love simplicity. Well, a few of my old friends also greeted me through text messaging, here I want to say thank you very much.

Year of mouse, listen DE DE MOUSE!

14 Jan 08

. J-Pop, Japan

DE DE MOUSE

According to Chinese Zodiac, 2008 is the year of Mouse (or Rat). Well when relating mouse or rat to popular culture, people might think of cartoon character Mickey Mouse, or last year animation movie Ratatouille or even classic cartoon Tom and Jerry for example. Now please add another member to the list, introducing the unique music world of DE DE MOUSE!

Quoted from Last.fm, DE DE MOUSE is a Japanese Dance/Electronica artist from Tokyo. His musical output is closely linked to and often accompanied by matching artwork, helping to further carve out the respective musical theme. During live performances he relies heavily on the use of visual arts. His music can furthermore be characterised as having an oriental feel. De De Mouse has thus far released an album and an EP going by the names of “tide of stars” (2007) and “east end girl” (2007) respectively.

Shokotan – idol, cosplayer, hardcore blogger

12 Jan 08

. Japan

Shokotan - idol, cosplayer, hardcore blogger

There is three kind of blogs that will impress me: blog that has nice contents, nice blog theme design and the third one is a dedicated blogger that update his or her blog regularly for a long time. Obviously Shoko Nakagawa’s blog falls under the third category, because it is very impressive that on how extremely fast she updates her blog! Averaging 20+ posts per day!

Shoko Nakagawa (中川翔子) or best known as nickname “Shokotan”, is a cute and multi talented Japanese idol. According to Wikipedia, she is active in a variety of field including acting, manga, singing and blogging. Her official blog “Shokotan*Blog” (しょこたん☆ぶろぐ), was started in year 2004 and she treated her blog as her dairy. She update her blog extremely regularly. Her daily best record is 86 updates on February 14, 2007. That means she update her blog every 17 minutes on that day!

Dotted world map vector resource

06 Jan 08

. Resources

dotted world map vector resource download

Here I present you the dotted world map vector free for download. It comes with three different dot sizes which is fine, medium and large to cater for different purpose and needs. This dotted world map is based on the world map resource from Deviant Art, and I overlay a dotted pattern on top and slowly remove the unwanted dots to form the shape of the world. It took me several days to accomplish this but I think it’s worth it!

It’s available as vector in Adobe Illustrator and EPS file hosted on Gumroad. Continue read on to download the map!

Archive for January, 2008

Batch Translation