Author Archive

Do you think like a programmer?

. General

Do you think like a programmer?

Few days back I came across this interesting flash game call Light Bot. In this game, you will use a sets of key actions and functions to “program” the robot character to the blue squares and light them up. Soon I played the first few levels, immediately got addicted to it. The levels are getting more and more difficult and challenging until the end and I actually manage to pass them all! So, I think like a programmer?

Well, actually I do like to think and I like puzzle games very much. Games like Light Bot or Portal is my personal favorite types of games because I like to solve problems. The more difficult the more I like it. When successfully pass a level, I will be very happy for it. The process of problem solving is very exciting and sometimes tough too, but it’s a enjoyable process overall. Just like when designing things, it has the similar process, to think of what kind of design that provide best solution, and normally it takes several tries to achieve.

Everyone can think like a programmer, just that you have to think what works best to pass the level and never give up! But well, it’s just a game anyway, please enjoy! šŸ˜€

6emeia – Blending street with art

. Art & Design

6emeia - Blending street with art

Everyday people walk on the streets. There are so many street elements that many people taking for granted, for example manhole, storm drains, light posts, and more that form the street. They are something that people won’t care about but for street artists group 6emeia, it is something special for them. They decided to blend them with art and redefine their role in street.

6emeia consists of two members – Anderson Augusto and Leonardo Delafuente who lives in SĆ£o Paulo, a city without commercial ads. The aim of 6emeia is to modify the means within which we all live, and proposing a new way to view things by reflecting upon themes generated through creative and unusual works. Normally their street art works can be found on the storm drains and manholes. For example, putting a character on the storm drains and the drain entrance become the mouth of the character, and using the natural shapes of the manhole and make it into food.

6emeia artworks are truly amazing and having a sense of humor too. I think two of them are really creative and unusual, I can’t even think of blending such street elements into art and giving them life and new meaning. The works are cute and fun, I think everyone will like them at first sight. Below are some of their works, for more works you can visit 6emeia’s homepage.

6emeia works 1

6emeia works 2

6emeia works 3

Picture credits: 6emeia

Colorful website designs

. Inspiration, Web Design

Colorful website designs

Color is one of the critical aspect in any design field. Different color and give different feeling and meaning and different color combination can give different mood to the viewer too. Great selection of color and make the design memorable, while bad selection of color can bring misconception and disaster to the outcome. So for me, color is a very deep discipline and cannot take it for granted. But today I’m going to show you a selections of colorful websites that displays great example of color usage yet harmony in outcome.

Colorful does not just restrict to bright and cheerful color, for me even combination of cold colors can be considered as colorful too. To create colorful designs, one can use high contrast colors or complementary color to bring out the color sharpness, or by using analogous colors to create a more harmonic tone of colors. Besides, tints, shades, gradient, textures richness also can bring out the sense of color variety too. Ok, enough talking, now let the do the talking instead.

Hanachimiya.jp

Hanachimiya.jp

adproject

adproject

meomi cloud house

meomi cloud house

Ecokids

Ecokids

Electrico – Everybody’s Here

Electrico - Everybody's Here

Vakendod

Vakendod

Hello Sour Sally!

Hello Sour Sally!

Madame Surto

Ecokids

Web Design Rajkot

Web Design Rajkot

Foccaland: Art Director.

Foccaland: Art Director.

Ed Peixoto

Ed Peixoto

Brad Candullo

Ed Peixoto

AdaptD.com

AdaptD.com

Jet

Jet

alisa.mtv.ru

alisa.mtv.ru

Novo Ford Ka

Novo Ford Ka

My dropped <hr> contest entry

. General

Last month, Smashing Magazine held an interesting competition about designing creative horizontal rules. I participated the competition and hopefully to be shortlisted or at least be part of this special event. Recently the contest was revealed and I’m very eager to find whether my entry was in or not. It was a long post with tonnes of refreshing horizontal graphics submitted by many other designers… but.. when scrolling down the page, I can’t find my work. My entry was dropped!

Well I felt quite sad and disappointed, because I’m quite confident with my design.. But nevermind, I will share with you here. Below is my design which consists of 5 pieces of graphics. My concept is the normal horizontal rule is just a horizontal line separator, why not having a sequence showing small little story? Basically this is the idea.

Jayhan HR 1

Jayhan HR 2

Jayhan HR 3

Jayhan HR 4

Jayhan HR 5

Above are the horizontal sequence. Although I think the design it’s not quite practical but because of the competition, I want design come out with something unique. Ahh, just plain unlucky. šŸ˜‰

Hi, Google Chrome!

. General

Hi, Google Chrome!

Well recently the hottest news that floated around the Internet world, without a doubt is Google launching their own web browser call Google Chrome. Without left behind, I myself also downloaded a copy, installed it and have a try on this sweet browser. Wow, it is fast!

I really enjoy using Google Chrome because it was lightweight, does not consume a lot of background resources, and the response is quick. I really love it despite it is still just a beta released browser. Just one thing that I’m not getting used to it is that the “Stop Loading” button was located at the far right side of the address bar. This is because normally the default “Stop Loading” button was located at the left side of browser, beside refresh button.

I think the future version of Chrome will have more useful features to look more complete and well rounded like FireFox. FireFox is still my main web browser to use, but it seems to be slower and eating more RAM resources. Maybe it is because of all the add-ons I installed that cause this. But I just hope it can be quicker like Chrome.

Although Google Chrome is new but I think it has huge potential to cruise forward, competing against the modern browser war.

Learn new Japanese words with Rikaichan

. Japan

Normally I will surf Japanese sites to get information. But I have a problem here: those sites contains a lot of words that I can’t figure it out what it means (thanks to my low level of Japanese language knowledge). But with the help of Polarcloud’s Rikaichan, I am now able to learn new words and understand what the word means! šŸ˜€

Rikaichan is a great Firefox extension that can help users to learn new Japanese words. Just click on this link or this to download the extension. Then you have to download one of the Japanese dictionary shown in picture below. Download them and restart browser to activate them.

Install Rikaichan

Well now in your browser’s Tools menu, it should have “Rikaichan” and “Rikaichan Lookupbar” there. Well there is a quick “Rikaichan” link at right click menu too. To use it, just simply activate it by selecting “Rikaichan” and then rollover on the Japanese words. A popup explanation appears below the word you rollover. The closest meaning will normally appears at the top position. To deactivate Rikaichan, just select Rikaichan again at the Tools menu or right click menu.

Rikaichan in action

For more detail explanation, you can use Rikaichan Lookupbar. When pasting text into the toolbar, it will popup the word’s explanation as well as individual kanji (Chinese character) break down, like in picture below. I think it’s a great way to learn kanji. Plus, you can also refer this page to learn how to use Rikaichan.

Rikaichan Lookupbar in action

Overall, I think Rikaichan is a great tool to learn new Japanese words, and I’m really recommend this tool to all Japanese learners.

Create simple light stripes effect in Photoshop

. Tutorial

Create simple light stripes effect in Photoshop

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.

Continue reading

Coffee in web design

. Web Design

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.

Freshivore

Freshivore

Dann Whittaker Creative

Dann Whittaker Creative

Ernesto Graf

Ernesto Graf

GNV & Partners

GNV & Partners

Point of Entry

Point of Entry

Simple.art

Simple.art

Stan Gursky

Stan Gursky

tehCpeng.net

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.
tehCpeng.net

Free iPhone, iPod Touch wallpaper by Pixel Lab

. Downloads, Inspiration

Free Iphone, Ipod Touch wallpaper by Pixel Lab

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! šŸ˜€

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.

Hard Typographic Artwork Series

An eye opener

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! šŸ˜€

DRAW HardMotionBlur

Dotted world map in Hyphen Magazine

. General

Dotted world map in Hyphen magazine

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! šŸ˜€

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.