One of my friends opened up the importance of business card to be included as one of our swiss knife when going out. As a matter of fact, I gained some business because of referrals. So I decided to have a new one because the previous card I had looks awfully bad! The text looks it was washed away by water. I went to the mall last week but instead of bringing home a card, I cam home with a pissed off feeling. I was just complaining about the quality of the provider’s print because I had already a previous bad experience on that but instead of giving me an alternative or solution (or I could have accepted a smile), the crew answered me back with sarcasm. I do not think I’m that harsh to get that remark from her. Oh well, some crew just doesn’t understand how to get business.

That night, I researched on how to create a printer-friendly design using Photoshop and I came to this and this sites. The only thing you need to know is to set your Resolution to 300 and color mode to CMYK. The latter tutorial explains it well that I was able to create following designs.

Click to see a bigger picture

Which one do you like best? I’m not going to print them in papers though, greater than 1 colors in a business card is just expensive but I don’t want to throw them just like that. I’ll create a minimalistic version when I’ll have the chance. Still, I’ll appreciate your thoughts

Every website I visit, I always tend to look at the design first before the content. Maybe this is my way to free myself from tiring programming tasks. And to add to that, I am a self-confessed artist with no gift of arts! So my tendency is just to watch artists do it

Last week, someone told me to checkout teamsugar. At first, there was nothing extraordinary. When I started to scroll down its long page, I felt something was different then I noticed that the gradient-drop-shadow background consistently follows but when I reached the end, I can see the closure line. I just thought it was amazing since I haven't seen something like that before. I was asking was it javascript or plain css? Today, I found the answer.

To break the excitement, the only key for this magic is background-attachment which is a CSS property. No javascript!

The background-attachment property determines if a specified background image will scroll with the content or be fixed with regard to the canvas.

Sound straightforward right? The only question remaining now is how scrolling ends when we reached the footer section? Stupid me but the answer was simple! Just cover it with an image. Here is the css:

And the HTML:

Feel free to play with it here.

That sums it up, I still have a lot of things to learn and I'll take them one step at a time. For today, background-fixed is my baby!

Aside from the grunge style that got the interests of designers, I found a few sites, mostly portfolios, that has common theme -- wood designs. Was it or is it or will it be the new trend this year? Below are the 22 out of 29 websites I found interesting.

aj-design.cn

alexbuga.com

carsonified.com

chamadigital.com

cssem.com

davidhellmann.com

destinationorganic.co.nz

eighty4.ca

freshlypainted.co.uk

hidalgofoto.net

ianfarish.com

kendo.bg

labarraca.es

nanamiart.com

nebonmedia.com

parketykulik.cz

philippe.plaideux.free.fr

thirdandgrand.com

tff4.com

volume5.co.uk

vslashm.com

whoism.ca

What can you say?

I am always amazed by tattoe artworks and when I saw this one my curiosity arose more. By searching the web, I found out that you can create your own artwork with these free brushes and this. I tried to do some but I couldn't make one that I'll be proud to post here but maybe you could. Just a warning, the brushes are quite big in size (I wanted to load them all but my pc just hangs ) Also, because they are free, they have terms on using it so please be sure to read them as well if your planning on using it other than for personal use.

Enjoy!