Study in UK for FREE!

How cool is that? Actually that is possible. There are a lot of scholarship programs available for post grad students. One of them is the Chevening Scholarship program that allows you to select a 1-year master’s degree.

The minimum qualifications are based on their website:

• an applicant is a Filipino, Marshallese, Micronesian, or Palauan national
• has attained a local/international degree
• has two years work experience in your chosen career
• applicant should also be committed to returning to the applicant’s home country after the period of study

I guess the more experience you have, the more qualified you are. The best thing with Chevening is that the scholarship covers all the costs of the period of study. This includes academic fees, monthly stipend and airfares to and from the UK. It ain’t cool right? It’s SUPER cool.

Check out more information here. Take note though that applications must be submitted before 15 October 2009.

I’m excited!

Just this week I posted in my YM status “I’m excited” and a lot of people asked me what was I am excited of. No one actually got the right answer. I was excited because finally my design for my latest web design project is done! (OA no? haha)

It’s quite an achievement for me because I finally was able to design something on my own. I implemented the things I learned in reading design blogs such as spacing and typography. I took me a lot of rearranging and mimicking ideas from other websites (I admit – I’m a second rate trying hard copycat! hehe.. not too ashamed, it’s just the way I start brainstorming ). I also asked a friend to do some of the images and logo and I also spent a lot of time in istockphoto. It took me 5 iterations to finally come up with something I am happy.

After seeing the converted design to HTML, it felt awesomeness to the max! I’m pretty much happy about it(I bet you can tell). I guess when I turn to my 30′s I’ll shift to design!

I guess the most important thing that made me happy about this project is because I had a goal beforehand. I knew who it was for, what basic elements and blocks that should be included and I knew why the project exist. I had several attempts to come up with any design in the past but I always failed. I think even you’re equipped with a lot of know-how but there is no a real value or goal in a design project or any project, it will always fail. Failure in the sense of your not able to satisfy something. Is it just me or am I not alone? Do you always have that great idea pop up out of nowhere? I’m interested to hear.

CSS Font Size and Family Cheatsheet

Here is a cheatsheet for Conversion from Points to Pixels (and Ems and %) and List of Web Safe Fonts. I did not create them, I got them from other sites and the original links are included for reference. It’s just handy when I have to convert PSD designs to HTML.

Download cheatsheet

New theme for a new year (2009)

Happy New Year!! It’s that time of the year again when it’s ok to always start something new. I’d like to say goodbye to my old orange skin and hello to the new Petixe! The theme is a free wordpress template from WooThemes and I just love the outline. It is clean and elegant although I still find it a bit boring in terms of color. I like bold, bright colors so I will probably tweak this a little more in the coming days.. or maybe months?.

My first plan was to create a minimalist design after getting a little hooked on it. I saw Vitor Lourenço work and I am just liking his style. I have started my design in paper but got stucked with Veerle’s tutorial on manipulating pen in AI (bummer). I got a bit frustrated so I decided to just settle on a free template for the meantime since I don’t want 2010 to come before I change my theme. I still hope this year I could atleast finish 1 design (added in my new year resolution).

What do you think about the new design? What about minimalist style just like in Lourenço’s work?

Business Card Winning Pieces

I just can’t get over the winning pieces title! haha! Oh well.. I received today my prizes for the business card raffle draw/contest held by octwelve and sponsored by Uprinting. I’m very happy with the outcome of my design and the quality of Uprinting’s cards.

Now I need to think how to distribute the 250 pieces of them… I hope you got the idea of how I got the title of winning PIECES (*corny* )

Thanks again Uprinting and Octwelve!

Japanese letters or words?

This is just funny. I do not know if they are real or not.

Source

How I ended up creating my own Business Card

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

Teamsugar’s Fixed Background

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:

[css]
#footer {
background: transparent url(images/bot_back.gif) no-repeat scroll center;
height: 32px;
}
#footer2 {
background: #fff none repeat scroll 0%;
}
[/css]

And the HTML:

[html]

[/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!

Wood background becoming a trend in Web design?

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?

Tattoes for your desktop

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!