84colors

The Fine Realty website is finally online and I thought it would be intersting to share some of the behind the scenes work that went on.

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As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I am a self-taught web designer and I often get messages from people who want to change careers or just want to get started web design industry don’t know how exactly how to do that or what sort of knowledge is required from a web designer today.

There are so many great resources available on the internet that it seems to be quite a daunting task telling apart the good from the bad and what’s the proper place and order to get started. I hope this guide will help with that.

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From the Fireworks CS6 default Styles panel. Ha, the one with the glowing blue outline is particularly fetching.

I finished a new painting this week!

I was stuck with it for a while because couldn’t get the shade of red to pop out the way I wanted so I was just redoing it over and over again. Eventually it came to me that maybe I should work on making the background darker instead and leave the rose alone for a while. Here are some shots of the work in progress:

the rose painting at different stages

I have my hands on 2 dribbble invites I want to give away to two awesome designers! (If you don’t know what dribbble is, then this is not the post for you).

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A while ago, I was approached by .net magazine to contribute to their web design build-off section.

In the build-off, they give a general short breif to 3 designers and then publish their designs along with a short one page explination of that design. In this case the theme was restaurant websites and you can see my outcome below.

in the printed magazine

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This holiday season I shot some photos while taking a little break from the Christmas table.

If you’re interested in the technical details, they were shot with a Canon 100mm macro lens and a Canon 7D, using natural light and the christmas tree lights.

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So, why the new look?

Like I mentioned in the previous post, a lot of things happened in the past 3 years in the web design industry. IE6 is finally dead, HTML5 and CSS3 have made big leaps in browser support, mobile traffic is quickly on the rise, we now have HD (or retina) screens in smartphones and laptops and Flash is pretty much dead too. So it was time for a refresh.

Here are a few other things I wanted to do with my new site:

• I felt that the old design competed too much for attention with the main focus of my portfolio, which is, well, the actual work in the portfolio. The homepage was particularly tricky to update with a new featured project.
• I wanted to update the typography and try out some BIG bold fun fonts
• I wanted to improve the experience while browsing my portfolio. Now all projects are on one page and are easier to scan. The background is light and less busy and makes the screenshots pop.
• more optimized for mobile browsing and reading. While it’s not a responsive design (which I don’t believe it’s a cure-all solution for a good mobile experience), it has less graphics (so it shouldn’t suck too much on HD displays), it’s faster to load, less http requests, no more flash, larger and more readable fonts, one column layout for blog.

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