It’s been almost one year since Apple released the Retina MacBook Pro, the first device produced for the masses that is not a mobile phone or tablet and offers a screen with an incredibly high pixel density. While almost all major apps for OSX have been updated already to appear in a super crisp look, the web still isn’t retina ready at all. Most web designers and developers out there still produce low-resolution content for the web – which is a bad thing, because retina actually matters.
On the 7th November 2012 I shut down my side project called "FireworksLab" which was a classical free design resources site for Adobe Fireworks files. It’s been a while but I finally got some free time to explain why I shut it down last year.
Recently, I was thinking about some ways to increase my earnings and also handle the increased amount of inquiries I’m getting every week. Since I’m charging my clients for the time I spent working on their projects (classical hourly rates), the most obvious way is to just increase these rates, which results in higher-paid projects and probably fewer clients. After some time thinking about different models on how to charge a client for my freelance work, I developed a different approach, which I'm going to explain in this post.
In the third issue of my CSS series, I will describe how to generate ellipse shaped box-shadows without using any images and with minimal markup. This technique will help you, with just a few lines in CSS3, to build on a very popular design trend.
More than a year ago, I published the iOS Design Cheat Sheet, a collection of useful data about iOS devices and things you have to keep in mind when designing something for iOS. Since the last update of my Cheat Sheet, a lot has changed in the world of Apple’s mobile devices. Designers now have to deal with a retina resolution iPad, and a new 16:9 format iPhone 5.
Around a half year ago, I quit my full time job at a creative agency in Stuttgart, Germany. I went straight into full- time freelance work and I‘ve never looked back. In this article, I want to share my thoughts about being a freelance designer as it may be a useful resource for others who want to become independent someday or who are already freelance.
In the second issue of this little CSS series, I want to show you how to create perfect inputs by using a lot of box shadows. Even if the input has an optical border, we won‘t use the border property here to achieve some nicer aesthetics.
I‘m starting a small tutorial series on my blog entitled “Going crazy with CSS3“. In each issue, I will describe a technique to achieve some special effects with CSS3. I‘m not trying to show you basic tutorials, but only techniques for edge cases, which are really helpful when you want to take your user interface to the next level. In the first Issue, I will cover a simple technique: how to create a CSS3 button with a linear gradient border.
Not long ago, I launched a new version of my portfolio and blog design. Now, around a half-year later, I'm doing it again. I completely redesigned my whole site.
I launched my new website around six months ago. Even though I was really satisfied with the result, I wanted to take it to the next level, making it more beautiful and usable for my clients and for readers of my blog. Today I‘m rolling out all the changes I‘ve made over the last month. Say hello to the theme that I‘ve called White Aurora 2.5 and explore all the new details!
When it comes to user interface design, Adobe Fireworks is an excellent tool for laying out your ideas and also for creating cutting edge graphics for your App/Website. Like in any other graphic software, there are different ways to create one effect. However, the result doesn‘t always look the same for each method. In this article, I want to show you how to achieve real pixel perfection in your designs.
During the last months and years we have seen countless posts on popular Blogs about which application is better – Fireworks or Photoshop. In some cases this was just useless bashing of one product, whilst in other cases there were some good points regarding when and why to use one of these Applications rather than the other.
When you are designing a lot of applications for Apple’s touch devices like the iPhone or iPad you often have to follow some conventions regarding sizes or radii of Icons, Buttons or Tables. Because it is always a big time loss if you have to search on the Web for this information again and again, I’ve put the most important specifications into a nice iOS Design Cheat Sheet.
After around two weeks of late night, Energy drink-fueled, designing and coding, I am very proud to unveil my latest website today. The old site has been completely redesigned and you can see the new design live now. I’ve called the latest version “White Aurora”.