Digital*Impulse

After almost a year in development, involving much tinkering and several re-edits focused on achieving the right look and feel, I present to you my GUI Championships entrant, Reverse IconPackage.

With it’s decidedly future-retro look and grayscale palette, Reverse IP aims to take you back to the era of black & white visuals, and the wonders of emerging technologies of yesteryear but with a decidedly modern flair.

Desktop “tech-noir” styling is now that much closer to achieve with this IconPackage. Read the rest of this entry »

So this year, like the last few years, my family is doing Secret Santas for Christmas.  As a consequence, I’ve been asked to provide a list of items from which the lucky person who has drawn my name out of the proverbial hat can choose from.

I’m somewhat against the whole idea of having to put together a list like this for a couple of reasons; the first being that I don’t believe I’m that difficult to shop for, and secondly, I believe I’m worth having someone spend the 10 minutes it would take to actually think about what I might like.  I’m not that complicated and definitely not that hard to get to know, given a little time.

Yeah, I suppose that could be taken as a little cutting, but if you actually stop to think about what the whole Christmas gift-giving concept is about, you might begin to see my point.

Also, before I delve into a list proper, you should know that I have no prejudice or aversion to you finding ways to save money when shopping for my gift.  Times are hard and finances are strained to the max for many people, so if you’re into buying on eBay, DealsDirect, or any discount store to save a buck, by all means feel free to do so.  Don’t feel as though you *have* to spend big on my account.  And hey, if you think you can make, build, or engineer a gift with your own two hands and save spending money altogether, go right ahead.  Whichever way you choose to come by a gift, I will nevertheless be thankful and appreciative.

So, here you go, lucky SS.  Pick and choose as you will. 

Read the rest of this entry »

So yesterday I didn’t really have much to do, and I was supposed to go see my little brother, Lucas, as it was his birthday.
Since I was on my own for the weekend and the bus service in this city is atrocious on weekends (it’s little better on weekdays, but not by much), I decided it might be a good idea to jump on my bike and ride there.
I’d been meaning to take a good long bike ride for a while now, since I’ve been considering starting to ride to work.  So I saw this as a good opportunity to kill two birds with one stone —I get to check my overall fitness, and visit family at the same time. 

So I checked my Giant XTC mountain bike over to make sure all was in good working order, packed some essentials (repair kit, water, energy bars, digital camera, etc.) in a backpack, donned my cleat shoes, helmet and gloves and headed out.

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Ok, as promised, here’s the very first tutorial for Adobe Fireworks based on the Official Digital*Impulse Desktop Wallpaper I posted up earlier. A couple of things you might want to do before you begin this tutorial:

• Find a nice, thick font you would like to use for your logo. This tutorial will work for almost any typeface you can think of but I tend to think thick fonts look better.
• Have a base colour for your project in mind before you begin.  Believe me, it makes things easier than changing your mind halfway.  I’ve settled on a red colour for the entire composition, so don’t be put off by the blue colour that I start off with. 

Final Image Preview

Here’s a look at the final image we’re going to create.  At the end of part 2, I’ll make available a finished fully-editable copy of the Fireworks PNG file.

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Phew…! 

It’s been a while since I last posted on here, hasn’t it?

Well, I got somewhat discouraged at WordPress and some other stuff and the headaches it was giving me affected my creativity but I think I’ve managed to get that all worked out now.  In addition, my sister’s family came to stay with us for a while so the house was a somewhat busy (and noisy!) there for a while.    My younger brother also graced us with his presence, so it was somewhat of a family get-together.

And on top of that, I’ve been working on some icons for the 2008 GUI Championships. Read the rest of this entry »