I need a Dribbble invitation

As you can see, I need a Dribbble invitation (player).

I have joined this incredible community some time ago but I am disappointed that I can’t post anything there. I’ve seen a lot of pages online that offers “free” invitations but there is mostly scam, as they request likes, posts or other things just to get a small chance to “win” the invitation.Check Out Mountainview Recovery Photos

I don’t know if it is for real or not, I haven’t tried yet, but if you have a Dribbble invitation and you like my work and style, please make me happy. I will advertise you on my website for doing this.

Thank you!

Affordable 3D Presentation Services

Our 3D presentation services are specially designed, in order to provide the best solution for our customer’s needs.

If you need a 3D presentation movie, a scene animation or just the image of a product or building that has not been realized yet, we can help you. We just need the specifications of the product that you need to present and some descriptive details. Basically we make 3D presentations for any kind of product, regardless of its destination: for an advertising campaign, for a website, application or video game.

When your business partners can’t view your product, a 3D presentation may be the best solution. Save time and cost required to see that product in another city, for example, and have much lower development costs than production itself. With the help of the 3D presentations you get a better spatial perception of your product, you can see any detail and you can reduce the production costs by identifying potential problems before the actual execution.

If you have already a building/property that you want to better value it by a new interior redesign, a 3D presentation will help you to get the best decision. Not always your creative and nonconformist ideas can be put in practice. Therefore it is better to know before how will look your new arrangement. You can save time, money and energy that you may consume making a design that finally you may not like.

Any 3D presentation involves 4 steps: modeling, texturing, illumination and rendering. Depending on your project requirements we can emphasize more any of these steps.

What are 3D presentations and what advantages have?

3D presentations are obtained from a three-dimensional graphic creation process using computers and special software. This can be done in the form of still images or videos. The stages of making a 3D project involves: modeling of the objects in the scene, texturing, scene lighting and rendering.

3D Presentations offers a number of advantages over 2D presentation (obtained by drawing and illustration). These include:

  • the ability to obtain images from any angle
  • the colors (textures) and lighting can be easily changed
  • can be done unlimited changes on the settlement and geometry of the objects, at any time, without significantly affecting the execution time of the project
  • the resulting images are realistic and very accurate, based on the exact dimensions of all objects in the scene, using natural perspective
  • can be made animated sequences of the scenes by using interactive 3D technologies

Where and when are 3D presentations used?

The renderings are digital images, made entirely by following a modeling process and digital creation. Therefore they can be easily used in any form, on any media:

  • initial presentation web site
  • complete website
  • digital brochures
  • catalogs and other printed materials
  • identification panels (for construction sites)
  • posters, banners
  • e-mail newsletters

Most times the client needs 3D architectural presentations while the project is still under development. Therefore the 3D production can be divided into several stages that can be synchronized with the phases of construction and promotion. 3D presentations allow great flexibility in their execution. Thus, we give higher priority to certain parts of the project, by developing together with you, real time. In addition there is always the opportunity to make changes without starting the project from scratch.

How we make the prices?

The 3D presentations are complex projects that often involve a series of preparatory or post-processing steps. Generally speaking there are no two projects alike, so we should consider all aspects in order to provide the final price.

First we should know if you need one or multiple renderings or an animation. Then we are interested in the environment you want to display presentations (web, print, posters, projections, etc.). Depending on this we set the dimensions in pixels of the final image.

Another important step is to establish the scene complexity, the level of detail you want and the final image quality.

The price also depends on the elements creation of the project. If we do creative work for various elements of the project or even all the creative work, the cost can be significantly higher than in the case you already have these aspects.

Finally, the price will be decided by the estimated work time, the necessary resources (graphic designers, computing power, etc.) and the number of the final images you want. Anyway, our price will be affordable!

Terms:

rendering, rendering: the process of obtaining an image from a 3D scene
render farm: a series of powerful computers connected together in order to increase the processing power thus decreasing time rendering
3D architectural rendering: the result of a 3D architectural project
3D animation: video result obtained from a 3D scene (fly-through video)

Cheap web design?

I see a lot of offers for cheap web design services, like Get a website for $100! or Free websites, but how much free or cheap are such services?

A website is not just a web presence for your company or an online business card how many are thinking. A website is basically a powerful marketing tool with endless possibilities to get your business known, to sell your products and to share and communicate information with your potential customers.

A website should not be cheap, nor expensive, but efficient! It should be wrapped around your company needs, incorporate the brand strategy, create awareness around your customers, sell and help you to have more and more returning customers.

Even if we talk about e-commerce, presentational websites, portals, news, social or portfolio sites we talk about business! And business means continuous investment. Your website should not be just an acquisition but a strategic measure to expand your offline activity online or to create something meaningful for your business. If you plan to invest just $100 on your business than maybe you should not bother. You can buy a nice chair or a nice painting for your office instead ๐Ÿ™‚

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t say that your website should be expensive! I say that you need to be seriously involved in a web project for your business in order to really succeed! The biggest companies are investing millions in their web services, thousands hours of design and development work and tens or even hundreds of people involved. Scale this down to your business level and have a thought on how much you can do for a good online investment.

Get real web design prices! ๐Ÿ™‚

A typography study on known websites

Typography is very important for websites, mainly because is the best way to help users to read easily and to focus on the important parts of the text. Another aspect of the typography is that it makes the text beautiful and can give the user the needed mood to read and understand the message.

Here is a quick research on what fonts and font sizes are using some of the best known websites by designers:

apple.com

Apple is using Lucida Grande and Lucida Sans Unicode as primary fonts, starting with a font size of just 10px for the footer links, 12px for some elements like the secondary menu, 14px – 16px for paragraphs and 22px – 24px for most of the headings, excepting those displayed as pictures.

google.com

Google is a lot more classy, using Arial as primary font and small font sizes (12-13px). Even YouTube is using the same standards. Other Google pages are using another font: open sans and more appealing headings and styles.

smashingmagazine.com

This well known website uses Proxima Nova with fallback to Helvetica Neue and Arial. The headings font is Skolar. The font size for paragraphs is 16px, and 32px for the headings.

twitter.com

Twitter is using Helvetica Neue with Arial fallback for the content pages. The most common font sizes are 14px and 16px for paragraphs and 40px – 20px for headings.

graphicriver.com

Graphicriver as well as other Envato websites is more conservative by using Tahoma and small fonts (13px) for paragraphs, but for the big headings is using ProximaNovaSoft font and 38px size, while other headings have 24px and Helvetica Neue.

 

Pinterest is the fastest growing website?

You didn’t known much about Pinterest until a few months ago, don’t you? Then you may not know that it is the fastest growing website in the world!

Pinterest interface

Here is some history:

The project started back in December 2009 and the first beta release was made in March 2010. Although the start up was slow and painful (one of the founders personally wrote the first 5000 invitations), Pinterest had it’s first 10,000 users after just 9 months. After that, the investors tried to sell Pinterest to a magazine publishing company from New York, but the deal was not even discussed because of no interest from the publisher. They had no way of knowing what’s about to come next!

On March 2011 the Pinterest team released an iPhone app that brought a lot of traffic, much more than anticipated, following that on December 2011 Pinterest will enter in the top 10 largest social websites, with 11 million visits per week.

Nowadays the company raised $120 million in funding, is moving in a large building and is passing $1.5 billion on the stock market. Awesome isn’t it?

And for your own knowledge, most of the Pinterest’s traffic is made by women: just over 80%!

I personally use Pinterest for inspiration, curiosity and image sharing. I find it very intuitive and easy to use, but more important very relaxing. Maybe this is why it is growing so fast. Now I am just curious what will happen next.

Simple web elements – free download

It is very useful when I need something nice but free for my working project or just to learn how others do it, and I search on Google and find it! Now is my turn to start giving something back to the community, and here it is!

Simple Web ElementsI’ve done a simple web elements design that seems to be very appreciated on deviantArt, counting over 2000 downloads in 6 months. You can download it for free here by clicking on the Download File link.

The included elements are:

  • buttons
  • form elements (select, textarea, checkbox, radio)
  • newsletter box
  • error messages
  • slider

I hope to enjoy it and feel free to comment here or on my deviantArt page. I have more interesting stuff to share with you in the near future, and I also recommend you to share all the valuable stuff you can. Someday good things will happen because of that ๐Ÿ™‚

Outsourcing, outsourcing, outsourcing…

Outsourcing is probably the best solution in the world for cheap but quality web design and development services.

The advantages of web design outsourcing are many for both contractors and clients:

  • the ability to provide services at a cheaper price while still keeping both the qualityย  and profitability
  • both parts can communicate by email, voice or chat anywhere on the globe – there is no need to be physically in touch
  • there are a lot of freelancers and companies available
  • there are many specialized websites that are connecting the clients with the providers
  • you can work securely using milestones and escrows
  • as client you can get a lot of proposals to choose from, before starting the work on the project.
  • there are a lot of projects and clients on the market
  • outsourcing is very scalable, so you can work for short periods of time or long term, with one ore more customers or providers

There are also some drawbacks about outsourcing:

  • the lack of control, people involved being less attached to the project
  • there can be problems with privacy and security when working with overseas teams
  • communication can be a problem because of the language differences and time zone.

Here are the best online outsourcing websites:

How quickly we will design more for mobile than for PC’s?

Seems that mobile traffic is massively increasing lately. As a consequence there are a lot of online publications like Smashing Magazine that are writing more and more about mobile design, apps, tablets, responsive design and other related stuff.

Sooner or later we will put the mobile design in front of any other interface design, as the people will use the portable devices a lot better.

As UI and UX designer, I have noticed that designing for mobile devices is more fun and interesting. Why? Because the screen size limitation, the lack of a standard resolution, slow Internet connections, and poor support of JavaScript or Flash, puts me in the situation to better focus on the content and functionality. Basically, a mobile site is a lot more straightforward for both the users and the designer.

There is a lot of evidence on the web about the increasing mobile traffic. Today more than 10% of world’s web traffic is from mobile devices, Asia being the most developed this way (18%).

Year after year, the mobile traffic gets more than double, having a growth rate higher than anticipated.

Most than half of the mobile data traffic is currently used by video streaming websites like YouTube.

There are also rumors that by 2016 every man, woman or child from the planet will have at least one mobile device.

Analyzing these figures, I think that is clear for anyone that mobile Internet is the future, and we as web designers should prepare for this transformation!

To be continued…

How important is the screen size and resolution for designers?

The display is the most important interface between the designer and his work. The quality and size of the screen is more important when we deal with prints, but also for photo retouching and video editing. However, the web design can be done using middle-range displays, because most of the people don’t have high quality ones, so it can be more accurate. This doesen’t mean that better screens can’t be used, just isn’t mandatory.

Apple Thunderbolt 27 inch LCD

I don’t know what others prefer, but I am a fan of large displays. For the moment I work on a 24″ full hd display and a 22″, both TFT LCD’s using TN technology but one with LED backlight. I hope to get an update to 27″ IPS display soon ๐Ÿ™‚

Here are some large high quality displays that I recommend for graphics design:

  • Dell UltraSharp U2711
  • HP ZR2740w 27 inch
  • HP XW476A4 27 inch
  • Apple Thunderbolt Display 27 inch
  • Apple Cinema Display 27 inch

A very important characteristic of a computer screen is the panel type. For designers I strongly recommend IPS displays, as they have very good viewing angles and color reproduction.ย  You can read more about IPS techonology here.

Bare in mind that very large displays have very large resolutions. For example 27 or 30 inch lcd’s usualy have 2560×1440 or even 2560×1600 pixels resolution, so the video card must be very good in order to render quality images at this size.

A feature very important for print industry but also for web si the “pivot” function, so the display can be rotated 90 degrees verticaly (from landscape to portrait mode).