Our so-called ‘design community’

Last week Skype announced a design competition asking designers to submit chat styles for their recently released and somewhat controversial Skype 5 client.  The new interface design had been in open beta for a few months, and featured a consolidated single window with a contacts sidebar, and a default style that had a frankly rather ridiculous amount of padding on nearly every element.

7 Photoshop efficiency tips

Photoshop is an immense application, packed full of so many features that almost no one will ever discover them all, or how to use them to their full potential.  With so many features also comes a bunch of shortcuts and hotkeys, which are often hidden away in documentation, and in my experience, most people only use things recommended by other people, or things they find by accident.

So here are the shortcuts and various bits of trickery I use literally every single day in Photoshop, to make life just a little bit less painful.  Some may seem so simple that ‘everyone should know THAT one’, but that’s not the case.  If even 10 people find something new here that helps their workflow, then my mission has been accomplished.

Pure CSS Twitter Fail Whale

Click through to the full article to see a picture of the ever-vigilant Twitter ‘Fail Whale’ fully rendered using CSS.  If you’re using a Webkit browser (Safari or Chrome), it should also be animated using the webkit-animation CSS functions.  If you are viewing in IE8 or below, well, this isn’t an experiment for you.

The idea for this came to me this morning after being greeted first thing this morning by another Twitter outage.  I’d been looking for something to stretch my CSS muscles on, and the Fail Whale seemed perfect.  Also I think the animation only adds to his (or her?) charm.