Feb 15 2009
Adobe Illustrator has become one of the leading products for vector design, especially icon design. But when you start to create your first icon, you have to keep one thing in mind - bitmap or vector? (As the guys of firewheeldesign point out, vector icons are less work than those made with Photoshop. On the other hand, scaled vector graphics don’t look very nice in comparison to icons created with Photoshop) All in all it’s a decison between saving time and getting the best possible quality.
To understand the basics of icon design, read the following articles:
7 Principles of Effective Icon Design by PSDTUTS
10 Mistakes in Icon Design by Turbomilk
Now that you are a bit familar with Icon design - try these tutorials:
Vectortuts.com
Create a Detailed Camera with Photo Icon

Create a Vector Film Slate Icon

Apr 17 2008
You waste your server resources for web applications? Why don’t accept the help of Google. Just a few days ago Google launched its Google App Engine. Being still in beta it allows you to upload your web application on the Google network and use their computational power. With a free account you are already able to use 500MB space, a CPU usage of 200,000,000 megacycles and a maximum of 10GB bandwidth per day. Also you get several other features:
- Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
- Persistent storage
- Automatic scaling and load balancing
- Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
- Fully featured local development environment
Great - Where do I have to sign in?
Google App Engine is still in beta. There were 10,000 beta accounts available but after ca. 3 hours they were all gone. Google already announced that more accounts will follow in the near future. So don’t hesitate to subscribe to the waitlist.
Apr 14 2008
At first what does Ajax mean?
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications. Ajax is asynchronous, in so far as extra data is requested from the server and loaded in the background. This is intended to increase the web page’s interactivity, speed, functionality and usability. Ajax function calls are usually made in Javascript using the XMLHttpRequest object. The asynchronous content doesn’t need to be formatted in XML.
Scripts for your Website
As quite every modern website makes use of at least a bit of Ajax you may want to have a few of those cool effects for your page. So I collected the best scripts for you. All of them are free to use and easy to install.
Lightbox 2 - Lightbox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.
Apr 6 2008
Do you want a special RSS icon for your website? Actually most blogs and newssites have RSS feeds. But many have just a standard button. You might want to show that your are more creative then they are. Use one of these free and fresh RSS icons so that you are in contrast of the masses.
RSS icon pack vol.2

RSS feed by Aaron Ovadia

MycirclesRSS

RSS icon by carlnewton

Feedicons²

Acid RSS by cavin

RSS Owl by balpert

RSS icon by datamouse

RSS icon set from smashingmagazine

3D RSS feeds icon

Circle feeds icons

Free RSS feed icons

Alternative RSS icon by mouserunner

RSS reader icon by twinware