After moving house and finally getting settled, I can finally get back to my blog. Look forward to updating really soon.

I am a Graphic Designer working for a sportswear company in Australia. At present, our company has been inundated with work that needs to be out yesterday. I’ve been working 12-13 hour days and have not had much time for my site of late, but soon that will change. Don’t lose hope as I will be back with more really soon. I will try to make an update every 2nd day or so to keep things fresh around here. Thanks for sticking around and if you have suggestions let me know.

When I’m re-drawing logo’s for clients, or even checking out some web sites for inspiration, I often get a font that I think “What Is That?”. I often eliminate the usuall suspects (Arial, Tahoma, Impact, Times New Roman etc.) but then I’m left with over 2000 choices. To speed the process up, I use a great tool that’s free on the net. Identifont.com is the website I use. Now I know there are plenty of Font identification websites out there, but I find this particular one suits my needs as I believe it will suit others.

It’s simple to use, you just hit the Identify Font link on the front page and you can insert (Case Sensitive) the characters that you have of the font. From there, you will be asked a series of questions that will help narrow their list down for you. I’ve found that most of my searches yield about 30 choices for what the font maybe, and ussually it’s in the first five. Check out their website if you need identification for those nasty hard to find fonts.

http://www.identifont.com

Are you looking for a good source of stock photography for that next project? DeviantArt is a great site for aspiring and accomplished artists and they also offer stock photography in their resources section. This is fantastic and can yeild some results that are hard to find in other places. Check out the link below, and find some usefull stock images. As usual, read the terms deemed by the artists and follow their wishes. Don’t rip them off. Enjoy.

Deviant Art Stock Photos

Thoses guys over at Six Revisions are giving away 5 Premium Liscences of FlashEFF (an advanced Flash effects component) valued at US$199. Just head on over to the the link below and cast your vote. Read through the terms and conditions and comment the right way “vote: web design tool” and not like the second comment off the bat Competition closes 9th of March 2009 so get in quick.

Six Revisions Competition

When designing websites, you need to be able to test browser compatability across the major operating systems and their corresponding browsers. Browsershots.org will help with this. Simply submit the web address and select which browsers over Linux, Windows, MacOs and BSD and snapshots of the site working in each selected browser. The service can take up to an hour to recieve the data, so bookmark the page that presents itself and come back a little later.

http://browsershots.org

In following with the HTPC theme, I’ve got something else for Media Centre buffs. These are icons to distinguish between 720p movies / videos and 1080i . These are provided as vector images and are saved in Illustrator CS3 format. The silver and gold colours will help to set apart the two different qualities of video. If you do find this usefull, please  leave a comment, or provide a link back to us. Thanks.

Download

In follow up to the Blu-Ray Vector Front Case Template for Illustrator comes the HD-DVD version.  You can find the Blu-Ray version here. I created this in order to have HD-DVD fronts show up differently on my HTPC (or media centre) at home. As I have a lot of movies, I sometimes have the same one on DVD and HD-DVD.

I’m sure there will be people out there that find this usefull. If you do, please give credit by posting a link back to this site. Download the file below.

Download

Have been playing with a logo today, and this is the result that you will be seeing above right now. I felt the other logo was a little plain and this takes that away I feel.

I’ve also added an Email Feed button under the search bar so now you have the choice of recieving feeds via RSS or Email. I will be making small changes here and there to the site, but if you have any suggestions, let me know.

Something special today. I have a Home Theatre setup with a vast collection of DVD’s and now Blu-Ray & HD-DVD’s. I wanted to display the Blu-Ray movies differently than the DVD’s so I looked everywhere but couldn’t find a template.

So, I created this template to meet my needs and maybe yours.This is the front cover of a Blu-Ray case which you can insert the front cover directly into. The black part of the template can be used to mask the cover to create the perfect size each time. I’ve saved this via Adobe Illustrator CS3 as an Illustrator 10 compatible file so it should be accessible by most versions. Now if you find these useful please give credit by posting a link back to this site. Donations are also appreciated. Download the file below.

Download