Monday May 24, 2010 Adham Dannaway

Pacman Google Game is still available!

A few days ago on May 22nd 2010, Pacman celebrated its 30th anniversary. The Pacman game has stood the test of time and on its 30th birthday Google decided to honour it by turning the Google logo into a playable Pacman game. Google has since removed the game from their homepage (although it was kept up there for an extra 48 hours). Don’t worry if you missed it, you can actually still play the Google Pacman game thanks to Paul Macek and a few other enthusiastic developers. Great work guys!

Monday May 10, 2010 Adham Dannaway

How to remove the dotted border from links

I’m sure that many of you have noticed the dotted border that surrounds links when you click on them. It’s actually an accessibility feature and in most cases it’s fine, but in some cases that dotted border surrounding active links can be quite annoying and ugly. There is a very simple and easy way to hide the dotted border from active links. All it takes is a few lines of CSS and you’re done.

Tuesday April 20, 2010 Adham Dannaway

Free papercraft toys that you can make yourself

Papercraft toys are basically models created from sheets of heavy paper or cardboard. They come in an array of different shapes, sizes and complexity and making them can become very addictive. There are many websites that offer different papercraft toys for you to download, print and fold. Some require glue while others are clever and only require folding. There are many great papercraft toys and some of my favourite include X-Men, Star Wars, Sonic the Hedgehog, Ninja Turtles and various other custom designs. In this post I’ll show you some of my favourite papercraft toys and where you can get them so that you can make them yourself.

Monday April 5, 2010 Adham Dannaway

Improve the performance of your website with YSlow

Does your website have a habit of loading slowly? Sure you could blame it on your web server, but there is actually quite a lot you can do yourself to improve the loading time and performance of your website. YSlow is a Firefox add-on that integrates with Firebug to analyze a website and suggest ways of improving the performance of that site.

Tuesday March 30, 2010 Adham Dannaway

The best way to embed a font in your website – @font-face

We are all bored of using the same small set of web safe fonts in our websites. Do Arial, Verdana, and Times New Roman sound painfully familiar? Luckily there are quite a few different ways to embed fonts in a website including Cufon, sIFR, FLIR, PIR, Font Jazz and Dynamic Text Replacement. Most of these methods involve using JavaScript and Flash to display the custom font and some of these font embedding methods can be quite tricky to set up. There is one very simple way to embed a font in your site which doesn’t require any JavaScript or Flash. It’s called @font-face and it’s great!

Tuesday March 23, 2010 Adham Dannaway

Create your own personal homepage with Flavors.me

There seems to be new website building tools appearing all over the internet these days. Some of them allow you to create your own blog, while others allow you to quickly and easily create a business website or shopping site with only a few clicks of your mouse. Many of these website builders are quite cheap to use or even free and pretty much all of them require little or no technical knowledge. Flavors.me is a free personal homepage builder that pulls all your online presences into one place. Here are some of the reasons why it caught my eye.

Sunday March 14, 2010 Adham Dannaway

Lorem Ipsum alternatives – Dummy text generators

As web and graphic designers we often need to fill our mock-ups with dummy text such as Lorem Ipsum. Now, I don’t know about you, but I have seen just about as much Lorem Ipsum text as I can handle. Don’t get me wrong, Lorem Ipsum text is great and it has served me well over the years. But once you get to the stage that you can speak “Lipsum”, it’s time for a change. Luckily there are quite a few alternatives to Lorem Ipsum dummy text and I will go through them in this post. So if you’re looking for a bit of a change then check out these dummy text generators.

Tuesday March 9, 2010 Adham Dannaway

Avatar movie artwork that you may not have seen before

I just watched the Avatar movie yet again and got lost in the amazing world of Pandora. After seeing the visual feast of colours, special effects and amazing characters I found myself still wanting more. Now, I’ve already seen most of the Avatar movie desktop wallpapers and movie posters out there, so I decided to explore the digital art world to see what it had to offer. To my surprise I came across some amazing Avatar movie artwork that you may not have seen before. I have included the artwork below with links through to the original artworks along with the very talented artists that created them.

Sunday March 7, 2010 Adham Dannaway

CSS background image stretch

Sometimes when creating a website you will need the background image of the site to stretch to fill the whole browser window. Below is a simple CSS based method to achieve a 100% stretched background image that fills the browser window and also dynamically re-sizes when the browser window is re-sized. The background image won’t maintain its aspect ratio, but it will fill the browser window at all times. It works in IE6 along with the other main browsers.

Thursday February 18, 2010 Adham Dannaway

Avatarize yourself! Create your own Avatar movie character

I’m sure that by now you have all seen the amazing Avatar movie and have at some stage considered packing your things and getting a one way ticket to Pandora to have the adventure of a lifetime. I know I have. But of course this may not be possible for all of us, so here’s the next best thing. Avatarize your face! You can actually create your own Avatar movie character in 3D and I’ll show you how.