Five Great Design Blogs.

Here are some great design blogs that I've found helped me in my design career.

Smashing Magazine - A great blog filled with information about design, photoshop tips/tutorials, patterns, textures and other great information.

Just Creative Design - Another great blog filled with design tips and strategies.

Abduzeedo - Many design tips and lots of inspiration can be found here.

Web Design Core - A website mostly about web design, but it also has many other areas of discussion.

Designora  - Like Web Design Core, mostly filled with information of web design.

These blogs are filled with great information about design bother for beginners and experts, they are really helpful if you need some inspiration to begin your next work.

IE6, the bane of Web Developers

Throughout the years, Internet Explorer 6 has been the bane of web developers worldwide. With the growing popularity of CSS around this time, there were many flaws in the CSS engine of IE6. Most have been fixed since then, but IE6 is still a very popular web browser, albeit not as popular as it used to be. When browsing certain websites, the way the CSS was adapted to the sites was different and full of holes when using IE6. This made web developers furious, and they had to come up with many different ways to work around the flaws so that the site could be useable in IE6. Thankfully, there is a way to code so that only specific lines of the CSS Code are read by Internet Explorer, making developers lives a little easier. In coming posts I will  describe some CSS bugs and how to fix them, and possibly, why they happen.

Seamless patterns, a small tip.

Want to create a seamless pattern that can be repeated at infinitum? With Photoshop, there is a very handy tool to create these kinds of images. First, create the image you would like to repeat. For the purpose of this demonstration, I will create a very simple one to get the point across. Say you want to repeat this image seamlessly:

Head up to the Filter menu, go down to Other and then click "Offset..." In this window, enter HALF of the dimensions of the image in the boxes and make sure "Wrap Around" is selected. Now all I have to do is connect the lines so that they connect, and make sure that there aren't any visible seams, and we have a seamless image. If you need to, re-offset the image to make sure it looks alright (you can use any value you need to). When it is done, the image will repeat seamlessly.

This will help immensely if you are creating textures for terrain or models for games or other kinds of things like that. This was a quick example and not using a very detailed image, however, this filter can be used with all of the tools in Photoshop to help you edit and complete very seamless complex textures and patterns.