Create A Simple Canvas Effect in Photoshop

So I thought I would share this great little technique, a really simple and effective way of creating your own canvas effect in Photoshop.

There are many sites around at the moment with this effect being used as a background or as part of the design. It is a really great alternative to simple noise effects or gradients and adds an extra dimension to your designs, really quickly and easily, and the best thing about it, it is repeatable, scalable and very easy to tweak.

A North East Brit Working For A Big Apple Agency

It has been a while since I last updated my blog, to long in fact. Those of you following me on Twitter will know that even though there are reasons for my time being fully saturated recently, none are any real excuse to let my blog slip.

But the time has finally come that I can happily and openly announce one of the reasons I have been so caught up recently. In December 2010 I accepted a new job offer to work full time for a Mobile Design and Development agency in New York called Fueled.

Tutorial Featured in .Net Magazine Issue No. 212

So a couple of months ago I was approached by Oliver Lindberg, Associate Editor at .Net Magazine about contributing a tutorial to feature in the February 2011 issue of the mag. Of course, being a regular reader of .Net magazine I was honoured to be asked, and immediately responded. After chatting things through with Oliver, there was a couple of routes I could have gone down but I chose to do a simple front end web based tutorial on creating a 3D ribbon using only CSS3 and XHTML, and here it is!

Noise, Grooves & Text-Shadows…

…And what do you get? One of the biggest web design trends of 2009 – 2010.

New sites are popping up all over using very simple techniques to create very effective, modern looking designs. And why are these techniques proving so successful? Well one of the biggest reasons is they are used so heavily nowadays on designs for Apple products, namely iPad and iPhone.

That’s right, Noise, Grooves and Text Shadows are such a winning combination because they highlight depth, and pixel perfect accuracy, simply because each of them use a single pixel width or height to create the desired effect, and you can’t get much more accurate than that…Well, unless you are designing for iPhone 4, in which case you have to use a bit of maths to calculate how wide a pixel actually is on screen, as the new screens use a higher resolution than that of superman’s vision!

What’s Your Daily Web Routine?

We all have one, a daily routine of websites we check and get updates from on a regular basis, it may be so natural and embedded that you may not notice it, but we do! So I thought this would be a fun way of sharing my routine and also find out how others spend their day on the web.

To kick things off I will list out my daily bookmarks and sites I visit in order, along with a rough estimate of time spent on each site, then hopefully get some feedback through comments on other peoples daily routines!