“The Copacabana steadicam shot from Goodfellas…the Dunkirk beach scene from Atonement…the Bobby Sands interrogation in Hunger…the whole of Russian Ark…What do these have in common?
They were all made using just one shot… oneshotmovie.co.uk

On the 26th of September, the One Shot Movie project will be held from my friends Daniel Palmer, Keir Menzies and Daniel Birt at Hackney Picture House.

I’m quite excited for them and about the Awards Evening because I have been working with the guys since the beginner of the year.
I’ve been involved in the making of the website competition www.oneshotmovie.co.uk (check my portfolio), leaflets, Awards Poster.

If you are around Hackney and if you like movies, don’t forget to book your tickets for the Awards Evening where will be the best 10 movies entries, using just one shot!

“Mobile browsing is expected to outpace desktop-based access within three to five years.
(Ethan Marcotte, 2010)

The clients demand to have a mobile version of their website is increasing and it has to be working on all mobile devices.
And we will have more devices to build our sites in the next few years.
So, it will be almost impossible to code website for all platforms and have the same looking in all of them.

But in the last year, webdesigners have never been so creative and the possibility to have fluid layout and resizing images brought us again the idea to be outside the boxes. I mean not having fixed width on our pages and leave the viewer see our website with his own current resolution screen.

From an article of Ethan Marcotte, A List Apart, may 2010 and his book, designers started again to think about fluid web layouts which was kind of ‘old fashion’ before. From his thoughts, there have been discussion with the pro & contro about the Responsive way to code website.

Css3 and media queries give us a huge improvemnts to the fluid websites from the 90′s.
Media queries are, in short, conditional comments for the rest of us. Rather than targeting a specific version of a specific browser, we can surgically correct issues in our layout as it scales beyond its initial, ideal resolution.

So we can code our css media queries for different screen sizes and decide what to show when the screen is smaller such as a mobile and keep respecting our business or portfolio style.
You can find hundreds of tutorials online about media queries.
I personally got very interested watching Think Vitamin tutorials, (thanks to the video tutor Nick Pettit).

Responsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation. The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries. As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities. In other words, the website should have the technology to automatically respond to the user’s preferences. This would eliminate the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market. (smashingmagazine.com)

Fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries are the three technical ingredients for responsive web design, but it also requires a different way of thinking.

We are designing work meant to be viewed along a gradient of different experiences.

My website has a fixed layout of 960px width. I liked the idea to have inside this field rounded shapes and thinking about my works as a process to develop my skills, I think will re-design my wordpress site and be more involved into Responsive web design.

Every day I take inspiration from lots of web designers via twitter and every day I’m amazed of how web design is developing. Thanks to:
alistapart.com
colly.com
hardboiledwebdesign.com
thinkvitamin.com

and also ref: mediaqueri.es

When I woke up this morning, for the first time of my life, I was sad for a death of a person who I didn’t personally know.

He has been the most influent person of my generation, your creations was, are and will be always an inspiration in my daily job, life and way to think!

“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.
(Steve Jobs)

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.
(Steve Jobs)

“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?
(Steve Jobs)

…

Thanks for all Mr Jobs!

This summer 11 me and my lovely wife decided to have holidays in her native city, St Petersburg.

Just flew after the London Riots days I’m having the most relaxing days of the year.
I will post here the best places of this amazing city and some geek talks I had with some Russian dude.

See also the photos I’m taking using instagram.

In my July post, I discussed about CSS3 and the exciting days of web design.

In less than one month that I was trying out some CSS3 generators, Adobe realeased as free preview, Edge. (1st of Aug ’11, first day 50K downloads!).

Basically, it looks a Flash-like environment software where you can do key frames, tweens, designs and make animations ‘BUT’ using web standards built in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS3.

The features in this preview release are:

• Possibilities to create new compositions with drawing and text tools.
• You can animate position, size, color, shape, rotation and more at the property level.
• Bring motion to existing HTML files while preserving the integrity of CSS-based HTML layouts. (Edge stores all of its animation in a separate JavaScript file that cleanly distinguishes the original HTML from Edge’s animation code.)
• Copy and paste transitions, invert them, and choose from over 25 built-in easing effects.
• Edge works with HTML content and adds animations, motion and interactive elements with HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript.

Watch a Demo from Adobe:

As a no Flash Designer (remembering the old days when I was buying Fl books and doing animation tutorials), I’ve always been interested in animation websites.

I like to have javascripts on my sites and make some fancy movements to containers and images (in a rigorous web usability standard, of course…) and I’m happy to see the fast progress of the web.

With Edge, we have other cool applications which can make “Flash effects” in a web enviroment.

I can note few here (if you know others please let me know):

• Hype
• Animatable
• Radi

After I’ve got into Christian Heilmann post, Living on the Edge and saw these animation tools more deeply, I feel they are improvements of how we can design and devolop easier fancy animations and a good start to take these in a HTML5 enviroment. Because this has to be our goal, to build in HTML5!

Welcome to the World Wide Web Revolution!

In a web point of view, the cognitive perception is changing. Humans are being educated to see the web like never before. Search Engines, Social Networks, Mobile sites are just few examples of how we use the web, the online experience is becoming always more detailed and users have knowledge about how to interact with the websites.

What could be done using graphics can now be done just with some lines of codes. HTML5 will permit this process specially for animations but what I wish to talk about here is the power of CSS3.

Being proud to be a CSS Web Designer, my thoughts are interested for fast, clean and beautiful websites which are designed to give information and great web experience to the users.
From the first part of the 2011, all the modern Web Browsers are already using the new technologies and the years of web design never been so exciting like nowadays.

“Through increased browser competition, we are seeing the fastest rate of change and additions to CSS than ever before.
(Paul Kinlan, Google Developer, 2011).

CSS3 helps designers and developers to more simply and easily achieve common design effects.

In November 2010, Andy Clarke published his book Hardboiled Web Design which is for me the best and inspiring book ever written on CSS. Tutorials and way to think about the web, have improved my skills on design, typography, hand coding.

Clarke turns this on its head by encouraging us to think ‘top-down’, design for best browser first then create a suitable experience for less capable browsers, mobile devices and printers. He strongly believes that by thinking in this way, as designers, we should be able to create a fantastic experience for those who can benefit from it and for those who can’t.
And all this is becoming true. People can experience our design and codes like never been before. CSS3 give us all the tools (in a coding point of view) to design gradients, corners, shadows, animations without using any images.
And for old browser users, we have the possibilities to implement into websites, javascripts library (like modernizer) or php hacks (like css3pie) and this is our chance to move finally forward with our creativity using CSS3.

Reading The Singularity is Near by Raymond Kurzweil, I’m becoming very interested about the future of tecnology and how humans will interact with it.
Sometimes, I’m wondering how I will code CSS in the next few years. Maybe using advanced generators such as:

• www.css3generator.com
• www.css3.me
• www.colorzilla.com
• www.csswarp.eleqtriq.com

Or maybe using a futuristic software (not invented yet) similar to Photoshop who will save our design layout in a web page so the option will be:
save as: html, css, js…

We don’t yet know what the power of CSS3 will lead to, but it’s an exciting time to be a web designer!

It has been a fantastic work in progress for myself where I could put in practice new CSS3 codes (which can work even on old browsers – IE7 & 8 – using CSS3PIE).

I liked the idea to have a light background and big spaces between containers and I’ve chosen to use the bold Cooper font for main links and headings (thanks to Font Squirrel’s kit generator).

The decision to have animation for buttons and thumbnails (not on IE7 & 8 this time) come from the studies I did with the Andy Clarke book Hardboiled Web Design which I really recommend to everyone involved in web design, css & html5. If sometimes you need coding-help ask Firebug , a powerful web development tool live on your browser (Chrome or Firefox) which consent you to inspect and edit HTML, CSS & see any errors of your page.

My website runs with the wonderful open source blog tool WordPress, the best CMS platform for me. I’ve installed and coded into it the naked template Starkers and made my own wordpress template.

I’m handcoding web designer and can work on different Computer Operating Systems but I do prefer working on an Apple machine where I can run 2 amazing softwares, Coda and CSSEdit.
I’ve been using Coda since 2009 and I didn’t find nothing better yet. Dreamweaver cs5.5? Not for me, thanks! Coda is a Text editor, a file transfer, Terminal, all in a single elegant & cool interface, perfect for my handcodings skills.
I really recommend it especially if you are doing wordpress websites.

The other light software I mentioned above CSSEdit (from Macrabbit), it’s a powerful user friendly css editor with amazing preview.

I love to work on my machine surrounded by cool softwares, user friendly and with elegant interfaces. From Adobe, I do like Photoshop and Illustrator which really give me so much inspiration and power with my skills in Graphic Design.

With all this tools and resources I’ve designed and coded this portfolio/blog website where I will write regularly about web design, development, graphics, art and cultural events in London.
My Portfolio is all my works about shaping digital things for people’s use.

As it’s my first post, it would be great to receive from you comments, ideas, advices or general messages regarding my new website.

Thanks for reading!