CSS text Effects

 have to create, but mostly because I've been seeing

CSS Shadowing

So I've been playing with CSS a lot recently partly due to having to learn all this stuff for the online portfolio we have to create, but mostly because I've been watching Allen create some really fun stuff with it. He's been trying to get that indented text effect that you see on all those hip/wordpress portfolios that have lots of ribbons and things. Anyway, While he was working hard doing that I found a tut that gives the basic effect (pictured below)



.css-shadow {
font: 40px Arial, sans-serif;
text-shadow: 0px 2px 2px #5e5e5e;
color: #222222;
width:300px;
}


Allen eventually worked out how to do it by overlaying two divs over each other, with one slightly offset and transparent. It's a little less user friendly, and doubles everything up, but the results are a lot crisper.



.firstlayer {
position:absolute;
top: 0px;
font: 40px Arial, sans-serif;
color: #000000;

}


.secondlayer {
position:absolute;
top: 1px;
left: 1px;
font: 40px Arial, sans-serif;
color: #666666;
opacity: 0.45;
}


Does anyone else have any other techniques to add to these ones that they personally prefer?

manual shadow (div offset)

manual shadow (div offset)

Which Network Where

Steph posted a thing the other day on G+ that got me thinking. What content is appropriate to post where? We are experiencing a period of time where we have a fragmention of social networks, each has it's own society and norms, or at least I like to believe so.

I personally believe that the content we post doesn't belong on all of these mediums. To be honest I find it strange that people would have a twitter just so they can advertise the fact they have a blog which has an extended amount of content and writing in it. I have a twitter account, but I never use it, and I really never planned on using it. So I'm not going to attest to what I believe the community is like, since it would all just be a listing of cliches and tiny.urls. 

As a designer I have a few places that I can post to almost specifically for the type of stuff I have to share Flickr, Dribbble and Deviant Art. These sites are more for finished products than anything else.

Facebook is the toilet of the internet. Where people you are forced to call "friends" all go to take a big communal shit in each others screens. As such, I don't have an account there anymore. And besides, its picture sharing capabilities always makes my images look like junk. But posting there is a quick way to keep people updated with your life, and since leaving I have fallen out of contact with people I would rather like to keep knowing.

G+ is just getting sexier and sexier the more I learn to use it. I get the content I want from the people I want streamed straight to my face. After learning that I could control the flow of my circles it has gotten so good. It means I can follow lots of artists and not need to worry about them outposting my mates. Personally I tend to post finished products on G+. Image presentation is good, although I wish I could order my images if I post a whole bunch in one go. Generally I think of G+ as being a place where everyone is sort of their own little reporter, reporting for all their little reporter friends. Saying things like "I wish someone would just go die." Is usually met with silence (and thus belongs on facebook) While posts that deal with the intricacies of why Facebook suck Quantum string is awesome are usually met with accolades.

Blogger and Wordpress I believe are the domain of posterity. I do it so I can look back on what I've done and go "Oh yeah, I forgot I did that. That was mint!" I like being able to post here since I know it won't disappear into the ether, and that this is the sort of thing people are likely to bump into during a Googling session. I can post my sketches from their primal beginnings to their finished results all in one post. This isn't the sort of place where you post a single link to a youtube video you like. If you like it, embed it. If you have a single witty line, put it on Facebook or Twitter. If you have a half baked idea put it on G+ and get some feedback. 

If you have pictures of food you're dying to show people, delete them. Either that or find an epicureans club or something. The only time you're allowed to post pictures of your food is if it is from a wedding, a special occasion, particularly weird looking, or has Jesus's face looking lovingly up at you. If it's your steak and mashed potato from Wednesday we don't need to see it...Nitish.

An Embedding Test

Just a test to see if CSS can embed within a post.. Looking good. Well, not if you don't have a good browser. Or of course, if you're viewing this with your RSS feed.

Probably Kissed a Girl

Everyone was doing a LAN for Mass Effect 3's multiplayer. It seems ok. Nothing to scream about. I was of course an observer, sitting in the corner with my tablet. I did manage to capture this one moment pretty well I think. Quin believes I should do it more often. I'm inclined to agree. Hayden in the middle looks a lot like how I draw myself, we'll just have to assume that when I draw myself without glasses it is in fact someone else.
Oh yeah, Shortland Street was filming in Tui Glen today. If you're into that sort of thing.

OS Dads

So I was thinking about it, and I feel as though there are some misconceptions about what the "windows guy" and the "Mac guy" are like, mostly due to mac advertising about what they are like. And we all know that drum beating for yourself is always going to be set to a tempo that makes you look good. So let me have a try. Contrary to popular belief BOTH of these personifications are in fact dads.

Windows Dad/Guy has a job doing filing of some kind. As he drives to work he sees pasted up posters telling "people that are part of the rat race suck." He doesn't understand why someone would say this. On the weekends he drinks beer with friends. His work station has one big pile of paper in the center. He has to flick through the pile to find what he's looking for and put it on the top to deal with. He's also a narcoleptic, which makes his work output less than satisfactory occasionally.

Mac Dad/Guy has the exact same job as Windows Dad. When he hangs out with his kids and their friends he says "dude" and "bro", but no one knows about how he had to practice ages to get it sounding natural. On the weekends he posts up posters along his route to work about how "people that are part of the rat race suck."
His work station has all the paper in seperate little piles overlapping each other haphazardly. If he finds the corner of a document he's after he doesn't bother moving the other bits of paper that may be obscuring the corners of it. He says it's dynamic, despite this it makes his work output less than satisfactory sometimes.

The Problem With Tetris

This post is written for a very niche community, so if you have never done a hard drop or don't know what a T Spin is, then I forgive you for glossing over this post.

Second of all I got a new keyboard. The last one got doused in pepsi for what I think is the third time. Last time I did that I wrote a song about it. Consequently it now thinks everything is a hot key and that W is backspace. So now I find myself having to get used to a new keyboard, which doesn't feel quite right in comparison to my last one. The backspace isn't extended like my last one was so I find myself hitting the "\" key quite a bit. So this is a writing exercise more than anything.

Tetris: A Brief History

I'm a tetris fiend. I gobble those Tetrimos (the name of the little blocks) for breakfast ever since my brother had one of those 9999 in 1 Brick game hand helds. He wouldn't let me play it much because I sucked cause I was 4 or 5 at the time. Since that personal DOS attack I have sort of obsessed over the game. I got back into playing it a couple years ago when I found one of the official Tetris games on a friends cellphone. I sat in the corner of the room while everyone else socialized, I was going to give it back when I had lost... I eventually had to top myself out (lose the game) because he had to go and it was a little weird cause we were pretty much the last people there.

The Iterations

I got a DS and after I had gotten through most of the decent games I was left playing Tetris DS, which is pretty much all my DS is used for now. Then they released Tetris party for the DS, and while it had cool multiplayer support, the play area was reduced and the feel of the blocks moving around felt far clunkier than the previous game.
Tetris on my phone is also clunky, but it makes full use of the screen and all that. And to be fair, my phone is not exactly top of the line, it lags just getting around its own OS, it can hardly be expected to shift colours around without giving it a good think first.
I haven't given it a hard out play on any touch devices, and what I have played I have been pretty ham handed at, so I won't comment on those ones.
Tetrisfriends.com is where I have been getting most of my tetris jollies from. But since its introduction of 30 second interactive video ads every couple of games I've been turned right off it. Seriously. That site is getting worse than all those torrent sites with the warpy shaped girls. Fortunatly multiplayer "arena" only gives you one of those ads when you start up and after that you can go nuts.
Also on the upside is that facebook has a decent working version of the game which is made be the same guys.
"What?" you say, "Aren't all tetris games made by the same people?" To which I reply, Nay! There are 5 companies responsible for all the digital Tetris products (not including the real world Tetris toys) that Tetris Co. Licences to. EA / EA Mobile, Tetris Online Inc, Nintendo, and Blue Planet Software. Now I don't know why they decided to let that last company get a hold of their game, because the PC/Mac desktop version stinks way out loud. I mean, look at this intro screen! Maybe in 1991 this would have been acceptable. But it's not, so it isn't.

The Crunch

So maybe it's my design lectures on brand identities that has brought this on, but I need to know that when I open a game that is officially "Tetris" and not one of those cheap clones then I need to know I'll be getting quality rather than "hopefully a bit better than a cheap clone."
There seems to be no real standard at which companies need to be held against to create a Tetris game. This may sound ridiculous, it's just blocks sliding down a screen, how can you screw that up right? Well it's possible, and it has been done more than once.
A lot of this can be construed as personal opinion. I have a very nuanced taste for Tetris. I just feel like they aren't being very careful with their product. When it isn't clunky feeling it's tacky looking.

Anyway, I hope there are some other enthusiasts out there who can relate to where I'm coming from on this. See you in the arena sometime.

Red Face 2

The other day I was saying that 28 Days Later is probably the best romantic comedy I have ever seen, and that in fact, if I was given a list of the best romantic comedies (28 Days Later among them) I would always pick 28 Days. I used the term "rom-com" at one point and had to explain it was an abbreviated term for Romantic Comedy. Much like how Sci-Fi is an abbreviated term for Sciatica Fiesta, a little known Spanish festival where they celebrate they're hobbled kinsmen by giving the unhobbled participants dead arms by punching them repeatedly.

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Now Wider Than Ever

Well I have been feeling the tweaky itch of messing around with the blog. I decided against my better judgement to make the blog even wider than it was before so now it's up to the 920 standard. Heck, it's not as though I care what people on smaller screens are doing, I already got you a mobile version of my site. I needed to give it an extra 200 pixels because all the hips I draw are so wide they couldn't fit in the regular format. And look at the pics in the previous post! Look how much space they have swimming around them now. I can make 'em BIGGER.

This site has always primarily been a place for me to show off my drawn work, and I really need more width if I want to do that properly. If I could find a decent way of getting rid of the sidebar without making the archives harder to get at then I would.

This shift also brings in a new version of the header and 1 point size up on the font. Also you can highlight things In a gaudy turquoise now! The font decision is clinging to the idea of what's hypothetically the easiest row length to read, Which is about 12 words long. As you just counted, the rows are a bit longer than that, but I couldn't bare pushing it up another point size.

So any comments or suggestions would be neato. If this is looking gross just tell me! You look at this more than I do... I hope.

Red Face

I've taken to follow Red Face around. He's a fun guy once you get past his stand-offish exterior. I'm following him with a crew of other guys who are recording his life for a month. Here are the first 10 days so far. The second to last image is from his dating profile. The last image is from some work get together. He may not be the most riveting person on the planet. But everyone matters and deserves to be listened to. If you want more updates more often you should follow me on G+, these are just reposts from there. If you want to ask Red Face any questions about himself please leave them at the bottom of this post or over at my G+. Alternatively you can email him directly at Redarchyface@gmail.com. He's a busy guy and may take a while to get back to you though.

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