Archive by Author
3 Ways to Download Facebook Photo Albums Fast
Posted on 03. Jan, 2011 by GrindSmart Media.
Users of Facebook, the world’s largest social network, have uploaded over 15 billion photos to the site, helping the site surpass Flickr as the biggest photo sharing site on the web. Many people, companies and events post their photo albums to Facebook first for the sheer fact that they know the photos will be quickly [...]
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Two of the Most Beneficial Multi-IM Clients for Designers
Posted on 28. Dec, 2010 by GrindSmart Media.
Years ago, before Facebook, before the term social media….if you were online, you were probably using AOL’s Instant Messenger service, AIM. AIM was the starting point for chat for many people, and we have seen instant messaging grow in recent years to include social IMs on Facebook, Gtalk in Google’s Gmail, video chat on Skype, [...]
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Font Discovery Services for Designers
Posted on 13. Dec, 2010 by GrindSmart Media.
As web and graphic designers, fonts play an increasingly bigger role in our work. Sometimes, a client gives us a logo that’s really just a 200 pixel wide jpeg image rather than a true vector based logo. The task of figuring out what font is used in that logo used to be tricky, if not [...]
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Inspiring Showcase of True Artists
Posted on 09. Dec, 2010 by GrindSmart Media.
As someone who keeps myself regularly updated with artists within the art scene (lowbrow/underground/pop surrealism) I find it very hard to find artists with websites that match their work. It is so surprising to see a group of such highly creative people have such sub=par web presences. I guess part of this goes back to [...]
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Parallax Effect In Web Design
Posted on 30. Nov, 2010 by GrindSmart Media.
A little seen effect in modern web design is the parallax effect or parallax scrolling. Parallax involves layered images that move at different speeds from background to foreground, creating depth and if designed cleverly enough, the illusion of 3D space. The effect can be achieved with plain old CSS and HTML, as well as with [...]
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Best Online Portfolios for Creatives With a Bang
Posted on 10. Nov, 2010 by GrindSmart Media.
Every creative professional needs an online portfolio. This used to mean having your own website, which for some people was a lot of work. Today, there’s no excuse. There are many online portfolios available for free that give illustrators, web designers, photographers, developers, and animators an easy solution to getting their work online. This article [...]
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Useful Gmail Plugins for Designers On-The-Go
Posted on 04. Nov, 2010 by GrindSmart Media.
Web based email services are increasingly more and more popular. Yahoo! currently losing market share to Google’s Gmail service. This can be partially attributed to the rise of Android devices, but mostly because Gmail is simply a powerful, reliable and easy to use webmail service. For years, Gmail users have seen an ever-expanding list of [...]
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HTML5 -Doctypes, Semantics and Back to the 90s
Posted on 27. Oct, 2010 by GrindSmart Media.
The Shiny New Doctype As part of the new HTML5 spec the WHATWG (they first created the HTML5 spec) created a new doctype, — at first glance this seems like an incredibly big-headed, narrow minded, simplistic move. Who would be so naive as to believe they had created the final, all encompassing definition of the [...]
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CSS3 Properties and What They Can Do
Posted on 26. Oct, 2010 by GrindSmart Media.
CSS3 is the latest version of the Cascading StyleSheet language — a language designed to separate the presentational and structural aspects of the web, removing the presentational layer from the realm of HTML. The first version of CSS allowed many of the functions we know and love today, initially support was sparse but as the [...]
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Top Security Tips for Working with MySQL
Posted on 24. Aug, 2010 by GrindSmart Media.
Having your website connect to a database is pretty much like opening up the backend of your website and letting users manipulate the data. What this means is, whether you secure the connection and data being inputted or not, data is still being manipulated. Many new developers tend to not secure and sanitize the data [...]
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10 Social Media Tools Designers Should Be Using
Posted on 16. Aug, 2010 by GrindSmart Media.
With all these social media services arising, many new social media tools also begin to arise very rapidly to satisfy the many needs these social media users have been wanting. With that said, we cover ten social media tools for various social media websites that designers should be using to connect to possible clientele as [...]
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10 Tools That Make Freelancing Easier
Posted on 09. Aug, 2010 by GrindSmart Media.
The freedom of working from home is what is expanding the freelancing industry to what it is today. As experienced freelancers, we all know one time or another, we will be under stress spending nights and weekends trying to complete a project for a client. Due to the stress that has conjoined itself with freelancing, [...]
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Why Using PHP Frameworks is a Good Idea
Posted on 06. Aug, 2010 by GrindSmart Media.
As developers, we work on a genre of projects from large to small and all in between. We sometimes forget to sanitize a few things or we forget to throw in a few flexibilities our clients requested. Other times some scripts are far too small to care about making certain functionalities modular as a client [...]
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How to Create an Amazing Vintage Background
Posted on 04. Aug, 2010 by GrindSmart Media.
Creating a custom background for a website is a trend of choice for many designers these days. There are infinite uses for a custom background in a website, the most common would be embedding within the layout. With this tutorial, I plan on showing you how to create a vintage background pattern that will give [...]
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Top Job Boards for the Freelance Designer in Need of Dynamic Work
Posted on 30. Jul, 2010 by GrindSmart Media.
As a designer, we are always in search for possible clientele to keep our portfolios expanding as well as to keep food on the table. With a plethora of freelance job boards available, it becomes difficult to select a few great ones as our methods to reach clientele. Furthermore, we gathered the top 15 freelance [...]