As a designer, sometimes it becomes a hassle to check your designs in all browsers. If you happen to be on your Windows machine, IE, Firefox and Opera are easy enough. For viewing in Safari, you have to fire up your Mac. That is until now.

Apple has done something to help those of you who don’t own a Mac, they have released Safari 3 for Windows. Although its still officially a beta, I found the installation ran smoothly as did the browser.

According to the Apple website:

“The world’s fastest web browser for Macs is now available for Windows PC’s. Safari 3, introduced at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, is the fastest browser running on Windows, based on the industry standard iBench tests, rendering web pages up to twice as fast as IE 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari joins iTunes in delivering Apple’s legendary user experience to both Windows and Mac users as well as full support of open Internet standards. Safari 3 features easy-to-manage bookmarks, effortless browsing with easy-to-organize tabs and a built-in RSS reader to quickly scan the latest news and information. Safari 3 public beta is available today as a free download at www.apple.com/safari.”

Download it here and give it a try. And don’t forget the plugins.

If you are on your Mac, well, you still have no way checking of IE. Not that you care, but you should since it still is the most used browser.

Now if Adobe would just allow you to install your one copy of CS on one Windows machine AND one Mac, life would be sweet.

If your like my wife, your not so into the plain vanilla look of your personalized Google homepage. Well fret no more, Google just released some spiffy little “themes” to beautify your Google.

You get six themes to choose from beside the original plain.

You can also enter your locale and the image will change depending on the time of day and weather.

This seems like a big departure from Google’s “Keep It Simple” mantra. As with everything, some will like it and some won’t. What do you think?

What is Kuler? Will it keep my beer cold? No, it won’t.

Kuler is Adobe Labs’ latest web application geared toward the design crowd. It is a online color scheme creator, for lack of a better term.

Here’s the main page of the application:

With kuler, you can creat your own scheme, search other users schemes, and share your schemes online. You can even download them as Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase) files, but those are only usable if you have Adobe’s Creative Suite 2 programs. If you don’t, you can always use the screen color picker in your copy of Color Schemer Studio, or of course you could use the Colorzilla add on in Firefox.

Reminds me a lot of the ColorSchemer.com scheme gallery. Except here you can actually create the color scheme online. Then share it with the world, so that other users may download your creation.

Download others themes, or create your own to let others use. You do have to have an Adobe ID to create or download, but sign up is easy and painless.

The Adobe Labs page says Kuler is being released as a technology preview, free of charge. Now whether that means it will someday be charging for it, I do not know. So for now, check it out for free, download some of the great color schemes available online, and give a try at creating your own.

I personally have been using Color Schemer Studio(shown below) for years, mainly for color picking and some themes, but this may be a great online alternative.

Check out Kuler, or Color Schemer Studio. They are both great applications.

EDIT: Just got this link from Lunarforums:

http://www.colourlovers.com/ - looks like a good resource also!

Yes you read that correctly, after five years of complaints about the old crappy site, I finally had some time to work on the Drake Storm Studios site. Hope you like it. I’m sure there will be tweaks made here and there. Like most designers, I’m never quite satisfied. In case you don’t recall what the old one looked like here’s a comparison.
Old Design:

New Design:

I think it’s way cleaner, not to mention, no tables. I used wordpress to make it easier for me to update, that way, it won’t go stale again. (I hope, LOL). Let me know what you think.

If you are looking for some help on how to price a project, read Pricing a Project, a nice blog entry by Brian Fling of Blue Flavor.

It’s how I generally go about pricing a project. I also use Cyber Sea, Inc.’s Proposal Kit Pro.

Although I have modifed the excel pricing template and some of the contracts to fit my own needs. I find that in using the pricing template, I am more accurately able to price projects.

Works great and I highly recommend it.

If you are into any type of technical type illustration, then you really should check out Kevin Hulsey Technical Illustration. The illustrations Kevin does, just makes me say Wow… He also has some nice tutorials as well. He has an amazing illustration of a cruise ship done in illustrator and photoshop that you just have to see.

I mean how do you spend 960 hours on an illustration. Read the rest of this entry »