Recently in design Category

Casino Beach has always been my favorite Domain name because it encompasses two of my favorite things, casinos and beaches. Many gambling sites try to create a sexy image by hiring scantily clad girls to prance around with the their company logo displayed somewhere on their skimpy clothing but it's a stretch of the imagination to think of how the girls relate to the website name. Whereas, the word beach conjures up images of bikinis, so that it's exactly what I've been designing into the Casino Beach by adding a Bikini Gallery and also publishing stories about some of the great beaches of the world, many of which have Casinos on/or near them. A plan is starting to take shape for developing Casino Beach into a "live" gambling site.

Social Media has exploded so rapidly this year that it's changed the landscape of the web. Websites are no longer as relevant and even blogs are taking a back-seat in the new media vehicles. Social Networks have gone beyond the tipping point to now become the preferred means of communicating by the masses. Now the trend is to connect the conversations across multiple social networks and instead of trying to keep up with the growth of all these various on-line communities the new trend is to use one interface and connect all the social networks, that describes the new mission of this website - integrate all Silicon Palms social networks.

Silicon Palms is built on Movable Type with the new technology called "Motion" which is designed to bring the conversations that I'm participating in to the this site as a central hub and each of the various social networks is like the spokes bringing the conversations back to one place and distributing each post here back to the networks.

Possibly the most important aspect of web site design is the categorization of the ideas, as this is what creates the navigation. Ultimately the flow of ideas is what makes a site successful or not. The way that people consume information online is very different from other medias, so it's even more important to get the categories correct and provide the reader an index of the content.

Just before my departure to Rio de Janeiro for the Christmas Holiday's I launched a new design on the Silicon Palms website and this Blog. In both cases I went for the less is more philosophy.

I've been publishing web pages for over 12 years now and an advocate of the open source movement. A few years ago I started following the OSWD (open source web design) and have found some really great themes and templates there, actually it's largely because of reverse-engineering other designers web pages that I've learned what CSS, HTML and PHP that I know. Recently I came across some designs that are in my opinion a "quantum leap" beyond anything I'd previously seen.

The template design in Gerhard Wolfgang's work is extraordinary, like a perfectly balanced composition. As long as there's incredible programmers him, putting his work into the public domain for others to use and improve, then I'm going to continue taking them up on the offer.

My first effort of image development for a web site design started over 10 years ago with the "crown & anchor" which I believe offers image correlation for "invest & offshore". Back in my early days of learning Photoshop this was a good practice subject, one which I've continued to devote time to right up till present day. Now I'm challenged with the task of making all sizes of banners from this icon, and the very difficult small buttons (120x60 pixels). Far from being a graphics wizard, everything comes to me from trial and error.

The Crown & Anchor image featured here, originally started out in the pages of a book about Naval insignia from the library. The symbol from the Dutch Navy is that of an Ensign, was scanned from the book, enlarged and then pixel by pixel transformed to become the icon I've used all these years for Invest Offshore.

My favorite colors to use with the crown & anchor are royal blue, gold and purple. Recently the blues and purple colors I'm fond of were found in an image taken from inside a large and powerful breaking wave, which lends the effect of motion and I find the effect to be very pleasing to the eye - see the design mock-up.

Looking for a new design or some great design ideas? check out the largest resource of free, easy to download web design templates on the Net. It's known as OSWD.org, which stands for "Open Source Web Design". Often times the original designer requests that you leave a link back to them when you publish pages using their design, however since these designs are "open source" you're free to modify, edit or improve upon the design but in all fairness it's not a good idea to attempt to sell them to others.

View a collection of my favorite designs by clicking here.

My first web page designs (from scratch) were published sometime in 1994, very crude but made with a simple Notepad editor. I consider that I was very fortunate to have had an excellent teacher in RJ Sullivan he'd been trained in college about commercial art then went on to work for major advertising agencies and for big design firms in NYC. Bob was much more passionate about fine art and music but figured commercial art was a good means to pay for those pursuits.

We became business partners and Bob shared many art design philosophies with me, one of his favorites saying's was that often "less is more".

My favorite occupation is designing websites, trying to match the best look and style with the subject focus of the website. Of all the things that I do using my computer, it's the initial design of a website that comes most naturally to me and therefore the task where the most amount of time can go by without my even thinking about the time. When the correct design is applied on a topic or subject it's like a light goes on and immediately I know that the design is on track. Sometimes it can take dozens of attempts to get to that point.