Nicola Callegaro website » webdesign

Graphic design competition sites

nicola — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:40:59 +0000

Looking for a website, logo or business card design?

The most effective way could be to start a graphic design competition on 99designs, DesignCrowd, CrowdSpring, or Guerra Creativa.

Here there are 9 tips to have the best result on your design contests:

Focus each project on one design task
Know what you are looking for
Guarantee your budget and pay a fair price
Invite the designers to work on your project
Provide detailed feedback, focusing on the good designers
Take advantage of designers riffing off each other
Get multiple opinions (from your collegues, friends and customers)
Check for originality (try http://www.tineye.com)
Consider getting the winner to work on it a bit more

Free 3d style WordPress template

nicola — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 18:18:53 +0000

Recently I discovered one of the latest free WordPress themes by Woothemes and I was really surprised: that great design was given completely free – no registration even needed.

You have:

Integrated banner ad management;
Widgetized sidebar, with some Mainstream-specific custom widgets to allow you full control of what happens in your sidebar;
5 different colour schemes to choose from;
cross-browser compatible;
localised for translation;
Suckerfish Menus

I found it very easy to customise this theme through the CSS.

Ah, and here is the Mainstream theme…

Batch Processor for GIMP

nikkey — Sun, 25 May 2008 18:58:30 +0000

I went mad looking for a batch processing plugin for Gimp and for my Windows OS (I know, maybe it is time to think about Linux).

Eventually I discovered David’s Batch Processor (DBP).

David’s Batch Processor is a simple batch processing plugin for Gimp – it allows the user to automatically perform operations (such as resize) on a collection of image files. Its main advantage is that the user does not have to learn a scripting language. Like the Gimp itself, DBP relies on a graphical interface. The user creates a list of images, and sets up the processing required for each image. The results of the current settings can be displayed. Once the required sequence of operations has been set up, DBP performs the same processing on each image in turn. The images can be colour corrected, resized, cropped, and sharpened, then renamed and saved to a different file in a specified image format. All the steps (except loading and saving the image!) are optional; so the simplest use of DBP is just to convert a number of image files from one format to another.

And for you:

gimp_batch_dpb_by_mediaofficinacom for gimp 2.2.x and gimp 2.4.x.

Official website: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hodsond/dbp.html

Webdesign themes

nikkey — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 11:59:59 +0000

Are you looking for a beautiful, strange, different theme for your website?

Have a look at Themesbase, where you can find some interest themes for:

WordPress Template Theme Generator

nikkey — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 06:44:57 +0000

Have you no idea about HTML, CSS and stuff like this?

Are you asking anytime to your “geek friend” to create a new template for your blog?

Don’t worry, I founded the right solution: WordPress Template Theme Generator!

This online generator creates your own custom unique WordPress Theme. Without any need for HTML, JS, PHP, or CSS knowledge.

Change the colors, settings, layout, preview live, click “save” and download your unique WordPress theme zip-file. Extract, upload, set, and you are done!Based on WordPress 2.1 to 2.3 with Yahoo! UI (grids, tabs & fonts) to support all A-Grade browsers and valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Theme supports Widgets & Tags.

What are you waiting for? Try it now!

>>> WordPress Template Theme Generator

Browsers shots

nikkey — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:07:20 +0000

What is Browsershots?

Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.

Mission Statement

In our dreams, the web looks good for all users. So we let web designers view screenshots of their pages in different browsers, at different screen resolutions and with different plugins. We’re trying to make this service easy to use, open for all (including access to the source code) and 100% free, as in free beer.
The problem: cross-browser incompatibilities

This project is concerned with a favorite problem of web designers: websites look different in other browsers. Testing a new site in many browsers can be quite time-consuming. Not everybody has a farm of legacy machines with older OSes and browsers. There are online services that offer screenshots of websites in different browsers for considerable fees. For the hobbyist and for open source projects, these fees may be prohibitive.
The solution: community cooperation

The idea behind this project is to distribute the work of making browser screenshots among community members. Everybody can add URLs to the job queue on a central server. Volunteers use a small program to automatically make screenshots of web pages in their browser and upload the results to the server.

Try Browsershots now!