It’s all too easy for someone who follows Web Standards to blab on about good usability and I’m often asked what is usability?

Hopefully this post, on Luke W’s Functioning Form website, will give an idea as to what is good usability. It highlights how simple good usability can be. It’s very often a case of basic common sense, but without someone pointing it out to you it may not be obvious. In short this post shows how having simple defaults in forms that we fill in on the internet will prevent those dumbass annoying errors - “you forgot to fill in this bit!”

http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?691

For the recent redesign of this site I wanted to use some of my own handwriting to fit with the sketchbook theme. I created my own font called Hand of Sean and it’s now available for download from DaFont.com. The font is free for personal use and all I ask is that you donate $5 if you want to use it for anything commercial.

www.dafont.com/hand-of-sean.font

I’ll be putting together a tutorial soon to show you how to create your own hand written font - watch this space!

UPDATE: 19th June 08 - 50,191 downloads!! And it’s been floating around number 20 on DaFont.com’s top 100!

Drop everything and draw! Get your pencils at the ready for the international drawing day taking place on June 7th 2008 - the idea is to get everyone (well, as many people as possible) to drop everything and draw, then upload it to your Facebook, Flickr, Myspace or even video it for YouTube and share with the rest of the contributors. Sounds like fun and I’ll be doing my bit!

DrawingDay.org

Another one of Bluestone’s designers, Jack Howell, together with Mike Armstrong (again) had their personal sites featured on a Smashing Magazine article showcasing 50 excellent blog designs. Good work chaps!

It was only January just gone when I launched version 4 of seanjohnson.net but I’ve never been totally happy with it, so I’ve managed to find some time in my busy life to revisit this sketchbook idea I had a while back. If you’ve been following my Twitter feed you’ll see I’ve been pulling my hair out over a few things, but I wanted this live as soon as, so I’ve ditched a couple of bits and will be feeding these back in over the next few weeks. Please feel free to leave comments and let me know what you think.

One of the designers at Bluestone, Mike Armstrong, has had his site, Catalyst Studios, featured on an article about creative website footers on the popular design resource site Smashing Magazine. Excellent work Mike!

It is expected that you have some basic skills with the pen tool and gradient fills.

1. Open your photo and resize it to a workable size.

2. Draw a white rectangle slightly larger than your photo and send to back…

3. then select both items and centre align them (both vertical and horizontal).

4. Copy and paste the white rectangle and bring to front. With only the copied rectangle selected, ungroup it and fill it with black. Use the pen tool to add some extra nodes to the edges. Click and drag to create Bezier handles.

5. Adjust the shape so that the corners just peek past the corners of the photo. Set the edge to feather with a setting of 10, and change the layer opacity to 50%. Send this ‘shadow’ shape to the back.

6. Use the sub-selection tool to adjust the shape of the ‘shadow’ shape to create realistic shadows.

7. Duplicate the white rectangle and bring to front. Change the fill to Gradient > Linear, then shorten and move the gradient fill handle over the top left corner. Change both colours of the gradient to #000000 (black) and set the top corner on the gradient to an opacity of around 10% and the other selector to 0% opacity - this creates a subtle page curl shadow effect.

8. Select all layers, group them and then rotate the selection slightly.

9. Repeat the process for any other photos.

Illustrator pen tool exercises

Creating a Leopard folder in Illustrator

Creating light motion trails & glowing sparks

Intricate patterns in Illustrator

Creating pins (badges) in Illustrator

How to make 3D vintage stars

Old School type – line gradients

Crop excess artwork

Creating a crazy cool logo

Vector polishing techniques

Create - to produce through artistic or imaginative effort.

Things – graphics, websites, animations, photos, music, etc.

Today I noticed a referral link to my site from sean-johnson.com (no relation!) who had a concern over my tagline of ‘I create things’. Upon searching his site I could only find the phrase in his introduction on his home page.

“My name is Sean Johnson. I create things. I live in Chicago and split my time working…”

Now, where as I didn’t copy it from him, I will put my hands and say I did steal the idea from somewhere else, and I have no problem in admitting that, remember - Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal

Also, if you Google “I create things” you’ll see it’s a popular phrase with over 20000 results. You’ll also notice that a search for “Sean Johnson” (of which I’m the first organic result) brings back over 60000. So, for two creative people who share a common name to share the same descriptive phrase ain’t so bad, is it?

The whole Lucida thing can get quite deep if you really want to get typographically pedantic, so I suggest reading this article for more info:
Lucida Hybrid: The ‘Grande’ Alternative
For a comprehensive guide to pre-installed fonts on Windows, Macs and Linux check this article:
Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows

Examples that demonstrate my point:

blog.popstalin.com

allconsuming.net

sean-johnson.com (no relation!)

Update: As a response to this post (the other) Sean Johnson has updated his CSS - see how much better it looks:

If you know of any more please let us know below.