Design

Tutorial: How to Create Suave HD Icons Glyphs

by Brian Li on Friday, March 2, 2012

Download the Suave HD Template here.

{ 0 comments }

A Better Helvetica

by Brian Li on Saturday, February 4, 2012

I just switched my blog font over to Helvetica Neue Light with the following CSS.

body {
font-family: "HelveticaNeue-Light", "Helvetica Neue Light", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif;
font-weight: 300;
}

Systems without Helvetica families installed will revert to Arial. It does look nice, doesn’t it?

{ 0 comments }

CSS Tip: Using Shadows to Increase Readability

by Brian Li on Wednesday, February 1, 2012

I’m not sure if anyone noticed, but I added a little shadow to all the text on my blog. It’s made a world of difference in terms of readability. The edges of the text would seem to blend in to the background after extended sessions of reading, so I decided to offset the text from the screen a little. The easiest way to achieve this is to use CSS to generate a slight shadow behind the text. This is the code I used…

body {
text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px #000000;
}

There were some elements which I decided to not incorporate a shadow for. One such element is my caption text which appears under images. In order to exclude that text from the previous CSS declaration, I used the following code…

.custom .format_text .wp-caption p {
text-shadow: none;
}

All written material is now more clearly defined, and makes for a better overall reading experience. Enjoy!

{ 0 comments }

Another day, another redesign…

by Brian Li on Wednesday, February 1, 2012

While the Cafe theme from Elixir Graphics was nice, I didn’t like it too much for my personal blog. It seemed too flashy, and I much prefer minimalism. I really want to stick with this layout for a long time, though I plan on experimenting a little with different fonts at some point. The layout now is actually based on my Tumblr layout. No, I’m not giving out my Tumblr URL, but this is indeed what it looks like: functional, minimal, and stylish.

{ 0 comments }

Redesigns are so time consuming…

by Brian Li on Tuesday, January 31, 2012

I spent most of the afternoon coding CSS and redesigning the blog today. I really love the Cafe theme from Elixir Graphics, so I decided to use elements from that theme. Don’t worry, I paid for it! I actually use the actual Cafe theme at Transcribblers, an upcoming premium music transcription service that is set to launch sometime in the next few weeks. I’m working out some final details with Miles Yucht, and we’re steadily building a library of popular transcriptions at the moment. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy the new design. It’s certainly a breath of fresh air compared to the stock Thesis theme I used previously.

{ 0 comments }

Edge Binding SMS Theme for iOS 5

January 25, 2012

This is my favorite theme for Messages.app and BiteSMS! It was original created by Alex Marchuk, and ported to iOS5 by Tyler Ferris. If you like it too, send them a message!  The themed items include… iMessage Bubbles SMS Bubbles MMS and SMS Selected Bubbles SMS and iMessage Send Button and Pressed Send Button Camera [...]

Read the full article →

Tutorial: Resize Suave HD Icons for the Apple iPad

June 24, 2011

The template and action files used in the tutorial can be downloaded here.

Read the full article →

Tutorial: Resize App Store Icons for Suave HD

June 24, 2011

The template and action files used in this tutorial can be downloaded here.

Read the full article →