optimiced | en

It was almost winter in the Borissov’s Garden, a few days ago, but today Spring can be felt stronger and stronger in the air and the birds start singing on the trees, thinking of Love…

I always liked graphic design. As Web designer, up until now I did not need any 3D skills in my work, and in the rare occasions, when I was imitating 3D or 2.5D (as this pencil, for example, created with Fireworks), I did it for fun:)

If you watched Ice Age or Shrek, you certainly know how advanced is now the 3D animation. Of course, I watched these movies, too, and I know that nowadays, almost every real object can be drawn in such a way, so it looks really real:)

Notwithstanding this fact, I was amazed to see this:

[©Steve Moody, virtualcoder.co.uk]

Looks incredible!

Yes, I know it’s not a photo, I know these balls were created using a 3D program, and for all that, my mind cannot accept this fact, somehow… I was even trying to convince myself not to check for available EXIF data in this image, it looked so much as a photograph to me:-)

Step 1:

Open Silverback.

Step 2:

Resize slowly your browser window (Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE7 are all ОК) and…

Step 3:

…watch the effect. Cool!

There’s a discussion on how the quasi-3D effect was achieved using CSS + half-transparent PNG graphics — to me it reminds me the old video games; and looking at Steve, I instantly think of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong!

CSS rullz! ;-)

Smart tools as xScope 2 make me feel sorry sometimes, that I don’t own an Apple Mac! ;-)

If you work on a Mac and do (web)design, I recommend you to drop a look at Doug Bowman’s blog, where he wrote a detailed explanation about xScope (in short, this is something like Screen Calipers, multiplied by 10… or even 100!).

Argh! This is called Win-discrimination! :-D

If you still didn’t send your Fireworks tutorial — now’s the moment, as the contest is extended ’till end of March!

I avow, that I didn’t yet send anything, because I started writing my tutorial in the evening of February 28th, and after approx. 2 hours of writing and taking screenshots I got at a dead end and… went to bed:)

Now I have the chance to make a revanche and finally create my first tutorial about my favourite graphics program ;-)