One thing I have to do in developing UVFood is provide photographs of… food. Also restaurants, but they’re relatively easy. It’s the food that’s difficult.

You want photographs of food to look appealing. You want them to look like you’d want to eat the food! But a lot of food photography is just plain awful looking. Delicious, luxurious looking dishes and up looking shiny and flat and alien in photos. Proper lighting is a big thing, but some foods just don’t hold up under the heat of the lights – like ice cream, which is sometimes substituted with mashed potatoes.

A lot of effort goes into the staging of good food photography, but once you have the photos, even if they’re not lit or staged well, there are probably still adjustments you can do to improve them.

(more…)

Ajaxian has an article on a Javascript package called Corner.js. It allows you to use CSS class specifications to add some simple effects to images at page-load time – you can round the corners, add shadows and shade the edges. The only things you need to do on your web page are load the script and add the appropriate CSS class definitions to your images.

Corner.js works with Firefox 1.5+, Safari and Opera 9+. Older browsers and Internet Explorer will just display images normally without the added effects.

Ajaxian » Canvas Corner 1.0
[tags]rounded corners, javascript, css, images, web[/tags]

I’m in the process of redesigning the theme on the Apocalypse Blog and I’ve been stuck on the colors. I know the basic color scheme I want to use…red, orange, black… alarming colors… apocalyptic colors. I used them in the original theme. I’ve been running into a lot of issues, though – for instance, it seems like the only thing that looks good on red is black. Other colors are just… dim. So I shouldn’t be using black for section headers, although it does look very dramatic and apocalyptic.

(more…)

Want stripes on your web site? Ajaxian has a link to a nice web site which will create a striped tile for you. The site’s easy to use and free… the only downside is that you don’t get a live preview of your stripes.

If you use this, just make sure they don’t make your web site look fat.

(more…)

You’re working on a web site and you need some icons for your feeds – now! After all, what web site in 2007 doesn’t have at least one feed? Yes, yes, you can always go to someone else’s web site and grab their icons – if you’re really unscrupulous you’ll link directly to them until they notice and redirect your link to goatse.

But if you want a variety of feed icons in a variety of formats (including Photoshop), the place to go is – ta da! – http://www.feedicons.com/.

(more…)