Monofactor - Golden Age Eddition

You know I have been suffering much from hosting related problems; it affected my productivity in the past. It was when there were site blackouts, downs and delays had me go cold about keeping here up to date.

Since I pretty much solved the technical issues, I’m giving more care about the site.

As of this period being my vacation, I use my time less for my clients but more for my own projects and improvements on monofactor.com.

So here are some bits from what I’m up to lately:

Yet another free vector icon cet I release for media interfaces.

The zipped file contains various vector formats which are basically highly editable with Illustrator 8 and above.

Please be informed that with earlier Illustrator versions or other legacy vector editors, you might loose some of the effects.

There’re so many times I find myself struggling with IE6 and 7 issues and some other misbehaviors when working on the css of my designs.

In order to shorten the time I waste on the css and to modify the elements a bit easier, I defined some common base selectors to use and they exist almost on every css file of my previous projects and this site’s css as well.

Doing that, I reset the default values for common elements and selectors, and then I restyle and organize those elements individually, wherever they are needed.

In the previous article, I tried to give small hints about getting prepared to set up and start the design process with ease.

Once we have the blocks of information and the important information areas determined, we can have a look at the design elements and how they can be used to interprete the ideas and messages, using the visual language.

So, here we go:

This is the first item I put up for sale.

This slick layout can be very useful and effective for web designers, graphic designers, photographers and artists.

The portfolio items are powered with lightbox gallery viewer and javascript based fade in/fade out effects when mouse is rolled over them.

It is all yours for only $20 USD.

As many of us know; rules inherited from graphic design, good web design consists of a few professional sights and terms.

At the institute I work, most of my class hours pass by giving students design works and to-dos. Like “œcreate a design layout for x consulting company website” or “Create an iPhone presentation page without using iPhone images but injecting the essence of it’s features visually” etc.

After declaring the work, almost all students (and most of the designers) open up Photoshop, and start gazing at the blank screen with blurred and blank eyes, for hours… We might almost call this “Designers’ block“- which I will be talking more about in an another article soon-, but it really isn’t.

The first part of the set contains 25 scalable Illustrator format icons. I hope you like them =) There will be more coming.

You can open the .ai file with any version of Illustrator above 8.0. With earlier versions, you might loose some of the effects on the icons.

After my server was doomed, I switched into another dedicated host and Monofactor is back alive at the moment.

As you also may have figured, my server had a crashdown last month. I tried restoring all the blog data but did not have a big luck with it.

So I’m readding my restored blog posts one by one, and new articles coming.

I’m sorry if you guys had “404″ errors trying to access into any content on my site.

Oh and, please wish me luck with new server; this is the 3rd time my visitors and I suffered from hosting services.

PS: Do NOT use Lunarpages for your hosting needs. Ever.

My best,

Onur

It all begins with the word “blogging” by blogger.com. The web started to become even more transparent, visitors gain more controls on where they visit.

Websites went more individual than corporate sheets, communities had more features and usable functions to bring together more people.

We had AJAX technologies, script libraries and frameworks to present better and more functional websites.

It is all good, all amazing and will be like that as long as Internet enables us and our visitors to have more abilities when surfing, getting everyone closer online.

Though, this article is not about the features of what we call “web 2.0″, but the visual effects of this trend.

When we were children, we all used to dream about becoming someone, something; very good at whatever it is.

Doctor, scientist, f-16 pilot, football star, singer…The list goes on. The following episodes starting by this one; is for those who used to have a lot of abstract visions and dream of becoming a good and successful designer.

I prepared these article series mostly depending on my career experiences and amateur to professional background in the business. Some of you may agree on these matters, and some not. Or think some of the rules are not that critical. These below are my aspects. I hope they will be helpful for you.