Designers & Programmers

Back in the days, trains were the primary land transportations that first transported goods, then after a few years the passenger trains. For these vehicles to reach one destination to another, it required railroads to guide the train to its proper track. Today, only a few railroads are being actively used by trains. Nevertheless, they can still be appreciated as wallpapers for our everyday screens. For our next article, we share to you 30 Astonishing Free Railroad Wallpapers for Your Desktop. In this collection, we have included some of the loveliest railroad wallpapers which you can download for free. Enjoy as you scroll down through our list. Come, Take a peek, and choose your pick.

When you work on your freelance jobs each day, you would go to your work station and see the usual place which you consider your own spot. But is your working environment healthy and positive? Does it affect your work performance? Well, we only hear of working environment if we speak of office work where co-workers exist and the bosses are there. You could picture a scene where everyone are in business suit and are working on their own cubicles or tables. In a big office, work environment would include good relationship with co-workers and a happy environment no matter how busy each one is. It also includes respect to each member of the company.

I do a lot of things, but I'm guessing you want to know more about my professional life. I mostly keep myself busy designing interactive and digital stuff, and I've been doing that for about 6 years. I also like to look over other people's shoulders and tell them they need to align something or make something or other red. Aside from that I like to do explorations with abstract geometry, patterns and typography. Some call it art, or at least want to put it on their walls or albums covers. It' s a lot of fun, and it gives some variety to my usual work of designing menus and layouts.

In this tutorial we will take a close look at the technique of creating blend objects that will help us to create smooth color transitions. We'll also talk about the problems you may encounter and about the technique that will allow you to avoid unpleasant artifacts. Using the Blend Tool (W), we can obtain smooth transitions between colors, obtaining the shadows, glares, or simply color spots. Artworks below are examples in which blend objects were mostly used. Source: http://designmodo.com/color-transition-blend-tool/#ixzz2VR9hJtOF

When I started writing this, the idea of a skyscraper construction project came to mind. I thought of a huge skyscraper with restaurants, retail stores, offices, gyms, and residential spaces - a large self-contained, compact community all by itself.

Whenever I have to develop a specific and focused library like this, I like to start with the outcome of, how do I want this to work? So, we can begin by writing down some of the features that we'd like it to have: The ability to load different pages according to the URI Reading parameters from the URI (placeholders) Keeping the pages dynamic as per the Meteor standard That looks pretty good. Now after looking over these features, you may think they are pretty similar to a 'router' type of library and I agree. So, let's take a look at how our 'router' library would work in action:

Whoops is a small library, available as a Composer package, that helps you handle errors and exceptions across your PHP projects. Out of the box, you get a sleek, intuitive and informative error page each time something goes pants-up in your application. Even better, under all that is a very straight-forward, but flexible, toolset for dealing with errors in a way that makes sense for whatever it is that you're doing. The library's main features are: Detailed and intuitive page for errors and exceptions Code view for all frames Focus on error/exception analysis through the use of custom, simple middle-ware/handlers Support for JSON and AJAX requests Included providers for Silex and Zend projects through the bundled providers, and included as part of the Laravel 4 core Clean, compact, and tested code-base, with no extra dependencies

The days when blogging was just a hobby of teenagers are gone; now, even entrepreneurs want to have their own blogs, but do you know how to talk to clients? What does this mean to freelance web designers? It means that there are a lot of people out there who are willing to spend money on a custom design for their blogs. How can you impress these potential clients and get lucrative jobs? Talk to your potential clients about what is important to THEM!

Playground is a Prague-based production studio that often mixes 3D renders, photography, and concept art to create really amazing composite images. In this article, we will show a few of our favorite works from their portfolio, as well as a few progress images for some of the pieces.

Semi Permanent was started in Sydney in 2003 by Australians Andrew Johnstone and Murray Bell and has since become an international annual conference, spanning across 5 counties and 9 cities including London, Los Angeles and Stockholm. Semi Permanent is now synonymous with assembling industry leaders from all creative fields to present their work, inspirations, processes, insights and to simply share their creative journey with fellow peers over two jam-packed days. As always, there was an impressive showcase of amazing work that spanned across Graphic Design, Film, Animation, Motion Graphics, Architecture and Visual Effects. Illustration, Photography and Graffiti. Photographer Max Doyle showcased his diverse talent by entertaining us with a live jam of one of his songs. And of course it wouldn't be a design conference without the guys from Stab Magazine firing t-shirts into the crowd from a canon.

Online games are undeniably becoming more epic as they improve in terms of gameplay, characters and graphics. One of these online games is called Rift which was released a few years ago. In this game, there are several 'rifts' which are divided into six elements (earth, fire, air, water, life, and death) and it is where monsters emerge to destroy anything in its path. For this moment we will be focusing in air element wherein these monsters are able to control the wind, clouds, and air at their will.

My sponsor Treehouse has not only an excellent video tutorial service, but also an insightful blog. I wanted to feature a few of the posts I found most useful -- hopefully you get something out of them!

Landing page is considered to be the most viewed page of any website. It usually serves as an intro section that consists of brief information about your business, including such essential stuff as logo, menu, welcoming photo-based or illustration-driven mascotes and, last but not least, tagline. The latter is mainly associated with opening headline which duty is to: Clarify what your agency does; emphasize difference between you and your competitors; encourage users to explore your website further; give a glimpse of your brand; promote your potential; show benefits; build emotions; establish proper atmosphere; add creativity. It's also imperative to take into account psychological side of the issue while choosing emotional background of your headline, since funny and serious statements can reflect on users differently.

High-quality usability has been the center of discussions in the industry in the past ten years, as it becomes more and more important for users. Good usability can also help build brand awareness and can generally improve a user's opinion of a website and even a company. There is so much focus on usability today because big and small companies showed how important a good usability strategy can turn out to be. Good usability has been in the past couple of years at the heart of successful start-ups. Simple ideas are most of the time the most innovative and this is mainly what usability is about: making a feature or a product easy to use, while still keeping the product quality at a high level. Today's article comes a lot down to common sense. It seems that after years and years of discussing this issue, web designers still have a hard time understanding it. Usability is not a joke anymore and the advices below should be printed out and pinned on the wall in front of your desk.

PHPUnit has hinted at parallelism since 2007, but, in the meantime, our tests continue to run slowly. Time is money, right? ParaTest is a tool that sits on top of PHPUnit and allows you to run tests in parallel without the use of extensions. This is an ideal candidate for functional (i.e Selenium) tests and other long-running processes.

Parallax scroll has become mainstream, Ian Coyle created the very first parallax website for Nike "Nike Better World" on 2011, nowadays it is overused as a trendy effect but it is a great tool if it serves the user experience and is perfect for storytelling websites. The term is derived from the Greek παράλλαξις (parallaxis), meaning "alteration". Nearby objects have a larger parallax than more distant objects when observed from different positions, so parallax scrolling can be used to determine distances.

Unless you are really HTML-savvy, writing articles directly using HTML is not ideal. First, you have to wrap the content properly with the tags in order to format it, and secondly you will have to go back and forth from your code editor to the browser to see how it looks. If you are a frequent web writer, I think it's better for you to write using Markdown. Markdown allows you to write content in plain text that later can be translated into a valid HTML format, and with the help of a tool, you can instantly see the output.

Blogging, or more specifically writing, is a daily routine for us, here in hongkiat.com. In the process, we've accumulated a lot of resources that would be real helpful in jumpstarting one's blogging career. If you want to start writing your own blog, you can always check out the tons of materials we have on blogging, plus this amazing list of cheatsheets, infographics & resources you don't want to miss. The cheatsheets here help you write and promote your content, understand how to work better with free blogging services such as WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, and we also have cheatsheets on basic HTML, CSS and Markdown to help you create beautiful blog themes. Now, let's get started!

This is great, I promise. We know Finland for a lot of things, rubber boots for instance or - ehm - Helsinki. Angelos Arnis and Tomi Hiltunen want to add to this ample variety. They just published a set of device mockups, all in PNG and CSS, that you can actually bring to life with real content. You've got a web app for mobile clients you want to show on your website? Not very impressive, unless you present it inside the frames of its mobile boundaries. That's what Arnis and Hiltunen have built…

The web is crammed full of words. There is enough content to keep you reading until you take your last breath, even if that moment is still 100 years from now. So far for the good news ;-) The bad news is, the web grows faster than you could ever possibly keep up with. Sooner or later, any netizen will suffer from information overload. I know I do already. This will become a growing problem for brands and their communication strategies as they will need to cut their messages short or risk to not get noticed. If you ask me, one of the best ways to deal with this necessity is the infographic…