Jamal
Jamal is a young freelance web designer, web developer, writer, and blogger based in Atlanta, Ga. His work can be found at his online identity Five Alarm Interactive(FAI). He is a college student and philosophical poet by day, and passionate professional by night. You can keep up with him on Twitter @5alarmint.
Is the Blogging Industry In a Downturn?
Remember that first time you got into the web industry as a professional? Speaking from personal experience, it must be a pretty amazing experience for anyone. Not only are you joining a community of friendly people who are not trying to destroy everyone in their path to grow their own brand, but there are tons of great resources right at your fingertips. These resources of course being the amazing books, fonts, frameworks, knowledgeable forum members, and of course blog articles that really shape and change the culture of the web profession. Although all those resources are important, without great blog articles, how are up and coming designers going to learn about all of them?
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Knowing Your Role in the Web Community
The web design and development industry has a lot in common with sport teams if you really think about it, and of course know enough about sports to see the similarities. Let’s take a minute and look at that. On any sports team, every player has a specific role they each must play for the team to win. A strong well-rounded team will have one star player, typically the leader as well, a diversely talented supporting cast that complement said star, a group of highly talented reserve players that can come into the game at any time and make their impact felt, the development/minor league team, and then the people who watch them and play as a hobby. The only problem a team built like this could face is that of the ego of the players. Since everyone believes they are the best, it’s going to get even worse with the freshest faces on the block, everyone feels like they should be stars. If that doesn’t sound like the web community to someone, then that person is either in denial or is oblivious to the truth.
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Can Sociology Improve Your Designs?
An artist is a creative who creates to satisfy their own aesthetic pleasure, unconcerned with the wants and needs of others. However a designer is a creative who creates in hopes of satisfying the wants and needs of others with their art, casting aside their own individual creative desires. This is an important fact to always keep in mind for any professional in the creative field, because quite often we tend to forget that we make our living creating art that MUST be found appealing to others and not just ourselves. Of course for any person with creative talent this is a major downside, but that is what we sign up for when taking on the designer role. Now, what does sociology have to do with any of this?
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Is the University Route Right for You?
Well, it’s that time of year again. The time when high school seniors, some overachieving juniors as well, begin to finally see their educational journey for the upcoming fall be just right around the corner. By now probably close to a billion, if not more, college applications have been completed and processed by admission boards for this group of young individuals looking to expand their minds by pursuing higher education. At first glance this seems like a great scenario, having young people putting care and consideration into their future is what everyone loves to see. However, what if these graduating students are making the wrong choice about their educational journeys?
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Usability Tips and Tools for the Visually Impaired on the Web
The internet is the most important tool in modern society. Through its use, people have access to a wealth of opportunity and information. This access of course includes things like communication, business, social interactions, entertainment, shopping, and so much more between people virtually anywhere in the world on a daily basis. Simply describing the internet as an important tool would just not be enough. In actuality it is a vital necessity, and one can’t truly survive without it. With that being stated, can you imagine what it would be like not to be able to view the internet?
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How SOPA/PIPA Can Affect You
The United States government has been facing an intense amount of pressure, mostly from the entertainment and computer software publishing companies for years to find some method of stopping the online piracy that is allowing people to own copies of their merchandise for free. This is of course understandable, nobody wants to see something they worked hard on to create something of quality be disrespected by people gaining access to it for free.
However, what the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate have planned for their respective bills is not a way of just putting a halt on online piracy. Tech giants such as Mozilla and Google who once supported these bills, now are on the offensive in trying to ensure they never get passed. Before going any further into how this affects the everyday internet users, let’s first get a good understanding about both bills.
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20 Mind-Boggling Parallax Website Design And How To Make One
There hasn’t been a design style that has captured the web’s creative community like that of parallax website design in ages, which, in non industry terms, is about a few months. You might be wondering what parallax website design is, I don’t believe I have ever heard of this. Well actually you have heard it, and seen its use for some time now. Before going into showcasing some really well designed websites utilizing parallax design, let’s take some time to examine and explain what it is.
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Razzie’s Of Logo Design: The Worst Logos Ever Designed
A logo is an image that is supposed to be the representation of an organization. The logo’s job is to give off the same energy you would want people to receive when you describe the company or organization it represents. That being said, it is quite astonishing that there are actually people out there that are willing, and more importantly bold enough to, post a logo design job somewhere in the price range of $100. Some even are bold enough to disrespect the creative community even more by going as low as $50, some lower than that.
The designers that accept these quite disrespectful jobs can’t be fully faulted here, quite frankly they just don’t know any better. For the most part, the people taking these demeaning jobs are either young starving designers on their last dollar with no solid client in sight, a relative of the person posting who plays around in Adobe Photoshop Elements every now and then, or they were daring enough to take it into their own hands after getting no responses. This treatment of logo design is of course going to lead to the inevitable lower creative standards set for this creative practice. With a key creative field being demeaned every day, a client base for this field with an ‘ignorance is bliss’ mindset, and swarms of people claiming falsely to be designers, what is there for real professional creatives to do?
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Why Are Fonts So Expensive?
Everywhere you look on the internet there is a freeware option available that easily competes with its licensed premium version. This competition can become so close that the question of why the premium option is even a possible choice for one often arises. The comparisons of productivity suites Microsoft Office and freeware open source options like Open Office and LibreOffice are a great example of this predicament. This positive change for consumers of course isn’t just for applications. This freeware shift has found itself to every aspect of all content one can find on the internet, of course the font world is not excluded.
Let me attempt at painting a common scenario for you. Imagine that you are starting on a new project, and have come across two fonts. One is a premium licensed font, and the other is a free font. Now the typical answer to this situation would be to go for the free font, save some money on the project, and the client really won’t know the difference so no complaints there. However, is the typical answer the choice that is always right? Is there any additional value that can be gained by going with the premium font option versus choosing the free option? Let’s take a look a look at some reasons why fonts cost so much.
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Improve Website Usability Using jQuery, HTML5, And CSS3
Remember back when if you wanted to add interactivity to your site to improve the UX aspect to make it more appealing to visitors, you had to immediately go to a flash outlet? Well that sure does seem like a long time ago now, surprisingly so because it was just a few short years ago. The decline of Flash use for these instances can be credited to advances in web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery. These advancements have made the use of Flash in most cases an outdated and inefficient method of tackling interactivity in a website. That is why in this article, we’re going to take a look at HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery tutorials, techniques, and resources that can replace aspects of a website where the use of Flash was the dominant and most practical option.
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