I went through a phase of  scrutinizing a few entries from a contest for designing a “contents page” for a tech magazine. Some of the worst entries had a  pathetic color scheme. With hot pink texts on dirty green and black background made my mind shutdown for a while. I then decided to post something that would help inexperienced color pickers.  Be it good typography or design, its always underpinned with the proper use of colors. Color combinations like these are pleasing to the eye:

Getting such a great sense of color demands great experience. Still some places on the web help us generating new colored ideas. Some of the tools which help finding a perfect color sceme are:

http://www.colorcombos.com/ Personally my favorite place for finding a color scheme for any occasion. This website has a huge gallery of pre-made color arrays. You just have to scan them and pick the best one that suits. There isn’t any hassle of turning knobs or pushing buttons to generate a scheme. On finding a box that is the best for your project, click on it for a full page display with the hex codes. Though the hex codes are within the box in the library itself. But having a look at the colors on a full page helps you decide.

http://colorschemedesigner.com/

http://www.colorschemer.com/

and the list goes on…

You would have to look some of these related articles to find great color picking tools on the web.

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It is always tough to find a WordPress theme that matches your blog theme exactly. Divine lets you design your own theme. With the basic knowledge of photoshop all you have to do is design a page in photoshop. Then simply export it to wordpress using Divine. All the CSS slicing and page elements are created automatically by this free photoshop plugin Divine. The free version of the program has significant limitations in its functionality. The process of template creation with a glance at these limitations is described at page How to create a theme with Divine Free version with videos. The program works with Windows only. Mac version is expected soon. You will need photoshop version CS2 CS3 or CS4 to install this plugin.

The FAQ page clears all the questions.

The free version has some minimum and maximum limits for the page size. Other limitations of the free version.

You have send them your email address. The download link is sent to your email. [download]

This website (is called HatchWise) I recently discovered, acts like bridge for designers and clients. Basically the clients give their needs for the logo in a detailed manner and the designers compete against each other to produce amazing logos. This website has 2 logins. One for the “Client” and the other for the “designer”

Sign-up as a designer and design logos for money. The clients pay in advance, so even if they don’t like the logo they still have to take it. That means an assured prize for us designers.

The price for a logo may range from 100$ to 500$ usually. The higher priced logos have mass entries because of obvious reasons (money). Low cost ones make sure that even individuals and amateur designers win sometimes. Whenever there is a new requirement, you get a notification in your mail you specified during sign-up.

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Sitting jobless couple of days back I discovered a good technique. Came up with this after hours of manipulation.

Adobe Photoshop was the only tool used in the making of the wallpaper. It is a nice big size (1900X1200) so you can crop according to your screen size. Request for custom screen size wallpaper, without the watermark in the comments OR a PSD.

[Test Page] Best viewed with Firefox 3.5 A test page I created using some basic photoshop. The slices I cut from the psd are as below. [images]

Curved DIV: There are many ways to create curved DIVs, but I preferred using a simpler method I found while surfing the internet. The curvature of the DIV tags is a simple code, can be found here:

[Curved CSS]

IE as expected doesn’t support the code, so a downloadable file is included at the above URL. The download htc file isn’t completely bug free. DIV height problems are still noticeable. Plus using it with the jQuery with it gave me hundreds of problems. I preferred to keep my design sharp edged for IE people.

The CSS style sheet can be accessed here [StyleSheet]. It is a bit messed up so have patience.

jQuery: The jquery was copied from the tutorial. Made many changes to the CSS according to my design. It required variable height so, I used just the min-height property on the content DIV.

[jQuery slider]

Known Bugs and Problems: Right now the fact that the page is static is disturbing. It has to be evolved into a php dynamic page. Loading of all the posts in a single page load will  increase load times later. Also there will be problem monitoring post statistics separately (indexing, meta, visitors). Another problem I have to overcome is the embedding of a flash movie in the jQuery DIV. Please report any other bugs and suggestions to indigoanalysis@gmail.com