Lately I have developed a deep and twisted love for Photoshop brush sets. They are a great way of quickly and easily adding texture and depth to designs and their usage can be seen constantly on the web.

I think texture and depth are particularly important in web design. Graphic designers get the texture and feel in the material they print on and often flat colours seem to work better in graphic design as lighting and texture come naturally. I think web designers often need to use allot of gradients and layering things up to give depth and makes things tactile, authentic.

This is where Photoshop brushes come into their own. You can of course build things up with images but brushes give a quick and fluid advantage where you can just stamp texture onto the mask of the layer or create imagery when you can’t find the right royalty free image.

Here are some recent examples I’ve seen Photoshop brushes used:

• http://www.mikeposs.com/
• http://www.pixele.fr/
• http://mesa.cityofgrace.com/

Adding Photoshop brushes is easy. Once you’ve downloaded some, all you have to do is open your brush pallette (F5), click on the little arrow top right and then click on ‘Load Brushes’, the new brushes will then be appended to your list.

Here is a great site for free brush downloads - http://www.brusheezy.com/.

I’ve also made my own brush set, you can download it here: http://www.brusheezy.com/brush/639-Rough-Edges

After watching the new series of Most Haunted last night, which I particularly enjoy seeing Karl and Stuart getting their asses kicked by the ‘astrol beings’, followed by a new vampire programme, Moonlight, I perhaps wasn’t in the best states of mind for what was to come.

At about 1am last night I found my bed shaking, much like it does on films such as The Exorcist or An American Haunting and was trying to think what Yvette Fielding would do in this scenario to deter the attack. I didn’t go to the extent of attempting to establish communication with the being or ask it to throw a stone or coin at me (one of Yvette’s finest techniques), instead I hid under the covers.

Logically, and because the attack didn’t persist I later thought it must have been a rare earthquake. Luckily for me, it was. The news is saying it’s the biggest since 1984, in their best attempts to really ham it up but come on, it’s not exactly on the same scale as Valdivia.

Valdivia: 6000 dead.
British pissy earthquake: one bloke had his chimney fall down, it was probably knackered anyway, just wanted to get a claim in.

One of my aims with the new site was to try and get onto some gallery sites so I’m really happy I’ve made it onto my fave! I’d like to say they randomly picked my site while perusing the web, but in truth, I begged for their approval. They must have felt sorry for me!

Anyway, from a technical point of view, I plan to include a fair bit of of AJAX + PHP actionoly to it and probably some Mootools or JQuery ‘fun’. Mainly as a learning exercise but also to improve functionality. I also wanted to have a user rating system for all work and blog posts but I may have to leave this til later, as it’s already going to be pretty darn brain intensive.

Here is a sneak preview of the site so far:

Since my Facebook in 40 years thing that got on the digg.com front page and loads of other sites, I got a steady flow of Facebook friend invites. I think someone has copied me too with this Pension Book, it is better than mine, but has a bit of an abusive angle to it, which I’m not that keen on.

After that I mainly posted items that consisted of sick or had atleast some relation to eating disorders (see example). These were not as popular and soon the posts dried up, much like the sick, a stale remnant, slowly eroding away.

But, the future is bright, I am currently re-designing my website as this one has become almost embarrassing. It’s never a good sign when you fear people looking at your site so it must be changed.

This one is dated, with the next one I aim for a clean, modern and sophisticated look. I also want to add some nice features such as rated content, more dynamic info going on such as a Rant Box, comments on portfolio work and latest site updates so people can see what’s new. I want to highlight my Flash games more too, as people always seem to like them.

From a technical point, I’d like to maybe get in a bit of jquery actionoly in but it’s thinking of a reason, I don’t like features for features sake, there has to be a use. I keep getting alured by Flash CS3’s mobile phone support too. I would love to make some of my games available on mobile phones and it looks pretty easy, but this will have to wait.

http://www.empiredirect.co.uk/content/edxtra/christmas2007/games.htm#flashg

The Christmas site itself is rather nice:

http://www.empiredirect.co.uk/content/edxtra/christmas2007/index.htm

And my legacy, that is Bargain Finder, a means for the user to quickly and easily view the best deals on the website.

http://www.empiredirect.co.uk/content/bargain/index.htm

That is all.

Of late I have been designing a new ecommerce site called ‘idolised.co.uk’. I have enjoyed this very much and produced my best logo of all time, yes, that’s right - Richard Stelmach’s best logo design of all time. The last logo I did was one for my own site, a warning type sign logo of someone puking up with the strap ‘creativebinge.co.uk - consume til yer puke’. Everyone hated this concept, especially the eating disorder angle I took.

So anyway, hopefully this one will be more popular:

Click here to view the site design for idolised.co.uk.

Other than that, I have been muchos enjoying making some Flash games…despite being told not to use so much blood. Well, sorry for adding a little realism to my games, if you hit a tree while skiing at like 80mph, you’re going to be in for a world of hurt. I said that my game would probably save about 10,921 lives as people would know the dangers of skiing, well, all I know is that the blood won’t be on my hands.

And where’s the fun in disintegrating people with demonic snowballs of hate, if all that happens is that they get turned into chirpy dancing elves.

More puke.