The Art Company’s Blog

Backgrounds are important. Whether they’re used on a website, on a drawing, on an image compo or on a mobile phone, they give an undeniable “cachet” to your creation, while also improving the viewing experience by increasing the focus on the content. And while they’re tons of free or shareware applications to create these backgrounds, there’s also a lot of free online tools that will do the same in seconds. This list of 15 online generators will allow you to create your own background, stripes and tartans in a couple of clicks!

» 15 Online Background Generators

Our friends at Smashing just released an article that features nothing but the ultimate list of must-have plugins for photoshop. It doesn’t mean these plugins are free, of course, but it gives you a clear idea of how your plugin collection should look like if you’re info serious graphic design.

» Ultimate Collection Of Useful Photoshop Plug-Ins

Enough with the talking, here are the links. Enjoy! Continue reading

As web developers, web designers, graphic artists or information architects, we deal daily with a lot of documents. Files, applications, archives, that’s a lot of information. We also exchange a lot of data with colleagues, co-workers, contractors, freelances… And in this mass of data, sometimes there are pieces we don’t know. What if you’re sent an obscure .ABT document and don’t have a single clue what this file format is? Of course, you can Google it, but wouldn’t it be nice to always be able to open any file you have, regardless if you have its native mother application or not? Now it’s possible, thanks to OpenWith.org! Continue reading

Writing for the web requires a certain discipline. Also, the way you put up your content can’t be compared to the way you write for other media, such as newspapers, or any other form of more “traditional” communication. But most of all, what you write on the web should talk to your audience, not to yourself. Our friends at WebDesignerDepot have written an excellent article over the subject, explaining the “ugly”, the “bad” and the “good” of a efficient copywriting, and how it can impact the effectiveness and the core value of your websites. Read on!

» Is Self-Centered Web Copy Hurting Your Websites?

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Rounded corners have become one of the essential design components of modern web design. There are numerous ways to implement them in your pages; pure HTML/CSS, proprietary javascript, or using standard frameworks like jQuery. That’s the approach we have chosen, since it’ll be very difficult to overcome the simplicity of this solution.

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Tweaking your CSS and your code so your pages render nicely regardless of the user’s browser is, we all know that, a very time-consuming hassle. But there’s more into it than just cross-browser consistency. Fonts might not display the same way on a mac and on a PC — in fact, that nice font you used for your headings might not even exist on the other platform. Now what? Hopefully, there’s Typechart.

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It’s been 6 months, since our last blog post. 6 months full of projects, of contracts, of customer meetings, of countless late work nights. We showed less signs of life than Han Solo in his carbonite prison. Some even asked us, kindly: “Are you dead”?

Well, we’re not.

We’ve been busy far beyond our expectations — which is good, we won’t complain about that. But we’ve neglected our audience, and that wasn’t good. So in the future, we’ll make every effort to try to post at least once a week. Those last 6 months, we’ve gathered tons of valuable resources, and we think it’s just fair that you get your hands on it.

So stay tuned !

When it comes to creating content, there are two options: either you rely on the software installed on your machines, or you use online applications. Of course, these two options are quite different: you can do much more with Gimp or NVU than with an online form generator or an online button maker. But to save time, ask yourself: is it worth launching Photoshop every time you need to design a background pattern?

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