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Featured Photographer: 463 Historical Photographs From Chris Niendethal

Today’s featured photographer is award-winning Chris Niendethal. With a strong focus on people and portraits, Niendethal’s photos have graced the covers of esteemed publications such as Newsweek and TIME magazine.

A freelance photographer virtually all his life, Chris Niedenthal is born and raised in London. After graduating from the London College of Printing, he has decided to return and stay in his parents’ hometown of Poland.

He has been contracted by Newsweek and TIME throughout the 80s, at which he has witnessed vital events, including the birth of the Solidarity union at the Gdansk shipyard, the implementation of martial law in Poland, and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.

Since then, he has won a World Press Photo prize, published four albums and an autobiography, and authored exhibitions featuring mentally handicapped children.

You can see all 463 and even purchase a copy of Niedenthal’s classy photographs in his website.

Featured Work: Have a “Cyber” Month with Loot Crate

Today’s featured work comes from Gabriel Silveira of Sau Paolo, Brazil. Drawing inspiration from popular science-fiction movies, Silveira has turned the Loot Crate June illustration into a hunk of iconic characters and objects.

Loot Crate is a fun subscription for geeks and gamers. Filled with exclusive goodies neatly packaged in a box, it is essentially a monthly treasure chest tied by a theme. For the month of June, the theme is “Cyber.”

To best present the theme and wonderful goodies it comes with, Gabriel Silveira was assigned to draw each letter based on the featured franchises.

In the end, C becomes a cyclon from Battlestar Galactica; Y becomes a light cycle from Tron; B ends up as the Blade Runner spinner; E transforms into Optimus Prime’s fist; and R is changed into the T-800 from Terminator.

Want to get access to exclusive goodies? Visit Loot Crate.

Be sure to drop by Behance and show Gabriel Silveira some love, too.

Featured Work: Knowledge Society’s “State of Mind”

Today’s featured work comes from Michiel van den Berg, who was commissioned to create a fascinating map depicting Western Australia’s changing path toward advanced innovation and opportunity.

“State of Mind” is a joint project between Knowledge Society, the country’s first public knowledge agency, and the University of Western Australia.

Aiming to inform the world of the developments that has come and is continuously coming to Western Australia, the duo got van den Berg to produce a beautiful landscape. The illustration served as their printed publication’s cover illustration and interior fold-out and, eventually, is turned into an animated presentation for their website.

See the illustrated landscape in action in Knowledge Society’s home page.

You can also check out Michiel van den Berg’s other concepts and 3D renders in Behance.

11 Creative Agencies That You Should Follow

Being original is tough, but it’s not impossible. Pulling out a fresh idea is a process, so let’s draw some inspiration from those who have been there and done that.

We’re not advocates of plagiarism; that’s against the law and our morals. Rather, what we want is simply to help you see new things and concepts that you might have never encountered before.

Take these creative agencies and individuals as an example. They have all carved their marks in the art and graphic design industry. Some may argue that their styles are not revolutionary, but there is no doubt that their innovativeness has helped them get to where they are now.

Soppo

An interactive production studio based in Poland, Soppo is founded in 2009 and is focused on producing websites, web applications, and online games. Some of its notable clients include Field Entertainment (Mickey’s Road Show Latin website) and Fox Home Entertainment (Die Hard 16-bit game and Epic Voice Changer and Become an Avatar apps).

Super Top Secret

Super Top Secret is an all-around group composed of top-notch writers, designers, strategists, developers, shooters, editors, and producers, it specializes in developing beautiful creations. Some of its best works include University of Oregon (interactive website), Assassin’s Creed IV (social media campaign), and Publik Coffee (brand development).

SHIBUI

With a minimalist website that reflects its slick, no non-sense approach, SHIBUI is all about producing engaging digital content for mobile, tablet, and desktop. Some of its clients are Go Now (branding, logo design, mobile app UI/UX), Scroll for Your Health (informative scrolling website), and Konimee (branding, logo design, web and mobile app UI/UX, web design and development).

Stupid Studios

Don’t be fooled by its chosen name, this Danish design and branding agency is anything but a fool. Stupid Studios takes pride in understanding and challenging clients to produce fun and creative content. Consequently, their thorough process allowed it to work with renowned brands and organizations such as Sony, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International.

Green Chameleon

This Bristol-based design agency is currently working on a better, cooler website, but that isn’t stopping them from continuously producing great graphic, web, and product designs as well as marketing strategies. Some of the organizations that have put their trust in Green Chameleon include University of West England, Greengage, Smirnoff, and Life Fitness.

Vaersågod

Websites that awe people is the specialty of this Norwegian design company. While Vaersågod is only available in Norwegian, it nonetheless let you see their latest projects. The collection includes designs for Harvest., Ibsen Award, Sporten.com, and Pilegrimsleden.

Lounge Lizard

After the chameleon, here comes a lizard. Based in New York, Lounge Lizard focuses on producing attractive, innovative, and feature-rich websites and mobile applications. As it takes time to completely understand its client to create the best possible output, it has been able to work with a large selection of known organizations such as Canon, Disney Interactive, and National Geographic.

AQuest

Believing that the best dreams happen when people are online, AQuest is a creative organization proud of its over 20-year history and more than 50 international awards. Its website reflects that sentiment, which highlights their best works, along with the prizes they have bagged with them. Some of the spotlighted works are for Cantina Valpolicella Negrar, 7MML, Gaudi, Panorama Auto, and Diumbo.

Kunal Chhajer

This web and graphic designer’s website is as fun and creative as his works. With doodles and a thoughtful self-introduction, Kunal Chhajer‘s website leads to his favorite works, which include promotional designs for companies such as Samsung, Eureka Forbes, and HCL.

Ryan Keiser

You can probably tell just how in love with colors this web designer and developer is. The portfolio Ryan Keiser shares in his website isn’t as grand or comprehensive as the agencies above. Nevertheless, they offer insight to how your choice of colors can make your website calming or crazy fun.

Dogstudio

Proudly making good stuff every single day, this Belgian design agency loves to work hard and play hard. Always aiming for high-quality approach and output, Dogstudio‘s most prized works include that for Franco Dragone (immersive website), “The Congress” (Ari Folman animated movie website), and Creative Wallonia (insights, branding, strategy, UX, and design).

20 Awesome Must Try CSS Tips for Beginners

Since the inception of the internet, CSS and HTML have been tied together in a conjugal bond. While HTML is possibly an easy markup language to learn, CSS can be quite a challenge.

Nevertheless, achieving the gorgeous layout that boasts a clean look and beautiful backend isn’t out of reach. Like any other craft, it requires practice and deep understanding of what’s at hand.

To give you budding web designers and developers a head start, we’ve compiled 20 of the most essential CSS tips and best practices that you can try to achieve a fabulous front-end.

Let’s get started!

Use style-sheet inheritance

Use a single CSS file for the entire project. This makes editing and updating easy. If you must use several style-sheets, be sure that they utilize only implicit properties while inheriting common properties from best level style-sheets.

Understand when to use IDs & Classes

IDs and Classes are probably the most misused styling components in CSS. The difference between the two is simple – use IDs when you don’t need to repeat your style for over one element and use Classes to style several elements.

Give logical names to IDs & Classes

IDs and Classes need to be logically named and should correspond to the tags that their styled. This is vital for code organization & debugging.

Style top level elements first

CSS is complex and the order in which elements need to be styled is very important. The general guideline is to always style top level elements first followed by inner elements. For example, HTML and BODY tags ought to be styled prior to styling encapsulated DIV tags.

Center elements through style-sheets

Never use center tags to center align elements. This strategy is obsolete. Instead, use style-sheets to center text and areas of the HTML file. This could be done through the margin property & text-align property.

Understand the CSS box model

Understanding the CSS box model is important to effectively position your elements. Cascading style sheet box model makes life easy for designers and developers.

Then shift to the Flex-box model

The box model is good enough to implement web page positioning, however CSS3 has launched the flex-box model that’s even simpler and easier. It’s the future of CSS.

Positioning with CSS

While HTML enables you to control the position of elements through tables and the use of non-breaking space, you can’t position things precisely. With CSS, you can place an item on a page with exact X and Y coordinates. This is important for any web developer. Understand CSS positioning before you try creating a layout.

Move to CSS3

The majority of development is now done with CSS3 and HTML5. To have a competitive edge in the field, it crucial to have a solid base of CSS3 principles.

Reference only one style sheet in the markup

Rather than including x number of style sheet references in each document, only include one and import the rest of the style sheets into one. It’ll be a lot faster while you’re working on a complex task to avoid needless HTTP requests.

Always specify media types

Specify media types within the style sheets. Don’t utilize the media feature on link elements or any place in the HTML—but rather specify media types either through @media rules or when importing.

Avoid resetting style sheets

Reset style sheets in general have two disadvantages – unnecessary AND redundant code. Reset style sheets that can’t even be customized will introduce both issues and since the majority of styling differences are simple to spot anyway, it’s generally best not to utilize resets at all.

CSS browser compatibility table

We all know every browser has different methods for rendering CSS styles. It is best to have a chart for reference, or a list that displays the entire CSS compatibility for each browser.

Keep CSS code clean

If your CSS code is not clean, you’re going to wind up coding in confusion and having a tough time referencing the previous code. For beginners, religiously make appropriate indentations for commenting effectively.

Learn to use Debugging tools

There are a ton of browser-based tools tools which can highlight CSS of the web page that debug on the fly as you hover over a specific tag. Here are a few good (and free) CSS debugging tools: DOM Inspector, FireFox Web Developer, Firebug & Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar.

Use Shorthand CSS

When possible, try to use Shorthand CSS.  It offers a quicker way of writing CSS code and most importantly – it tends to make the code cleaner thus easier to understand.

Typography

It is not hard to use clean and simple text on your pages, rather than letting Internet Explorer and Firefox default to the serif-heavy fonts on Linux and Windows. Try adding this to your primary style sheet:

body

{

font-family: Arial;

font-size: 95%;

}

Arial isn’t great, but it’s not too bad either. By clearly setting a font, you pull yourself away from being a victim of the OS/browser. It’s especially useful when you don’t have spare laptops lying around for testing purposes.

Span and Div tags

You can use cascading style sheets on more than just <span> and <div> tags. Ensure that you style every little thing that makes sense in your file. Newbies invest a lot of time attempting to convert their websites to span and divs, when it isn’t necessary. Remember that you can style any tag you have to.

Style the larger elements first

Whenever you style a page, have a plan and structure in mind – <html> and <body> and then the greater elements like <p> and so on. In fact, consider giving all your web pages the style of HTML. Then you have a standard palette to work from.

Practice is key

The web is filled with free resources that’s available if you look for it. Code samples and tutorials are abundant. Each time you come across an amazing web element that’s visually attractive, have a look at the source and CSS using Inspect Element or Firebug.

So there you have it, 20 awesome CSS web design tips. Remember to always plan what you would like to achieve before you start and this will make your life easier. It’ll save time in creating websites and the results will be better for you and the user.

About Navid Tayebi:

Navid Tayebi has considerable experience in digital marketing and brand development. He is the founder of Creative Over, an Orange County web design agency, CA that primarily focuses on providing digital marketing solutions to small- and medium-sized businesses. He is a versatile, organized and self-reliant person. His areas of expertise are refinement and development of marketing goals, promotional activities, pricing strategies and branding. You can find Navid on Twitter, Linkedin, Google + and Facebook.

Daily Freebie: Huge List of 21 Premium Photoshop Mockups

Today’s daily freebie comes from graphic, UI/UX, and web design studio Premium Mockups from Denmark.

Never failing to impress, this release is no different as it possesses the same high quality, versatility, and user-friendliness that thousands have come to expect from the studio.

This set of Photoshop mockups is divided into two parts: t-shirts and phone.

There are four mockups for t-shirts, allowing for easy styling and color customization. On the other hand, there are 17 iPhone 6 mockups arguably the most popular of iPhones. Mockups are available in 3 colors (black, white, and gold), and have editable reflection with one-click filters.

Check out Premium Mockups at Behance and get the PSDs through the link below.

Gimme some premium