Archive for category: Random Stories

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/CFkmfkNoF1o/ashes-beautiful-art-benefits-california-wildfire-relief-funds

From the Ashes: Beautiful Art Benefits California Wildfire Relief funds

ibby
Oct 13, 2017

If you’ve been following the horrific wildfires ravaging our beloved wine country here in California you may enjoy a moment to take in a small piece of positive news proving art can really rally a movement for good. Enter the amazing husband/wife duo Eric Rewitzer and Annie Galvin, the founders of printmaking workshop 3 Fish Studios located in San Francisco’s Sunset District. Annie created a lovable watercolor print of a California poppy rising from the ashes to pay homage to the victims of this heart-wrenching natural disaster while also doing their part to contribute to the relief effort. Through today, ALL proceeds of 3 Fish Studios iconic I LOVE YOU CALIFORNIA collection will go to support relief efforts for those affected by the California wildfires. 3 Fish have also just released a set of inspirational cards, printed on donated 16-point card stock featuring the “rising from the ashes” print. The four-card packs ($10) will also benefit ongoing relief efforts. An inspiring story from an inspiring couple doing their part to make a difference through art. 

ABOUT 3 FISH STUDIOS

Eric Rewitzer and Annie Galvin are printmakers and painters, husband and wife, and founders of 3 Fish Studios. The Outer Sunset hub is home to their workshop and studio, where art happens daily and visitors are always welcome; they love collaborating, making, and sharing creative projects with cool folks.

Annie was born and raised in Ireland. She worked as an illustrator in a Dublin agency before moving to San Francisco in 1989, two weeks before the earthquake.  Annie is inspired by San Francisco, Vogue magazine, comic books, Josef Frank textile designs, gardens, Mexican wrestlers, the short stories of Haruki Murakami, and her own dreams and daydreams. She doodles constantly.

Eric was born and raised on the industrial shores of Lake Michigan. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art, and moved to the west coast in 1987. Eric finds constant inspiration in the scale and diversity of the the California culture and landscape, and will forever love the mix of natural beauty, urban grit, and human diversity on display in San Francisco.

Annie and Eric met in Berkeley in 1998, were married in 2001, and started 3 Fish Studios in 2007. From its original space in the Dogpatch to its now permanent place in the Ocean Beach Republic, the pair have created a dedicated space where they can make and show their work together, and invite people—neighbors and newbies alike—to do the same. 

 

watercolor
3 Fish Studios
california wildfire

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/ag5mUpLgq3k/colour-theory-11121290

Colour is such a pervasive part of everything we visually encounter in the world, that for many designers it becomes an intuitive choice. If you think back to school though, you'll recall being told at a young age that there are three 'primary' colours – Red, Yellow, and Blue. We were all taught that any colour can be created by mixing these three colours in varying quantities.

It turns out that this isn't quite right (although it's still workable enough in practice to be taught the world over to five-year-olds).

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How colour is formed

Colour theory stretches back to at least the 15th century

Understanding how colour is formed and, more importantly, the relationships between different colours, can help you to use colour more effectively in your designs.

The Bauhaus school understood this in the 1920s and 1930s, with staff and students going on to develop colour theories for evoking particular moods and emotions through choice of palette in design and architecture.

The theory of colour is a discipline that stretches back much further than that – at least to the 15th century – and encompasses physics, chemistry and mathematics to fully define and explain the concepts. However, much of this is unnecessary to being able to use colour effectively. 

This quick primer will give you a handy overview of all the important aspects to help you start making informed decisions.

Colour systems

There are two primary colour systems – methods by which colour is reproduced: additive and subtractive (also known as reflective). We use both on a daily basis – the screen you’re reading this article on uses additive colour to generate all the colours you see, while the book you’re reading uses subtractive colour for its front cover.

In simple terms – anything that emits light (such as the sun, a screen, a projector, etc) uses additive, while everything else (which instead reflects light) uses subtractive colour.

01. Additive

Additive colour is based on red, green, and blue – RGB for short

Additive colour works with anything that emits or radiates light. The mixture of different wavelengths of light creates different colours, and the more light you add, the brighter and lighter the colour becomes.

When using additive colour, we tend to consider the building block (primary) colours to be Red, Green, and Blue (RGB), and this is the basis for all colour you use on screen. In additive colour, white is the combination of colour, while black is the absence of colour.

02. Subtractive

Subtractive colour is based on cyan, magenta, and yellow

Subtractive colour works on the basis of reflected light. Rather than pushing more light out, the way a particular pigment reflects different wavelengths of light determines its apparent colour to the human eye.

Subtractive colour, like additive, has three primary colours – Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (CMY). In subtractive colour white is the absence of colour, while black is the combination of colour, but it’s an imperfect system.

The pigments we have available to use don’t fully absorb light (preventing reflected colour wavelengths), so we have to add a fourth compensating pigment to account for this limitation.

We call this “Key”, hence CMYK, but essentially it’s black. Without this additional pigment, the closest to black we’d be able to render in print would be a muddy brown.

The colour wheel

The modern colour wheel has been in use since the 18th century

In order to make it easier to see the relationship between different colours, the concept of the modern colour wheel was developed around the 18th century. These early wheels plotted the different primary colours around a circle, mixing different primary colours together in strict ratios to achieve secondary and tertiary colours.

The colour wheel allows us to see at a glance which colours are complementary (opposite each other on the wheel), analogous (adjacent to each other on the wheel), triadic (three colours positioned at 120 degrees on the wheel from each other) and so on.

Each of these relationships can produce pleasing colour combinations. There are many more pleasing relationships between colours based on their position on the wheel. There are free apps for picking a colour scheme, or you could use your designer's eye to pick your own. Click through to the next page for a little help on this.

Next page: the three components of colour, colour gamut, and more…

The three components of a colour

The three component parts that help us define a colour are hue, saturation and brightness

Yellow is yellow is yellow, right? Well, actually, no; there are many different colours we could refer to as yellow. Different shades or tints, saturations and hues are all possible while still being within the yellow part of the colour wheel. As a result, there are three primary component parts that help us define a colour:

01. Hue

This is the position on the colour wheel, and represents the base colour itself. This is typically referred to in degrees (around the colour wheel), so a yellow colour will appear between 50 and 60 degrees, with the perfect yellow appearing at 56 degrees. Green, meanwhile, appears at 120 degrees on the wheel at so on.

02. Saturation

This is a representation of how saturated (or rich) a colour is. Low saturation results in less overall colour, eventually becoming a shade of grey when fully desaturated. Saturation is normally referred to as a percentage between 0 and 100%.

03. Brightness

This is how bright a colour is, typically expressed as a percentage between 0 and 100%. A yellow at 0% brightness will be black, while the same yellow hue and saturation at 100% brightness will be the full yellow colour.

Colour gamut

Colour gamut describes the range of potential colours a system can reproduce

Colour gamut is a way of describing the full range of potential colours a system can reproduce. It may surprise you to learn that the range of colours achievable in CMYK is different to that you can achieve with RGB.

This is partially because of the nature of the two different systems, but also (in the real world at least) as a consequence of limitations in our technology – screens aren’t always capable of producing the same range of colours as each other, and pigments reflect light at a non-uniform rate as you reduce their saturation.

Colour perception

Finally, it’s worth looking at how different colours can affect the way we perceive other colours. A typical illustration of this features a mid-grey tone placed over a light grey background, and the same mid-grey tone shown over a dark grey background.

The apparent brightness of the mid-grey is altered according to the context in which you see it – a trick of the eye, working to make sense of its surroundings. Hues works in the same way as tones when placed adjacent to other colours, allowing you to create different effects using the same palette of colours.

Further reading

There's more to explore in the world of colour, which is why we've got a tag for all of our articles on the subject of colour. Visit creativebloq.com/tag/colour to explore our latest colour articles, or read some of these highlights below.

01. The designer’s guide to using colour in branding

Colour sells. Whether you’re working with a product, service or space, the ‘right’ combinations of colours can influence how someone feels, thinks and behaves – with powerful results.

What are the ‘right’ combinations, and how can designers sidestep subjective debates to harness the power of colour more effectively in branding projects? Computer Arts magazine takes a look in this guide, speaking to experts in colour branding and looking at tools to help you make the right choices.

02. How to pick the perfect colour palette every time

In the 1980s, colour psychologist Angela Wright identified links between patterns of colour and patterns of human behaviour. She went on to develop the Colour Affects System, which identifies links between four colour groups and four basic personality types, based on original research involving Aristotle, Newton and German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

If harnessed correctly, designers can use the Colour Affects System to control the message of their colour palettes and, crucially, kill subjective debate around colour in client meetings with evidence to back up their decisions. This guide from Computer Arts magazine's colour issue explains how it works…

03. How to manage colours in Photoshop

This article provides a great overview for users who are new to colour management, with practical advice for managing colours in Photoshop.

It explores how to convert your images from RGB to CMYK mode, and the effect this will have on the colours within your image; how to customise your colour settings to suit your particular needs; and how to sync your colour profile across all of your Adobe CC apps, add a particular colour profile provided by your printer, and preview a CMYK version of your design without losing any RGB information.

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04. 10 colour management terms designers need to know

Getting your colours right means getting your head around some tricky terms. There are a number of jargon terms that might baffle you – so we've put together this handy guide. 

Have a read, and you'll soon be able to sort your spectrophotometer from your tristimulus colorimeter…

05. 4 ways to master colour in logo design

Colour is a universal language in design. It can help convey a brand’s personality, create market standout, and evoke an emotional response. This article reveals four ways to work with colour more effectively in your logo design work… 

06. Outstanding uses of colour in branding

Successfully 'owning' a colour is a big deal. With this in mind, we've explored how different brands around the world have staked their respective claims to 10 colours – in some cases with considerable success.

07. The best colour tools for web designers

For web designers, one of the most important choices to make is over colour selections. Choose the wrong ones, and you might just lose out on an opportunity.

But how do you know which colours work well together? To help with the important task of colour selection, this article points you in the direction of some of the best free colour tools on the web (plus one special bonus at the end for Mac users).

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/warnings-and-errors-in-sass/

The following is a short extract from our book, Jump Start Sass, written by Hugo Giraudel and Miriam Suzanne. It’s the ultimate beginner’s guide to JavaScript. SitePoint Premium members get access with their membership, or you can buy a copy in stores worldwide.

Our incredible journey through Sass is slowly coming to an end, and so far you’ve been doing great! There’s one technical chapter left before we look at project architecture, and then you’ll be fully equipped to write Sass code in your own projects.

Now we’re going to look at warnings and errors. Both form a one-way communication system between the program (in this case, Sass) and the developer (you). If you’re wondering about the point of errors in the CSS world, remember that you already know the answer. Whenever you forget a semicolon or use a function incorrectly, Sass throws an error at you, explaining what you’ve done wrong and how you can fix it, thankfully! It would be a real pain to have to dig into the code to figure out what’s gone wrong.

Sass has long provided a way to emit warnings from stylesheets, but it’s only recently added support to throw errors as well—and for good reason! Over the last few years, Sass has allowed authors to build complex systems to abstract difficult or repetitive patterns and concepts, such as grids. These systems must be able to communicate with authors, stopping the compilation process with a custom error message if anything ever goes wrong.

Both warnings and errors are emitted in the current output channel. When compiling Sass by hand or by using a tool through a command line interface (CLI) such as Grunt or Gulp, the output stream is the console. For tools that include a user interface, such as Codekit or Prepros, it’s likely that they catch and display warnings and errors as part of their interface. Online playgrounds such as CodePen and SassMeister manage to catch errors but not warnings, so don’t be alarmed if you’re unable to test them in there.

Warnings

As has been stated, the ability to emit warnings in Sass is not new. It’s possible to display messages or the value of any SassScript expression to the standard output stream through the @warn directive.

A warning has no impact on the compilationprocess; it does not prevent compiling to pursue or change it in any way. Its only purpose is to display a message in the console.

There are a lot of reasons to use warnings in Sass. Here are a couple, but you’re likely to find your own:

informing the user of an assumption made about the code in order to avoid surprise and hard-to-track bugs
advising about a deprecated function or mixin as part of a library or framework

Sending a warning is dead simple to do: start with the @warn directive, then state whatever it is. Warnings are usually made to provide some information and context, so they often feature a sentence explaining the situation. That being said, you don’t have to use a string; you can warn with a number, a list, a map—whatever. Here, we print a string:

@warn ‘Uh-oh, something looks weird.’;

Using a regular CLI client, this warning will emit the following output:

WARNING: Uh-oh, something looks weird.
on line 1 of /Users/hgiraudel/jump-start-sass/warning.scss

Hey, that’s nice, isn’t it? Although this warning is far from helpful. It says that something looks weird but does not say what, why, or what can be done to stop it from looking weird. We’ll discuss how we can improve on warnings further on.

Let’s move on to a more serious example now that we know how to use he feature. Imagine we have a Sass custom function that attempts to convert a pixel value in em unit:

@function px-to-em($value, $base-font-size: 16px) {
@return ($value / $base-font-size) * 1em;
}

// Usage
.foo {
font-size: px-to-em(42px); // 2.625em
}

All good. Now, what happens when passing a unitless number—such as 42—to the function? Maybe you’ve guessed it, but as it’s not quite obvious I’ll give you the answer:

2.625em/px isn’t a valid CSS value.

This happens because you’re trying to perform a calculation between incompatible units (px and em). What we could do to circumvent this issue is assume the unitless value be expressed in pixels and convert it first:

@function px-to-em($value, $base-font-size: 16px) {
@if unitless($value) {
@warn ‘Assuming value `#{$value}` to be in pixels; attempting to convert it.’;
$value: $value * 1px;

}

@return ($value / $base-font-size) * 1em;
}

The function is expecting a value expressed in pixels. We can still make it work with a unitless value; however, we cannot be sure that this is the expected behavior. We can only assume that it’s good enough.

Because we’re assuming what is the correct behavior for our function, it’s important to let the developer know what we’re doing and why. Otherwise it could lead to bugs that are hard to track, which is not
what you should be aiming for.

Another practical example would be to warn against the usage of a deprecated function or mixin. You might have already heard of or used Bourbon, a lightweight mixin library for Sass. Bourbon is actively maintained, and sometimes requires removing helpers from the library. To avoid suddenly breaking a person’s ode, Bourbon warns about future deprecations way before it actually removes mixins:

@mixin inline-block {
display: inline-block;

@warn ‘The `inline-block` mixin is deprecated and will be removed in the next major version release.’;
}

Clever! People who still use the inline-block mixin from Bourbon are aware that the library will remove it completely in the next version, so they know to start updating their codebase to remove the mixin.

The Difference between @warn and @debug

You may or may not be familiar with the @debug directive, which prints the value of a SassScript expression to the standard output stream in the same fashion as @warn. You might be wondering why there are two features performing the same task, and what could possibly be the difference between the two.

Continue reading %How to Use Warnings and Errors in Sass Effectively%

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Designrfix/~3/x8o96OEanUY/5-common-mobile-app-development-mistakes

Forrester predicted that 46% of the global population will use smartphones by the end of 2016 and they were spot on. According to Neilson report, 89% of the time spent on smartphones is spent in using mobile apps. According to Google, 25% of mobile apps are never used while 26% of mobile apps are abandoned […]

The post 5 Common Mobile App Development Mistakes You Should Never Make appeared first on designrfix.com.