As some of you may know, I was involved with the cross-country-collaborative effort for the Stop The Violence documentary film.  The film was contributed to not only by AnimiVirtus Productions (me), but also Neighborhood Studios, a group based in Ohio.  The film was basically a series of interviews with students, teachers, parents and other high school staff about the issue of school and teen violence and aggression, and essentially coalesced into a 20-minute film from two different parts of the country with one core message: Stop The Violence.  Take a look at the film below, and please add it to your DIGG, StumbleUpon, and del.icio.us collections to help us raise awareness about our cause and the effort we’re fighting for.  Thanks for your support!

DIGG Link | StumbleUpon Link

Hey guys, it’s been a hell of a long time since I’ve posted anything, but it’s also been a long time since I was any kind of active in the web design and development community, so when I stumbled across this guy’s website today and was briefly reading through some of his lengthy, informative and useful pages of suggestions and information about his company, I thought “why not feature him on the JDB blog?” So that’s what I’m doing.

John Hacking is a Brisbane, Australia-based web designer and developer, using CMSs (content management systems) as often as possible. He says of his methods that he “train my clients to use the CMS so that they can make small changes themselves.
This saves them time and money and differentiates me from my competitors.” A good idea, to be sure, of aiding the customer in not only receiving their desired site but in giving them the knowledge to modify and comfortably change and add things themselves as their sites move through time. He also provides an almost comic relief sketch of Brisbane, the city he’s grown up in, and all the things he loves about the area. I was happy to stumble across this personal aspect of a web developer who obviously does some simple but effective stuff, based on the screenshots on his home page. He also offers the standard but useful contact and FAQ links about his site, as well as pricing information and a nice search function. Accompanying this, though, are plenty of articles on web design and development, as well as a list of the “18 Common Web Design Mistakes” or “(Where people often go wrong with their web site).” And the coolest part of this is the fact that he doesn’t approach it from a designer’s point of view, he uses ideas from a common e-business perspective to critique what people often do wrong on their websites. Things like “Foggy or undefined business goals” and “A Bad Business Model” are great things to address, as well as things like the site’s domain name and “Not thinking like a customer,” a great technique to use when developing an e-business site.

With many aspiring web developers/e-business entrepreneurs out there today, this site is not only useful in terms of a means to get their site done on time, but it offers plenty of resources for the average Joe to read through and apply to their own site in an effort to further improve the effectiveness of their business idea. It’s definitely worth checking out, whether you’re looking for a company to get your boss’s site done sooner than you can yourself, or just looking for some advice on developing your own e-business and the site to give it an international face. Best of luck to you developers, and thanks to John Hacking for providing this kind of resource, I’ve been wanting to go out to Australia quite a bit recently, and this has only increased that desire, due to his love of Brisbane. Thanks for that, John ;). The rest of you, enjoy the site.

Link: http://www.johnhacking.com/

As you probably already noticed, footers are becoming a very interesting issue in the web design industry. We can’t avoid the new Web 2.0 trend and the creative yet attracting ones. This article discusses and showcases 35 website footers of all over the web with different designs, styles and trends! Make sure to check them all out!

As you might already know, good web design - in most cases - should contain basic elements such as easily used (yet beautiful) navigation menus, attracting headers, well written content, and for last, footers. In this post I would like to talk more about the last element that is becoming a very fascinating issue these days - the kinds and styles of footers.

In a lot of sites, footers are no longer a single line copyright text and/or a simple secondary navigation; nowadays they are more complex than that. They count as a factor every web designer needs to pay attention to when designing, just like to any other element [Continue reading...]

Enjoy and digg if liked!

Hey people!

Yes, It did feel like we don’t care about the site anymore. I have been working really hard in the past couple of months and I simply had no time to update anything on JDB Blogs. Blake has been working and still is I guess on some new films, and let’s hope he will post them very soon

I recently launched Thuiven, my freelance portfolio website. I am pretty proud of the overall site design and the other works I got there. There are soon to come about 3 other works. If I can offer you anything from the services, contact me and we’ll get right to it.

But that’s not what I am writing this post, I wrote a tutorial some time ago about retouching portrait photos, but focusing on eyes effects and how to make a beautiful yet natural effect.

From the page:

I have been using this effect lately for some of my portrait photos and thought of sharing one of the methods I use to improve those kinds of photos. I mainly want to focus on the eyes, but I’ll go over some other extra quality touches as well. So let’s start, uh?

Retouching Portrait Photos - Eyes

ENJOY!

Hey everyone, I met a guy a few months back who’s trying to organize an effort against Violence in the form of a video collective/group of YouTube where people can post their videos about violence in their area, their lives and in general. I’m a part of the group and am almost done with a nearly 20-minute documentary on the subject of violence at my old high school. I want to ask all of you to at least join the group and help spread the word about the group on YouTube. If you can post on forums, blogs, anywhere, tell friends, whatever, join the group and tell other people about it. Whoever can record video with a video camera, still camera, webcam, whatever you’ve got, or even an audio file with your computer’s microphone, do something to contribute and post it on the group’s page. There is no definite final product out of this, just a group of people wanting to stop violence to some degree in whatever manner they can. So, without any more from me, here’s the link, and please join the effort:

http://www.youtube.com/group/stoptheviolence

Thanks!

Blake & The Stop The Violence Group