I noticed this way back when Digg redesigned their site. The site that took great part in that “Web 2.0” look with it’s shiny buttons, soft gradiants and shadowy badges was now stripped of all that stuff, replaced now with something that I thought at the time to look sort of retro. Now that I see it everywhere, it’s starting to grow on me.

I can totally understand why this is happening. I’m sure a lot of it has to do with the fact it’s “in” right now, but that’s not all. One of the main aspects of web design has always been optimising how quickly your page loads. The simpler your graphics are, the quicker they’ll load. It is kind of ironic, though because while this is happening, bandwidths are increasing to the point where we can watch streaming hi definition movies without any hiccups or loss in quality.

Evidently web designers are starting to move on past their love affair with shadows and gradients.

What’s the point then? Well it seems while on the surface, websites don’t look all that different than the way they looked back in the day, you have to remember that there is much more going on under the hood. Along with very large, complex databases and other systems such as scriptaculous or sproutcore, there are many more people surfing the net which means much more demand on your server.

Really, we’re in the same boat we were in back in the late 90’s, just on a much larger scale. As a web designer the challenge will always be to create a site that is light on size, but rich on style. I don’t see this trend going away any time soon. Have you seen the new Facebook? Their website was lightweight to begin with. Now it’s just anorexic.

I would always picture a laid back agency with bean bag chairs, a wide open studio with Macs and expensive equipment. get to meet with some of the top agencies around the area.

I started my job search with this lovely image still in mind, thinking that all I needed was a good portfolio and a resume and all would be well. I put my site out there, applied to a lot of different places, and sure enough landed a few interviews.

My first interview was about a half hour, then to my surprise had an interview with a second person right afterwards. By the end of the day I had long chats with about seven employees total. I was there for nearly four hours before all was said and done. The last person I spoke with gave me what she called a “design test”. I was given the task to create several online advertising campaigns and one online survey.

After submitting my work, it was critiqued in a conference call. After that, I had another day of interviews with the company owners. As it turned out, after all that I did not get a job offer. This didn’t really get me down though. It was only the first place I applied to.

My most recent interview was even more intense than that first place. Like last time, I had a long interview with many different people. At the end I was given a test again, but here it was a bit different.

The company is planning on designing applications for the iPhone (awesome!), so they were looking for someone who could work in 3d or 2d. I have experience with both and I am learning to develop for the iPhone, so I offered to work on both tests. I spent about thirty or so hours on them total.

Things went extremely well when I presented my work and had it critiqued. I got along very well with these guys. It was like I was made for this place. They liked my 2d design so much they said they wanted to use it for the final product. My recruiter told me the job was “in the bag” on the phone as I was leaving. I was psyched.

Things went extremely well when I presented my work and had it critiqued. I got along very well with these guys. It was like I was made for this place.

A week went by and my recruiter reluctantly told me I was not offered this position. Apparently this was because they thought it would take too long to get me up to speed with what they were doing. I’m still not sure what that meant

At any rate, I’m a pretty optimistic guy. I don’t look at this as anything to dwell on. The more you work for something, the more you’ll appreciate it when you get it.

My advice to anyone going through this, or who will be going through this is simple. First of all I am not exaggerating at all. If you want to work as a designer chances are you will have to do everything I talked about here if not more. I find that the best way to go about doing it is to look at these “tests” as a way to polish up your portfolio and improve your interviewing skills because chances are you will go through dozens of these things before you actually land that job.

Now that I’m (just about) out of college I think I will finally have the time to realize it to the its full potential. A while ago I decided to use Maya as my platform because until this point I haven’t been able to spend a substantial amount of time on a project. Typically in 3d we’d have assignments that are meant to exercise a specific aspect of the program. The resulting movies end up somewhat bland. This story will allow me to really push the limits of what I can do.

Right now, all I have are a final sketch of “Hubert”, the main character with the front and side view to use as a template in Maya, as well as a few very rough storyboards and a rough title. I guess the first step would be to develop these story lines a lot more and create concept sketches with color to set the overall look and feel.

I would expect the final movie to be about five or six minutes long. The nice thing about doing this 3d project on my own is there are no deadlines so I can really pack in the detail.

Im psyched to finally be working on this, I’ll keep you posted!

Here’s what I did. Create a new file in Photoshop (File/New) with these dimensions and hit enter or click OK:

Next, using the Type Tool, click somewhere in the white space and type anything. The font I’m using is Cooper Std, 72pt, color #1b69eb. Position it somewhere near the center.

To the bottom right, you should see a list of layers. Click on the layer with the type on it, then click the “fx” icon on the very bottom. On the drop-down list, click “Gradient Overlay…”

This brings up the styles palette. By default it will fill your text with a simple black to white gradient. This is actually what we want to work with. Click on the gradient bar to bring up the Gradient editor.

Next, to emulate that shine effect, click and drag the black box or “stop” at the bottom left to the center, or type in 50% click the spot where you dragged the black box to create another stop at 0%. After that just click once around the middle to create another stop. Set it’s location to 55%.

Click on the stop at 55% and change its color to #999999 by clicking the color box. Click on the stop at 0% and change its color to #7f7f7f. Then click on the diamond shape between the two stops and drag it to 75%. For a sharper shine, I changed the location of both middle stops to 50%. Click OK.

This is where the magic happens! Click the Blend Mode drop down menu and change it to “Overlay”. Take a look at the image. While the gradient is grayscale, the text stays blue. You can lower the intensity of this effect by changing the opacity.

As a final touch, click on “Inner Glow” and copy the settings I have here:

Click on “New Style…” and save it as whatever you’d like. Now you can apply the style to just about anything by clicking the icon under the “Styles” tab. I find it useful when I’m laying out sites. It doesn’t really alter the color scheme, and makes it very easy to create consistant on and off states for buttons. One downside, however is that it does not work when you use a really saturated color, especially full red.

You don’t have to stop here. Try playing around with different things such as a subtle bevel and emboss, or outer glow. I’ve even had some good results using a subtle inner stroke. Just make sure to save the style.

Got any suggestions or comments about this tutorial? Leave a comment below or send me a message!

I wasn’t sure what I was in for. I made it there early because I didn’t want to miss anything. I was a bit worried because most everyone there had a portfolio, like the ones they used back in the day before the internet. Being the geek I am this printed portfolio thing never crossed my mind. Instead I borrowed my girlfriends laptop and was planning to simply show this website to the creative directors.

So this past Thursday was Portfolio Night in Boston. It was basically a seminar that takes place simultaneously all over the world where designers get to meet with some of the top agencies around the area.

The event itself was much more laid back than I would have ever expected. No khakis to be seen, and free drinks all around. In the beginning everyone kind of stood around. I met up with my friend and a couple other people from our college. After a few minutes they let everyone know how it was going to go. At the time on the back of our name badges, we’d have fifteen minutes to talk with each of the three creative directors listed below our designated time.

My time was 8:00p.m., and the event was running late. That meant I had about three and a half hours to kill. Then I realized that maybe the place did not have a wifi hotspot set up. I spent the next hour trying to track down the owner of the place to get a straight answer. There was wifi, but I had to stand in one small area to use it. About an hour before my time, I decided to download a local version of my site because I wasn’t trusting the spotty connection. I very carefully held up my girlfriends laptop in that one spot and luckily was able to download my work.

As it turned out, the internet at the side of the place with the creative directors was perfectly fine. My three interviewers were Mullen, One to One Interactive, and I forget what the third one was. Evidently the creative director there didn’t like me or my work too much either, so maybe that’s why I can’t remember where he was from.

My three interviewers were Mullen, One to One Interactive, and I forget what the third one was. Evidently the creative director there didn’t like me or my work too much either, so maybe that’s why I can’t remember where he was from.

Internet issues and waiting aside, I’m glad I went. To me it served as kind of practice for going on design interviews. I also met some very interesting people who were obviously passionate about what they do. Portfolio night reassured me that I’m going into the right field.