SteelSkin.net – The Ramblings of Chris Nutt

Shiny and Virtuous

10th January 2007 - Category: Design,Life

As you may or may not know I like to recycle, but I’m also rather lazy. My kitchen is often overflowing with paper, plastic, metal and glass waiting for me to take it to the local recycle bins. I like to do it all in a one’r now and then to save on shifting backwards and forwards with small amounts.

The BMW designed Ecopod E1 seems like the answer, unfortunately it is only available in the states.

Upgraded to 2.0.6

9th January 2007 - Category: Site News

As always it was easy as pie to upgrade to the latest wordpress. I urge you to do the same for the safety of your blog.

Update: Now 2.0.7

New Year New Avatar

7th January 2007 - Category: Design

The last time I created an avatar theme for myself I was interested photography and fractals. So I wanted an avatar that would scale and reflect my current interests. So the the Avatar shown to the left was born. It features the white border of a Polaroid photo, the HUD of camera and my personal favorite little fluffy clouds. :D

Well its a new year and time for a new avatar. This one is more design orientated and was made in Adobe Illustrator rather than Photoshop. My most fav’d deviation on Deviantart.com is an vector made avatar set, so I guess I needed a more relevant avatar. It comprises of an abstract C at 45 Degrees and N at 135 Degrees interlocking. The background is a ripple out, similar to an art style I haven’t used since High School. It is usually colour animated from blue to green to brown/orange to blue. Some forums don’t allow such animation so they will see like above the static blue version.

The Awfullness of CS3 Icons

4th January 2007 - Category: Design,Desktop

You may or may not be aware that Adobe has released a beta of Photoshop CS3, mainly I think to prove to those Intel Mac owners that there will be X86 versions on their way. There have been many posts of the subject so I won’t bore you with the details, I’ll just state my opinion and offer some appropriate links.

I started off liking them for,  mmm, around 5 minutes untill I realised how essentially broken they are. The CS/CS2 icons are fairly broken, but examples like Icon Masks and the comedic Their Toolbar make the point quite well. BeckleyWorks makes a good arguement, unfortunatly he also links to the Icon Masks image, which is equally true in the pre-CS style squares. I’m happy with abstract, but really icons should be icons not minature versions of the finder label highlights.