The new dutch Ford occasions website is (after a half year of  hard work) online. At Ford A1 you can browse trough all available Ford Occassions in the Netherlands. As the creative lead on this project, I was responsible for the complex interaction design, functional design and visual design. The technical development was done by Auto Interactive and project management by Yorick Wolf. Please take a look at the rest of the Ford A1 site. I will post some early sketches soon.

More to come: The relaunch of the 150+ dutch Ford dealer websites and Ford maintenance website.  Both amazing large and complicated projects that I have been working on for the last year.

• Use ruler guides. If the existing dimensions of a graphic has changed, update the corresponding ruler guide to reflect the new dimension.

• Also delete unused/redundant ruler guides.
• Minimize the layer effects in the layers palette. Do not leave them in expanded mode.

Organizing Layers

• Name all your layers and layer groups appropriately.
• Delete unused layers or elements.
• Group all appropriate layers if possible.
• Color-coding your layers can be useful.

Clipping masks

• The Photoshop clipping mask feature is a quick way to create effects such as text filled with a photograph.

Hold down [ALT] and hold the cursor between the layers. You will see your cursor change to a little double circle icon. Click between the layers.

You can also apply the Clipping Mask from the menu. Select the layer you want to become a mask and go to Layer>Create Clipping Mask.

A litle arrow pointing downwards indicates the clipping mask is applied to the layer it’s pointing at.

Adjustment layers

• Adjustment layers are the smart way to apply many of Photoshop’s most-often-used adjustments because they don’t permanently change the image itself.

• After you select the adjustment, you need to name the layer.

To create a new adjustment layer, open an image with only a background layer, choose Layer > New Adjustment Layer, and then choose the type of adjustment to make using it.

To apply adjustment layer for only one specific layer:
Hold down [ALT] and hold the cursor between the layers. You will see your cursor change to a little double circle icon. Click between the layers.

A litle arrow pointing downwards indicates the adjustment is applied to the layer it’s pointing at. Including clipping paths.

Some new work again on the portfolio page.  This time its for Adez. I will try to explain what my role was on this project. Adez has been working on rebranding their product of soy and fruit drinks. and my job was to redesign the website.

Somehow they didn’t want to invest much in the website because there was no more budget anymore. ( It was all spent on the TVC)  With the small budget in mind I refreshed the website design. added a grid, some standard templates, and removed all the old stuff that had been added to the old website during the last years. Besides removing outdated elements. I wanted to add some flash smoothness. The old websites was built on asp and I personally think it looked like crap. So I chose to build everything in flash.

Presenting a flash website to a major client is tricky, especially if this client wants to be found on google. You know the blah blah. So after some investigation I convinced Unilever (and our main developer) to build our site with the Gaia frame work. Gaia’s SEO Scaffolding is as simple as clicking a button and has an elegant and unique solution of using a single XHTML file which serves as both the data source and the embed page for each page in your site. The final result was a slick looking website (compaired to the previous one) without costing a lot, and built on this latest flash technology. We also added background videos and smooth transitions. I am happy with the final result. are you?

“By a combination of skill, cunning, and sloth, I’ve managed to successfully avoid social networking sites/tools for several years now.

The main reason has been that I already get far more communication (mostly email) than I can possibly reply to, and I don’t need anything else in my life that’s going to make me feel like a failure.”

This is exactly how I feel about twitter