Tag - Digital Art

By Sean Geng

Nowadays everyone’s using a different browser. Between popular options like Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer, which make up close to 98% of the internet market share of browsers, and the other little known browsers like Konqueror, there are a multitude of browsers being used to view your site.

How does your website function across all these options? It’s important that your website is usable across all major media, whether it be popular browsers, mobile devices, or any other web browsing devices. In this article, we’ll cover some basics of making sure your site is cross-browser-compatible, including snippets and resources to help you along the way.

The Problem

Not everyone uses the same browser. Similar to how everyone is running on a different operating system, you can’t expect all people to be using the same web browsing tool.

So what are the options? The data about current browser share varies depending on the source and the region, but in general, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera make up most of the market share, with Internet Explorer dominating the market. Internet Explorer 8 has over 25% market share, Internet Explorer 6 has 215 and Internet Explorer 7 having 14%.

When there are so many different options out there, each running their own rendering engine, how do you ensure that your web design or application will hold up in each of them? That what we hope to cover and provide solutions for in this article.

How does your site perform?

So, how does your current site perform in the multitude of browsers that are out there? Why not check for yourself? If you don’t want to install all the major browsers out there on your own personal machine, here are some resources to help you out.

Adobe Browser Lab
Adobe Browserlab offers an awesome solution for viewing on demand screenshots of your site. This is usually my go-to program for testing in various browsers.

Browsershots
Makes screenshots of your web design in a lot of different browsers. After you submit your URL, it gives you a url where your screenshots will be loaded up.

Browser Sandbox
Runs an application to view your site in a variety of browsers.

Browsrcamp
Allows you to test the compatibility of your design with Mac OS X browsers.

IE Tester
A free WebBrowser that allows you to check how your site looks like on IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP.

Browser Proofing Your Site

So turns out your site doesn’t function as expected across all the major browsers? Don’t worry. It happens to the best of us. Now it’s time to go about fixing it.

Validate

First off, validate your site. Ironing out those XHTML and CSS errors can often solve those pesky browser bugs. I suggest running your site through W3’s XHTML Validator and CSS Validator.

CSS Reset

Another great way to ensure your site is cross browser compatible is to always reset your CSS before working on a project. There are many different global CSS resets, but Eric Meyer’s one and Yahoo’s one are considered to be the most correct ones:

Eric Meyer’s Reset Reloaded

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
        margin: 0;
        padding: 0;
        border: 0;
        outline: 0;
        font-weight: inherit;
        font-style: inherit;
        font-size: 100%;
        font-family: inherit;
        vertical-align: baseline;
}
/* remember to define focus styles! */
:focus {
        outline: 0;
}
body {
        line-height: 1;
        color: black;
        background: white;
}
ol, ul {
        list-style: none;
}
/* tables still need 'cellspacing="0"' in the markup */
table {
        border-collapse: separate;
        border-spacing: 0;
}
caption, th, td {
        text-align: left;
        font-weight: normal;
}
blockquote:before, blockquote:after,
q:before, q:after {
        content: "";
}
blockquote, q {
        quotes: "" "";
}

YUI’s CSS Reset

body,div,dl,dt,dd,ul,ol,li,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,pre,form,fieldset,input,textarea,p,blockquote,th,td {
        margin:0;
        padding:0;
}
table {
        border-collapse:collapse;
        border-spacing:0;
}
fieldset,img {
        border:0;
}
address,caption,cite,code,dfn,em,strong,th,var {
        font-style:normal;
        font-weight:normal;
}
ol,ul {
        list-style:none;
}
caption,th {
        text-align:left;
}
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
        font-size:100%;
        font-weight:normal;
}
q:before,q:after {
        content:'';
}
abbr,acronym { border:0;}

Either include thet CSS reset styling at the top of your stylesheet, or have Yahoo host it and simply link to it in your HTML-documents, right before your own stylesheet:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.8.0r4/build/reset/reset-min.css">

Conditional Statements

Another popular method of ensuring your site is cross-browser-compatible is targeting specific browsers using conditional statements. Basically, the idea is to detect the user’s browser, and if it is one of those specified, it should perform a certain action.

One of the most common uses of conditional statements is to include a stylesheet if the browser is Internet Explorer. By doing this, you can correct some bugs that exist in your code and override your current stylesheet.

To use conditional statements, simply include the statement in the head section of your XHTML, right below the stylesheet inclusion.

Include a stylesheet if the browser is IE

<!--[if IE]>
        <link href="ie.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->

Target Specfic Versions of IE

<!--[if IE6]>
        <link href="ie.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->

(Of course, you can replace IE6 with any version of IE)

PHP Browser Detect

If you are looking for a more specific way of targeting browsers and even operating systems, then you should consider checking out Techpattern’s PHP Browser Detection Script. It’s a very powerful script that will detect everything from your visitor’s operating system, browser, JavaScript support, screen resolution, and more.

jQuery Browser Detection

For a jQuery-based solution of detecting browsers and adding a corresponding class to the body of your site, check out TVI Design’s Browser Detection using jQuery. The script adds a class to the body, which you can then style in CSS.

Mobile Devices

Things are changing. New devices are emerging as a medium for browsing the web these days. Whether it’d be smartphones, iPods or an iPad, there is a new enviornment for web design and as they become increasingly popular, it means that you must also take them into consideration when designing a site.

What does my site look like in a mobile device?

How about testing your site in some web based mobile emulators? If you are looking to test your design in a mobile device, here are some great resources:

Test iPhone
Simulator for quickly testing your iPhone web applications

iPhoney
iPhoney is a free application you can download in order to simulate a iPhone browsing experience. Includes support for rotating, zooming, and even turning off plugins like Flash.

MobiReady
Excellent tool for testing in mobile devices. Provides feedback including test results, options, and emulators.

Mobile Device Emulator
A great way to test your site across a multitude of mobile devices.

 

Ways to make your site mobile friendly

So how do you go about making your site mobile friendly? Well, if you are interested in pursuing a mobile version of your site, here are a few ways of doing so.

Redirect Users on a Mobile Device
An easy way of making sure your site is mobile-friendly is to redirect users viewing it from a mobile device to a certain “plain” version of the page on your server. Some of the easiest ways of doing this include Studio Hyperset’s Mobile Redirect Script, or using Mobiforge’s Lightweight Device Detection in PHP.

Mobify
Mobify allows you to design a mobile version of your site based on your current design. It also allows for traffic stats and advertising options.

Mofuse
Mofuse lets you create a mobile version of your blog for free. It’s pretty easy, and only takes a bit of time.

Further Resources

Still hungry for cross browser compatibility resources and solutions?

• 15+ techniques and tools for cross browser CSS coding
  Cats Who Code’s very useful reference guide of great CSS techniques for cross browser coding.
• 7 Fresh and Simple Ways to Test Cross-Browser Compatibility
  More resources for testing your site on different browsers.
• Browser Tests, Services, and Compatibilty Test Suites
  Smashing Magazine’s article on Browser Tests
• Tips to design your site for mobile devices
  Woork’s excellent article on designing for the mobile device.

About the author

Sean Geng is a freelance web designer based in Pittsburgh, PA. He is the site curator over at Designmess, a online community for designers and developers. You can follow him on Twitter, or contact him via his website.

Quick tips are 3-5 minute screencasts, short articles, or short 6-10 step tutorials on how to do something simple, quick, but useful. There are lots of tips, tricks and techniques that can be packaged into brief educational material. Read on if you have some ideas for submitting a Quick Tip to Psdtuts+, we’d love to hear from you.

Submitting Quick Tips

We post numerous quick tips each week, and pay $50 USD as the base rate for these. Following is information on creating these. You can learn more on our updated page: Submit Tutorials, Tips, Articles, or Other Content.

Quick Tip: Short Written Tutorials

See our Written Tutorials section for information on putting together a written tutorial. Quick Tip tutorials are similar, except these are shorter and more focused (6-10 steps). Here is an example:

• Quick Tip: Create a Realistic Paper Texture in 5 Minutes

Quick Tip: Screencast/Videos

See our Video (Screencast) Tutorials section for information on putting together a video/screencast tutorial. Quick Tip screencasts are similar, except these are shorter and more focused (3-5 minutes). Here is an example:

• Quick Tip Screencast – Painted Snow Lettering Effect

Quick Tip: Articles

See our Articles section for information on putting together written articles. Quick Tip articles are similar, except these are shorter and more focused (around 500 words). Here is an example:

• Quick Tip: Dramatic Portraits With Off Camera Flash

Other Content

There is quite a bit of diversity of content we publish on Psdtuts+, and we’re expanding all the time. Learn more about writing tutorials, putting together articles, or recording screencasts, in addition to making Quick Tips on our updated page: Submit Tutorials, Tips, Articles, or Other Content.

In today’s screencast we will revisit a tutorial by Anastacia Sholik that demonstrates how to illustrate a fun red-haired child in Adobe Photoshop. This tutorial shows how to use shapes, layer styles, brushes, and other tools and effects to add dimension of depth to our character.

View the written version of this tutorial How to Create a Fun, Red-Haired Boy Character

Science fiction art is seen everywhere these days. If you enjoy a good blockbuster movie or spending your Sunday afternoons playing Halo or Final Fantasy, you probably know sci-fi concept art quite well. Sites such as Behance or DeviantART frequently post incredible sci-fi concept art renderings. This post showcases a collection of 40 incredible and stunning sci-fi concept art pieces to help boost your creativity; most of which have been created using Adobe Photoshop or a similar application with the artists bare hands. Enjoy!

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Watching For The Last Launch

This stunning matte painting by Bechira Sorin uses some lovely colors, including various washed-out shades, to give the piece a surreal and soft look.

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Passenger

This great painting by Sven Sauer is a concept piece for a television sci-fi series. The painting reflects the atmosphere, mood and the intensity of destruction.

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Perry Rhodan

Another piece by the great matte painter Sven Sauer. This piece was specifically painted for a background image for the “Perry-Rhodan” adventure game.

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Ankaris

The dark and gloomy atmosphere in this painting by Wayne Haag makes the main source of light from the spaceship stand out like there’s no tomorrow.

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Sci-Fi Book Cover

This book cover design by Franco Brambilla uses a cleaner and brighter color scheme compared to most others in this showcase, making it very unique.

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Space Scenes

An absolutely incredible piece of digital art by David Fuhrer. The intensity of glowing lights makes this work fascinating to look at, and is very inspiring.

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The Luminarium

This piece by Husam Elfaki was produced differently than many others in this compilation. Instead of a painting, it is actually a photo manipulation, and a pretty impressive one!

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Shuttle Landing

This shuttle concept painting by Benjamin Penrose revolved around the narrative of “seeding” a new planet with life. The mothership design was based upon a seed pod containing hundreds of shuttles.

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Space Sunset

A wonderful sci-fi space illustration by Walter Vermeij, using a lovely selection of colors to produce a dramatic atmosphere.

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My Red Tie

This piece by Daniel Conway uses a dull and limited color scheme to make the red tie (the title of the piece) stand out. The background was completed in a short period of time, allowing the user to focus more of their attention on the subject rather than its surroundings.

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Hostile Takeover

Hostile Takeover is a digital painting by the talented Marek. This particular piece of art was for a book cover for Polish publisher “Fabryka Slow”.

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Shrapnel

Another piece by Marek. This digital painting was used as a cover for the awesome comic book “Shrapnel: Aristeia Rising” (Issue #3), published by Radical Comics.

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Shrapnel Concept

This digital painting by Ukitakumuki was completed as a ‘pre-concept’ piece for Shrapnel (Zombie Studios).

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Inherited Hell

A very impressive monochrome digital painting by Vitaly Alexius, completely specifically for the “Inherited Hell” CD cover for a music band named Stonecast.

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100 Years of Force

Another piece by Ukitakumuki, this time completed for the San Diego Comic Con’s souvenir book. The piece was inspired by Heinlein’s concept of cap(sule) troopers.

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Delphian Calamity

This great piece of art by Vitaly Alexius was created in Photoshop at a whopping 10,000 x 7,617 pixels at 300dpi. The illustration (and story that goes with it) was witnessed in a dream; several weeks were spent on this project.

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China Tower

This piece by Torvenius has a slightly rougher look to it than most others in this post, and took just 55 minutes to complete.

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Steampunk

A steampunk piece by Patrick Reilly, using a strong combination of copper tones to really bring out the great highlights and shadows in the piece.

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Steampunk Octopus

A wonderful sci-fi piece by Raybender, created for a Steampunk Challenge over at CGTalk.

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Feral Nova

This experimental exploration project by Vitaly Alexius was created for the improvement of anatomy, perspective, colors and expanding the artists “dreaminism” style and ideas. This piece was completed in Photoshop and took approximately 2 full days (40 hours) to complete.

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Titan

This gloomy, dark and grim Warhammer piece by Rado Javor incorporates the differences between light and shadow very well, making it pleasing to look at.

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City Docks

A slightly different approach to digital painting and airbrushing by Antifan Real, using vivid colors and dynamic lighting to give the piece a new form of life. This illustration was completed for the digital painting book “Bold Visions”.

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Final Confrontation

An incredible piece completed by Lorenz Hideyoshi Ruwwe for a sci-fi/horror saga called “The Lost Launders” written by Matthew Ewald.

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Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek is yet another piece completed by the great digital painter Marek. This piece was created for the workshop section of popular magazine “ImagineFX”, and was produced by hand in Photoshop.

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Sky Riders

Another piece completed by Marek for the great “ImagineFX” magazine. This particular piece combines various different styles, making it different and unique compared to a lot of others showed in this post.

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Heaven 2.0

This wonderful piece “Heaven 2.0″ by Nicolas Ferrand was completed as a challenge. The gorgeous color scheme and highly textured canvas adds a lot of depth to the work.

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Future City

“Future City” by Antifan Real uses a lovely warm, glowing color scheme. Based on a crop from another piece, this piece took just 70-80 minutes to complete, incredible keeping in mind the amount of detail this piece has!

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The Spiral Staircase

A personal piece of work by Lisa Rye, featuring a spiral staircase that was originally a three dimensional model, and then brought to life using Photoshop and a Wacom Intuos graphics tablet.

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What Will Be After

The popular Marek is back again, this time with an apocalyptic-style traumatic painting. Originally this piece was going to be a promotional piece but ended up being a personal piece of work.

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Antipodal Evolution

The monochromatic (almost black and white) style of this painting by Vitaly Alexius adds a superb dimension and makes the viewers appreciate just how incredible the lighting and shadowing skills used in this painting are.

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Redux

This lovely space scene by Antifan Real consisted of 20-22 hours work, and was completed purely in Photoshop CS3 using a Wacom Intuous 3 graphics tablet.

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The Sky Opens

By Antifan Real once again, this green monochromatic-style painting puts the power of depth to great use to create this interesting composition. The piece took 15 hours from start to finish.

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Aburod Terra

As you can tell from this compilation, Vitaly Alexius is a very busy digital artist. This piece took over 50 hours to complete and it’s clear to see why. Click through to see some of this piece whilst in progress, as well as early sketches.

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Into The Fray

Into The Fray by Ukitakumuki is a very detailed experimental piece of digital art, combining modern warfare with zombies and a touch of sci-fi.

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Divinity, The Descent

This personal piece by Yap Kun Rong started (unbelievably) as a speed painting on a Nintendo DS. The artists imagination took over, and it was eventually taken into Photoshop to create this stunning and vivid piece.

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Our Phantom Skies

Finished off nicely with some white symbols, this huge A1 poster painting by Ukitakumuki was completed as a solo project for a diploma/college class.

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Castaway in the Stardust City

Compared to most others in this showcase, this piece by Cyril Rolando may look quick, but in fact it took over 40 hours from start to finish. Its warm color scheme and soft tone make it a pleasure to view.

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City T25

This industrial-style painting by Amir Salehi holds such detail that, without very close inspection, it appears to be real life. It was painted in Photoshop CS3.

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Res-wR

Kai Spannuth has combined two eye-peeling colors from the opposite ends of the spectrum to create a wonderful first-person style painting completed in Photoshop CS2.

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Waterfall City Extreme

The glowing yellow and orange color palette combined with the fine detail of line-work in this piece by Theo Prins is spectacular to look at. Before it became Waterfall City Extreme, it was just Waterfall City. Click through to see the original piece, which wasn’t sci-fi.

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