Check out these amazing real life, scary pumpkins carved for your viewing pleasure! All of the awesome pumpkins were done by a man named Ray Villafane and he’s going to be on the “Food Network Challenge: Outrageous Pumpkins” soon.
India’s richest man, and the fourth-richest man in the world, Mukesh Ambani, has built a 27-story Mumbai skyscraper, as Forbes reported this morning. Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani plans to move into 570-foot building, called Antila, this month. But in addition to being an imposing postmodern edifice, it likely sets a record as the world’s most expensive residential home at $1,008,645,533.00!
The last time Forbes ranked the world’s most expensive homes was November 2009, when The Manor, Candy Spelling’s Beverly Hills mansion, won out- it was priced at $150 million. That home is still for sale, and its price hasn’t budged, qualifying it for the number one spot on our recent list of America’s most expensive homes.
Plus, that ranking is a year old – new mansions may have come on the market since. But even given those facts, at $1 billion the Antila outprices any home on the market, anywhere in the world, by an order of magnitude.
Ambani, his wife and three children have moved into the building which is named Antilia, after a mythical Island. It contains a health club with a gym and dance studio, at least one studio, a ballroom, guestrooms and a range of lounges and a 50 seat movie theater. There is even an elevated garden with ceiling space to accommodate small trees.
The roof has three helicopter pads and there is also underground parking for 160 cars, which will come in handy for guests at Ambani's forthcoming housewarming party. From the top floors of the 173m high property are spectacular views of Mumbai and of the Arabian Sea.
The 53 year-old tycoon is not only the richest man in India but the fourth richest man in the world. In total there is reported to be 37,000 square metres of space, which is more than the Palace of Versailles. To keep it running smoothly requires 600 staff.
According to Forbes magazine Ambani, who owns much of Reliance Industries, the oil, retail and biotechnologies conglomerate, is worth £18bn. He used to help run the company before falling out with his brother.
Client: “I take it, since I haven’t heard from you, that you are not interested in building my website.”
Me: “I told you I wasn’t interested when I left your office. I can’t imagine why you expected to hear from me.”
Client: “Well, have you changed your mind about working on it?”
Me: “Have you changed your mind about wanting me to do it for free?”
Client: “You would get stock.”
Me: “You don’t HAVE stock. It doesn’t work that way.”
Client: “Well, I am faxing you a non-disclosure agreement.”
Me: “Okay. Why?”
Client: “So you don’t steal my presentation materials and pass them off as your own.”
Me: “I never received any presentation materials.”
Client: “Yes, you did. I showed you the presentation in my office.”
Me: “Are you under the impression that I memorized and re-created your powerpoint presentation?”
Client: “Well, just don’t.”
Good old Wikipedia helped for this explanation:
"Tilt-shift photography" refers to the use of camera movements on small- and medium-format cameras, and sometimes specifically refers to the use of tilt for selective focus, often for simulating a miniature scene. Sometimes the term is used when the shallow depth of field is simulated with digital postprocessing; the name may derive from the tilt-shift lens normally required when the effect is produced optically.
"Tilt-shift" actually encompasses two different types of movements: rotation of the lens plane relative to the image plane, called tilt, and movement of the lens parallel to the image plane, called shift. Tilt is used to control the orientation of the plane of focus (PoF), and hence the part of an image that appears sharp; it makes use of the Scheimpflug principle. Shift is used to adjust the position of the subject in the image area without moving the camera back; this is often helpful in avoiding the convergence of parallel lines, as when photographing tall buildings.
Enjoy the pictures!
I love good design. These are some beautifully rendered ideas in packaging from all over the world. Thought I'd pass along the beauty...
Creeping closer inch by inch, 900 feet above the mighty Colorado River, the two sides of a $160 million bridge at the Hoover Dam slowly take shape. The bridge will carry a new section of US Route 93 past the bottleneck of the old road which can be seen twisting and winding around and across the dam itself.
When complete, it will provide a new link between the states of Nevada and Arizona. In an incredible feat of engineering, the road will be supported on the two massive concrete arches which jut out of the rock face.
The arches are made up of 53 individual sections each 24 feet long which have been cast on-site and are being lifted into place using an improvised high-wire crane strung between temporary steel pylons.
The arches will eventually measure more than 1,000 feet across. At the moment, the structure looks like a traditional suspension bridge, but once the arches are complete, the suspending cables on each side will be removed. Extra vertical columns will then be installed on the arches to carry the road. The bridge has become known as the Hoover Dam bypass, although it is officially called The Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, after a former governor of Nevada and an American Football player from Arizona who joined the US Army and was killed in Afghanistan. Work on the bridge started in 2005 and should finish next year. An estimated 17,000 cars and trucks will cross it every day.
The dam was started in 1931 and used enough concrete to build a road from New York to San Francisco .. The stretch of water it created, Lake Mead , is 110 miles long and took six years to fill. The original road was opened at the same time as the famous dam in 1936.
An extra note: The top of the white band of rock in Lake Mead is the old waterline prior to the drought and development in the Las Vegas area. It is over 100 feet above the current water level.
I was reading my daily round up of design and tutorial blogs today and came across this great article on web typography. With so many fonts out there to use, why use the same "safe" ones all the time in your design? There are countless others that come standard on both the PC and the Mac.
Here is a run down from author Amrinder Sandhu from his article Revised Font Stack. The font stacks and stats for both serif and sans serif are after the more jump.
Revised Font Stacks
* Some of the fonts, like: Garamond, Baskerville and Didot are not as readable on screen as Georgia. Feel free to make your own selection.
* Due to smaller x-height; Caslon, Didot, Garamond, Baskerville and Hoefler Text should be set at minimum of 14 pixels or above.
* Lucida Grande, Futura and Tahoma are mechanically obliqued to fake an italic.
* Geneva, Baskerville Old Face and Big Caslon has no bold and italic. They are faked to bold and italic.
* Avoid using Helvetica or Helvetica Neue for body text, especially below 14px.
* Futura, Gill Sans and Franklin Gothic Medium should be carefully stacked and used because of their unusual weight.
Tweener who you say? Well I gotta tell ya after getting this new job I am doing more Flash work than ever before! I do remember quite clearly letting them know I am not in any way a Flash programmer, and their response was, "Don't worry, we'll show you."
Well a 15 minute quick review shadowing a fellow designer at the corporate office while there for 2 weeks, was simply not enough for me. I am left to my own smarts and a FLA file he made on the fly to help me with the code. It's just how to get started that has had me in a quandary.
In short, instead of using the timeline and Flash's built in Tween class, Tweener is another class onto itself. It makes things so easy and if you want something to move across the screen, rotate while doing that and stop at a specific spot and then ease back like on an elastic band, Tweener is your new friend. You tell it what, when and where and it does it for you - without you having to know Action Script language and other back end Flash code. Simplistic and a God send.
All documentation, files etc. can be found by clicking on the above Tweener image! These are the guys who created this wonderful script: Zeh Fernando (Project Owner), Nate Chatellier (Project Member), and Arthur Debert (Project Member). I found the initial documentation a little vague and just needed a in-my-face tutorial to get me to visualize the way to initiate it. Here are two sites I found to help me with this:
Have fun, pass it on and be well. I need to get back to work!
Here are some tips I picked up recently to help speed up the design and patience aspect of redundant production processes:A few weeks ago a designer and blogger I have been following, as well as very active Twitterer, Graham Smith of imjustcreative, announced a series of logo round ups he was posting. I figured I'd take a look and found these words:
This is Part 10 of the Logo Design Round-Up series. This ongoing series showcases a collection of logos and brand marks, self submitted by a bunch of freelance designers and creative folk in many creative areas. These designers use the logos to sell, promote, brand and market their various skills. If you want to be part of this logo design series, then details can be found at the bottom of this post.
Well I was excited and got to work following the specs to submit and write a quick synopsis on the the logo treatment for my personal business Anubis Creative. Hey, free advertising and a link from a well known blog site, who wouldn't, right?
After a long day at work I decided to check some email, read a few of my favorite blogs and Retweet some valuable info to the design community and... Well to my amazement Graham posted an announcement about the latest submissions! Anubis Creative was on the Part 11 blog post in living color. Excited I texted a friend and just hope people make some nice comments. Maybe even a new project would be great, the visibility is wonderful and much appreciated - hence the posting here talking him up!
Remembering though that as Graham puts it: "This is not a competition, it’s not a best of, it’s not a who has the best logo, it’s not a collection of logos that I have chosen. They are logos supplied by those that wanted to be part of this post. And a huge thank you to everyone who has submitted."
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