Christopher Murphy has this sweet little project, called Optimus, that works very well for certain use cases. You can find more information about it on his website christophermurphy.dev.
images
Free Software for Animation
Once a year I teach Animation & Interaction at MKstart in Amsterdam. When I started teaching this class over 10 years ago, I used Flash. I’d make some very tiny animations with them during the first few classes and then some mini games during the last few classes. I loved it, they loved it, it was great. When Flash died, eventually I switched to Animate. The brush tool is still the same, the regular crashes are the same, but working in Canvas has made Animate more buggy and unreliable. I haven’t found any good alternatives so I use it anyway.
Refine edges in Affinity
What: Refine edges > Apply > Done!
Where: in Affinity Photo
A client wanted his name as his logo in a handwritten style. He was thinking of a handwritten font; I asked him to actually write his name for me because if you want personal, it’s often good to be personal. He wrote his name for me on paper, took a photo of it and emailed it to me.
I did all the obvious things: increase contrast, select the light background with the Flood Select Tool, Invert Pixel Selection, copy and paste it to a new layer. So far, so good. It looked smooth.
Images and ::before & ::after
I learned today that the pseudo-elements ::before and ::after don’t work with the img-element. As I went looking I found out that the CSS spec is very unclear on this. It has to do with the fact that <img> doesn’t have its actual content on the page/in the HTML, it pulls it in from elsewhere. This makes it a replaced element. Form elements are also replaced elements. It is also an empty element, like <br> and <hr>.
Rule of thumb (for now) seems to be that empty elements can’t have ::before and ::after applied with the exception of <hr>.
Other empty elements with which ::before and ::after wont work (may) include form elements and <br>.
Photo by Jack Krasky on Unsplash
Duotone
I wanted a duotone effect on the photos on this site and at first I thought I would like to create it through CSS but what I found seemed to require adding extra HTML, which isn’t something I want to spend my time on for this site (I’m using GeneratePress and I’m not in the mood for a child theme at the moment), and as I was searching for different ways to create the effect, I came upon this little tutorial for Photoshop.
Title: Digging into Duotone: How to Create & Use Colorized Images in Web Design