The main site of www.lamia.nl was based on Drupal, but hadn't been updated for a long time. When I started thinking of a redesign, I realized that a full Drupal site wasn't necessary for what is in principle a brochure site. So I decided to remake the site as a static page, old fashioned, hand coded html,css and javascript.

I still wanted to have some interaction on it, so I decided to have the content areas dynamically updated in a tabbed main view. I also wanted to make the links to our websites a bit more interesting.

Sometimes it is nice to give your visitors an idea of where your external links will take them. To make this visually attractive, a nice device is a small popup window with a screenshot of the remote site and a short description. You can see how this works on the left hand side under 'Our other sites'. When you hover over the links, you get a floating popup showing you where you will be linked to.

As far as graphics tablets go, there really only is one contender. Wacom has a long history of great tablets in all categories; from small doodling up to desktop filling CAD tablets. Recently they created a new generation of the Intuos tablets.
Previously I used the Graphire tablet, and that definitely fit its purpose, but I always wanted to have a slightly bigger tablet. When the Intuos 4 line came out, I knew it was time to update.

Here is a very quick and easy technique to add some depth to drawings in Photoshop. See the pictures at the bottom.

To start with, make a line drawing of the subject. Here I have drawn the Pokrovski cathedral on the Red Square (also known as st. Basil's).
Create a second layer and apply the base colors on it. Don't worry about shadows or highlights yet, just use the basic color.

Something wonderful has been done by the people over at www.visual6502.org. Something that several years back would have been thought impossible or at least implausible. Looking at it makes me realize how far computers have come.
The microprocessors used in the earliest home computers (we are talking late 70s, early 80s), were wonderful bits of engineering, but by todays standards very simple. It was still possible for hobbyists to understand the CPUs fully and to program them in assembler. Actually the whole architecture of the home computers themselves was simple and could be understood. The chips used for input and output, the operating system and its calls, all could be described in a single book.

We are currently setting up shop, so come back soon.

in the meanwhile please check out our other web presences:

Lamia IT Consultancy
My personal website
A community website I created