6 Steps to the Perfect Cup of Tea

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Thanks to my friend Anca Foster, I was up until 3am this morning discussing my ideal method for making a cup of English Breakfast tea, so in between explaining my method and theory behind it to her over Twitter, I sketched out this informative panel to help all of you wannabes …and those weirdos out [...]

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Tutorial: Twitterlove Bird, from sketch to vector in Photoshop and Illustrator

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Following the recent launch of SoulTweet, Graham Smith made a call out for any illustrators to help out with the site.
In a few minutes that I had spare, I doodled a couple of birds to offer up for use, and sent across the best of the two for consideration. It didn’t get taken up, so [...]

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The Makings of a WordPress Design Blog

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This is somewhat of a follow-on from Jacob Cass’ article, 29 Great Wordpress Plugins That I Personally Recommend.
Jacob posted his article just as I was putting together this version of my website, and it helped me a huge amount in finding the right plugins to do what I wanted my site to do.
In that spirit [...]

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Fast-loading CSS rollover menu items

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I’ve just been going through a few design sites this evening, and it’s surprising how many nice looking sites have such slow-loading navigation images. What I mean is, you see the menu fine, but when you hover over a link you have to wait a second or two for the rollover state to download and [...]

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Quick tutorial for ‘300′ Movie effect

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I found a pretty cool tutorial last night for mimicking the style from the movie ‘300′ — basically taking a shot, compositing it on top of a moody cloud backdrop, and overlaying with brown-beige.
I whipped up a couple of fast demos of the technique in the image below — the first shot is the stock photo I [...]

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Rob Barrett Introduction