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 Welcome on Ishimaru-Design !

This French/English website is meant to be complementary to the forum. You will find graphic kits, tips, tutorials for your forums, websites, blogs for free.

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Website news

New section in Ressources : SVG files, on 06/17/2008 at 8:49 am

Having made many vector graphics for buttons and logos I finally decided to add a new page on the website where you can download the .SVG files so you can use them for your webdesigns and other graphics kits.

[titre2]Some explanations[/titre2]

SVG is an XML-based open format who respects the W3C standards and who's used for vector grapics. Unlike the bitmap drawing who's composed of pixels and loses quality when scaled, the vector drawing doesn't lose any quality, so you can either make cute tiny icon or a huge screen-sized pic from a same vector file. This is very handy when you need a logo in several sizes, for example for corporative/associative logos or simply for a design.

The most known software for vector graphics is Adobe Illustrator, but it is quite expensive.
So, as free and opensource alternative, I suggest you Inkscape who does a nice job and who is an excellent complement to GIMP in graphics design.

When we export a vector file to a bitmap, the format will generally be in PNG 24 bits, in order to keep the transparency and an optimal quality. Moreover, the demos you see in the SVG files page are under this format.

I will add more SVG files as I will make new icons.

The works can now be resumed, on 05/19/2008 at 10:30 am

You surely noticed I was less active lately.

Actually, the reason is that I made the jump into Linux by installing Ubuntu 8.04 on my PC while keeping Windows XP. By the fact that is was the first time that I was doing an install, even more for a dualboot, I needed to print docs in order to have it at hand while partitioning my C disk and installing LInux.

But the install has been done a few days later than expected, because a few errors in Windows made the Windows partition non-resizable, so I coudn't make place for Linux. I finally got sorted out with a scandisk who corrected the errors, and thus, I could finally do the install last Thursday night and everything went fine.

But after, I had to prepare my fresh desktop for graphics design and PHP testing. This wasn't quite long for graphics : a pack of GIMP brushes + fonts + install Inkscape for vector drawing. But for PHP, it took longer to set up, because a LAMP server is more manipulations to set it up than a Wampserver, and I had to seek support on ubuntu-fr.org for a few details I missed (mostly when it's 3:00am XD).
I finally could finish setting up the server this night and it is now ready to receive my PHP pages and to have my SQL backup imported.

But for now, a few Z's won't be bad for me, ain't it ? XD

Correction in font sizes, on 04/21/2008 at 8:14 am

While I was testing font sizes on a forumotion board where I was trying to replace fixed sizes by relative sizes, I noticed that font sizes in pt are actually... fixed sizes, so there was still the text zoom problem under Internet Explorer, so if you tried to enlarge the fonts under IE, you surely had this problem. For this reason, I removed the value in pt I put in the stylesheet. You shouldn't have text zoom functioning problem under IE anymore.

Glassy buttons are back !, on 04/06/2008 at 9:08 am

Those who've known the old Ishimaru Design when it was still hosted on Forumotion have surely known the glassy buttons and navbar pages who were online since the very beginning. The buttons were hosted on external hosts (Photobucket and Archive-Host).

When Ishimaru Design moved, I concentrated my works on the main pages and I told myself that I will add the pages one by one, once the site reopened, but finally, I haven't had time because I was working on my phpBB2 styles and I had two big requests to take in charge. More, the packs needed to be updated because of Forumotion's updates ("Online" button, etc.).

It's only this week that I updated the .zip archives while I was doing a cleanup on my D hard drive, and Itonight, I coded the pages and uploaded them.

You can now download the buttons kits and navbars to use them on your board. But you will have to ask someone else if you need extra buttons, because I had my hard drive replaced last October, and MS Office 2003 (where the font I used came from) has never wanted to reinstall itself because of a problem with the license number (That Micro$oft and its proprietary licenses...-_-). More, I haven't reinstalled PhotoFiltre since I exclusively use GIMP now. For these reasons, the packs are now under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa license. This means that you are authorised to redistribute and modify them, but under these following conditions :



More pages will come... when I will have time for this.

New version of ID ! + News cleanup, on 03/28/2008 at 7:59 am

You were waiting for it, didn't you ? The new version of Ishimaru Design has finally arrived ! Many changes have been done for this new version.

First of all, the design has completely changed and has now lightgreen tones, to replace the old yellowish design. For this occasion, I took the opportunity to rewrite the CSS from A to Z, in order to have a cleaner stylesheet. The XHTML code has been reviewed as well, to improve the appearance and to limit useless tags and classes.

Talking about style and appearance, I did a first step to make the website more accessible. For this, the font sizes are now relative, so this will allow IE users to enlarge/shrink them. I also arranged the style so that the font size follows the number of points per inch the visitor uses whichever browser he uses. Other accessibility measures might come later, as I will read documents and test techniques.

Next, another big change : the forum has passed from phpBB2 to Connectix Boards, this change permitted me to use the forum's session on the website (at last !). This also permits to have a better coherency in the HTML coding, by the fact that the new board is coded in XHTML 1.0 Strict, the same Doctype as the site's one, compared to HTML 4.01 transitional with table formatting which is very characteristic to phpBB2 and who gave me headaches.

With the board's match with the website, the accesses to the website's private sections are now managed with the groups. More, on the side menu, you have now a fast log-in form when you are logged out, and a block with a logout link and two links to your profile and your PMs when you are logged in.

And finally, I did a cleanup in the news, to start back from zero. The fact is that I have implemented a BBCode parsing system to replace the usage of HTML. This change makes formatting easier, but has deactivated HTML in old news. So, why not reseting the news ;) I also cleaned up the links in the side menu.

For now, there is no much content, but for some pages, I had to wait until the new version is online, because I have a few ideas for the pages I want to include, in addition to other small improvements I'd like bring.

Enjoy your stay on the website and the forum !

Ishimaru Chiaki

News Administration