We realised that every day we seem to end up making new gradients. It ends up taking quite a while, especially if you need to do it on a regular basis. We hope our Gradient set saves you some time and stress whenever you need a little emergency colour inspiration.
Get the Adobe Illustrator CS2 File [2.3MB]
Don’t have Illustrator? Get the SVG [500KB]
GONE are the days where you can only send a maximum of 10MB as an attachment on gmail, make way for the new 20mb limit!
Starting today, you can now start sharing more of those home videos, large presentations and files that were simply too big to send before, making your gmail space even more useful. This also makes gmail much more useful and practical for sending multiple attachments.
Yahoo, the leaders in online email (however that happened) currently only offer users attachments totaling 10MB unless you fork out on their premium service in which case you get up to 20MB.
Now that gmail accounts beat that, will we see a change in the market leader?
We are pleased to report that after our best day ever, with quadruple the number of visits since our last appearance on the wonderful/painful digg homepage, we experienced absolutely no downtime. Shows you what kind of hosts (mt) are, and that we needed a bit more room to move.
Thanks to everyone who has shown their support, both through digging us, adding us in del.icio.us, and by leaving uplifting comments. We really appreciate it.
Cheers,
The GoSquared Team.
If you decide to go with (mt), you can show your support for liquidicity by quoting “gosquared.com” whenever they ask who referred you. Alternatively, you can just go straight to their purchase screen.
Listen up Mac users. You may already know this, but I didn’t until the other day, and it really comes in handy. Safari has a little tool called the Activity Window, which can be accessed by going to going to “Window > Activity” (shortcut: alt + apple + a). In here you can see every file that the website you are viewing is calling upon. The brilliant thing is that by double clicking any one of these files, it will download straight to your desktop.
Considering you would most likely want to download a file containing video or audio, look in the column on the right to see its size. By process of elimination you will see that the biggest file will be the one you want.
So if you happened to be on YouTube, you could download any video you wanted. Similarly, if you were on MySpace, and had no respect for copyright law, you could download anything you wanted.
This, if you didn’t know it already, could save a lot of people a lot of time (and money).
You might also like 165 Vector Icons, 50 Ways to Become a Better Designer, 77 Vector Buttons
So, I did a Google search, and what greets me is a glimpse of Google’s new interface. (or, if its not going to be the new interface, a test prototype of it).
I know Google’s been parading a whole load of new stuff this week, but were they supposed to be letting any of it out in the wild yet? Perhaps they are randomly setting aside a number of searches to assign the new interface for, and seeing how people like it.
Pics below (click on the thumbnails to view fullsize):
They’ve also added a dropdown. I know that will save a whole load of time.
This I gather was a test of the new interface. In my opinion, it looks good. Its nice to see they’re keeping the simple and clean interface that helps make Google what it is: an essential tool that anyone can use.
Cheers, just thought I would share my discovery!
Geoff
Everyone seemed to like our original set of vector icons, so we thought you might like some more. 165 more to be precise. In 5 colours. So, I suppose that actually makes 825 icons. As always, they’re free for you to use as you wish. Oh, and this time, as you asked nicely, we are giving away an svg as well. Hope you like ‘em!
What has really pissed me off this week in the technological world by Dan Ashcroft.
Firstly, Having forked out on Windows Vista, i have found it absolutely riddled with bugs: I keep on only being able to get local access on my wireless router; When I leave my laptop downloading overnight, i often find that it hasn’t been downloading, no: it decided to reboot at 3:00 in the morning because some display driver stopped responding. I have to agree that yes, Vista is an improvement on XP; regardless of what anyone says – it is more secure and they have finally changed the way Windows downloads updates.
It used to drive me insane the way that when Windows had finished installing an update on XP, the way it would constantly notify you every few minutes that you needed to reboot, and would be nice enough to do it for you, regardless if you had unsaved work and were not at your computer at the time. At least now with Vista, you can get the notification to piss off for up to four hours, that’s right, FOUR HOURS of sanity of not being disrupted whilst you try to finish off those taxing reports on word.
Windows Media Center has really provided a lot of e-rage this week, having decided to give Microsoft a chance to prove themselves in the audio software department, I decided to give Media Center a shot. Don’t let the new silky interface fool you: you have to wait around 10 seconds between pressing play now and actually hearing the first bit of the song. What an ingenious function, I’m sure that people wrote in the suggestion box for Vista, that they wanted to have a relaxing period of silence just before they got to hear their song. Another problem that I find is that when choosing an artist to play and am listening to a song, it just stops after the song and doesn’t go on to the next song if it’s from a different album. I wish Microsoft would show some team spirit as well; funny how when playing a song on Media center, it doesn’t show what you’re listening to on Windows Live Messenger but when using iTunes it does!! I’ve learned my lesson, and its back to good old iTunes. And I’m the one with the Vaio!
Amazon, this week have announced plans to create a music download site to rival Apple’s. When reading this, i thought “At last, something to challenge the DRM kings.” What I simply cannot understand is how people keep on buying song, after song on iTunes and yet they don’t actually own the frigging thing after forking out money for what can quite simply be downloaded for free by other means (but we wont go into that). At least REWARD the user that has decided to buy music legitimately with actually giving him (or her) what they have paid for.
That’s enough ranting for one week.
Dan.
Being a successful creative has a lot to do with the way you work. Sure, you can’t teach good design, but it never hurts to learn a few new tricks, or simply make the most of your talents. So without further adieu, here’s 50 ways to be more successful as a designer. Take ‘em or leave ‘em.
Don’t get stuck before you’ve started: get some good ideas.
Great ideas can stem from using themes and metaphors. Basing a site design around the idea of a school, for example, can open up a whole avenue of ideas. A great design works because the theme houses and conveys the content seamlessly.
It always helps to throw ideas around with a colleague or friend (as long as he knows what he’s doing). Try to have a couple of short sessions of brainstorming rather than one massive one as ideas can quickly go cold.
Sometimes it’s best to just have a break. Leaving the computer can seem like going on holiday in rush hour, but it usually helps if you just take a 10 minute break and get some fresh air. If you can’t do that, try listening to some music, or taking your jumper off.
A lot of creatives work from home, but that doesn’t mean they can’t talk to anyone. There are a lot of really helpful and talented people out there willing to have a chat about design, you just need to find them. Here are some of my favorite forums:
Graphic Design Forum (one of the oldest and largest forums on graphic design)
Smashing Magazine Forums
Layers Magazine
Designate Online
DevLounge (OK, it’s not a forum, but it’s a really decent site)
Try going to a few courses on branding, as brand thinking is vital to developing the way you think. Keep your ideas squeaky simple, and 9 times out 0f 10 they will work. Thinking in terms of branding means you can develop key words to stem your ideas from. Complexity just doesn’t work.
I almost always start with ideas that I have scribbled down in my trusty sketchbook. Whenever I get an idea I just make sure I get it down on paper. This always helps as whenever you’re stuck at a later date, you don’t have to go out and buy another book, just refer to your own! Don’t just keep it to ideas though, put URLs, book titles, words, and all the sketches down that you can. It will develop into your creative mind, on paper.
Always ensure you know the media you’re going to be using at the start of working on a project. Knowing that there’s going to be photography involved means you may need to think about locating a shoot. 3D may mean getting some help to make it look that little bit better. Taking it to print in the last minute is also not advised: things never go to plan! Ensure you know the scale of production you’re going to be dealing with, and research the printing processes you’re going to use.
I find it helps to visualise the brief. Highlight key words and phrases, and jot them down in your trusty sketchbook. Then see how these ideas could link up by drawing lines between them and branching out from those core ideas. Pretty soon you’ll have enough on the page to sketch out some decent ideas.
Once you have THE idea, and it’s on paper, try putting it together at low res on the computer. This way you can see what you might need to rethink or improve to get the job done well. At this stage you don’t need to worry about perfect dimensions or colours, just see how it goes.
No, not because your odor is putting your colleagues off, but because (apparently) running water increases brain productivity. Try not bring the brief in with you, but spending time in a place that you feel really comfortable in can greatly help those ideas flow. Read the rest of this entry →
Let me just start off by apologising for the downtime, which lasted for approximately 16 hours. Many of you will have been met with “500 Internal Server Error” when trying to access the site. This is because, (un)surprisingly, the server encountered an Internal error.
Due to the demands of the scripts I’ve written for other parts of the site, we require certain aspects of PHP to be enabled. The default compilation of PHP on the server did not support some of these scripts. Therefore, we decided that we would recompile PHP to include this functionality. However, recompiling PHP caused the almighty Plesk control panel to become misconfigured, which meant that PHP scripts on the server were not parsed (didn’t work). Consequently, Apache thought “!*$£%(^@?” when this happened and threw up a 500 error.
The compilation of PHP would have worked if it wasn’t for the control panel, which likes to sink itself into all the server processes.
The moral of this story is, you should read into your server configuration closely before trying to compile PHP yourself. I write PHP, not install it.
Anyway, I eventually got everything working again and we are pleased to be back online, resuming normal service (yet again).
What a week.
Thanks,
Geoff
The GoSquared Team
Just a quick note, we have finally added a little “digg this” button to the end of every post.
We hope this makes it easier for new users to find us, and bring more contributing and friendly people to liquidicity.
The “digg this” button joins the already in action “del.icio.us” button, so hopefully we can gain even more visitors from these two brilliant services.
Thanks,
The GoSquared Team.
* Actually don’t bother digging this post, because I don’t think many diggers will really find it all that mind blowing… 
![Don’t have Illustrator? Get the SVG [500KB]](http://downloads.gosquared.com/vectors/Gradients_01.svg){kind=link}