Check out my latest Illustrator tutorial on Vectortuts+! How to Create a Yellow Submarine Icon with Gradient Meshes

I have been living without a TV set for exactly three years and 8 months now. It’s great and I don’t miss a thing. Don’t get me wrong. I loved every awful program, every commercial, every useless newscast, but it was time for me to get on with my life. Like many other people, though, I love vintage appliances and cherish the memories associated with the old TV set we had when I was a kid. To celebrate that I decided to create a fun little icon in Adobe Illustrator.

You might have heard about Semantic Code. It’s a coding best practice whereby, for example, one wraps block content in a block element (div, p, etc.), inline content in an inline element (span), lists in list elements (ul, ol), you get the drift. This might seem obvious but thanks, or rather, because of the flexibility offered by style sheets some web developers ignore the intrinsic inline or block nature of HTML elements because they can change it via CSS. So a <span> element can be made to be a block, a <div> can be turned into an inline element and so on. This malpractice conflicts with the very nature of HTML: it is a language and its function is to describe the contents of a web page. Ignoring that is not only foolish, it also makes for a more confused and less interconnected Internet, and we don’t want any of that. Writing semantic code means using HTML elements the way they were intended.

Now if code is poetry then why not take it to the extreme? How about Romantic Code? Say you’re creating a website for your girlfriend or a family member. Wouldn’t you like to add a personal touch to your code? Let’s get maudlin!

UPDATE – Sept. 20th 2009: The system described in this tutorial is no longer in use in the new website. I’ll update the tutorial as soon as possible with picture references of the old system.

As anticipated in a recent post I have set out to turn my Portfolio and Freebies pages into dynamic lists that update automatically every time I add new content. The process is finally complete. Here’s how I did it.

Psdtuts+, one of the best online resources for Photoshop users, has published a tutorial I wrote entitled “How To Create a Moka Express Icon.”