What's the meaning of the strange punctuation you find on Twitter these days? DLB helps you speak like a native by deciphering some Twitter shorthand.
Because Twitter’s features were designed to be accessible via SMS codes, the service can be pretty unintuitive without a little study.
Twitter uses a special command syntax, both internal to the application as well as through other services using the API. If you encounter some text with a strange prefix applied, and it doesn’t read like typical TXT-speak, that’s probably what you’re looking at. Today we'll cover a few that you're likely to run across.
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Nick — Oct 16, 2008
The saga is complete. DLB presents the final chapter in our series of 3D asset tutorials.
Last time, we converted our 3D rendering into vectors. We left off with a Photoshop file which we’re going to finish today with textures and shading.
First things first, I made a slight mistake in the last tutorial that I need to correct. Luckily, there’s a quick fix.
In the previous version of the graphic, I colored in the vectors with shading. This certainly makes the image more interesting, but shading so early not a good idea, as we can do it much better with Photoshop.
Dull, but fixed.
So, if you’re following along, go ahead and make all of your fills a neutral version of their base color. In my case, it’s mostly brown with a little light gray for the blade. When that’s done, export the file again and you’re ready to go for today’s tutorial.
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Nick — Jul 11, 2008
Continuing from Friday’s post, we cover the next step in converting the 3D rendering into crisp shiny assets suitable for framing: tracing into vectors.
We left off last time with a high-resolution high-contrast rendering of our model. Now it’s time to explain why.
Here at DLB, we prefer to make most of our assets as vectors. Vectors are mathematical representations of lines (rather than pixels which have a fixed scale) so they are always crisp and perfect at any scale. That’s why we like them so much. We’re absolute neat-freaks, whether it’s geometry or CSS and we don’t like building things more than once.
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Nick — Jul 6, 2008
Two weeks ago, I described how DLB uses 3D modeling to give its projects that extra-special sauce. Today, I’m going to take you back into the kitchen and show you how it’s done.
Before things get rolling, I should say that I’m only going to provide a 1,000 ft. view of our process. This is for two reasons: 1.) every project is different, so the best I can do is provide a summary of the steps we take, and 2.) this needs to fit into a digestible blog post, so I can’t be too verbose with my details (lest I venture into QED territory). If there is enough demand, in the future I can write up something more in-depth.
In general, there are four steps to generating a graphic from a 3D object the DLB way:
1. get a model, 2. render the model, 3. vectorize the rendering, 4. style the graphic.
We’ll cover steps 1 and 2 today and finish off 3 and 4 in future posts.
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Nick — Jul 4, 2008
