Welcome to www.iamfake.com personal portfolio of Jens Hjalmarsson

Last Sunday, a buddy of mine talked me into ordering a 3 day pass to arvika festival here in Sweden. Thursday morning comes and I jump on the train with two good buddies of mine, some ~4 hours later we arrive to arvika without a clue how far away the camping area really was. Each having their bags filled with around 15kg worth of beer along with our tents, sleeping bags, chairs and whatever random things you need at a festival :)

After an hour or two and some wrong turns we finally got on the right track. Quickly whipping up our tents and start filling our empty stomachs with the beer that was such a bitch to get there in the first place and to pass out around 11pm that same night. Hadn’t planned on seeing any bands that day anyways so it was all good and ready to go out strong early friday morning.

Waking up early Friday morning cracking the first beer at 6am getting in good mood around 9am feeling optimistic that some pizza place would be open around that time, apparently not… Walking around the town drunk by myself for a few hours until I gave up and took the 30min walk back to our camp where my mates finally starts waking up and get back in to party mode working on getting rid of their hangovers. 17 beers and one Interpol concert later I crash out around 4 am.

Saturday was a bit tougher. Waking up around 9am start working on that hangover once again until i had enough around lunch time where I knocked out laying with my head outside my tent catching up on sleep, noticing that everyone has gone in hiding and I’m soaking wet. the weather had turned from the hottest area in Sweden to the coldest(maybe not, but it felt like it anyways:)) in a matter of 10 mins. After 2 hours or so it finally stops, and we all are coming out of our tents to get back into drinking once again. Took us a while until we stopped complaining about the shitty weather and just enjoy another night of drinking and watching some good bands. The night turned out great and the whole festival were awesome(at least this far^^).

Sunday morning. One of my mates wakes me up, stressing us to start moving to the buss station. Jumps on the buss home at 10am. Switch to train 2½ hours later and from there switch to the last 30min buss ride home… but WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENDS!!! my brain fucking farts on me (I guess 3days, 30 some beers, a bottle of wine and a few drinks later that could happend :/). As the train starts moving again I see them through the window looking for me, the only thing i could think of was, No!… fuck.. fuck.. fuck… So I got off at the next station and at that time it was already to late to get on the first train back to catch up with them, didn’t help that those fucking time tables made shit sense to me at that time. Angry, annoyed i start to walk around randomly cursing(luckily there weren’t that many people out in town that Sunday, they would probably take me for a random retard). After 3 hours i jump on the first train to a city 40 minutes from mine, holding my old ticked and faking to be asleep as i couldn’t afford to pay for the extra trip, 8 hours and 10 bucks later I’m finally home tired as hell laughing at my own stupidity…

Meh!

As I started to get more in to CSS coding i though “hacking?!?!? pfft, probably because you can’t code”… boy how wrong I was, and today you see people state the same thing everyday.

Had an interesting discussion with a fellow coder/developer about what I thought would be a really simple and easy thing to achieve. The problem was to get an ordered list to align even when the list numbers gets double digit, so that 10 and up doesn’t get more indented then the previous 9.

I thought this would be an excellent example to show that even for the simplest tasks we need to rely on “hacking” our CSS.

As we want to keep our content aligned we have to take it out of the normal flow, so we position our links/text absolute only to realize that IE6(would assume IE5 aswell, but who cares about that old shit today, right? :P) take notice to the padding set on our parent element. Safari and FireFox already has it down works like a charm even tho I would prefer another way then absolute positioning… it gets the job done.

So what about opera? yeah what about that shitty fucking browser… I’ve always had something against opera and this just made it even worse. It doesn’t even display our list numbers, apparently there is no content there (as we have taken our element out of the flow) so it looks like a fucking mess. Fine lets throw in a “ ” so it realize that there is some content there… only to find out that it double padding’s, and on top of that it still gets more indented when it hits double digits, like what the fuck… make up your fucking mind!.

So what should we do? we know that we can target IE and Opera individually and get an almost pixel perfect result, should we settle for that? or forget about people with bad eye-sight and let our designs break while increasing/decreasing our text-size and use a large background image instead? or maybe forget about proper markup at all and generate our list number with a for loop?

This inconsistency is getting on my nerves, why do we still bother with outdated browsers like IE6. It would probably take youtube a day to wipe the interwebz clean from “shitsplorer” and make use of what conditional comments really is intended for ;).

Anyways… with some minor hacking we have a result that for me is acceptable enough, check it out.

/ends rant :P

Having an understanding of how modern browser behave is a good step in right direction, of course with an exception for that retarded one owned by, uhm what’s their name? macro… mecro… micro… ahh never mind. (No one can understand how “shitsplorer” behaves anyways)

What we do know is that we are moving forward to an easier and understandable web. Talking about semantics is never an easy task as people have different opinions about what it really means. In my eyes giving something meaning is what it is all about, why am i doing this… why aren’t I doing that.. since there is more then 1 way to markup your web page, and certainly isn’t a matter of right or wrong when your page is coded with a purpose.

So what is the purpose? should we code for faster load time and saving of bandwidth? or is less more? whatever you may prefer there is always someone that has a different take on it.

So in this example the use of unnecessary markup is kept to a minimum, because of that we suffer from extra large images. In this particular design that wouldn’t be a problem but for a site on the larger scale it might have been.

Would adding a few extra markup elements to achieve a faster load time still be semantic? you decide.

• Demo.
• No CSS.

I know… havn’t updated for a while, anyways im on the move so I will be occupied with stuff to do in the coming week/weeks. I need to get a shitload of stuff I can’t afford, even the smallest things cost like a trillion dollars :). Been searching after a new computer desk for ages, everything is so damn fugly and whats up with these “pullout keyboard holders” everyones got? it makes your keyboard like a mile away from the screen. Not sure how I want it to be with wall paint and such yet but hopefully it’ll end up awesome for some cool before and after shots.

Next on the list is to actually get a job :P, the rent is pretty low so I would manage freelancing if I so wanted but the fact that I would be out of inet connection for atleast a couple of weeks (i think) forces me to actually do something about it. Now left to see if all these late nights has payed off :D

whoah!

So… not a whole lot have been going on lately, some minor work and simply try to survive this time of the year. :)

But i do have some personal projects in mind that i want to get going. What has been bugging me for a long fucking time is those frigging famfamfam icons, don’t get me wrong they are good but every lazy fucking designer is using them… I’ve had the domain iconbullets.com for a couple of years with the pure intention to release some free icons, actually had a couple designs made in the past like this one, but at that moment there where other priorities so they are now long gone :/

Recently also picked up markupsheet.com that would serve as a html/css resource, book reviews, code examples, navigation techniques, html/css reference and so on, don’t know how far i want to take it yet so that would be on hold for some time while I’m working on getting back into PHP.

To get going with my programming i thought up a small project that would be relatively easy to get back in the game. The main purpose would be to simply store your project outlines along with the necessary files. I constantly see people on forum marketplaces avoid including their full domain(making it an active link) for stats or whatever reason they may have, no research has been done so i have no idea for the demand of this kind of service, simply a learning experience for me but you can check out the temporary static pages here. :)

yay got myself some early christmas presents :). Ordered HTML Mastery and Bulletproof webdesign (2nd Edition).

I have already read HTML Mastery and really enjoyed it, alright i’ll be honest here I downloaded the e-book illegaly (had to see what it was all about first right? :P).

Well I thought it was up to par with CSS Mastery so had to give my support and buy it, and i really need something new to read in the bath :D

Dont know anything about Bulletproof webdesign (2nd Edition) tho, havn’t read a sample chapter or even gone throught some reviews.

I picked it up by the design of the cover and the author ^^, that also inspired me a bit to a simple project and would be a good starting point to get into the RoR framework, I’ll see how that goes and will keep you updated on that at a later time.

I’ll probably end up buying some more next month so if you have any suggestions or recommendations feel free to let me know, spanks! :)

I thought i would share some simple way of producing the flowers seen on this page. First of all color and tone settings are all relative to the design in question so there wouldn’t be a point displaying the #hex since the end result would be different, adjust it to fit your needs.

Alright lets start of by creating the “green grassy thingy” the flowers should be attached to.

Step 1. Create a new layer, select pencil tool and with a size of 1px randomly draw something along your canvas or design, something like this.

First we will add some blending effects to get rid of the flat look, see the result here. We then we duplicate the layer add a bit of gaussian blur, Filter -> blur -> Gaussian blur.

Go back to your original layer and lower the opacity to about 25-30% depending on the level of blur you have applied, this is to still have some definition (again it all depends on what feel you are going for).

Step 2. To speed things up we can use a custom shape from photoshop instead of freehanding it with the pen tool . The custom shape i’ve used is the star, draw it out on your canvas and select all the inner points (use the pen tool, hold down ctrl + shift to select all the path points) hit Ctrl + T and hold down alt + shift and drag one of the corners towards the middle, you should end up with something similar to this.

Next we want the corners to be round and not sharp as the stars original shape. Select the pen tool hold down your alt key and you would get the convert point tool , so click on your outer corner and drag untill you are happy and do so with all 5 corners and you should have a flower shape. Resize it to a more realistic size of your document then apply some basic blending effects to make it stand out.

Final step. This is really simple, take the ellipse tool hold down your alt key and draw an even circle to fit in the middle of your flower apply some blending effects and it should all be done.

A good thing is to have everything in layer sets so you can duplicate the flower and flip i, twist it and turn it however you want to make it more random.

This tutorial is based on verry simple photoshop tecniques and only takes 5 minutes to do but with good results. If you wanted to you could go crazy and do different types of flowers, colors add some leaves or whatever you feel would fit.

I also added a wallpaper with the re-use of one flower, enjoy

1280×1024 wallpaper

The introduction part. Alright folks it’s that boring time again, the first post (yeah i know type something worth reading ay!). To be completely honest i hate writing and certainly stuff that goes on with my life, hopefully that will change with time and you will get something out of my useless ramblings. :)

So where is the damn about page? It is on it’s way but for now i’ll do a small introduction for the people that don’t know me.

I am a 23 year old freelance webdesigner located in Sweden. Been interested in the web-design and development side of things since i got in to the wrong classes in school :). (still looking after the first design I did, if I find it I will update this post)

My work is currently only available on the front page, I will try and sort it all out in the coming week but it’ll do for now. If you find any bugs(yeah i know it’s way to graphics heavy, one of things to do) send me an email or post a comment.

Worth mentioning is CSSMastery and HTMLMastery. Two verry good books from FriendsofEd that made this site possible.

Cheers