Nur Ahmad Furlong

Tag: imagery

  • Finding Good Free Imagery Online

    Searching for images for design projects is one of the daily frustrations of any designer, especially when clients are not willing to pay for imagery but still want the highest quality. I love browsing Getty Images’ Vast collection of exquisite images, but they’re way out of the league of most companies in terms of budget.

    In the past I’ve used websites such as www.sxc.hu (Stock.XCHNG) which has a large database of free to use images with various degrees of usage rights.

    stock-exchange

    Flickr.com is another great source of images and it has a surprising amount of great looking high quality images, though it’s a bit of a chore sifting through the images and finding those with appropriate licenses.

    flashbased-flickr-tag-search

    I liked searching through this flash based related tag flickr search tool. It brings up some options much quicker and allows you to randomly browse tags which are related.

    cc-search

    I just found the creative commons search page, which allows one to search Flickr, Google, BlipTV and a few other sites for creative commons media to use in your projects. http://search.creativecommons.org/

    What’s your favourite place online to find imagery, free, paid for, whatever.

  • nomad-one Recent Project: Arabella Website

    Arabella Golf & Spa Resort & Hotel South Africa

    I recently completed a little website design project for Arabella Hotels & Resorts. This mini-site is more of an entrance into their main websites for each specific resort and needed to give a brief showcase of each resorts. The best way to showcase places like resorts and spa’s online are pictures which reflect the atmosphere, spaces, relaxation so that would-be visitors can transport themselves into the space and take themselves on a little mental journey. People want to know where they’re going to be spending that valuable relaxation time and need to be transported in the atmosphere they’re looking for. This is true as well for advertising properties for sale whether it’s residential or commercial. Seeing something and getting a real sense of the space and the surroundings makes a world of a difference.

    Arabella Western Cape Hotel & Spa

    I coded this site using XHTML & CSS with as many web standards as possible but due to time constraints and scope changes I must admit there’s a few tables being used in the html. The nice thing about this page is that even though all images are in flash, all text loads very quickly and the SEO friendliness of the textual content is quit good, with a nice semantically correct hierarchy of content, ie. menus are lists and headers in their H1 & 2 tags. I did advise the client against placing all the venue visuals in flash as the initial loading prevents visitors seeing the venues as quickly as possible.

    I quite enjoyed this little project as it gave me some time to craft some nice little interface goodness which I haven’t done for a while. The elegance and luxury of the venues comes through with the soft shiny gradient. I did find the curly font a little difficult to work with in this case as it makes the main headline a little illegible.

    All in all though I’m happy and learnt a few little CSS tricks along the way. This project was developed through a new media agency in Cape Town(not telling who) but all the work was done by yours truly.

    What do you think of this Design?