Take Hotlink Protection One Step Further With Notification Emails

Anybody who showcases their creative images online like me will eventually realise that there are some very unscrupulous people who will try everything they can think of to steal your images, possibly to claim the credit of design for themselves. Those are the type of people who might first try the age old trick of linking an image element on their own website to an image file hosted on your own, also known as “hotlinking”. If somebody hotlinks any image belong to you without authorisation, then that person is committing copyright theft. This may lead to a loss of income from that image if you sell it as product, it may also damage your reputation if it’s used in ways you bare not to think about.

But what can we do about it? Well various methods of hotlink protection have been around for almost as long as hotlinking itself. Though the end result varies from the end user receiving no image at all, to receiving a different image altogether, the likes of which you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see, though I’ve never come across one yet that automatically informs the owner of the website

Split-Screen User-Interface

One page websites started a craze among various creative types several years ago and have increased in popularity as time went by. That trend has spilled over into small business websites and generally any site with a limited amount information on it. They’re so good for this size of website because once the page as loaded, there’s no need to call the server again to load another page. However, they still have one problem, you can’t see all the information at once

Opening External Links The Right Way

It’s a common misconception among web developers that the “target” attribute has been depreciated completely. First of all, and simply NO! There is still support to use plain and simple XHTML to open an external link, though it will only validate in XHTML 1.0 transitional and some earlier code standards, just add the age old target=‘_blank’ to the link that you want to open in a new window… tada!!

Although there’s nothing monumentally wrong with XHTML 1.0 transitional, it’s a little outdated, not very exciting and not very supportive of increasingly popular html features

Alvar Benjamin, Typeface

With inspiration taken from the Finnish furniture designer, Alvar Aalto, this geometrically simple typeface was derived from circles, consistent angles and clean lines. The two styles, normal and italic, as well as the two different weights, regular and light provide

Beautifully Sacrificing Serifs

Inspired by the Argentinian typographer, Emiliano Suárez, this serif poster has an aged and distressed style applied throughout as it bends and even breaks the traditional rules of design in imaginative ways. The way the characters of the phrase, “Anything that‘s worth having can only be attained through sacrifice, keeping it requires devotion”, merge and intertwine with each other relate to those particular parts of the phrase, most noticeably at the point of “through sacrifice”, while the background colours and surrounding elements serve to keep

Screaming Woman

Because this was a personal project on the side, developed in between working with clients and writing articles, it’s taken me almost a year to produce this much detail. I’m proud of the high level of realistic detail, and creating it was painstaking a lot of the time, especially the

Light-Weight, Accessible Drop-Down Nav Menu

Of all the developers in the world, there’s only a relatively small amount who know how to make a simple, 100% dynamic, light-weight, and totally accessible drop-down list, that works with and without JavaScript. However, I’ve recently been enhancing my knowledge of the topic as I understand that accessibility has never been optional, it’s a necessity in a world with

All Trades, Logo

As I initially sat down with my client, of the new multi-tradesmen business, to discuss his needs for this logo, one of the questions I asked was what company image he’d like to project to his customers. He replied

Help Microsoft Kill IE6 For Good

As stated in a recent article, Internet Explorer versions 7 and 8 are now obsolete, leaving IE6 as the last remaining outdated browser that, it’s safe to say, pretty much everybody hates. It’s not only far more difficult to use in comparison to modern browsers, according to secunia.com it also poses over 200 security risks at the time of writing this article, most of which can be remotely triggered from anywhere in the world, and a large amount of those allow access to system-wide security settings such as

Facelift UPVC.com, Logo

This redesigned logo was the beginning of a complete corporate re-branding, and also the beginning of my professional relationship with the roofline plastics installer, previously known just as Facelift UPVC, which

Apple iPod Shuffle

This pair was something I designed shortly before the release of the product in 2009, intended for online advertisements. Like all Apple promotions, they’re

Volkswagen Beetle, Still Thinking Small

Julian Koenig’s original advertising campaign, launched by the American agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, for the Volkswagen Beetle began in the 1950′s, put simply, revolutionised the way designers thought about how to construct an advertisement. Instead of hiding the facts by

Dress Different, Poster

This is one of my very first designs, which I happily produced for a friend, just after graduating from college in 2005. As a new entrepreneur of the online men’s fashion accessory retailer, he stated that he likes