Latest Posts

Web 2.0 peeling sticker

The peeling stickers are definitely pretty popular these days on the web. I bet you’ve all seen them and some of you might even wondered how are these things done. I’m going to write a tutorial as soon as I’ll have some free time, but until then here’s a PSD source for one.

web 2.0 peeling sticker

Download

Some design

Haven’t written anything in a while now, haven’t been on vacation if that’s what you think, even if that would have been great; I’ve just been working, so here are some things that I’ve done. All of them are contest entries on SitePoint so the logos are not mine and they are only mockups, nothing finished.

The gallery:

SiteRank Ratings
TalentRun 1
TalentRun 2
TheMagicTeacher
Verve Hosting 1
Verve Hosting 2
Declaration 1
Declaration 2
Declaration 3
Verve Hosting 3

New profile face

Right now I’m doing a lot of changes, for the better I hope, so that everybody knows that I’m alive and active. Latest thing I did was to change the size of the profile picture and the picture itself on stelianfirez.com, so my face is no longer covered by the Nescafé mug. “Season7″ comes from this phase I’m going through at the moment with the moving to a foreign country and looking for a job there. “Season7″ is also the name of a WordPress theme I’m selling right now on SitePoint (http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/11267).

Back to the changed profile, here’s the new picture:

Stelian Firez

QuickFly Media logo on FAVEUP

I usually don’t post these kind of things, but right now I need as much good publicity as I can get. So, the logo made it to the FAVEUP gallery and it even got some votes. Here’s how it looks:

QuickFly

If you like it yourself, you can vote it at http://faveup.com/design/404. Don’t worry about the “404″ in the link, it’s just the logo’s id :) .

3 steps to have dotted borders in IE

It seems that Aaron Bassett has found a much easier way to get the 1px dotted borders in IE. You can see it here.

Step 1
Open an image editing software, I chose Photoshop, and make 3 transparent GIF or PNG images like the ones bellow:

right_dot.gif
size: 1×2
right_dot
bottom_dot.gif
size: 2×1
bottom_dot
topleft_dot.gif
size: 2×2
topleft_alt

Step 2
This is the CSS part. Just create 3 classes for the DIVs which will get you the needed borders. Here’s how the classes should look like:

.right-border{ margin: 0; padding: 0 1px 0 0; background: url(right_dot.gif) repeat-y 100% 0%; } .bottom-border{ margin: 0; padding: 0 0 1px 0; background: url(bottom_dot.gif) repeat-x 0% 100%; } .topleft-border{ margin: 0; padding: 1px 0 0 1px; background: url(topleft_dot.gif) repeat 0% 0%; } p{ background: #ffffff; /* It’s necessary to give the dotted bordered element a background color */ }

Step 3
Last thing were going to do is put this piece of code around the element that we want to have dotted borders:

<div class="right-border"> <div class="bottom-border"> <div class="topleft-border"> <p>Here's how you can have dotted borders</p> </div> </div> </div>

TIP
If you want to apply the borders to an image you’ll notice that the DIV will be wider than the image itself. To fix that you can add to the right-border class the float: left; property and afterwards add to the class of the element that succeeds the right-border DIV the clear: both; property.

Example

Here’s how you can have dotted borders

I know this is not what you’ve been dreaming for, but if you hate dashed borders and you need to have dotted ones in all browsers this is one way you can do it.

Moving to Belgium

Well Belgium, here I am. Yes it’s true, for five days now I’ve been living in Liege in “Les Homes du Sart-Tilman”. The only reason I chose this place is that I’ve stayed here before, while I was an Erasmus student.

So I’m back, the only difference is that instead of studying, now I’m looking for a job. It’s obvious that I’m not gonna look for a place to work only in Liege or in Belgium cause Netherlands and Luxembourg are really close, I mean, after all Benelux is actually my target.

I know it’s not gonna be easy, being a Romanian and everything, but I hope that someone will appreciate my work and my skills. So starting from today I will send my CV to any company from Benelux which is hiring web designers. Whish me luck :) !

New WordPress Theme - 24frz

So I made another theme. I know I promised to release “Numbermac” first, but 24frz seemed to be a better choice at this moment.

Some things i could say about it: it’s pretty clean, it has a lot of space and if needed it can be modified pretty easy to fit an 800×600 screen resolution. Another great thing about it is the header which being so thin leaves the focus on the post.

24frz

I’ve decided to use it because I want to prove that it works good and I don’t mind it being the face for my blog. Plus I like to change the look of my site whenever I can. I also added a link in the header for people to see that they can download this theme. Enough talking, hope you like it.

Download

By the way, if you’re wondering how “Numbermac” looks like I can only tell you that it’s inspired from the Mac Aqua desktop.

WordPress Theme– Numberlay

Here’s the latest WordPress theme that I designed and coded. It’s called “Numberlay” and besides downloading the actual theme you can also download the source file.

Numberlay

Some things you should know about this theme:

License

  • You may not resell this theme
  • A link back to stelianfirez.com must be kept in the footer
  • You can use the theme in any kind of project, personal or commercial
  • You can modify it as you like

The Sidebar

If you are using WordPress 2.2 this version has WordPress Widgets included. If you are using a previous version you can install the widgets plugin from Automatic; in this case you will find along with the theme package the widgets plugin file customized.

Details

If you find any bugs that you can’t fix please leave a comment and I’ll solve the problem.

We love WordPress powered sites

welovewp.com is a nice gallery of WordPress power sites i’ve found a couple of days ago while surfin the web.

Shopping Cart Template

It’s the same template you can also download on the main site, nothing different.

The Blog

I just posted it here too for those who have never visited stelianfirez.com before. It’s made somewhere in December, last year. The zip file doesn’t contain the fonts because some of them are under license. So there are some screenshots on Flickr so you can see what you’re about to download.

ScreenShots:

Source files:

Want the pretty URLs?

You can start by reading this article about how to use mod_rewrite and get the most of it for search engine URLs.

It’s up and running!

I’m sure that those of you who have already visited my website have seen the screen below.

Yeah, I know, it’s been on the front page for the last 3 months, but I had a lot of things to do since February. Anyway, this time I will keep the blog updated and will come with free stuff and tips all the time.

The Blog
Stelian Firez Hello, I'm Stelian Firez, I'm 22 years old and I recently moved from Romania to Belgium.

In 2003, while finishing high school, like everybody else, I had to make my final paper. Back then Flash was spreading like nothing else before so I thought what a better way to impress the examiners than to make a whole site in Flash. That's how it started this passion of mine: web designing. Right after high school I went to study Automatics at the University of Oradea, but after a year I said to myself that I have to get a job and I did - I worked for almost 2 years as a web designer for dotBoost. For about a year I have only worked as a freelancer, but now I'm thinking about getting a full-time job. Well, if you want to contact me or view my portfolio you can find the details on the main site.
centree2centree1
several3 Stelian Firez on Flickr