Sickdesigner

My name is Radu Chelariu, I'm a web designer and here you can get to know me better.

Emotional design

It’s not often that we get to experience real, intense emotion when we look at a website. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced it. Until today. Through a very friendly exchange of @ tweets with Jin Yang (he does “desig

Masonry CSS or Getting awesome with CSS3

Gotta tell you folks: this one’s been bugging me for a week now. I’m sure everyone is familiar with David DeSandro‘s awesome jQuery plugin, Masonry. Well, what this is is two things. First, it’s an homage to David himself and

Question time: What drives you to keep on designing?

Speider Schneider wrote on Twitter today: “I will punch the next person who sends a resume that says, “I want to make the world a better place through meaningful design!”“, which got me thinking. Why do we design? I know why I

Photoshop Quick Tip: Handling complex files

Ever worked on a really complex design? One of those suckers that stretch for hundreds of layers? If you’re like me, you probably reach the point where understanding what’s going on feels like a task best suited for supercomputers pretty

Designing for the iPad without an iPad

Ever since the iPad came out, the sheer number of purchases has caused quite a paradigm shift in what we used to think was an established medium for website consumption. Tablets are, nowadays, equally important as desktops, so it makes sense that we

Analyzing In-Browser Design

We’ve come such a long way from the times when CSS was just starting to become mainstream. It is now a widespread technology, with all browser makers offering wide, though still not complete, support. So maybe it’s time for another change

Contagion #4 – Bill Chambers

It’s time for another run down of a game of Contagion. This time I played with my good friend, Bill Chambers, hailing all the way from sunny California. We had loads of fun & ended up with a killer punk-rockin’ design so click to see

Contagion #3 – Brian Purkiss

This Sunday I played a very fun and insightful game of Contagion with Brian Purkiss, a young, Texas based, designer. Our game was different than the other two, but if you’re curious why & what our collaboration yielded, then click that Read

Contagion #2 – Sergiu Mocian

It’s time to show off another game of Contagion, boys and girls. This week I played with a very good friend of mine, Sergiu Mocian. It was loads of fun and, as with the first game of Contagion, a valuable lesson in design, for both the players.

Contagion #1 – Matt Ward

About a week ago I had a sick idea (I’m prone to have them) about getting a bit more personal with my readers (that’s you guys & gals). Comments, Twitter & Facebook are all very nice and dandy but they don’t provide too much

Understanding the CSS display property

One of the most powerful & useful properties in all CSS is, without a doubt, the display property. And yet, it is also one of the least well known, especially by those just starting out with CSS. In this post I’ll try to shed some light on

The Solar Method (of building websites)

In the past years, web design as a profession has grown immensely from a wee toddler to a field well into its adolescence. We now have standards and recommendations, best practices and various ways of testing the rigor of our work. Web design is grow

A slightly sicker giveaway

You read it right, folks, it’s no joke! The Sickness is giving sh..stuff for free. Well, not stuff per sé, but rather a free ad slot for a whole month, starting the 15th of June. Click the read more link to find out how you can get a slice of

HTML5 Starter Pack – a sick freebie

Normally, I’m a big adept of not using templates for presets for pretty much anything I do. But, I must admit, there are tasks that are so trivial, so mundane and so bleedin’ boring that just scream for a template. The Starter Pack, as I

Photo reconstruction: Venus de Milo

After the last few weeks when I focused more on the design update for the site , it’s good to get back in the tutorial game. And this time it’s a biggie: we’re going to give Venus de Milo her arms back. And we won’t be using a

Get your designs to pop: Part 5 – Typography

You know how, often times, clients demand that your design needs to pop more? Well, welcome to the last post of our 5 part miniseries jam packed with easy to follow tips and tricks. In this episode we’ll be covering the basics for: Typography.

Get your designs to pop: Part 4 – Depth

You know how, often times, clients demand that your design needs to pop more? Well, welcome to part 4 of our 5 part miniseries jam packed with easy to follow tips and tricks. In this episode we’ll be covering the basics for: Depth. Depth Depth

Get your designs to pop: Part 3 – Colors

You know how, often times, clients demand that your design needs to pop more? Well, welcome to part 3 of our 5 part miniseries jam packed with easy to follow tips and tricks. In this episode we’ll be covering the basics for: Colors. Colors Thou

Get your designs to pop: Part 2 – Light & Shadows

You know how, often times, clients demand that your design needs to pop more? Well, welcome to part 2 of our 5 part miniseries filled with easy to follow tips and tricks to get that lovely design of yours to pop! In this episode: Lights & Shadows

Get your designs to pop: Part 1 – Textures & Patterns

You know how, often times, clients demand that your design needs to pop more? Well, welcome to a 5 part article filled with easy tips & tricks to get that lovely design of yours to pop, while keeping quality high. In this episode: Textures &

Serene photo tutorial inspired by Justin Maller

Sometimes achieving a certain effect seems easy with a quick fix. But what separates the boys from the designers is the ability to see (in your mind) variations from the easy fix that change the mood and quality of the photo entirely.

The definitive guide to formatting CSS

As web designers, we like certain things done a certain way and the way we write our CSS is probably at the top of that list. So today I’ll try to show you a few ways to write better CSS, not just for yourself, but also for others.

Pure CSS Vignette

Our latest posts have mostly been about design, so today we’re going full on code monkey with a cool CSS3 technique: Vignettes! The technique involves a few divs, a bit of simple CSS, and a whole lot of fun. So click the pic and read on.

Photo manipulation: The Mad Hatter Makeover

When we think Alice in Wonderland, most likely the image of the Mad Hatter comes to mind. In this tutorial/case study we’ll try to turn a regular Joe into the Mad Hatter himself. And, hopefully, we’ll pull it off without going mad ourselv

Why I trust the reader

KISS is a general circulated term, whether in the blogosphere or in the journalistic circles from whens it first emerged. But I believe & trust the reader. And I especially trust the reader to NOT be stupid. This is my argument that users do come

Another point of view: Manual shaded threshold

Every now and again I stumble onto a technique which is so simple and effective that it has to be shared. I like to call this one the “Manual shaded threshold” technique. The name stems from the not so popular anymore effect of Threshold,

Keeping a keen eye out – Design in the real world

Looking for inspiration in sources outside of our tiny design universe is a widespread idea being tossed & turned around design blogs. And while all the information on this subject out there is pertinent & well worth noting,

Designer zombies – the sickness IS spreading

Web design & development is one of the most booming areas lately, with more & more people choosing this as their life long profession. As a fairly young line of work, very few statistical data has been gathered regarding any health issues

Poster tutorial: Save the pandas

It’s time to show our tree hugging side with a poster tutorial for an imaginary panda saving campaign. We’ll be doing some nice shapes, some brushing and a bunch of pow, in-your-face factor so click the link, read on, learn something.

Taking semantic tags one step further

Lately it seems that the interwebs have been going all out nuts with HTML5 and CSS3. Everybody’s a pioneer and everybody’s declaring NOW is the time to start using them. But has anyone actually done more than just dip in?