krstatzar design studio

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Modern design for your needs. Complete web design, graphics + code (HTML, CSS...), custom Wordpress themes, GUI design and more at affordable price

Jul
22
2009

Windows 7 Look for Aston2 Menu

Now this was a huge task and I wouldn’t do it without great help of Vitaly Cashev, greatest Aston2 skinner, (so far :) ). I though it would be easy at first but it took much longer than I have ever expected. The end result is satisfactory and what I like is that we incorporated some Aston2 Menu features pretty good. Something to kill some time before Windows 7 is released and the cool thing is that you can have this start menu even on Windows XP. You can get the  skin here and the screenshot below is taken on Windows XP  running Aston2 Menu. Aston2 full skin is coming soon!

a2menuwin7shot-big

Jul
6
2009

Sleek Unlimited Aston2 Theme

Sleek Unlimited Theme is back better than ever.  I have been working really hard on this skin in the past 2 weeks and thank to Nick Egorov’s and Dmitry Cashev’s suggestions and tips it turned out this good. I am especially proud on wallpapers. There are 3 wallpapers included (one for each theme version) and sure you can combine them at your will. Theme can be obtained here . I represented Aston2 as a brand of various products, who knows maybe Gladiators will decide to make orange juice, mints and candies some day :)
Anyhow making this skin was a blast and I hope you’ll enjoy it.

I have  posted full screenshots below (click to enlarge of course)

sleek blue shot

sleek orange shot
sleek black shot

Jun
23
2009

wrSideLinks

wrSideLinks is a free (freeware) desktop utility which you can get here . It is made by very talented programmer from Cuba, Rogert Gomez Ocano who has earned its fame by releasing several very popular plugins for Astonshell. This amazing app (others  should folloow soon) will have its own website (work is in progress). As the author stated this app is a tribute to Astonshell and it is designed for people who like to experience a taste of Aston. This app works as Aston’s sidebars (toolbars) and works great under explorer, Astonshell and Aston2 Shell.

preview-sidelinks
System Requirements: Win 9x, Windows XP, Windows Vista
Download Link

Stay tuned for updates and news on this gem :)

May
7
2009

Skinning and Web

I know some people tend to underestimate the knowledge of skinning and question its usability in other fields but I personally find the knowledge from my skinning background pretty applicable. I’ll show one example just to illustrate it.
CSS sprites, really cool way to achieve nice rollover effects, button states, look at the css code below from planetaston.com

#menu ul li a {
display: block;
float: left;
line-height: 34px;
width:100px;
height: 34px;
text-align: center;
color: #ffffff;
text-decoration:none;
background:url(‘images/butts.png’) no-repeat top left;
}

#menu ul li a:hover, #menu ul li.current_page_item a {
color:#1D1D1D;
text-align: center;
background-position: -100px 0;

}

#menu ul li a:focus, #menu ul li.current_page_item a {
color:#FFFFFF;
text-align: center;
background-position: -200px 0;

}
#menu ul li a:active, #menu ul li.current_page_item a {
color:#FFFFFF;
text-align: center;
background-position: -200px 0;
}

And the image butts.png is below

butts

(more…)

Mar
7
2009

Playboy Skin is Born

Finally found time and here it is, Playboy skin for Aston2 Menu. You can get the actual skin  here .
I wasn’t lacking inspiration in general but was keen in finding something special and interesting that would follow the theme nicely, was really happy when I bump in to wonderful classical pinup style girl made by Gillian Riley Lepisto from phrizbie-design. But the coolest thing was that she let me use it in my skin. So huge thanks again Gillian this skin would not be possible without you. Since I am far away from being a newbie in skinning and design in general I felt bad for using  stuff  made by others but that feeling was very soon replaced with the feeling of joy once the skin was finished.

bigprev_playboy

The biggest issue during the entire skin creation process was that pink (bubblegum pink) color. (more…)

Feb
10
2009

Making Reflections – Adobe FireWorks Tutorial

Most underestimated graphics editor in my opinion is FireWorks . I think it is great and I’ll make several tutorials on achieving great things using Fireworks. I made one video tutorial and placed some nice music in the background since it  will suit you better than my Niko Belic like accent :)
See how easy it is to make  nice reflection using Adobe FireWorks.

Jan
21
2009

Sunburst background

Sunburst backgrounds became very popular across the web (and off the web just as well). Cannot tell if it is due to its hypnotic effect or something else but I like them and many people find them neat and very posh. Since we cannot argue and sunburst will be fashionable for quite some time in the near future let me show you how easy it it is to make one.

example1

I believe the same principle can be applied with other main stream applications but I will show you how to do it using Adobe Illustrator.
(more…)

Dec
7
2008

Christmas Theme

This year I am really in the great mood for the upcoming holidays so I decided to treat  myself with nice Christmas theme. It is not much, just made new header and few other minor elements but I think it’s quite alright. I’ll maybe add few more things here and there but really happy with what I have now. It will be on for entire month. I really love Christmas.

And of course feedback is welcome :)

Dec
2
2008

Gloss and Opacity Mask

In this very simple tutorial I am using Adobe Illustrator (CS3) to show you how easy it is to get a nice gloss using the opacity mask. Start by creating a new 400 x 400px rgb document. I will use popular star (badge) shape that you can see a lot around telling you that something is new or so.


Step 1

Select the star tool and click on the blank canvas, for start use the following settings from the dialog.

(more…)

Nov
28
2008

Very quick gloss (using Adobe Illustrator)

Gloss effect is very popular weapon in the arsenal of web 2.0 designers. You can create it using any main stream app but I will show you how to do it in Adobe Illustrator CS3 (any version will do I guess except maybe some ancient one :) ) . This is I believe the easiest way yet and gloss effect can come handy for many things if you are Aston (or any other app) skinner. You can use it for instance for glossy balls like in Vista glossy orb start button, icons or whatever.  Ok launch your Illustrator and create any size basic rbg document (use rbg document for all that does not need to be printed on paper – that is the fastest explanation I can give). Size of the document or of the objects is not important since we are dealing with vectors here and we can always resize it at any time without any fear of quality loss.  In order to have something to apply gloss effect to I’ll show you by the way how to create nice blended object which is neat alternative for gradient fills and can lead to some pretty cool results.

Step1

Let’s quickly draw two circles by using the elipse tool, set the color of the larger circle to  darker color than the one inside and set the stroke to none.

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Check out some of my latest work

Services

I offer various design services at a very affordable price. Design services include:

  • Web Design
    HTML/CSS + Graphics
  • WordPress
  • Skin Design
  • PSD to HTML
  • GUI Design and more...

Feel free to check on my portfolio to get familiar with my skills and style. Contact me any time krstatzar{at}gmail.com