When Spotify delivers more frustration than music

I’m a long time music lover and listening to it is a big part of my daily routine. Whether it’s a blues tune on a cold rainy evening, some fast paced beats when cycling down a mountain or a post-rock instrumental rhythm for those times when I just need to gather my thoughts. I like discovering new music and I […]

Creating a vinyl record wall clock

About five years ago I saw a similar idea on the wall of a pub in Brașov, Romania and I wanted to have one of my own ever since. Altough the one in that bar was actually just the printed image of a record stuck to a round piece of glass I figured it wouldn’t be so hard to put one […]

Tools of the trade: Sketching the web

As a user interface designer at TrustYou one of the biggest challenges I have is coming up with simple interfaces to help our users get not-so-simple things done. That’s all there is to it and it’s by no means an easy job. Now I’m not going to ramble on about our entire process behind buildind these interfaces because chances are that you already have […]

Brackets vs. Sublime Text: A designer’s text editor

As most developers will know, finding that perfect combination of tools to help you get your job done fast and clean is pretty damn important but also pretty tricky. For example I myself have been through quite a lot IDEs, from [Macromedia] Dreamweaver to Eclipse and from JetBrains WebStorm to Aptana Studio before finally settling down with Sublime Text […]

The hand-made castles of Stefan Lüpges

Two weekends ago the Town Foundation Festival took place in München, celebrating over 8 centuries since it’s official establishment. To mark this event the city gathered together lots of artists and craftsman in the old city center, from woodworkers to glassblowers, from knitters to painters and from blacksmiths to sculptors. The old center was filled […]

Creating triangles with pure CSS

As I’m sure most designers who also like to code already have the hang of this, I still want to put it down in writing for those of you who still aren’t familiar with what tricks you can use in CSS to get your way around. I’ve often found myself needing to insert different triangle/arrow […]

Custom made dot-grid book

As most designers, I started drawing stuff on all sorts of paper: squared, lined, blank… basically anything I could get my hands on. Over time however, my experience grew and I started to see the different needs I had in terms of support material depending on what type of project I was working on. For […]

Autumn giveaway: high-quality texture packs

This autumn I bring you 10 completely new high-quality texture packs for you to use in your future projects, commercial or non-profit. The result of a enjoyable walk during a great October day, they were taken with a Canon EOS-1100D and adjusted to serve you well in any of your most demanding projects: website backgrounds/headers, […]

Last ride on a great autumn day

There’s (almost) nothing like feeling the warm sun above you as you pedal your way through a single track in the Carpathians, wind rushing through, brightly colored autumn leaves flying by, dirt being thrown from your rear wheel. I felt that a bit today, on my last mountain bike ride through Brașov, as a sort of […]

My take on the 2013 IM World conference

This autumn marked the second year for IM World – an internet and mobile conference at Romexpo in Bucharest – and it promised to bring a lot of interesting keynote speakers as well as plenty of interesting exhibitors, to say the least. Hopes were high, expectations needed to be met and the enthusiasm was at […]

A weird surprise in Barcelona

During our honeymoon in Barcelona, while coming back from the beach, me and Adriana mingled a little on the small alleys adjacent to La Rambla. It was to my surprise that I found one of my designs – Coming back to life – printed on a phone case that was up for sale. I didn’t consider checking […]

Which designs would you wear?

So it seems that my T-shirt designs are selling pretty good and some of them now have the chance to be printed in higher quality and in greater numbers. What does this mean for you? This means higher resolutions and more durable prints for the designs that will make it “to the top”. What I need […]

Free touch gesture stock images

I came across a set of free, high-quality stock images for touch gestures and I thought I should share the link with everyone. The pack includes 9 gestures – each at around 800x1000px –  all rolled up into one PSD file, nicely layered and ready for use in your projects. You can find the download link […]

T-shirts with my designs now available at Inkspired

As of November 26’th you will be able to purchase T-shirts with my designs right from Inkspired’s website. So far only five pieces of my work have been submitted, some old, some new. The other good news is that a few more are impatiently awaiting in my sketchbook, ready to be turned to digital format and printed […]

The year 2000 as seen from the past

While reading some online articles, I came across a set of postcard illustrations depicting the future of humanity’s day-to-day life. Some of these early 1900’s postcards are from Germany, created as a campaign for the Hildebrand chocolate factory, while the rest are created by French artists to be presented at The Great Exhibition of 1900. […]

Wooden smartphone holder

Because I was sick of having my phone simply lay there on the desk – especially when I had the earphones connected to it and wanted to listen to some music (or perhaps watch a video?) – I decided to get myself a phone holder. The thing is I wanted something simple, stilish and without […]

Another year, another restyle… and so much more

It’s been a whole year – give or take a few days – since I last made a major change in my website. Because of the need for more flexibility than the one myown CMS offered, I decided to migrate to WordPress and use it to fuel my website. Despite having a few hickups at the begining […]

Getting the “Thank You Button” count from anywhere on you blog

I’ve been working on rebuilding my website, that is my portfolio and blog, and wanted to try out something like a “Thank You” button. I’ve managed to find this neat plugin that does just that. It’s nice that it’s customizable for the average user and for those of us for which that’s just not enough, well… we […]

Free DVD case template

While looking for a mockup for some DVD cases to use for my new website design (have to rearrange some contetnt for better showcasing) I found this guy on deviantART who made a truly awesome job on a free DVD case template. You cand download the file here in a *.3ds format (for 3D Studio Max) and do whatever […]

The Noun Project

Found out about a really nice project created by the husband-and-wife team of Edward Boatman and Sofya Polyakov, along with designer Scott Thomas. The thing I’m talking about goes by the name of The Noun Project and is a really awesome database of free and downloadable symbols for designers and artists to use in their creations. The article […]