New year, new post, same oul me

So this is going to be a quick one and not like any of the rest.

I wanted to quickly write down my thoughts on what I've been doing for the past two weeks. 

First off, after an incredibly busy year, I decided to take two weeks off for Christmas and to spend time with my wife and the rest of my family. I'm a firm believer in downing tools and getting away from all things work so that I can recharge my batteries. That is what I did; eating out, drinking pints of Guinness with my friends, playing the latest civ game, watching movies, and getting it a lot of time on the bike. It was great.

After 11 days of no design work whatsoever, I got bored so I decided to play around with some stuff. After watching a few videos on YouTube, here is what I created in a day.

Keeping up with design trends.

When the first iPhone landed on the scene, Skeuomorphism was used to help make the user interface resemble real-world items. This trend was slowly replaced by flat design, but it might be coming back in 2020 as Neumorphism (New Skeuomorphism). I'm gonna write up some stuff on this soon but for now here is a great article describing how to do it.

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Creating animations with After Effects, Bodymotion, and Lottie.

I've been messing around with After Effects a lot. I love animations, and how they can improve designs, so after watching a few videos by Design Course and Webflow, I created several animations. I share these below.

Playing around with Webflow and Firebase

Although I do zero development work in my day to day, but it is always good for a designer to be familiar with web development. So I decided to turn the above animations into two live sites, one hosted on Webflow and the other on Firebase. The Firebase version performs extremely well and the Webflow one also performs good too. I personally prefer using Webflow as it is so easy to create but I mix the both in the future. Click the image below to see the results and make sure to check out the 404 page too 😜

• Click here to view the Webflow site.
• Click here to view the Firebase site.

That is what I've been up to. This was a last-minute post so I'll be back with a few of my usual posts soon. But have a wonderful new year, keep doing what makes you happy and stop doing what makes you sad. Peace and love.

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