CommuniCats: August 2022

August 25, 2022

Nicepage website builder revisited

I started using the Nicepage website builder in around the beginning of October 2021 and after a few weeks wrote a rather enthousiastic blog entry about it. I tried several other applications that allow users to build websites, none of which matched the capability and diversity of Nicepage. Since that time my enthousiasm only increased and during that period of roughly one year Nicepage has issued over 20 updates ( ! ! ! ), that added more functionality still to the program, all of which make sense. Also these updates never came with bugs, so their dev-team is not only prolific, but also very skilled. To get an idea about their productivity, you may want to visit their page that contains Nicepage's update history.

The Nicepage website

I would recommend this program to both beginners and seasoned pros, because building a website with Nicepage requires no coding whatsoever and is capable of what Nicepage calls Web 3.0, which means objects can be placed anywhere on the page without restriction, while it offers total freedom of positioning along the Z-axis as well. A few years ago, this may have seemed to be a dream that was out of reach for website builders, but Nicepage has made all this possible, while building a clear and intuitive UI, that is top of the bill in the industry.

The number of features that the program has, is incredibly large and yet expanding rapidly. The same goes for the continuously growing number of templates they offer their users for free.... Any designer that hasn't at least given this program a try, is depriving him- or herself of fantastic functionality, creative freedom and sheer speed. And by the way, I am not paid to write any of this; it simply is the high level of productivity and creativity that Nicepage makes possible for website builders, that inspired me to compose this blog entry.

Beside website builders the program is also very well suited for prototyping and UI design and, I dare say, it is so diverse and powerfully efficient that these stages can be skipped. It therefore allows to meet deadlines that other programs are incapable of achieving and make design work a lot more pleasing, because Nicepage removes all restraints that programs of its competition have not yet been able to resolve. Website builders can therefore communicate directly with their clients and apply the changes they request, can be implemented instantaniously. This is a big argument for creative non-coders, that has the potential to increase income drastically in considerably less time.

I use Nicepage in combination with Affinity Designer - a cheap, no subscription vector drawing program and Affinity Photo (a Photoshop like bitmap editor), that can also be purchased for a low one time fee. Nicepage offers its various versions for very modest subscription fees, that by far most designer will not consider to be unaffordable. So, if you're fed up with bootstrap grid restrictions for placing objects, coding and unresponsive support departments, you should definitely check out Nicepage, that also offers a free of charge version for individuals. Finally, all upgrades are handled from within the program - users are notified of an update and can do so immediately. It does not get much easier than this.

Finally, I have to write a few words about Nicepage's support, which is unsurpassed. I ran into trouble once or twice, encountering a bug (which is a rare thing, even when the devs add functionality at an incredible speed), but the developer team addressed the issue immediately and one or two days later the problem had been fixed. I have never experienced such fast resolutions with any program that I ever used. Nicepage really makes an effort of supporting their user base with great pace. This should be an encouragement for website developers that serve many clients; once they run into a problem, they will not suffer from it for a long time and will remain able to serve their clients properly and continuously. This is a really good argument to try out the program.

August 5, 2022

Vector portrait of Emma Britten

I originally posted this drawing in 2019, but kept on working on it every now and then (which is what I often do). Many artists are familiar with this method of working, because after 'finishing' a drawing, it is more often than not discovered that the image needs more adjusting and / or additional work. At times this is a repetitively occuring moment, especially with portraits, in which likeness can depend on moving objects 1 or 2 millimeters, changing their size or shape, skewing them or fiddling with their colours. Faces are the most prominent visual characteristic of a person, which is why there is not a photo of your foot in your passport or ID card, but one of your face.

Emma Hardinge Britten was a well known spiritualist who lived from May 2 1823 to October 2 1899. She was a writer, public speaker, musician and opera singer in her younger days to support her family after her father passed away when she was 11 years old. Her spiritual gifts brought her fame and she was frequently consulted by high ranking politicians, corporate leaders and other important people of her day. It is an indication that elevated echelons of society value the spiritual reality that is intentionally kept hidden from common folk.

This portrait is a work in progress and is drawn in Affinity Designer. This program has all the functionality to create realistic vector portraits that can be edited afterwards relatively fast which is a pain to do with mesh-filled vector portraits. And since tinkering is almost a necessity for portrait artists Affinity Designer is their ideal tool to make 100% vector portraits that can be re-scaled to any size without loss of quality. However, this work also contains vector brushes, which are not really vectors - more about this later.

Had to place this here or else the ugly
image below will show up in preview

What makes vector portraits look realistic is that edges of shapes and lines can be blurred in a controlled way. In addition color fadings can be customized in any desired way (using different colours) as well as the transparency of objects (in a linear, radial, elliptical or conical fashion). The combination of these 3 functions allows artists to create works that are visually indistinguishable from pixel portraits, but - as stated before - can be produced in any desired dimension while retaining the original quality.

Ugly Adobe Illustrator attempt (no offence) to
create a realistic vector portrait, b.t.w., this
is caused by Adobe Illustrator's limited
functionality to create realistic art.

Outside of Affinity Designer only the magnificent free open source program Inkscape (which a difficult to learn UI) has similar features, be it that some of them are difficult to find in Inkscape's UI; CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator do not have object blur functions, except when converting objects to bitmaps first, and can not be converted back into vectors. These programs are therefore not suited to create realistic vector portraits, other than with the hideously tedious mesh-fill tool. The portraits not made with the mesh fill tool are very unrealitsic looking portraits with hard edges, as is shown in the image above. Adobe's marketing department has tried to turn this into the standard for vector portraits (in which it obviously succeeded) by suggesting that the programs shortcomings are some sort of artistic oddity that they turned into an alleged type of feature. But no matter how one looks at the result, these are not realistic portraits of high quality; they are at best a visual metaphor of realism.

This is the custom vector brush
created to draw realistic strands
of hair. This can be imported in
your collection of brushes and
used for this specific purpose.

This is the custom made brush used
to paint skin pores. Mix dark strokes
and bright strokes combined, the latter
always on top in the layer panel.

Apply 3D and or Bevel / Emboss fx
to the textured brush strokes to
create a realistic skin pore texture
and fiddle with the brush properties
use custom colour and transparency
overlays and underlays, whatever it
takes to approach realism as much
as reasonably possible.

So below you see a realistic vector portrait created in Affinity Designer. Bear in mind that at this point (September 2019) you are looking at the early stages; it will become more realistic as more work is done to the image. Skin pores and detailed strands of hair in particular will be applied. For the hair texture I created a custom brush that allows to create realistic strands, both dark and bright. The oldest stage is at the bottom - more recent stages are placed above that. Click on one of the images and they will be shown in Google's Lightbox, which (on a PC anyway) allows to scroll through the various stages to quickly see and compare the changes. The original size of the portrait in which it was drawn, is 80 x 62 cm, approximately ten times larger than the images submitted to this site.

Mind you - as I found out later - vector brushes in Affinity Designer do NOT create vectors, but are pixels created inside of a vector drawing program, that will remain bitmaps. So when creating realistic art with Affinity Designer, be sure to make large images in order to avoid blurring and jagged edges when using 'vector' brushes, if the intention is to make large prints of the image.