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Online Web Conference

Photoshop Consultant — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:16:16 +0000

I have been teaching some of my students Photoshop in a live web conferencing system so thought I would share it.

Learn the secrets of how small businesses are “communicating with clients and each other” for a fraction of the cost corporate giants are paying with VOIP Web Conferencing.

Online Web Conferencing has always been available to the large corporate sites and techies. Now you can use this brand new software to run your own web conferencing and even generate residual income just like the professionals with no knowledge of programming required.

VOIP or Voice Over Inernet Protocol is becoming one of the fastest growing technologies on the internet today. You can talk with a business associate, friend or family member anywhere in the world.

To find out more go here.

Discover the best FREE Graphics program that you can use as an alternative to photoshop.

Photoshop Consultant — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:54:07 +0000

If your looking for professional graphics program I suggest you learn Photoshop however if you want a simple graphics program for web and general use then you have come to the right place!

I searched for years for software like this for my students and now you can profit from all my research. No this eBook cover is not made with the software but the header is and some samples below.

This Software is an open source, raster graphics editing program for Windows, developed on the .NET Framework. The Software has evolved from a simple replacement for the Microsoft Paint program, which is included with Windows, into a powerful editor with support for layers, blending, transparency, and plugins. It is available under MIT License.

Get your FREE Copy here

Another Photoshop How-to-Crop Marks and Bleeding

Photoshop Consultant — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:02:52 +0000

If you are an artist of any kind, you probably have to have some of your prints printed at a professional printer. That means that you must have the proper specifications for printers to produce quality work for you. If you are designing your digital photos in Adobe Photoshop, crop marks and bleeds will be very useful to you.

Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator are equipped to handle bleeds and apply crop marks automatically. Adobe Photoshop allows you Print with Previews crop marks and bleed options. This means that you can, and often will have to make your own crop marks. Just in case you are still in that dark or if you are just getting started on your art journey in Photoshop, let???s talk about what crop marks are. Crop marks show where the page will be cut or trimmed once it is printed. The image usually goes all the way to the edge of the printed page after cropping. A bleed is typically used when this happens. When you hear someone use the term ???bleed???, they are referring to the ink that is extended past the crop marks. This makes sure that the little mistakes in registration or trimming does not make an undesirable white line at the edge of the image.

If you are going to make a bleed, you will need to make the decision. Photoshop???s Print and Preview allows you to make bleeds of 0.125 inch. If you choose to use a bleed of 0.125 you will need a canvas size one-quarter inch wider and taller than the art you are creating. In order to place guides numerically, you will go to Photoshop???s menu and click on ???View>New Guide???.

At the time you are ready to output, go to Photoshop???s ???File>Print??? with the Preview command. Once the Print with Preview dialog box opens up check, ???Show More Options???. Point your mouse arrow in the Output area and select the Corner Crop Marks box. Next, click on the Bleed button. Choose between 0.0 to 0.125 inches for the proper bleed you want. The crop marks will be moved inward when the page is printed out.

Before you print your artwork, it is important to know if the ink will bleed off of the edge of the page. It is important to know if your work will bleed before it is printed because the trimming knives cut the area of one of more edges. Bleeds don???t really run off the page. Instead the trimming knives slice so close that the ink looks like it is running off the edge. That means that your printer might need a larger press sheet to print your work. A large press sheet may only be available in a larger press, thus costing you more money. This is why it is important that you call ahead before you take your artwork to a specific printer.

If you want to use the Adobe Illustrator, you can build a bleed into your document by setting the document size to your actual trim size. Extend the area of the color beyond the edges of your document. You will want to be careful when you are determining the exact bleed measurement. Extend the area of the color to the measurement.

Bleeds vary greatly, so you will want to ask your printer how much of a bleed they require before you take in your artwork. Crop marks are not always a necessity but they can occasionally help your avoid some issues. You will need them in Illustrator sequences you plan to import and to keep the alignment of your images. Using crop marks will help you avoid recompressing the layer. Importing vector files without crop marks in Photoshop can leave you with sharp lines on your artwork because Photoshop changes the image.

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10 Websites with Wood

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 03:53:08 +0000

Natural elements lend themselves well to websites, they bring something that we can all relate to to our screens and soften what can otherwise be a sterile and lifeless environment. Wood is one natural element that has been used frequently, today we’re going to look at some of the best examples in recent web design …

Electric Pulp – I’ve been a big fan of this design since it launched – it blends faux-water color techniques with a dark wooden background

ISO50 – Portfolio of Scott Hanse, one of the first sites I remember seeing that used wood as background

Fish Marketing – A wooden chopping board and a fish that loses his head, what more do you need ?

DJ Art – Dennis Jones uses a wooden frame to display his excellent illustrations

Delicious Monster – Organisational software framed with wood

BSSP Family – Pine (or is it maple?) flash-based goodness

Meubelen Van Aerde – Dark wood background ties in with the rich photography nicely on this furniture web site

Capitol Media – A deep red wood is used as a background on this web design company’s site

Rayform Design – Dark wood encases this portfolio site

Mondonation – This site uses grained wood as a footer

10 Monochrome Websites

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 00:44:29 +0000

Monochrome websites can be very effective, especially when combined with a solid grid layout, continuing our color series today we take a look at 10 of the best …

30 Great Website Designs (Part3)

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 18:31:22 +0000

Today we have a bit of mid-week inspiration, lets take a look at some great examples of standards-compliant web designs. If you missed them, have a look at part one and part two as well.

Knoxville Life Church

Open Doors Student Site

25 Code Snippets for Web Designers (Part5)

Photoshop Consultant — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 07:40:19 +0000

Part 5 of the code snippets series sees us take a look at more handy pieces of html, css, javascript and other usefull things to a web designer …

Web Project Framework – The ESWAT web project framework is a kit that contains a folder structure and some pre-written components that I use whenever I start off a new web project

SwfIR – Using the dark arts of JavaScript and Flash, swfIR gives you the ability to apply an assortment of visual effects to any or all images on your website

Sexy Buttons with CSS – This tutorial will teach you how to create pretty looking textual buttons (with alternate pressed state) using CSS

Uni-Form – Uni-Form is an attempt to standardize form markup (xhtml) and css, “modularize” it, so even people with only basic knowledge of these technologies can get nice looking, well structured, highly customizable, semantic, accessible and usable forms

PNG Overlay – Basically, it involves creating a transparent PNG overlay which can be used as a mask / frame around regular JPEG or GIF. This way, a typical CMS installation can be configured so users can upload photos without having to worry about using any graphics program to apply filters

CSS-Based Form Template – Provided here is a flexible, semantically correct, and dare I say, accessible form template

CSS Cheat Sheet – All the CSS properties at a glance

New Clearing Method for IE7 – The easy clearing method described at Position Is Everything uses that to create a very convenient way of clearing floats without having to add extra markup. Unless I’m wrong that method will not work in IE7, since the box model bug was fixed in the original IE7 Beta 2 Preview

10 Free CSS and Javascript Calendars – Calendars may be used on webpages for various reasons, such as allowing users to easily pick a date in a form, or just to provide monthly information. Here are a list of various css and javascript calendars for use on your site

10 Free CSS Graph Resources – Often in web-based applications, developers want to be able to display on the fly graphs. Here are 10 CSS Generators or Techniques that may help you in generating CSS graphs

Master Stylesheet – One of the most common mistakes I see beginners and intermediates fall victim to when it comes to CSS is not removing the default browser styling

Grid Calculator – Change the settings (by dragging the sliders, clicking on the bars, or editing the values) to calculate the overall width of your grid

Subtraction – It’s been about a year now since I first started thinking about creating some kind of definitive documentation about my approach to designing for the Web with the typographic grid as my primary layout tool

101 CSS Resources – All the cool kids are using CSS to separate content from appearance on their sites. Here is 101 resources that will get your feet wet with CSS

CSS Boxes with Outside Frame (Rounded or Not) – The designer I work with wanted to have a site with information inside boxes. He also said that there would be a lot of boxes of variable height and width. More to that, the boxes needed to have a custom border all around and both the bottom side and the left one of the box would have a shadow that would be positioned above a random pattern

Ajaxian – JavaScript Round Corners with Drop Shadow

Heat Map – ClickHeat is a visual heatmap of clicks on a HTML page, showing hot and cold click zones

Ajax Poll Script – Download this Ajax script for creating a poll on your site

Ajax Load – Create your own animated gifs to indicate Ajax activity on your site

Ajaxian – Dynamic Right Click Context Menu

Plotr – I came across PlotKit, a well written piece of javascript that enables developers to use Canvas or SVG elements for rendering bar, line and pie charts. The only thing was that PlotKit needed the Mochikit library to work. So I took some parts of PlotKit and wrote some parts myself. The result is a lightweight charting framework (12kb!) named Plotr

Simple PHP randomizer – Display list items randomized

CSS Solid block menu – This is a lean, professional looking CSS menu that’s draped in a solid two color background image

8 Web Menus – I will show you some great examples in this posting which I hope you will enjoy and use on your websites. Some of them are built by me while other have credits but are free to use

CSS Link Backgrounds – Offering in-line external link backgrounds is challenging, especially getting them to work and look right with Internet Explorer 6. I decided to try it for myself to see what the fuss was all about

30 Great Website Designs (Part2)

Photoshop Consultant — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 07:40:19 +0000

Today we have a bit of mid-week inspiration, lets take a look at some great examples of standards-compliant web designs. If you missed it, have a look at part one as well.

Vorsat

Knoxville

Tomas Ledba

Jesus Rodriguez Velasco

San Diego Brewing Company

Links for Web Designers : May

Photoshop Consultant — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 07:40:19 +0000

As the end of the month approaches lets take a look at the usefull articles and resources for web designers that have been popular over the month of May.

Freelanceswitch – Hourly rate calculator

Free Stock Icons – Icons from the Crystal Clear icon set by Everaldo Coelho

Educate Your Stakeholders – Most of the important decisions of website development are not made by design professionals. They’re made by the business owners and middle managers who hire us

Creative Bits – Cool business card designs

CSS Slicing Guide – How to turn a Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or Fireworks template into a fully sliced, coded and XHTML and CSS valid web page

Contrast and Meaning – If you’re a designer, you work to communicate and convey meaning. So it’s important that you understand the mechanisms by which things and ideas acquire meaning

Vecteezy – Free vector downloads from some top designers

Make your site mobile friendly – How do your web pages fare in today’s mobile browsers ?

Freelanceswitch – 10 signs you may be charging too little

Deziner Folio – Web 2.0 layer styles for photoshop

Sitepoint – Breaking out of the box

Smashing Magazine – Ideas for better CSS coding

E Logo Design – 50 logo tutorials

roScripts – Best CSS tools of the month

Nill Photo Album – Fake HDR tutorial

CSS Dock menu – An apple-inspired menu for use in your websites

Color Schemes – Huge list of color-related resources

BBC News – Helvetica’s 50th Birthday

How to think like a client – Having trouble getting clients to see things your way? Maybe it’s time you spoke their language

MB Web Design – Nightmare Clients!

Liquidicity – 77 vector buttons

Top 10 Map Tools and Mashups

Photoshop Consultant — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 07:40:19 +0000

Since the excellent Google Maps was created there has been loads of usefull tools and sites created which use their API, today we’re going to be taking a look at the best and most helpfull examples …

Google Maps for WordPress – Handy plugin which allows you to easily embed google maps within your wordpress pages. Usefull for a contact page or to illustrate somewhere you are talking about in a blog post.

Goggles – Google maps flight slim, useless but a cool use of the api all the same

Streetview – New from google, allows you to virtually explore certain cities around the world

Real Estate Auctions – Ebay real estate auctions mashup

Wikimapia – Lets users tag an area and add notes about it

GeoNews – GeoNews is a auto updated Google Map of Google News with user comments

Petrol Prices -Shows the cheapest petrol station near to you, UK only

Housingmaps – Mashup of craigslist and google maps to help you find somewhere to live

Simply Hired – Find a job near you, searches job boards, classifieds and company sites

Hotmaps – Hot or Not + Google maps mashup