… the re-design of my personal website BeantownDesign.com is complete! Well, complete enough to launch I should say. A TON of hours went into this latest version of my site, and I can truly say I’m pleased with the results. I liked my old site, but I had too many new features that I wanted to try out, as well as a new look.
In a previous post I went through the process of how you can make amazing panoramas in Photoshop. It’s a simple process, using “Photomerge” to put the photos together, and “Zoomify” to make them viewable on the web at a large size.
A friend of mine just got back from a trip to Arizona, and had a couple Panoramas he wanted me to make. So here they all, for all to see.
Apple is known for their clean designs, both in their products, and the way they display these products. One of the effects they have used a lot is displaying their images with a reflection of the product below it. When used correctly, this is a very simple, clean way to display products.
I’m sure there are plenty of ways to create this, but I’ll show you the way I do it.
I took these photos in San Juan in February of 2008 with an Olympus SP-350 camera. They were taken around the “Old San Juan” area. Great place to visit.. so warm…
Lorem Ipsum is dummy “filler” text. It’s been used as filler text since way before websites were around, back to the 1500s actually. The purpose of using Lorem Ipsum dummy text instead of grabbing real text from somewhere is that you want your viewer to concentrate on the design of the piece, be it a printed piece or a website. You want them to know that there is text there, but not to worry about the actual content of the text. You don’t want them to get distracted reading about last weeks homer that Ellz-busy hit over the monster.. which you randomly grabbed off the Globe website for filler text. Get the point? Good.
So why am I making this post?
Isn’t it easier to just have a word doc with the text ready to be copied/ pasted? Perhaps, if you work on the same computer daily. As a freelance designer, I work on at least five different computers weekly, and I’m always looking for the dummy text. I use it at least every other day. I decided to make a post that I can just bookmark on every computer with the text, and when I need it I can copy/ paste from this post. Feel free to bookmark this post and use the filler text in your own projects.
I recently created this website for Professional Makeup artist Dani Wagener of Boston, Mass. When I was designing this site I decided to try out a technique I stumbled across: making fading link colors on rollovers. What I mean by this is that when you roll over the main navigation the links fade from gray to blue; instead of just switching right to the color like a CSS rollover would do. Check out the final result, and then I’ll explain how to do this effect in Dreamweaver. DaniWagener.com
Digital cameras are so inexpensive now that there is no reason to not be taking photos at high resolutions. But what good is having these large photos when you need to make them tiny anyway to put them online?
I’ll show you a method of taking a collection of large photos and turning them into a panorama. Once you have a large panorama put together, there is still the problem of being able to put it online for others to use. You don’t want to have to make it 900px wide.. because obviously you will lose all the quality. Uploading it as a huge image file and having a scroll bar is no good, who is going to wait for that to load? I’ll show you the perfect solution to this problem.
Step 1 – Take Photos
Well you’re going to need photos to make a panorama! You can use a tripod with a camera, and take multiple photos as you turn the camera around until you reach the original position. Make sure to overlap the photos as you take them so there will be somewhere to blend. If you don’t care about them being perfect, or you don’t have a tripod on you, just hold it as still as you can, and turn in a circle as you take pictures. That’s the method I used when I took all these photos in St. Maarten last year. I actually like the effect it gives not having the top and bottom edges lined up, (you’ll see what I mean soon).
Well I’m a designer, (duh), so I work with color every day. There are a ton of different tools to make using color easier both on and offline. I was going to make a post about the top 5 sources/ tools that I use for color palettes, picking, etc… but I’ve decided to take them one at a time.. I think they are so important that they are all worthy of separate posts. Then maybe I will create one post summarizing them all.
I’m going to start off with my favorite. This is a Firefox Add-On (mental note.. create a Firefox Add-On post), that I use almost daily. It’s called ColorZilla.
I don’t know about you, but I read a lot of different forums and blogs. I’m always fascinated by peoples avatars, gravatars, etc. I’ve noticed recently a lot of people have these little cartoon caricatures of themselves. Could they all be that good at art? Not likely.
Then the other day I stumbled across how they are creating them. I’ll show you how here.. and even if you don’t care about having an avatar of yourself, it’s worth checking this free program out.
I think Photoshop CS4 has some seam carving built into it, I’m still running CS3 so I haven’t used it yet… but the possibilities of this look amazing. I’m especially impressed by the ability to completely remove objects from a picture in a matter of seconds.
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