Here’s a quick way to further enhance the branding of your website. If you don’t have an iPhone go get one. Then try bookmarking your website; (go to a website in your iPhone Safari browser, hit the + symbol, and hit “Add Bookmark“). What this does is take a small screenshot of the webpage and add it to your iPhone, right next to the other icons you have.

Well forget that, now we can make custom icons, so when somebody bookmarks your website, the icon is one that you actually created! As a designer I might be a little bit TOO excited about this, but hey, this is the stuff I live for. You can see in the above image the two icons I’ve created for my websites, WebDesignAndSuch and BeantownDesign. So now the icons match the favicons of my websites, and I can just touch them to launch my websites on my iPhone.

Keep reading to see how to create your own iPhone icons.

So the process is actually ridiculously easy. First, create your icon at the size of 57×57 pixels. Don’t create any gloss or rounded edges, the iPhone actually creates both of those for you. You can see in the image below what one of my icons looked like before it was added to the iPhone.

Next, save your icon as a .png in your website’s images folder. Then you need to link your website to the icon so the iPhone can do it’s magic when someone hits “Add Bookmark” on their phone.

Glossy Icon

This first code is if you want the gloss to appear over your icon. Put this in the head of your website, and of course make sure you set the path to your icon.

Non-Glossy Icon

If you don’t want the gloss for whatever reason you can use this code.

There you go, have fun! If you want to test this out, pop open WebDesignAndSuch on your iPhone in Safari, and hit “Add Bookmark“!

Ya.. I said “Web 2.0“.. what?

Well if you’re still here after that, here’s the deal. I was reading an interesting tutorial about creating a button similar to the one found on the Campaign Monitor website. I actually went ahead and created the button, I always love seeing the approach other designers take at creating things in Photoshop.

Well after I created it I figured I may as well put the PSD file up here for anyone that wants to use it. I’ll give the CSS code to add it to your website as a CSS sprite also. Now I need to give credit where credit is due. The CSS code, and the tutorial of how to make the button are from Jacob Gube over at Six Revisions. Check out that link if you want the step by step of how to make this button.

I’m really putting it up here so I’ll have easy access to the PSD file in the future so I can download it no-matter where I am, make a few color adjustments, copy the CSS code, and have a new button for whatever I’m working on that day. Check out the demo to see the button in action, and feel free to download the PSD file of my version of the button. Keep reading for the CSS code.

View Demo

Download PSD File

Below is the CSS code for your button and the rollover effect.

Below is the XHTML code to put the button on your page.

If you’re a webdesigner you most likely use Photoshop to create mockups of webpage designs for your clients. One technique I use in a lot of my website designs is dotted borders. They add a lot more visual interest than a regular underline, and work great to break-up sections of content.

So it’s easy enough to create a dotted line with CSS for the web, but how do you create a dotted line in Photoshop for your mockups? It’s actually rather simple; (as anything is when you know how I suppose).

Step 1
Choose the brush from your tool bar.

Step 2
Open up your brushes (under Window > Brushes). Uncheck all options on the left, and move the “spacing” up to 250% (more or less for different spacing obviously. You’ll see the dots separate in the preview.

Step 3
Draw a line with your brush on your canvas, and your line will be dotted. Hold shift for a straight line.

There it is.. How to create dotted lines in Photoshop!

ilz out!

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.

GREAT BASIN PANORAMA
OBSERVATION POINT PANORAMA

Next up? Fenway Park panorama!

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.

First, you will need an image of course.. I chose to use the exact Apple cinema display that I am staring at right now. I prefer to put the objects on a black background as I think this makes them really pop. You can use whatever color you want for yours.

Double the height of your canvas, so you will have room for the reflection image

Next, click on the layer with the image, and choose Duplicate Layer. This will be the reflection image/ layer. In fact, I called this layer “reflection”, so I wouldn’t get the two confused.

We need to flip this image, so while clicked on the reflection layer, go to
Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical

Slide the upside down image to the exact point where the two meet.

Now we need to make this reflection layer darker.
Go to Image > Adjustments > Levels

There is no exact number here, it depends on what you think looks good, and what image you are using. Use the slider to darken the image.

Finally, we are almost ready to create the gradient to fade out the reflection image. While clicked on the reflection layer, click on the Add vector mask icon at the bottom of your layers palette.

Next click on the gradient tool in your tool panel. You need your gradient to be the color of your background (in my case black) to transparent

Now with the gradient tool selected, click about halfway up the image, and shift drag up to the point where the two meet. Again, this is not an exact science. Try different start and end points until you get a reflection the color and height that you want.

So there you have it, your own apple reflection image!

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).

Step 2 – Creating the Panorama

Photoshop has a great build in tool to create the panorama with. It’s called Photomerge, and it’s under File > Automate > Photomerge.

Choose the folder that you have the photos in, and watch as Photoshop does it’s magic of combining and blending all the photos.

When the process is complete, you will have a file with the panorama, and a bunch of layers like this:

In this case I’m happy with the outcome, except for one area, my sister. Photoshop thought I wouldn’t notice if they blended half of her head in, but that’s sooo not cool. No big deal, 10 minutes of a little blending of my own and I fixed the problem. I then filled in a black page background and blended the edges a little.

Step 3 – Putting the Panorama on the web

So we have the panorama now, and we need to put it online. We will use another tool built into Photoshop, called Zoomify. This is located under File > Export > Zoomify.

The idea behind this tool is to take your large image, slice it into a ton of tiny photos, and put them in a viewer. When complete you will have a viewer for you webpage that lets you scroll around the picture, zoom in and out, all while not losing any of the quality of your photo. It loads the small slices as you go, so you aren’t waiting for one huge photo to load.

The tool lets you pick the color, size, etc.

Once it’s done this is what’s created, a folder with a .swf, .xml, and a bunch of image folders. Those folders hold the slices. It also creates a .html file, this is where you can view the Zoomify viewer.

As you use the viewer, you will see that as you drag the photo around, it loads the slices as you go. Pretty neat trick to make this work.
Click here to check out the finished product.

Check out Zoomify.com for more info about the tool. Hope you enjoyed the tutorial!

Update: Since this post I have created a couple more Panoramas using this process, they can be seen here.