Web Design: Old School is Old

Posted by Jennifer | May 31, 2006

This article on ITworld.com talks about three old school web design issues that used to be BIG issues in the day before broadband. The author talks about how, unless you are “building pages for your local Windows 95 user group” you need to move on from worrying about;

  1. Limited Screen Resolution - the days of 640 x 480 pixels are long gone, the majority of Web surfers now use screen resolutions 1024 x 768 or higher.
  2. The Browser-Safe Color Palette - also out the door are the limited number of colours you had to choose from. They were 216 colors that never seemed to include the colors you needed.
  3. Multimedia Avoidance Syndrome - don’t lose any sleep at night over whether your multimedia is going will fit down the phoneline. With many users connecting with broadband it’s safer to add to Flash and video to your sites now.

Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Design Stuff! 

Small Business Blogging : Pajama Market

Posted by Jennifer Farley | May 30, 2006

I’ve just come across pajama market - a blogging site all about small business blogs. Five days a week, they blog about a small business that is blogging. If you are thinking about starting blogging or have already started, this is a great resources to turn to get ideas for your own blog.

You might come across a design you like, a topic you like or perhaps a writing style that you enjoy. The blogs featured on the site cover the full spectrum of small businesses from wine growers to t-shirt companies.

One of the features I like best about this site, is that they interview the small business bloggers about things such as the tools they use and how the blog has helped their business. It’s all very down to earth and easy to relate to.

Posted by Jennifer Farley | Filed Under Small Business 

What the heck is a Search Engine?

Posted by Jennifer Farley | May 30, 2006

If you are brand new to the web and taking your first tentative steps, you may be wondering about Search Engines (because you will undoubtedly have heard about them) and what they do. Search engines are used about 3.5 billion times a day to access information on the web and are the starting point for most people when they’re looking for something on the Internet.

Search engines can be defined as a set of programs that include:

  • a spider (crawler, robot or bot) that crawls the Internet looking for web documents. It then follows links from those documents to other web documents. Think of a big spider coming into your house and checking what’s in each room!
  • a program that produces an index from the documents found by the spider.
  • a program that takes search requests, looks to see what is has in its index and then returns the most relevant results to the user.

The most popular search engines on the web are:

Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Ask .

If you want to get results from several of these search engines in one go, try out Dogpile. Dogpile chases down the best results from the Internet’s top search engines, including Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN, Ask, About, MIVA, LookSmart and others.

It’s essential that your Web pages are indexed by the search engines, otherwise your site will be hanging out there in oblivion. Laughing Lion Design, submit all our clients websites to the major search engines.

Posted by Jennifer Farley | Filed Under Photoshop Tutorials 

Photoshop: Quick Tip - Use a new layer for retouching

Posted by Jennifer | May 30, 2006

If you are retouching a photograph, for the sake of safety (and your sanity if you accidentally erase something you didn’t want to) , you should do all of your retouching on a separate layer above your image. By doing this you are only changing your new layer and won’t damage your main image and you can play with blend modes and opacity to achieve different levels of retouching.

Sample All Layers

So if you are using the Clone Stamp tool (S) or the Spot Healing Brush (J) or the Healing Brush (J), in the Options bar at the top of the screen, turn on the Sample All Layers option. Now you will be sampling from your main image but painting onto the new layer you created above it.

Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Photoshop Tips 

Photoshop & Illustrator: Inspiration

Posted by Jennifer | May 29, 2006

Bert Monroy is an unbelievably talented and dedicated digital artist who specialises in photorealistic artwork. He is also a writer and I’ve read a couple of his books - Commercial Photoshop and Photoshop Studio and they are superb.

I was looking on his website today and in the fine art section there are some wonderful examples of his work. This particular piece http://www.bertmonroy.com/fineart/text/fineart_damen.htm was created using both Illustrator and Photoshop and in total contains 15,000 layers and 250,000 paths. Take a look and be inspired (and a bit scared at the amount of work involved!).

Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Photoshop Resources 

Illustrator: Inspiration - Adobe Illustrator in Action

Posted by Jennifer | May 26, 2006

I believe it’s very important to look at how other people use design software - both in terms of seeing what the software can do in the hands of a pro and also for inspiration for your own work.

Todd Ferris is an artist and designer who uses Adobe Illustrator to amazing effect with his wonderful illustrations of classic cars. Have a look at http://www.warking.com/.

Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Design Stuff! 

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