Photoshop Tutorial : Warping Type

Posted by Jennifer | August 22, 2006

It’s easy to add a bit of flair to your text using the Warp dialog box. Warping lets you distort type into a wide range of shapes, such as a flag, a wave or a fisheye. The warp style you select is an attribute of the type layer - you can change a layer’s warp style at any time to change the overall shape of the warp.

1. Open a new file or open an existing image file that you want to add some text to. I’m using an image of some running legs.

2. Select the Horizontal Type tool (), and in the Character palette, choose Century as the typeface, 72 pt as the size and white as the colour. (make sure you don’t have a white background or you won’t see your text!)

3. Click anywhere on the image and type some text. Then click the Commit Any Current Edits button () on the tool options bar.

The words appear on the image and a new layer appears in the Layers palette. The new layer will be name whatever you typed in. In this example, I typed the word Running, so the new layer is automatically called Running.

4. Click on your new text layer in the Layers palette to make sure it is selected and then click on the Create Warp Text button on the tool options bar.

The Warp Text dialog box opens.

5. In the Warp Text dialog box, choose Style > Flag and click the Horizontal radio button. For Bend , specify + 25%. Then click OK.

The words you typed will appear to ruffle like a flag in the wind. Easy as that!
I repeated steps 4 and 5 with the words “Away” layer, to create the image below:

Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Photoshop Tutorials

Free Photoshop Brushes : Fish

Posted by Jennifer | August 17, 2006

Some more free Photoshop brushes for your photoshopping pleasure. These brushes all feature fish or underwater animals like seahorses.

free fish photoshop brushes from Digital Design Cottage

You can download the zipped file here.

Let me know if you find them useful.

Posted by Jennifer | Filed Under Photoshop Brushes

Website Building : Keeping your visitors for more than 50 miliseconds

Posted by Jennifer Farley | August 6, 2006

A recent study at Carelton University in Ottawa, Canada suggests that the first impression of your website design is made in about one twentieth of second. Fairly mind-boggling stuff and when you consider the length of time you’ve spent designing your site and working out your super-friendly navigation system.

The Canadian team showed volunteer testers a short glimpse of several websites, lasting for only 50 milliseconds. The testers then had to rate the websites in terms of their aesthetic appeal. The researchers found that although impressions were formed incredibly quickly, when the testers looked at the websites for a longer period they came to the same conclusions.

The Halo Effect
The researchers also found that the quickly formed first impressions last because of what is known to psychologists as the “halo effect”.

When the testers believed that a website looked good, this positive feeling spread to other parts of the site such as the content.

Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and lead researcher of the paper warned that companies should take note. “Unless the first impression is favourable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,” she said.

Tips to keep your visitors on the site
So when you’re up against this sort of speedily formed impression, what can you do to keep your first-time visitors on your site? Here are some tips:

1. Your home page is a gateway to the rest of the site. Provide links to popular parts of the site, highlight new content and setup navigation to categories you may have on your site.

2. Flash and video can slow down a page’s loading time, so keep these sort of plug-ins off the home page if possible.

3. A short, snappy, straight to the point explanation of what your site is about should appear in a prominent place on the home page.

4. Ensure that your navigation system is obvious and easy to use. You may have beautifully designed icons, but unless a user can easily understand what they do, you will have some frustrated visitors on your hands.

5. Your navigation system should always be above the fold (you should be able to see it without scrolling down the page). Your visitors should see your logo first and then your navigation immediately after.

6. Visitors like search boxes. It’s easy to add a simple search box to your home page.

7. Don’t make your visitors to for anything unless absolutely necessary, it’s a sure fire way to drive them off your site. Provide interesting content to keep them on your site.

Posted by Jennifer Farley | Filed Under Website Building

Photoshop Tutorial : A visual overview of the toolbox

Posted by Jennifer | August 1, 2006

Photoshop CS2 Toolbar
Just like an artist’s work table, the toolbox - the long, narrow palette on the far left side of the work area in Photoshop - contains the tools you’ll use to draw, paint, erase, and do a myriad of other things whilst working on your image. There are several distinct categories of tools in Photoshop’s toolbox:

• Selection tools

• Painting and editing tools

• Vector drawing and Text tools

• Foreground and background colour selection boxes

• Viewing tools

When you let your mouse hover over any tool in the toolbox, you will see a tooltip which lets you know the name of the tool and the tool’s keyboard shortcut. It’s worth making a concious effort to learn the shortcuts as it speeds up your work enormously. Some of the shortcuts are really easy to remember such as Z for the Zoom tool or E for the Eraser.

Whenever you see a little arrow on the bottom right of a tool in Photoshop (or any Adobe application for that matter), it means there are other “hidden” tool choices. Hidden tools are accessed by clicking and holding on any tool that contains a small black triangle, located in the lower-right corner of the tool. It can sometimes be hard to find that one tool you’re looking for because it’s hidden under a fly-out menu icon.

The illustrations below show an overview of the toolbox, with each tool available and its shortcut key

Selection Tools