We wish you a artistic 2011

http://www.brightenthecorners.com/

http://www.nacionale.net/

http://rocketdock.com/

At first I thought it was just another silly plugin to mimic OSX, but then, with a couple of add-ons, it boosted my productivity, surfing through my Documents and Server Folder without feeling entangled with Windows hierarchy file.

I do really encourage you to test it a bit, even on your work desk (if you can!); a definetely must have!

Logo Lounge trends

Little box of ideas interviews

LogoBlog predictions

I had a few more, but, in the end, we link to each other, so…

Before I leave, I want you to check this logo for the London Design Festival: brilliant!

Cheers

Everyone involved in graphical issues, and particularty with communication ones, have a more-or-less good stock of fonts, to be used suitably within the project, but if you’re still in need, I just point you out a couple of links that may shake you out of the hold-up.

Let’s start with this one: http://www.dafont.com/ It comes in two languages, has a lot of free fonts – even for commercial use, just, be honest and thank back the authors, ok? DaFont.com has filed fonts in macro typografical species, so you’re redirected as your need, without browsing too much

Let’s move on to http://www.urbanfonts.com/ another good source for free fonts; though it has fonts a bit too fashioned, it comes with a nice hovering preview trick, saving you time for the complete typografical preview; it also has a nice cloud tag of font to chose from: a sort of Google’s “I feel lucky search”

Last but not least http://www.abstractfonts.com/. This site has a awful web layout, but we’re not here to criticize this aspect…In the pulldown menu, you will experience the drama of overwhelming of information, as you browse through Categories or Designers or A-Z… On the whole, it has pretty good fonts and plenty of informations about.

This are just a couple of sites, if you want to point out some more, feel free to comment.

Cheers

1. first

expand your image. Select your image, select Object menu and hit Expand command. Change no setting and you’ll end up with much messy selection area than before.

2. second

you can erase one-by-one every background part or choose select->same->fill color and you get all of your background selected at once.

Now you have your silohuette ready to be tweaked to prepare the artwork you need.
With a little of work, a couple of brushes and some suggestions, it ended up like this: our glass door to the kitchen!

I hope you understood the real aim of this tutorial, both in PS and AI, so you can unleash your imagination to create better images than mine!
Cheers

Ever since I got married I wanted to print my works, and I had this big chance to use a image I realized to be printed on glass sliding doors: not to be missed at all!
This is the final result:

The process is long, involves a couple of programs, some skill and patience.
On the other and is really simple.
Let’s start with a picture you want to deal with: I chose this one I made of the Big Ben – I’m fond of London!

Fire up Photoshop and duplicate background (either by dragging the layer on the icon or Duplicating it), toggle off Background (the original one) visibility
Now comes the tricky part: we need to crop Big Ben from the cloudy sky easily without losing too much details! How can we do it? Let’s use the contrast between the background and the subject, let’s use Color Range selection – from the menu select, choose color range
The trick is to chose the add to selection tool and select all the area we need…even in the thumbnail image: don’t get too mad on the result on the part we need, we’re going to fix it with quick mask tool.
Once we’re happy with the result – particularly on border lines! – we just close the pop-up window and we have the working area blinking on the screen. Now hit Q and enter quick mask mode; we need to mask all of the Big Ben area so hit B to enter in brush tool and choose a proper sized brush and paint inside the Big Ben area until you have no more white spots.
Hit again Q and exit quick mask mode, now you have the correct selection; now hit the channel palette next to the layer one and hit the button save selection as a channel: remember white is selection, black is not.
Now back to layer palette and to our background copy, with the selection of the shape of the Big Ben, inverse it (command+shift+i or CTRL+shift+i -on Windows- or select-->inverse) and eventually delete the sky! Now we have our shape!
Ok…for now I’m done. I will continue on part 2

Cheers

Cheers

This is how a new font project has to be managed.

Period.

I already had a number of password for my e-mail accoounts, e-banking, websites, programs and so on…but now I added a few kilos more to manage hosting and WP and Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools…Weeeee! I-NEED-HELP!

So I surfed the web for a while and, since I needed a flexible program, I stopped in KeePassX website. It’s a cross platform program – so you can run it on OSX and Windows and Linux – which is pretty handy to resolve the job of managing your account: you need the program, you need the key, you need a password. Everything else goes inside KeepassX – painless.

It is mandatory to remember that it is highly recommended not to store personal and important data on webmails:  though they’re pretty useful, they offer a unnecessary risk to get your informations breached.

As usual, Cheers

1. don’t upload anywhere in the net

Choose your trusted sites ring wisely: you need to show and get known not release free images!

2. use a watermark

A watermark is a smart way to stitch our name inside our work, without spoiling them; in other terms, we still let our final image completely clear (or at least, most of it) but it is signed irreversibly with our name. This can lead to steganography, but it is a completely different story…

Some ideas of watermarking
Here I show a few links about watermarks, so you can better understand the power of this technique.

a - This is also a good tutorial for GIMP about watermark creation

b – this is another blog post about the subject

…But this one is basic!

Check it out, learn it, tweak it and thank the ones who wrote it.

Hope you enjoyed the reading.
Cheers!