Is this just a Photo?
Toronto Winter City Festival - Angel of the Apocalypse Exhibit by the Flaming Lotus Girls
I have been blithely producing this series of Olympic Plugin articles without asking a very relevant question - when is a picture more than just a picture? By that I mean in the process of doing photo-taking [...]
The Vancouver Winter Olympic Games have been a delight despite the warm weather. And the coverage in the Press around the world has been a lot more than I expected given that it is Winter events that just do not have traction in much of the warmer climes. What really surprised was the mixed coverage [...]
The last step in PhotoFinishing is to add a frame to your image - and this can be an extraordinarily dangerous business. I have seen too many very good shots diminished by overstated metal/wooden frames and mattes. And in the digital world , the ability to do great harm to a good image seems to [...]
One of the advantages of the Web 2.0 RIA revolution is that Flash and JavaScript websites are not only getting more features but also much faster in performance. Color Wheels and Color Chooser websites have gotten very sophisticated. Going to my old wheel favorite Color Scheme Designer I could not find it - it has [...]
Another Example of “free” widgets - this one from Google. They have 2000 of these.
Issuu.com is more than a website for publishing your PDFs - it takes displaying Adobes PDF’s to anew level. And it shows how to display PDFs with the greatest panache:
Now as Honourable Father would say - “How do you like them marbles??”
There is an absolute flood of image viewers and slideshow scripts that one can add to a website or blog - here is one from TripTracker that seem rather nifty and clean and most important, fast:
For Slideshow-Click Me
See me in the show
The virtues of this slideshow viewer is the simplicity of its implementation and [...]
The People at Wix helped me create this in about 5-6 minutes:
Free website - Wix.com
Here is a detailed shot of the online editor being to create the widget/page:
If you are a Web or Graphic Designer, I suspect you will want to take a look at this…its free.
Apple is getting a stranglehold on the evolution of computing devices, particulary for consumers. iPod + iTunes dominates the media playing world. iPhone + iAppStore dominate the phone plus highly portable app and messaging world. But Apple missed the boat despite a huge technology leads on the PC desktop and laptop world back in [...]
Caribana colours, as we have seen, are rich and sumptuous. Equally clever is the design and craft of the costumes and floats which make up the Parade. Having been behind the scenes while work was done on some of the Rose Bowl floats in Pasadena California I was expecting to see some of the [...]
Caribana took place this last weekend in Toronto - see PixofCanada for pictures and a complete description of the event. What I want to show here is some of the great colours and ideas to be found in the many Caribbean cultures that put on another splendid show in Toronto this summer. The hues were [...]
RIA - Rich Internet Application are designed to show off what is possible to do both online and offline with the latest Internet enabled programs and interface design tools. Many designers and graphic artists are often on board to add design flare to the apps. But sometimes the functionality gets missed despite the good [...]
It is Spring!
So color is on mind. And so exploring what is available in color wheels and creative aids followed in interest along with a web blog development project. And in the process I came across a … uhhh color tablet from GenoPal:
Get the genopal widget and many other great free widgets at Widgetbox!
Now this [...]
First there were PDAs, then cellphones and then the merger of cellphones+PDAs variously known as Smart Mobile devices or Smart Phones. All are related to what was promised a long time ago - Preferred Information At your Fingertips or PIAF devices. Now after several innovative and ersatz tries by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Palm [...]
Benq is showing the pint sized LED projector with power to burn … but this is just one example of the explosion of projector products that have been coming down the pike due to the miniturization of LEDs linked with ever smaller and more capable DSP chips coming primarily from TI. The result is a [...]
For the past 3-6 years, the facilities in graphics programs have improved such that it is simple to create very good looking galleries on the Web. The programs do all the major taks:
1)help gather together the photos into a collection;
2)allow simple resizing and/or watermarking of the images;
3)provide many templates for the basic Web Gallery design;
4)allow [...]
Lenovo has launched the latest and most power packed graphics notebook this August - go to DPReview.com for all the details. What is notable is that this machine acknowledges that graphics processing is now driving PC development.
Look at all the graphics goodies - 17″ Hi-resolution, high gamut WUXA screen, NVidia 3700 with 1GB of [...]
On the margin between bitmap photo editing and vector drawing/illustration, there is a new world of image composition that combines vector+bitmap in new and innovative ways. A lot of vendors have dabbled in this arena including Deneba(now ACDSee) Canvas, Adobe Fireworks and Xara Xtreme Pro - even hints of it in Adobe Photoshop with its [...]
With so many good online photo gallery websites available, why bother to roll your own? You have to get some web space and a domain name which together will cost $60-100 per year. Plus add in the “pleasure” of installing and maintaining your own gallery - who wants the grief ? Besides some great gallery [...]
InDesign One on One
InDesign CS3 One on One by Deke McClelland - O’Reilly Press - $55 ($35 at Amazon)
I am not an absolute neophyte to DeskTop Publishing having used Microsoft’s Picture Publisher, early versions of Quark Express and Adobe Pagemaker from time to time. But for a project I needed to come up to speed in InDesign and [...]