Category: Graphics


Just ran across this excellent tip for using the Posterize filter to reduce the number of colors in png files.

I just learned that.

I spent about 4 hours working on the paper background you see here, futzing with getting the tiling wrapper background to mesh seamlessly with the footer and header pieces. I love how it turned out – it’s for a horse sale website with an obviously Western flavor, but when I checked in IE6 I found it simply stretching the wrapper instead of tiling.

Hmm. I had no idea.

So I went back to Photoshop, opened up my wrapper-bg.png and put a background color layer similar to the middle values of my gradient-filled browser background. I also had to do it to the footer piece. It’s not going to be right on because of the background gradient, but it’s close enough.

I really hate IE6. I know I say I don’t support it anymore, but I can’t stand it when something I’ve worked hard on falls apart and I just have to try to fix it…

I used this excellent paper texture tutorial this morning when I was working on a Western-themed web design.

I’ve used a number of other PhotoShop paper tutorials at one time or another…

This is an excellent torn paper edges tutorial, beautiful results and very simple but it’s also very time-consuming.

This fast torn paper edges tutorial uses a custom brush and is a lot quicker than the previous one.

Simple but effective weathered paper look.

Another very good-looking torn paper tutorial.

But what do you do with these textures next?

How to turn a texture into a seamless background to use it for a website or other large area.

This happened to me today. Normally the eyedropper picks the foreground color when left-clicked and the background color when alt-left-clicked but it was happening the other way around.

To fix, open the color palette and make sure the foreground color is selected (has the heavy black outline).

I’d used phpslideshow for my website’s portfolio a few years ago, but lately it had gotten unwieldy. Because of the layout of my site, I could only fit in three columns of thumbnails, and I’ve launched quite a few projects recently. The thumbnails were way below the actual content of the page, so I decided it was time for something new.

I really like SimpleViewer after using it for a client’s site, and that’s the one I started working with first, but I needed more control over the captions.

One of my tweeple pointed out how nicely Javascript-based Highslide allows you to style captions by showing my his own nicely-done portfolio, so I decided to try it. I liked that Highslide is a thumbnail viewer and not primarily a slideshow – that’s just what I needed. I also really liked the very nice caption styling options.

I downloaded a copy and found it extremely easy to work with – in about 30 minutes I had the first few thumbnails set up and working. This is a very nice script. It took me several hours to dump all 36+ projects into the page, but I’m very happy with the results in my new portfolio.

Found this nice Photoshop tute for making round badges this morning:

http://www.photoshopstar.com/web-graphics/nice-simple-subscribe-badges/

I’m making a Green Hosting badge for my hosting company site.

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