Mindtracks

In Working with Illustrator ‘Art’ Brushes: Options and Adjustments several key points that effect the way you can use Illustrator “Art” brushes are covered. You can tweak many things to influence the way your “Art” brush stroke will take form. Stroke weight, scale strokes and effects, proportion and colour are all effects that are covered.

I love popup books and found this 3D ABC on YouTube. As each of the three dimensional letters moved before my eyes I wanted to make them dance to the 30s music.

This morning I will talking about RSS readers as the web has changed the way we research, read, write and publish information. Once you start poking around blogs, flickr, and the like you quickly have problems with ‘keeping up’. Before RSS, users had to visit individual web sites to find out what was new. You no longer have to click from blog to blog to see if your favourites have published anything new. With an RSS readers newly published content is delivered directly to you, using an aggregator or reader. Their main advantage is that they save you time as using an RSS reader is a efficient way to read and keep abreast of your research interests.

I will be discussing RSS readers with my class this morning but RSS in Plain English produced by Commoncraft neatly covers the mains points

Most RSS readers are free to use, and easy to learn. You can subscribe to key news media outlets such as the BBC, or Reuters, as well as non-news sites such as for instance Flickr, podcasts, video podcasts, or Apple’s iTunes Music Store. When an aggregator is opened it is much like an email program.

• Google reader
• Bloglines
• There are many other readers available

Flickr now has video. If you are a pro member, you can now share videos. See where it was announced here and they have an interesting definition of video as being a long photo

On another note its mid term break so I will not be around for a week or so

The Powerhouse Museum has joined the Commons on Flickr. Drawing on images from the Tyrrell Collection the museum have put a couple of hundred early photographs online. These are significant examples of early Australian photography so its great to see them out in the open. The Powerhouse on Flickr managed to sidetrack me wonderfully for an hour or so! I could not resist this early image of Darling Harbour in Sydney. It’s interesting to see the landscape yet to be dressed in some of much loved national icons.

Thanks to Fresh and Newer for the news and doing the work which you can read about here

Obsidian Dawn has released some new distressed brushes and I also discovered these 26 Silhouette brushes of people for Adobe Photoshop.

I came across this Photoshop tutorial on Creating A Cool Vintage Collage Design

There are also 10 high res brushes “Messy Spraypaint” brushes from Bittbox and there is some new free vector graphics this time it’s flowers!

Nenodesign made a great find in a garage sale and has scanned the part of a collection of design motifs from a copy right free publication on design

In the process of creating a simple tools icon Veerle demonstrates the use of the Pathfinder and Align tools in Illustrator and has a new tutorial on the Pucker and Bloat Effect

On the tutorial blog you can find out how Make Repeating Seamless Tile Backgrounds with Photoshop which led me to Pixblix which houses ‘useful web graphics’

It is not often we can see the birth and rise of popularity of a symbol.   Time magazine has done a photo essay on the use of the Peace Symbol since it has turned 50. Apparently the the symbol first appeared at a nuclear disarmament rally in April 1958.

“…the little sectioned circle has become so familiar, it feels as if it had no genesis, that it just emerged out of a collective folk culture, like the Star of David or a nursery rhyme. But in fact it can be traced to a single inventor, Gerald Holtom …” the rest of the article is here

Adobe has released a free web based image manipulation tool Photoshop Express which allows users a simple way to enhance, share, and store photos. This is a beta product so I imagine there will be more features and functionality developed.

You join and upload your JPEG images both of which I found quick and easy. Phtotoshop express just supports JPEG files so your images must be saved int hat format. It’s all fairly obvious but you can also Test Drive Photoshop Express using that feature on the home page.

The crop and rotate tool in action
Once photos are loaded via the edit button you will discover the basic tools used for image manipulation.

Autocorrect option
These include basic manipulation tools such as crop and rotate, autocorrect red-eye removal, touch up and saturation.

You can fine tune the image with white balance, highlight, fill light , sharpen, and soft focus.

People will enjoy the Effects options pop color, hue, black and white, tint, sketch and distort options are avalable.

You can preview what the image will look like and feel free to experiment as at anytime you can undo what you have done by clicking the cross on the right hand side of the image.

Popcolor options

Hue options

Black and white options

Tint options

Sketch Options

Distort in action
If you want to apply the effect to this image click the green tick on the right hand side of the screen.

You can also ‘zoom in’ on the image using the plus and minus icons found at the bottom left hand of the screen

Photos uploaded are not automatically made public. If you want to share them click Albums in the left column, then choose the checkbox labeled Share under the albums you want to make public.

You will need Flash Player 9 but that is free to download.

There is free storage space of up to 2 gigabytes and you can easily connect to Facebook, Google’s Picasa, and Photobucket. This means you can open your Facebook photos from within Photoshop Express, edit them, and save them back.

It is not in any way an online replacement for your desktop Photoshop CS3 but then it is not meant to be. At times it’s a bit slow but for a beta product I think its a great online editor with the exception that I could not find a way to change the size of an image or rename a photo.

Did you know that approximately one in twenty people have some form of colour blindness which means many resources online are inaccessible to them because they are coloured in such a way that renders them incomprehensible. The Colour Blindness Simulator allows you to check what images would look like with various forms of colour blindness.

To check the colours used on your web site simply make a colour swatch and load that as your image and you can see what the contrast level is like for someone who is colour blind. A very handy tool!

Ponoko is a new online service that many studio based designers and artists will interested in. Ponoko allows designers to make and trade individualized products on demand and it is an online space for a community of creators and consumers.

As a designer you can create the design, submit the eps files to Ponoko and they can laser cut them for you. Rather than print on demand its a ‘make on demand’ service. You can also sell your products form their site via your own shop front.

Check out the Make and sell section of the site for more information and they have blog you can follow too. Check out their product of the week.

Thanks to Allie for dropping me an email and giving me the link