Mindtracks

I am always scouting about reading tutorials. In part it is because I teach and like to point students to resources but in part I just enjoy discovering good well written and illustrated tutorials. I recently added TopTut.com to my reader as they constantly dig out good tutorials. They describe themselves as being dedicated to web development and design, but have a look at Photoshop tutorials category and their most popular posts for a bit of reading.

The complete works of Charles Darwin are online.

Images from Darwin’s notebooks are taken from microfilms. Unfortunately there was not enough money to scan in colour and these images are provided in the interim. That said it is a valuable resource online.

When I encountered SocialRank I once again had my attention directed to the importance of being linked to as this service “monitors thousands of blogs in popular categories and identifies the hottest stories and bloggers every day. We do this democratically by measuring what stories users link to, talk about and pay attention to.”

This video clearly explains what it is and you will find a list of topic areas if you scroll further down their index page.

Peachpit often provide sample chapters of their books. The site houses such items as a sample chapter on using the Bridge in CS3 and the Photoshop Reference Guide by Matt Kloskowski houses a number of video tutorials. Unlock the True Power of Illustrator by Mastering Vectors written by Mordy Golding focuses on the pen tool. These are a few of the resources to be found at Peachpit so do explore a little particularly the blog

I will be out of action this week as most of what I do has come to a screaming halt. I have put my back out. I am standing at the key board to write this! I wont be blogging  for  a week or so .

Digital Arts Magazine has published a very good tutorial titled Creating art using the golden ratio. Using the golden rectangle (a rectangle shaped according to the golden ratio) as the canvas the tutorial divided the space into “golden sections” which becomes a spiral.

Not mentioned in the article but related is that the math behind this is based on a the Fibonacci sequence. Yep, that series of numbers that got our hero and heroine excited in the Da Vinci Code.

If you want to explore the Golden ratio and the Fibonacci spiral further check out Wikipedia there is a good article
Image credit: file from the Wikimedia Commons.

Over on Bittbox there is a great Freebie roundup for texture lovers with 12 Places To Download Free Textures

Copyright is a big issue for anyone online. If you want to discover sites that are “Stealing your content” go to Copyscape and type in your URL. Results will reveal anyone who has copied your content. The site also tells you how to defend your copyrights.

The latest issue of Bonefolder is out. (I know I am a little late with the news but I only got to down load and read it this weekend)

For anyone interested in the book arts, artists books, book binding or the paper arts this online mag is well worth downloading as it is presented as a PDF file.

If you are not aware of this publication browse the back issues they are all of high quality and of interest.

You can make sure that Google is indexing your images correctly by going to the Google search page, and click on the “Images” link on the top to take you to the Image Search. In the search bar type “site:yourdomain.com“. The results will be the images that google has indexed as coming from your site.