August 20, 2008
Plagiarism Today has published an interesting CCS technique to counter or at least frustrate anyone who is scraping your site. Check out the article Using CSS to Thwart Content Theft.
Jonathan Bailey of the Blog Herald has written and excellent article about some of the issues to consider when looking of a host in 10 Rules for Finding Good Domain Hosting
Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz have listed their Top Ten Web Typography Sins
August 8, 2008
Obsidian Dawn has produced some new vector gear brushes for Photoshop
Pixels and Icecream is another 5 free high resolution floral brushes from Brusheezy
This tutorial from up240 teaches you how to create and save for future use Pattern & Swatches in Adobe Illustrator
Also from Bittbox is a Free High-Res Texture Pack: The Anatomy of a *Really* Old Book
Image * After describes itself as a free image collection from which you can use any image or texture from the site to use in your work, either personal or commercial.
Jonathan of Vectortuts.com has written up some great tips in Seven Helpful Techniques That Every Adobe Illustrator Artist Should Know
July 29, 2008
Dot Pattern Art Brush in Adobe Illustrator is a illustrated tutorial on creating a brush
Spoongraphics wrote this roundup of free ornamental, floral, swirly and curly graphics on the web
Vector Illustration: 60+ Illustrator Tutorials, Tips and Best Practices is what it says it is. There are some great tutorials in this list and I must admit to not yet checking them all out.
Tutorial Blog has featured Color Manipulation in Illustrator
Over on WebResources depot there is a listing of 64 Beautiful And Free Nature Brush Sets And Vectors
On the DZine Blog there are 27 Best Photoshop Web Layout Design Tutorials to Design Decent Web Layouts
May 13, 2008
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.
May 7, 2008
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.
May 6, 2008
If you enjoy learning software via video tutorials Adobe TV should be just your thing as you can learn by seeing a demonstration and following along. Needless to say presenters are experts from Adobe covering the company products
You will need Adobe® Flash® Player 9 and broadband to view them. However they can also be viewed in the Adobe Media Player. Since episodes are downloaded to your desktop this means those on slower connections can view the videos.
February 22, 2008
With the start of the academic year in Australia I have been taking note of internet research tools that are useful to students. Here is the start of the list.
TechTracer2.0 has written 10 Most Amazing Google Search Tricks.
Top search tip when teaching in an Art school is showing students how to use Googles Image Search and introducing them to Google Scholar
With Google’s glossary search engine you can look up a word or a group of words in many of the glossaries online. To use it, add the define: operator in front of your query. In other words if you wanted a definition of Surrealism In Google’s search box type define: Surrealism
In 1996 the Wayback Machine began cataloging the internet. Often if the article you are looking for is no longer available you can find it archived there
The Art School Library has a resource page Online Images Collections and Search Engines
The Internet is a self-publishing medium which means everything must be analyzed for its appropriateness. You need to evaluate the information you have found.Ask what is the type of site and why does it exist.
Sometimes the domain suffix will help you evaluate a site. For instance education sites run by educational institutions have a .edu and/or country code suffix. In the case of Australia it is .au. A government site has a .gov suffix. Non-profit organisations have a .org suffix Here is a list of country TLD codes and a list of Internet top-level domains from Wikipedia
Ask do they provide references or links to source material? If so what is the quality of the source material. See if the information is dated and find out if it is current. Ask yourself who published the page? Look for authorship and the credentials of that writer. If the author is affiliated with an academic institution, or organization, check the directory on the Web site to confirm that this is in fact the truth.
If it is not clear you can use Whois Lookup to find out who owns the domain name.
As a side note: If ever you are dealing with copyright problems this is how you you trace the owner of a site.
Laura B. Cohen has produced Evaluating Web Content which covers the topic well. It includes evaluating web genres like blogs and wikis, social networking sites, Social bookmarking sites and multimedia sites such as YouTube
January 31, 2008
Introduction to the photoshop layout is a video tutorial that is ideal for beginners to Photoshop introducing the user interface to those who are new to the program.
Stephanie of Obsidian Dawn has released some lovely Texture brushes hat can be used in Photoshop. They are created to be used as brushes ie actually painted into an image so the assumption is that you enjoy drawing. Its not quite the same a squishing paint about or getting mucky with pastels but almost as much fun! If you are a heavy user of Photoshop’s base texture brushes you will enjoy these.
Ladyvictoire has creates some Script brushes for Photoshop for Brusheezy
Diane Miller has written a tutorial on Changing Colors Selectively in Adobe Photoshop CS3
January 28, 2008
I sometimes get questions about the font size on screens and one tip many people do not know is that on a PC
hold down the control (Ctrl) key and press + (plus) to increase the font size on your screen
Ctrl – decreases font size
Ctrl 0 returns font size to normal
On a Mac you use the Command key to do the same thing. The command key is the key with the small apple icon on it
Command + increases font size
Command – decreases font size
Command 0 returns font size to normal
