Unhandled Perception

Link: http://turbomilk.com/downloads/zoom_eyed/

On the Picnik team, Halloween is one of our favorite times of year. We get a bit giddy anticipating our braaaaainstorm session for this holiday. We love dreaming up ghouls and ghosts that bring spooky effects to your photos.

This October, we brought back mob favorites, like Vampire and Zombie, Lightning and Ghostify. And we’ve introduced new effects like eeriness with one click, unearthly textures and heaps of new stickers.

Link: http://googleblog.blogspot.com…

Make sure you mouseover the logo in Google today.

FYI: This is my latest project. Very exciting…

Link: http://openmenu.com/

I love this timeline, showing the evolution of Crayola’s crayons from 1903—eight colors, including poop—to 120 colors today. Now, imagine PC graphics running on Crayola’s Law, which states that the number of hues doubles every 28 years:

Link: http://gizmodo.com/…

You probably know what Photoshop disasters look like, but your photos can benefit from more subtle and elegant touch-ups. With these tools and techniques, you can sharpen, texturize, re-contextualize, and remove tourists, among other problems, from your shots worth saving.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/5555512/…

–Giveaway Closed – Congratulations to Mike Ebersole–

Just leave a comment in this post on what you like about SnagIt v10 and you’re entered.  Random drawing will be on Friday (May 21st) around 5:30pm EST.

(please leave your email address so Veign can contact you if you win – use a format like me-AT-domain.com to protect against email harvesters)

The all-in-one capture is a great new feature that makes v10 well worth the upgrade (or purchase if you’ve never used SnagIt).

Snagit: http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp

Free trial: http://www.techsmith.com/download/snagittrial.asp

Color in design is very subjective. What evokes one reaction in one person may evoke a very different reaction in somone else. Sometimes this is due to personal preference, and other times due to cultural background. Color theory is a science in itself. Studying how colors affect different people, either individually or as a group, is something some people build their careers on. And there’s a lot to it. Something as simple as changing the exact hue or saturation of a color can evoke a completely different feeling. Cultural differences mean that something that’s happy and uplifting in one country can be depressing in another.

This is a great article that every web designer should read and have a basic understanding of.

Link:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/…

What makes a design look coordinated, planned and professional? The answer is: ‘color’.

Not every project needs bland corporate blue to look professional. Planning color means creating a framework that describes which colors to use and how to use them.

Color is the slipperiest design element. “Good” color is so closely tied to elusive things like personal taste and intuition, as well as technical considerations such as contrast and monitor calibration.

Link:
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/…

It took 172 minutes on a rooftop to shoot 1655 overlapping 21.6 megapixel images and 94 hours to stitch them together. The result is not only a gorgeous 26 gigapixel view of Dresden, Germany, but also the world’s biggest photo.

Link:
http://gizmodo.com/5429290/

Where the image resides:
http://www.dresden-26-gigapixels.com/dresden26GP

An estimate of US consumers’ data consumption places the figure at 3.6 zettabytes per year. But most of that comprises pixels temporarily thrown onto the screen, not bytes permanently written to media.

Link:
http://arstechnica.com/media/…

PicPick is an all-in-one software for software developers, graphic designers and home user. It has an intuitive interface and simple, elegant operation. After starting the software, you simply select one of the tool from the PicPick Tools trayicon menu when you want. It features a powerful capture tool, image editor, color picker, color palette, pixel ruler, protractor, crosshair, whiteboard and etc. You can use all these tools freely.

Link:
http://picpick.wiziple.net/features

FontStruct lets you quickly and easily create fonts constructed out of geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks.

And if you want to manage your existing font check out Cfont Pro – my tool.

Link:
http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/

Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a “lossless” tool, which means it optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality. After Smush.it runs on a web page it reports how many bytes would be saved by optimizing the page’s images and provides a downloadable zip file with the minimized image files.

Who knew Yahoo had such a tool. Every image I tried it was able to optimize, even if it was just a little.

Link:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/smushit/

NSFW because of language.