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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I recently expanded the functionality of Quick Thumbnail to include a Quick Image Cropping tool. This tool lets you crop an image by uploading a file or by entering a URL to the image file. Once uploaded, Quick Cropping allows you to select the cropped area and each time you press the Crop button a new output is generated. No need to reload the image, simply adjust the selection area and press crop again.
Over 1 billion charts, maps, plots and diagrams are found in print publications each year - but only 40 million online. This huge discrepancy is a reflection of the complexity to create & publish charts online. Chartle.net tears down the complexity of online visualizations - offers simplicity, ubiquity and interactivity instead.
You can now add watermarks to any image while your resizing it at Quick Thumbnail. The text is rendered as part of the image. Like everything else I develop for free this was done to play around with a code technique, in this case rendering text onto an image.
For now I only give basic control over the text: The phrase, color (either light or dark) and a choice of three sizes.
This year we decided to try something a little different. In the past, we’ve invited some of the best designers and trainers in the industry to share their top secrets. This usually took a lot of bribing and just a little physical coercion—okay, a lot of physical coercion. Most of them just didn’t want to give away their most-guarded secrets.
This time around we decided to go straight to the horse’s mouth: the Senior Product Managers at Adobe. We have never seen so many people so eager to share all of their favorite tips. They were almost breaking down our doors. (In fact, we’ve had to request a few restraining orders, but that’s a story for another time.) And not only that, everyone on their teams wanted to get involved, as well: Product Managers, Evangelists, and even the janitors. We’re glad to report that we’ve survived their barrage of tips, and we’re proud to be able to share those tips with you. Please enjoy.
Similar Images allows you to search for images using pictures rather than words. Click the "Similar images" link under an image to find other images that look like it. Try a search of your own or click on an example below.
The aim of this site is simple. We list a whole bunch of icons which are all great to use for your web development projects. But we are different to other icon-related websites because we only list icons which you can use for free on personal AND commercial projects AND without having to provide back-links/credit to the author. These types of icons can be tough to find, so here is a while list for your convenience!
Logo Instant is a collection of logos you can use and hack-up for your own needs. The collection isn't huge but its a good start and the logos they do have are of good quality.
So you’re browsing through your favorite website and found a site that uses a font you love. You want that font too, (and must be as quickly as possible!)… so how do we go about finding out what that font is called? Sounds familiar? Yes… we’ve all been there before!
I have used What the Font many times and its a really neat tool that has saved me from lost fonts before. The only one in the list that does the work for you is What The Font. You can upload an image of the font and it attempts to identify it automatically - worked great for Veign's logo.
Finds error levels from jpg compression in images with Error Level Analyser. Basically it will allow you to see where in images alterations have been made against what was actually photographed.
Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.
Tilt-shift photography is a creative and unique type of photography in which the camera is manipulated so that a life-sized location or subject looks like a miniature-scale model.
The above image is an image of a full sized train.
Spell with Flickr lets you enter a word a a series of images are returned that is the word spelled out with Flickr images. The interface is ok. Don't really like the black background and it would be nice to have a single image of the word. What I do like is you can click each letter of the resulting image and have it call up a different image for that letter.
YourFonts.com is a FREE online font generation service that allows you to create your own fonts within a couple of minutes.
Professional designed wizard interface walks your through the entire process. At the end you will have a font of your handwriting. Give it a try and post a comment on your results.
TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology. Given an image to search for, TinEye tells you where and how that image appears all over the web—even if it has been modified.
This is a very cool, specialized search engine that can really help find out if someone is stealing your images. Its kinda of like copyscape but for images. TinEye is what I used to find out that a blogger had stolen one of my blog posts and had hot-linked the images from my server.
Microsoft Photo Info allows photographers to add, change and delete common "metadata" properties for digital photographs from inside Windows Explorer.
When installed, a new "Photo Info" item appears on the context menu for files selected in Windows Explorer. To use, simply select one or more image files, right-click and choose "Photo Info" to open the Photo Info properties editor. You can edit metadata for files individually, or all together as a batch. Photo Info reads and writes metadata in IPTC and XMP formats (depending on file type). It also provides enhanced "hover tips" and additional sort properties for digital photographs in Windows Explorer.
This is the main interface of the online version of Adobe Photoshop called Photoshop Express. Once you have uploaded an image, through the My Gallery manager, you can access and modify your images. What Adobe has done is make this as dead simple as possible. Nothing too complex, but still pretty powerful.
The menu of options seems limiting at first but when you get into modifying your image you will see it covers pretty much everything need to do (at least for the person using an online version of Photoshop). What they have done that is very cool is when you apply or use one of the menu items it becomes checked and that option is applied. You can simply uncheck the item to see your original image.
Everything is done through an AJAX, interactive, interface which means things are done without having to refresh or reload pages.
I changed the color of the corvette in the image with two clicks: select Pop Color from the menu and then select one of the preset choices.
Did I mention all menu items, when selected, give you 6 or 7 choices to try so you don't have to worry about figuring out what the settings should be.
Just upload your manuscript, photos or digital files, use our formatting tools to get everything set up just the way you want, from size to binding to cover art, and... well, that's it. You're the proud parent of a brand new digital creation, ready to publish and cherish. The publishing process couldn't be easier.
Cartoonizer is where the user re-creates images/videos by turning into digital paintings, cartoons and comics in just a few seconds without downloading any tool.
Windows only: If there's only a few things most Microsoft Vista upgraders and nay-sayers can agree upon, one likely talking point is that Vista's fonts are generally clean, smooth, and a step up from XP. Getting the newer fonts in XP doesn't have to involve illegal downloads and system tweaking, however—as the gHacks tech blog points out, simply installing Microsoft's PowerPoint Viewer 2007 installs a bundle of Vista fonts in XP that you can use as your system defaults.
Logos are the ultimate mark of distinction and everyone loves them. We see logos everyday - on the highways, on consumer goods, on the Web and in the institutions and organizations we support. Read about the different types of logo designs here and learn what principles and techniques are used to create them. Discover what the future holds for logo design!
Ever wonder how Google ended up with the logo that they did? The designer of the logo, Ruth Kedar recently talked about what went into the process and even shared some of her early ideas. Surprisingly it started out more complicated and ended up as the more simple logo that is known around the World today.
3,000 copyright-free images have been added to Flickr thanx to the Library of Congress. Take a look and maybe you'll find something you like for your design.
Logo design is arguably one of the most important and valued areas of design. A quality logo design combined with the branding of an organization or company can become one of the most powerful forces in today’s society. If you love logo design as much as I do, then I am sure you will enjoy these logo design tips and resources.
We have a collection of over 100 free logos created by our designers available for download. As our collection is growing daily, be sure to check back often for more free logos.
Create your own logos from free blank logo templates designs. We [LogoTemplater] are creating free blank logos templates and free vector art images in Adobe Illustrator EPS files for free download. Use our graphics designs for your website, company or MySpace icon graphics.
I figured I would give it a quick test and here's is a logo I did in 5min:
Vectorization (aka tracing) is the process of converting a raster image to a vector image. Raster images are pixel-based, whereas vector images are represented by geometric shapes such as lines, circles and curves.VectorMagic converts bitmap images to vector art - it's an online auto-tracer. Just upload your image and we will vectorize it for you.
If you don't like working through a web interface for handling your Flickr account then you can use the standalone applications they offer for uploading and working with images in your Flickr account. Easy to install and even easier to work with makes this an option for the most novice users.
Also, Flickr has a pretty cool WinXP Explorer plugin that lets you 'Send To Flickr' right from within Windows Explorer. Can't get much easier than that. (look at the bottom of the tools page for the download and how to install here)
The next version of Cfont Pro, font manager, has been released. This version brings some new tools and makes it compatible with Windows Vista, finally.
Whats New:
Now supported on Windows Vista
Redesign Font Browser to include an always displayed Folder Browser
Brand new Quick Detailed Viewer lets you see all fonts with key information in a single location
New Zoomer tool lets you see the details of any font and any character
Added a Property Toolbar to let change some properties instead using the Property Window
Glyph viewer lets you see how a font character is constructed
This version was going to include a lot more things but since I have some other projects that are taking focus I thought I would release it just to get people on the newer version.
Floorplanner is the easiest, quickest, and best looking way to create and share interactive floorplans. Using point-and-click, drag-and-drop tools, you can make your floor plan in minutes, and rearrange it as often as you want. Then you can save, send, and print your designs to share them, or place them on your own website.
Interesting. Not only can you create a floorplan but you can add and rearrange furniture. What a cool way to plan a room.
With thumbalizr you can take screenshots of any webpage you want. Use it for your presentations, documentations, visualisations or your webpage.
Just enter the target-URL and press the "thumb it"-button. Wait a moment and a screenshot of the desired page will be taken. You can choose between a screenshot with a fixed height of the screen or the complete webpage.
What's real cool about this tool, unlike a lot of these simple online tools, is that they have exposed an API so you can automatically have thumbnails generated on your website or blog.
Not a huge selection but they are very well written and produce some very cool effects. For all you Photoshop freaks out there this is a website to bookmark.
In this article, we'll study the JPEG baseline compression algorithm using the image on the right as an example. (JPEG is an acronym for "Joint Photographic Experts Group.") Some compression algorithms are lossless for they preserve all the original information. Others, such as the JPEG baseline algorithm, are lossy--some of the information is lost, but only information that is judged to be insignificant.
A great little article to get a bit more from your digital pictures. When the quality isn't working for you this article comes in and teaches you how to enhance your images. Good read.
More than half a century ago, Aemelius Müller, professor at the academy of Winterthur, Switzerland, came up with a formula that could predict the appreciation of a color-combination. In other words: Müller was able to predict which combination of colors most people would probably like.
Interesting enough and I guess if I wasn't colorblind I would appreciate it more.
ColorWare Inc., established in 2000, is an industry leader in altering the color of existing products. The idea behind ColorWare started with transforming the ubiquitous beige computer into a custom-colored work of art.
A simple idea that can give your hardware a personal touch. Check it out.
The typeface is the brainchild of Don Meeker, an environmental graphic designer, and James Montalbano, a type designer. They set out to fix a problem with a highway font, and their solution — more than a decade in the making — may end up changing a lot more than just the view from the dashboard. Less than a generation ago, fonts were for the specialist, an esoteric pursuit, what Stanley Morison, the English typographer who helped create Times New Roman in the 1930s, called “a minor technicality of civilized life.” Now, as the idea of branding has claimed a central role in American life, so, too, has the importance and understanding of type. Fonts are image, and image is modern America.
In honor of some of our favorite summer blockbusters (Harry Potter and Transformers), we bring you our 10 11 most-favorite movie-effect tutorials. From Scarface to Sin City to Pirates of the Carribean to 300, we’ve got 11 great ways to go Hollywood on your photos. Read on!
80 Beautiful Typefaces For Professional Design is another great article by Smashing Magazine which talks about 80 of the best, in their opinion, fonts to be used by professional designers. What I like the most out of the articles written by Smashing Magazine is their use of screenshots and graphics in the articles. They use a lot of graphics in the articles which means that even if you don't have the time to read the articles you can get something out it just by skimming through it.
Keep up the great work and looking forward to the next article.
GIMP is well known as a powerful application, and especially in the last few years has gained a rather large community of users. There’s also a large group of people for whom GIMP would be their tool of choice, if it had the same kind of attention to user interface as Inkscape, GNOME, Firefox and other modern Open Source apps.
bayimg.com is a place where you can host all your images. We do not censor them. We believe in freedom of speech, it's of utter importance to us.
You can upload about 140 different formats. There's even support for .RAR and .ZIP-archives! If you upload an archive with multiple images, you'll also get an album-address for all the pictures inside of it. Tags are separated by spaces, removal code is a password to let you remove images you upload.
Seems they are also working on a Video hosting service, like YouTube, but since its in a closed beta really can't get any other information on it. Try it if you want but this one isn't for me.
Iconlet is an icon search engine that will return icons based on a keyword search. As of now the icons as pulled from various sources so licensing issues may pop up. So watch out and don;t just think you can grab the icons and use freely in your designs. Regardless, this is a great tool for any software developer or web developer (I use icons in design to make elements 'pop' on a page).
How Adobe's Photoshop Was Born: "Photoshop was not the result of an elaborate skunk works in the depths of Adobe. Rather, it was developed by Thomas Knoll and his brother, John."
Ultimate Web 2.0 Layer Styles is a very well put together collection of Photoshop Layer Styles that make creating some of the web2.0 looks simple and easy. If you're impressed with this make sure to check out his Ultimate Web 2.0 Gradients v3.0.
IrfanView is probably one of the most feature packed and fast image viewing applications around. IrfanView has released version 4.0 finally as they seemed have been stuck on the 3.9 versions for the past years.
Whats New:
Improved Vista compatibility
New display option: Center image in window (Menu: View->Display options)
Toolbar skin option added (Properties->Toolbar)
More Toolbar skins are available on the IrfanView homepage.
New Properties->Video option: Use DirectShow for playing (good for MJPG AVIs)
New advanced batch option: Auto adjust colors
"Enhance colors" can be now used on selections
New EXIF dialog button: Show in Google Earth (if GPS data available)
The EXIF dialog can stay displayed on screen
Thanks to Dmitri Poguliayev for the new Vista icon!
New Hotkey: CTRL + SHIFT + M = Show/edit JPG comment
Several PlugIns are changed/updated, please install the newest versions
http://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm
Some bugs fixed (Start folder, RLE BMPs, ANI loading)
I like it! Kuler is nothing more than a color scheme library where users submit color schemes. For anyone looking to design something, like a website, Kuler can make locating a color scheme an enjoyable process. If you're colorblind like me, its a little toturous, but useful nontheless.
Fotowoosh Will Turn Any Picture Into A 3D Image: "Fotowoosh, a new service from Maryland-based startup Freewebs, will turn any image (preferably an outdoor image) into a 3D model. They went live on Friday. Examples of what the service can do are above (along with the original 2D images. A video is here which shows more examples."
With Picnik you can quickly edit all your online photos from one place. It's the easiest way on the Web to fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye, or apply effects to your photos.
Unlike others, I gave Picnik a shot since I heard some good things about it. A clean, Flash design makes this one very simple and intuitive to use. Plus its fast. Faster than the other all inclusive online image editors I've reviewed, probably because of the use of Flash.
Whats Its Color is a fun little online application for getting the primary and complementary dominant colors of an image, how many visually unique colors are in an image, and the top ten visually unique colors in an image. Why is this useful? Well, if you were creating a website around an image or using an image as the primary inspiration for any type is design it can be very helpful to know what its primary dominant color is or what are the unique colors that people can see when viewing the image. The final results will display your image on a background that is best suited for that image. This application is just fun to play around with.
Logo Instant is a collection of logos you can use and hack-up for your own needs. The collection isn't huge but its a good start and the logos they do have are of good quality.
See the above and many more.
Some pretty amazing data visualization techniques:
If you don't like working through a web interface for handling your Flickr account then you can use the standalone applications they offer for uploading and working with images in your Flickr account. Easy to install and even easier to work with makes this an option for the most novice users.
The next version of Cfont Pro, 
Title says it all. A collection of very high quality, print quality, brushes for Adobe Photoshop. Some of these brushes are amazing.
I like it! 
Hard to believe this is computer generated. See this one and many more at the link below.
