Facts of the Day

Since writing a full article everyday like I planned just doesn’t fit into my current schedule, I thought up concept that would help keep a steady flow of content into Gnar! There is that old saying that goes “you learn something new everyday,” but what exactly DO you learn each day that you didn’t know before? Well that’s where my new concept steps in. In an attempt to log the little bits of information I acquire throughout my daily life I’m going to post my findings to Gnar! Given that knowledge gained can be a very broad subject I’m going to leave it that way, very open and not pertaining to a specific overall subject. With this in mind I’ll move on to the first of what I’m calling “facts of the day,” or “FOTD.”

FOTD #1 04/24/2005: View layer mask PS CS.
I work with Photoshop a lot, and anyone that knows me can vouch for this, so every time I stumble onto a new feature I’m absolutely amazed that I hadn’t somehow stumbled onto it before. So last week when I was editing a logo I accidentally held the ALT key while I clicked on the layer mask and was amazed that what I saw is the layer mask that I was working on! At first I thought I somehow copied the layer mask and pasted onto my working layer, but then I did it again and it went away. In short, to view the layer mask you are working in Photoshop CS, simply hold the ALT key while clicking on the layer mask in the layers panel, and to exit from the view hold ALT and click on it again!

Design Monopoly anyone?

Here’s a bit of news that will shake up the design community. Adobe systems is acquiring Macromedia for an estimated $3.4 billion dollar in an all-stock transaction transaction. Now we just need to bow down to Adobe for all our design, video, web, and print design needs. Should be interesting to see how it all unfolds. Goodbye understandable product names, hello Adobe Flash CS2 MX 2006 Professional!

Tiled Backgrounds: Is web style repeating itself?

When I started designing websites almost 7 years ago, tiled backgrounds were the way to go. Sites had everything from wonderfully hideous animated flames to spectacular twinkling stars that were the hallmark of sci-fi web pages. But as more and more people logged on to the internet and demanded legibility and sites that didn’t burn their eyes when they looked at them, tiled backgrounds became taboo. All the web design books from then on preached that backgrounds on web sites are bad things and they shouldn’t be used under any circumstances. This practice of shunning the dreaded tiled background continues on until today; In an entrepreneurship in eCommerce class I was taking, a guest lecturer came in and talked to us about web design do’s and don’ts and mentioned “don’t ever use backgrounds other than white.” As soon as she said that, it hit me that recently I’ve seen a lot of design websites introducing tiled backgrounds into their design. Sites like Spoono, simplebits.com, and asterisk are breaking the web design rules and proving that if done right a background image can be very effective in setting the style. Recurrences such as this happen all the time in the real world with clothes to music; something goes out of style only to be discovered twenty years later and often times improved upon. Now it’s a matter of years that has passed since the matter in subject became pass, but in internet years I guess its due time. Lets just hope that some practices die out for good and don’t come back to haunt us, cause I don’t think even Spoono could make blinking text and scrolling marquees look good.

Blogging

Presently blogging is nothing short of an online revolution. �Blog� is even the number one word of the year according to Merriam-Webster. Everywhere online you go it seems that people are latching on to this new concept and blog�s are popping up right and left. But what is a blog, who uses them, and are they for me? I will answer these questions and fill you in on the world of blogging so that you too can get started on your own blog.

Presently blogging is nothing short of an online revolution. “Blog” is even the number one word of the year according to Merriam-Webster. Everywhere online you go it seems that people are latching on to this new concept and blog’s are popping up right and left. But what is a blog, who uses them, and are they for me? I will answer these questions and fill you in on the world of blogging so that you too can get started on your own blog. Continue reading “Blogging”