Nice Little Yahoo Pipes RSS Feeder

I've heard of Internet Tubes, but as of last week I had no clue what a Yahoo Pipe was. The smart people over at Yahoo devised a nice little tool called "Pipes" that allow you to customize your very own RSS feed. The one I came across was created by the folk's over at GoMedia that will get a date sorted RSS list of design resources from Deviant Art, Go Media, Brusheezy, Vecteezy, IHeartVector, and more.

What's that mean? Well, it's a nice little feed of textures, photoshop brushes, vector images and basically a bunch of cool design resources.

Check it out, it's pretty cool.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=287f077c4d68ca5e6f0b7f703abf1110

A Graphics String Theory

For those of you that don't know, my first passion is graphic design. And I thought I would take a little break from all my programming articles and show you a nice little Photoshop CS3 trick. This tutorial will explain how you can create those nice little glowing strings or streamers that you see in a lot of commercials and print ads lately. If your not familiar with what I'm talking about, take a look at the final image below.

The image on the left is our Base image or starter file. On the right we have the Final image with our stream effect applied.

[More]

The Evolution of a Bottle Cap

When I began converting the website to the current format, I needed to update some of the graphics along with it. And one of the things that bothered me from day one, was my ugly bottle cap. It's the one located in my website header that has my logo in it. If you don't remember what the old one looked liked, trust me, it was ugly. I decided to make the new one and I thought I would give you a quick run down of the steps I went through. First thing to know, it's not a photo. The entire bottle cap is made from scratch using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

[More]

A time of turbulence

I remember a long time ago, back in college, I was on a road trip with a group of friends. We were headed back home and it was fairly late at night. Everyone on the bus was drinking partying and having a good time, but me? I was sittting, staring out into the darkness like a zombie. One of my friends came up to me and asked if I was o.k. It startled me and I turned around and said, "huh?" She said, "Are you all right?". I was like, "Yeaaahhh??!?". She asked if I was going to be sick or something and then I laughed and said, "No, I was looking at the night studying how the light was bouncing off of things. It facinates me."

At that point my friend got up and said I was weird and walked away.

What's this have to do with anything you ask? Well, the long-short of it is that I'm weird. I'm always looking at things out the window, facinated about colors, composition or how light plays off objects. I normally take my camera with me or have it sitting on my desk in case I see something I like.

[More]

I seem to go through this about once a year. I'm not sure if I change something or if Photoshop just hates me. But if you are ever working with an image in Photoshop and it will look totally different after you perform a "Save for Web". then take a look at the small little dialog on the "Save for Web" dialog box. In there you should see a setting that says "Convert to sRGB". Make sure that's not checked. It should save you a headache or two.

[More]

Who would have thought that we would go all Hollywood on you. Frank Popper, went out a created this great documentary about a little guy named Jeff Smith who was running for political office in 2004. You'll laugh, you'll cry and be amazed by this heart wrenching story that won tons of awards and almost received an Oscar™ nomination. We would like to think that the slick movie poster and DVD graphics had a small part with that. 

If you haven't seen this movie, then go out and see it!