The Information Technology Blog brought to you by 4 Ace Technologies
Friday, June 26, 2009
Some javascript Tabs scripts that you can try out
http://www.barelyfitz.com/projects/tabber/
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Image Effects
There are lots of little tricks to add special effects to images. This tutorial shows a few of the popular ones, done in Paint Shop Pro 7. Below is the image we'll be working with, taken from my free photos archive.
Grid Overlay
A nice addition to images, usually when used in layouts, is to add a grid layer over the top. When the image you want to add a grid to is open in PSP:
- Go to Effects>Texture Effects>Blinds.
- Click on the Auto Proof button
so you can see what the effect will look like.
- Make sure "Horizontal" is checked.
- Play with the options until you find the effect you want. I set the width to 1 and the opacity to 30.
- Click Okay.
- Now the image is Interlaced. To complete the grid, go to Effects>Texture Effects>Blinds again.
- The settings you used last time will have been remembered. All you need to do is uncheck "Horizontal".
- Click Okay. Now you have an image with a grid.
Selected Areas
If you make/edit graphics often, you're familiar with the selected area look, with the dotted lines, or "marching ants". You can incorporate this look into your actual graphics.
- Select the area you want to show as selected, using either the Magic Wand
or Freehand Select
tool.
- Once it looks the way you want, press the Print Screen (Prt Scr) key on your keyboard.
- Then press Ctrl+V on your keyboard, or go to Edit>Paste>As New Image.
- Crop the resulting image to the area you want, and save it. That's it!
Semi-Opaque Text Areas
If you're using a background image that is too bright to have text put over the top, you can add a semi-opaque text area to the part you want text to be readable on, like this:
- To do so, open your image, and go to Layers>New Raster Layer.
- Set opacity to whatever value you'd like. The higher the opacity, the easier the text will be to read.
- Click Okay. Then click on the Shape tool.
- Set your foreground color to null (click on the black arrow) and your background color to white, or whatever colour you'd like the text area to be.
- If you haven't got the Options toolbox open, click on its icon to open it.
- Select the shape you'd like the area to be. Make sure "retain style" is unchecked.
- Click and drag to draw the shape on the image layer. It may take a few tries to position it right.
- When you've got it the way you want, go to Layers>Merge>Merge All (Flatten), so you can save it as a jpeg.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
5 Beautiful Icons Set For Web Designers
http://www.instantshift.com/2008/09/24/5-beautiful-icons-set-for-web-designers/
Material extracted from the above site:
Icons are the basic requirement of any web related projects and good icons are like a treasure for web designers.
Being a successful creative web artist has a lot to do with the way you work. Sure, you can’t teach good design in some lessons or you can’t create icons for your daily needs, but it never hurts to pick a few free icons which are always available free to grub.
Function icon set is a great collection designed by Liam McKay. All icons are free for personal non-commercial use.
Icojoy has beautiful free icon sets including web development icon sets, pixel icon sets, rss icon sets & smiley icons.
This is the 4th part of their web development icon sets. Click here to find their all free icons.
Web development icons is a set with 60 free icons in web 2.0 style (24×24). These icons are free to use in any kind of project unlimited times.
Monofactor is a beautiful set contains 25 scalable Illustrator format icons. You are completely free to edit, change and/or directly use the icons in your site and in any kind of your projects.
Aquaticus is a beautiful social icons set designed by Jwoloh (60×60, 48×48, 24×24, 16×16):
Simplicio is a simple looking but a quality & free icon set.
The set has 78 icons & the download package consists of ICO, PNG & AI files.