Another GUI, web project, or any other kind of prototype that needs to be dissected by developers is designed beautifully and it’s time to send it for coding. To make sure that your design will be implemented perfectly – you may need to help the front-end developer by creating a reference sheet with annotated measurements for your mock-up.
Of course, you can use standard Photoshop tools to draw arrows and type annotations but, as you can imagine, it will take a considerable amount of time. Not to mention that it is extremely tedious.
There are tools for Photoshop, extensions and scripts, that automate the process. I’m not going to go into detail about each of them, and although some have little more features than others, these tools are all pretty basic. These Photoshop “plugins” measure distance, draw rules, and type-in pixel values for you, saving you time.
What is a stock photography license?
A stock photography license is an agreement in which the photographer, who owns the copyright to an image, grants specific usage rights to the purchaser of that image. The license outlines the scope in which the image may be used by the licensee.
Rights-Managed and Royalty-Free
Stock photography industry breaks down into two dominant model types – a rights-managed a royalty-free. While there are other licensing models in stock photography, I will only outline these two because they are the most commonly used in the stock photography industry.
A few days ago I launched an online controlled vocabulary aimed towards stock photographers. If you sell photos through searchable photo collections, you know how important keywords are. Also, you know how time consuming image tagging is. This tool helps quickly find relevant keywords in the database based on your search term. The interface makes it easy to refine the list of keywords further.
There are drag and drop website builders, hosted CMS / blogging platforms, and other options for creating websites. You have reviewed them all but decided that you need a custom solution.
Whether you are building a website yourself or hiring someone else, you still need to take care of two things. In order to be publicly accessible, the files of your website must be uploaded to a server permanently connected to the Internet. There are companies that provide space on such servers. These companies are called web hosting providers and the service of providing that space with public access is called web hosting.
Your future website also needs a web address. This address is called a domain name. It will be pointed to the space on the server with your files.
I made a discovery – Google Translate interprets idiomatic expressions. I mean, not word to word as some other applications, but it finds analogs in the language in which the text is translated. For example, the Russian saying, “Делать из мухи слона (Make an elephant out of a fly)” will be converted to a familiar to English speakers phrase with the same meaning, “Make a mountain out of a molehill” or another one, “Заблудиться в трёх соснах (Lost in three pine trees)” will become, “Lost in broad daylight.”
Some ideas can be expressed deeper and more clearly with help of idiomatic expressions. Idioms are acquired gradually throughout childhood and adulthood and can’t be quickly absorbed by adults who started learning, in this case, English as a second language. This feature is extremely useful for such people, including myself.
In the evening of February 28th the event started with a presentation held by Khoi Vinh, a user experience designer, writer and speaker, who spoke about the online news industry and web design tendencies. The last part I liked the most, although, at the end of the allotted time, Khoi Vinh ran out of time and had to skip some parts which, judging by the slide titles, were interesting. The second part if the meeting was dedicated to website design critique by a panel of designers. And at the end we supposed to open network and socialize, but I was hungry and had no energy for that. Overall, I liked the meeting and plan to go there often (and socialize).
P.S. The NYC Web Design Group constantly looking for presenters, so if you have a topic you’d like to present, or a website you’d like to have critiqued, or just looking to network with others in the web design industry, please find more information here.
I’ve opened for myself another project from the corporation I like. Art Project, powered by Google, lets one to explore museums with Street View technology and virtually move around a museum and view some artworks in high resolution. Now you can be a highly cultured man without changing out of your sweatpants. >>
I’ve finished illustrating my children’s book. Soon I will put some illustrations here. The book, “Raymond likes to read, do you?” is a story about a rabbit who thought that reading isn’t important.
Video Tutorial: How to Make a Gradient Transparency in Illustrator
This video shows three methods of creating a gradient to “nothing” in Adobe Illustrator (the methods are; blending modes, “Fade to Black” which is a function implemented in CS4, and using opacity masks). There is another way of creating transparent gradients by blends (different from blending modes), but I’ve decided to not include it in this video. It will be a separate one.
This small application I’ve created a long time ago for my personal use and later I wrote about it in my old blog. Some people found it useful, so I’ve decided to republish it.
My Personal Punch-Clock is time management software for freelancers that helps to track time spent on projects. This software wasn’t created to compete with commercial versions with lots of features. What singles it out is its total simplicity. In addition, it’s absolutely free. It runs under Windows only and I don’t plan to develop a Mac OS version (don’t know how). Doesn’t require installation. Download
