Erik Olson, ON THE TOPIC OF General

Every so often, projects come along that are so unique that it's difficult to find others like them on the net. When building a project, take a video player for example; I often search for others like it to see how other developers have handled the same problems and make any attempt to add improvements wherever possible.

Such a project came along recently which needed to give users the ability to create their own floor plans. Since floor plans come in infinite shapes and sizes, I needed to give every user almost limitless control over their shapes. How does one go about doing this?

Continue reading "Creating Unique Shapes Using Actionscript"

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Jim Basio, ON THE TOPIC OF General

Stock imagery can really make or break a good design. Searching for that perfect image(s) to complement your design can be a very time consuming task -- not to mention budget limitations we may have to consider.

Luckily, there are lots of great stock image resources available on the web whether to meet any budget size.

Continue reading "I Can Has Stock Images!"

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Mindy Wagner, ON THE TOPIC OF General

The rounded corner style has been around for a quite a while now, and one thing (beyond wanton overuse) has always bothered me about it. When working with rounded rectangles in Photoshop, there seemed to be no elegant way to resize them. The corners don’t remain intact when you use Transform (Ctrl/Cmd-T) to scale the shape. Instead of lightly rounded edges, you end up with ugly mishaps like this:

My default method for getting around it was to rasterize the shape, move the ends around, and then fill the gaps by resizing the middle. Darren Hoyt has a good walk through of that trick here. Another workaround is to create the shape in Illustrator and then paste it in as a Smart Object. But both felt like bad hacks for doing something that should be inherently simple.

Continue reading "Resizing rounded rectangles in Photoshop"

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