Creating Unique Shapes Using Actionscript
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?
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I Can Has Stock Images!
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.
Resizing rounded rectangles in Photoshop
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.
Getting Rid of Jaggies on Your Photo Borders
During a recent moodboard review, the design team got to wondering what the best solution was for getting rid of Photoshop "jaggies," those jagged edges that show up on your nice clean shapes; especially when you start rotating them. I had a few ideas but decided to do some tests to see what REALLY works best. I started my testing with a common design element that falls prey to jaggies: a photo with a white border, slightly rotated. The photo I’m working with happens to be of my ultra adorable dog Bruiser. First, I created two versions—one photo with an 8-pixel white inside stroke (Layer Style > Stroke) and one photo with a white square shape layer behind it. Then I rotated both sets 8 degrees clockwise. 
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Typography Tuesday: Let it Breathe
Getting Moody: A Look at Inspiration and Style in Early Design Techniques
As designers, we often think (read: "know") we have great ideas and intuition coupled with the ability to turn around a design that a client will love. If we love it, then s/he should, too (because it rocks ... or so we think). We can spend hours upon hours leading up to a design presentation getting a design to a wow level only to see our passions wilt in the face of someone who so desperately wants to love it but simply doesn't. A good practice to avoid this is to start with a mood board.
What is a mood board?
Mood boards, being a lot like they sound, are typically used to help establish a style, theme, expression, environment, atmosphere, or feeling. They often consist of found objects from magazine tear outs or digital imagery to fabric or color swatches, but really can be anything that inspires (like a favorite saying, or phrase, for example). We'll collect these inspirational tidbits to help establish a general look and feel direction prior to jumping head first into a full, precise design. It's all about starting loosely and getting specific as you progress through the design process.
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How I’m Using Adobe Bridge
Up until about a week ago, Bridge was merely an annoyance... an application that fired itself up every now and then when I clicked the wrong button in Photoshop or Illustrator. I knew it came with Adobe Creative Suite 3, but beyond that I didn't know much. I've been successfully ignoring it for quite a while because as a web designer I didn't think I had much use for it. As it turns out, I was wrong.
Recent Comments
Nice tip! Thanks for sharing this. Your suggestion helps me a lot.
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