Wow, do I regret that now or what?

Within two weeks, I’ve managed to network out farther than I think I could have via any other method (besides SXSW! This Friday! YES!) There is a thriving, tech-oriented, youthful, and professional community out there, just waiting to hear your opinions on what people are tweeting about. I think this is what surprised me most: I really did expect Twitter to be similar to Facebook’s statuses or MySpace’s messages in terms of maturity and relevance. Instead, I’ve found about a dozen new blogs to follow that are very interesting. I’d like to recommend Mike Rickard’s (Re-)Learning Web Design, which gives very in-depth analyses of topics ranging from client-designer preconceptions, to the inherent challenges to the medium. Diego Aguilar’s FlyLyf drips with style – it highlights awesome cars, gorgeous portfolios of graphic design and art, and fashionable apparel.

Another thing I’ve learned is that by taking the extra step to put your honest two cents in on a topic that you know something about, or even just want to learn more about, will garner you more followers. I’ve asked a lot of questions, and it seems people like others who want to learn from them. I’ve linked up with a variety of developers, all of whom have given me some insight that have updated my opinions on a variety of backends. I’ve also sought out user experience and usability analysis experts, and have been shown some really great blogs and posts on related topics.

Twitter rocks. Go figure.

Talk to people

This is probably the most important part of SXSWi, in my opinion. SXSWi brings together a lot or brilliant minds in many different creative fields, and it is a great venue to meet people. Meet people you’ve connected with on Twitter. Don’t be afraid to go up and talk to your web heroes and mentors. In Austin, the atmosphere is very friendly and there’s this creative energy that just emanates from having so many great people in one place! So grab a drink, bring some business cards, and don’t be a wall flower!

Eat good food

Sure, it’s a web conference, but it’s hosted in a really great city; Austin, Texas. I would recommend checking out Iron Works BBQ for lunch, where there are many famous Texans pictures on the wall. Try and get there early cause the line gets long…it’s a well known BBQ staple! Another great grub opportunity is Gospel Brunch at Stubbs. John and I walked away from their buffet last year about 5 lbs heavier. Definitely worth it. Finally, if you don’t mind a bit of a walk (or hailing a cab) check out Hoffbrau Steaks for a tasty meal that’s light on the wallet. I always feel like I should have steak and Texas go hand and hand…thus Hoffbrau will get my business again this year!

Plan, plan, plan!

There is going to be a lot of cool programming this year and a lot of great people speaking, so make a list of talks you think you would be remotely interested in. Rank them and put down when and what room they are in. You may walk in to a talk thinking it is going to be great and then find it is lacking 10 minutes in. Don’t waste your time! Hustle to the next one on your list! SXSW packs in talks/panels/speakers in abundance so you should never waste your time on something you aren’t getting value from. Luckily, the organizers at SXSW saw the need for planning tools and built in a schedule picker to mySXSW. Use it!

Drink

Water. Every night before you go to bed. Austin is loaded with great bars and there are tons of sponsored parties so you’re bound to have a drink or two or three…so the important thing to do is hydrate when you AREN’T at the bar. Panels start pretty early in the morning and if you are out late, which is VERY likely, you’ll be able to maximize what little time you spend sleeping by hydrating! I usually buy a 12 pack of Propel or Gatorade (do they just call it G now? What the re-brand?) and drink it before bed and during long panels. Trust me on this one.

Enjoy SXSWi without blowing your shrinking stock portfolio

In these tough economic times, frugality is an important trait. If you’re going to SXSWi then you’ve paid for registration, transportation, and lodging. Might not want to spend a lot more money, huh? Here are some money saving tips:

1. Pack some breakfast bars or roll out of bed in time for continental breakfast! Utilize free coffee wherever you find it.
2. Buy some microwavable lunches and make them in your hotel room. Pack granola bars for snacking during daytime programing. Don’t expect to find too many cheap lunch specials, Austin knows when SXSWi is and prices accordingly.
3. Figure out which parties have open bars and get there early! Lines were pretty monstrous last year and with the economy as it is this year, I highly doubt open bars will last as long. That being said, I spent about $10 on drinks last year, and that was purely toward tips!
4. Plan ahead and allow yourself time to walk places instead of taking cabs. If you have to take one, do so in a group to lower the cost!

So there you have it, veteran tips for maximizing your experience at SXSWi. Hope to see you there!

Tonight, each 30 second spot will cost 3 million dollars, which is a record level as far as commercials go. As you can see from the title of this post, that’s $100,000 per second. Expensive, to say the least. What we’re wondering, here at Tridea, is whether this is a good investment? A lot can be accomplished with the amount companies are spending on 30 seconds. Of course, nearly 100 million viewers are expected to watch tonight’s broadcast, so some say the cost is justified.

Further, the Superbowl Ads are not only viewed once during the game but are then blogged about all over the internet. So in terms of getting people to see your message, well, it’s tough to beat that exposure. However, I am curious to see how people will react to these companies spending so much money when thousands of jobs are being shed each week.

When all is said and done, NBC will have banked a record $206 million dollars on the Superbowl ads. Could that money have been spent saving people’s jobs? Shoring up an ad buyer’s bottom-line? We’ll have to wait and see.

Backpack

I’ve used Backpack for my own personal needs, but never for planning an event, let alone a wedding. One thing that I want to make sure if, is that we stay organized when planning. And, organized in the sense that I can easily edit lists, notes, etc., without having to worry about stacks of paper. Backpack will allow us to easily keep in touch with ideas, post links, and jot down ideas. There doesn’t seem to be any “standard” use for Backpack, so it will take some time finding out footing to get the best use out of it. But so far, it’s been great.

Twitter

I am heavily involved in Twitter, and I’ve spent many hours building up a network of people around me, especially the creative types. My first experiment with using Twitter for wedding planning was the task of finding a photographer. So, I posted the question, and within minutes I had a handful of responses, and was referred to great photographers, leaving me hours of portfolios to sift through. This beats searching a phonebook or Google any day. I plan on following the same routine for other aspects of the wedding as we progress.

Since it’s still very early in the planning process, I’ve only uncovered the two tools mentioned above, but I’m pretty sure more will come in handy. I’ll be sure to post an update as I come across more tools, but there is certainly no shortage of online resources to help with planning a wedding. Are their any other tools that you’d recommend on the web?

The basic premise of a mask is to eliminate portions of an image from view, without actually affecting the image itself. A mask can be applied to a single layer or a group. Masks operate with simple rules: dark masks, and light reveals, with the shades of gray masking relative to their darkness.

For absolutely no reason at all, I’m going to demo masking by replacing a man’s head with a giraffe’s.

The two photos I used to create this came from my favorite stock photo site, sxc.hu.

• Man in costume with tie 5
• Giraffe Close-up (props to Johnathan By)

There are multiple ways to apply layer masks, but I’ve found only one to be really practical. Since I always have my Layers palette open, I use the button at the bottom specifically for this.

If you have a selection active, and then click this button, it will mask everything outside of what you have selected–a quick way to do masks too. Oftentimes, I will apply the mask, and then proceed to begin masking using the Brush tool, selections, or gradients.

The mask used here was applied to the picture of the giraffe’s head, to eliminate the background in the image, and also to mask around the collar of the man’s shirt. Essentially, what’s happening is something like this:

The result is not exactly satisfactory, though.

I’ve got some of the man’s head still peeking out, so in order to correct that, I’m going to use the Clone tool with a large-sized Soft Mechanical brush from the Basic Brushes set to wipe his face out. This is where carefully selecting a good picture comes in handy–a more complex background would require a lot more effort to eliminate his face.

The final touch is to use the Burn tool around the bottom of the giraffe’s neck near the collar to add some shadowing for a more-convincing merging between the giraffe and the man’s clothes.

The final result, again:

Some general tips when doing this sort of work:

• Keep proportions in mind and do your best to get everything sized properly before beginning to mask.
• When hunting for pictures for this type of composition, I find it’s best to use tabbed browsing to quickly flip back and forth to size up whether the angles, lighting, and various other factors will be workable. Pick a primary image, from which the suitability of other pictures will be judged against. The suit was the primary picture in this case, and I searched for giraffes that were looking in a realistic direction similar to the man’s.
• When masking, the keyboard shortcut for switching from foreground to background colors is typing “x”–this lets you quickly mask and unmask portions, giving you lots more flexibility while using the brush tool.

I’ll continue to discuss the myriad uses of masks in another tutorial, focusing on the ways textured brushes and gradients can create some really stunning compositions.

A bit of explanation of what layer blending actually is. The term is straightforward enough-it is mixing one layer with another-but this isn’t the whole picture. In sequential order (going by the stacking of layers on the palette), you can blend together as many layers as you want! Keep in mind, the layer blending affects the layer directly beneath it, but if that layer is blended with the layer below it as well, then the top blend is actually blending the result of the two below it. Confused? The two figures below might help.

Figure 1 & 2

The Layer Blending menu has 25 different options, grouped in 6 categories, based on how they blend.

Normals

• Normal
• Dissolve

“Normal” is the default setting and can be thought of as a base for your blending needs. Layers set as normal will not become transparent as a result of blending, and so serve best as the bottom layer of any particular composition or component. “Dissolve” I have rarely found useful, its only function seemingly to be to create noise around the edges of the object.

Darkeners

• Darken
• Multiply
• Color Burn
• Linear Burn
• Darken Color

This group all deal with blending only the dark areas of a layer. Note that using layer blends in this category don’t necessarily mean that they always darken–in the figure above, orange and blue colors are combined to create a greenish tone. “Multiply” is the most used layer blend for me; it is excellent at evenly accentuating darker tones in a picture without affecting the lighter tones. “Color Burn” and “Linear Burn” are more bold variants, tending to narrow the range of shades in the effected area. One major tip is any white present in a layer that has a darkener layer blend applied to it is that the white will leave the area on the layer below unmodified. See Figure 3 for an example.

Figure 3

Above our oranges, I’ve put a layer of some rendered clouds on Multiply (increased contrast using Levels). The spots that show through are white, and the spots that are black are also black on the cloud layer.

Lighteners

• Lighten
• Screen
• Color Dodge
• Linear Dodge
• Lighter Color

This is the counterpart to the previous grouping, blending areas of light colors and white. Screen is the opposite of Multiply: see Figure 4 for an illustration. I’ve simply changed the blending from “Multiply” to “Screen”.

Figure 4

You’ll notice the areas of black are now showing through, and the white is remaining present, as opposed to disappearing.

Colorizers

• Overlay
• Soft Light
• Hard Light
• Vivid Light
• Linear Light
• Pin Light
• Hard Mix

Each of these layer blends in this grouping will do interesting things to the colors and shading. Experimenting with the various changes they cause is the best way to get a feel for how they can be used, since both light and dark shades are utilized in this set. Dramatic changes can be achieved by using multicolored layers, and blending them onto monochromatic layers. I make use of “Overlay” the most out of this set, as it acts like a combination of both “Multiply” and “Screen”.

The remainder of the layer blends I will not list here, as their utility is limited and pretty specialized. I have yet to find a situation that calls for their use, so I will leave it up to you to play around with them! The same applies for the rest, though–the best way to gain an understanding of how each works, and what applications are best for each one, is to experiment!

Not sure where to vote? Find your polling place.

Not sure who to vote for? Take this handy quiz to find out. Or read up on the candidates.

This election is predicted to have the highest voter turnout in history, so make sure you get included in that statistic!

Photocompositions are one of the primary uses of photoshop: to integrate seamlessly several images to produce a new reality represented in the resulting image. Look through your Sunday advertisements, I guarantee you will find dozens of instances of this; this morning I found the Hulk sitting on a couch to watch his namesake film with a family in a Best Buy ad.

The foremost challenge to creating images of this nature is that the photos to be integrated have to have a kind of interplay already. When dealing with objects that will interact with each other, they must be able to achieve realistic proportion, form and lighting. To some extent, we can manipulate these three factors, but in the end, if the photo isn’t right, those efforts will be moot.

I’ll be going through some basic concepts and steps to create this composition I put together.
View full-size here.

I used 4 images from stock.xchng, my favorite stock photo site: the sink, the hole, the wall texture, and the head.

I began with the sink image as my foundation. The lack of vertical perspective (seeing into the sink or under the sink) can be challenging or very easy to work with, depending on the availability of photos that compliment this angle. Many of the texture sets on stock.xchng are taken head-on, with no vertical perspective, so using the Distort or Perspective from Edit > Transform can very easily allow them to match up with whatever vertical and horizontal perspectives you’re working with.

In my case, I needed only to put the texture above my sink layer and set layer blending to Linear Burn. All that was left was to apply a mask to the texture layer and mask out the sink area.

Next up was the insertion of the head. Thinking of the shape of the sink, I figured that the head wouldn’t be able to sit in it totally upright. I rotated and then masked accordingly, trying to achieve a natural look to the way the head was positioned in the sink. I lucked out on the lighting used in the original photo, as the directions of light and shadow is mostly accurate. Watching out for shadows and dark areas on photos you plan to integrate is a major consideration to make. As best as you can, try to approximate the direction that the light source is coming from, and judge its suitability from there. Many times, it doesn’t make or break an image since the application of the Burn and Dodge tool can fix it enough so as to be less noticeable.

It’s missing a little something–shadows. On two layers, one above the head and one below, I added shadows using the brush tool to add a shadowcast on the wall behind the head and one on the head from the inside edge of the sink.

The last component was the hole in the wall. This particular photo is a real find, since it appears to be without any vertical perspective, but has a slight amount of horizontal perspective to show off the great textures along the inside of the wall where the hole was made. After setting the hole layer blending to Multiply, I positioned the image where I wanted, and masked everything on that layer except the hole itself. I used the Dry Media brush set that comes with Photoshop to touch up the mask around the hole.

All in all, it is a simple photocomposition, but the more elements that are added, the more important it becomes that a cohesive balance is kept in regards to the three principles I mentioned earlier: proportion, form and lighting. I continued to embellish the image and arrived to this final composition–perfectly spooky for Halloween!

Five Flat Screen TV’s served up a partially dynamic menu. Wouldn’t you know it, the item I was looking for–Milk Shakes–was part of the dynamic section. So while I was scouring the sections of the menu that weren’t moving…the milk shakes were coming in and out of the picture on the 2nd monitor.

Now, I since this Burger King is in Manhattan and right across from the World Trade Center, I’d say they bring in a pretty penny and can afford to have huge flat screen TV’s for their menus. And since New York city law requires that menus display calorie information next to price information, it makes the job of updating food items and calorie information quick and seemingly painless.

But what about the user? From my experience, and I’m sure others as well, a dynamic menu with words and images in motion every few seconds, was not the best way to get information across. Menus have been static for hundreds if not thousands of years. We know what to expect: Food items in logical groupings in list form. So when BK tried to mix it up and make it fancy, it ultimately goes against the customers instincts and was quite an annoying experience.

If you need a dynamic way to wrap or curve a line or whole blocks of text, Photoshop is perfectly capable of catering to your every need. A seemingly uncommon demand for a raster-based image application, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used the following techniques.

They all center around paths, a vector-based function; text entered into Photoshop is also vector-based. Paths are essentially ways to establish a boundary that some action can be applied to. Most often, its used for masking or shape fills. Today, we’ll be using it to fill with text!

Since it’s October already, let’s try to get some text to wrap around a pumpkin–the end result will look something like this:

First, you’ll want to have your pen tool activated, with the “paths” option, “rectangle” function, and “add” option all selected:

Now, draw a rectangle in the area you want the text to appear in, overlapping the part you don’t want it to include. We’ll cut that area out in a sec:

Now, here’s the key: we want to get rid of the portion that’s overlapping. You can use the oval tool, or the pen tool to create an arc to your liking. BUT be sure you now have the “subtract” option selected:

Now comes the insertion of text. I find it most useful to type up my text in TextEdit/Notepad and paste it in. Have the text tool active, and click in the box path: you’ll notice it turns into the usual “I” shape, but with a dotted circle around it. Go ahead and paste or type your text. You’ll wind up with this:

On a Mac, “Command-Enter/return” will set your changes. The awesome thing is the path is also set, and you can resize the path like you would a regular text box, only it’ll retain the area you cut out!

Now, let’s do a single line of text, curving around the top and above the text we just added. This is easier to do. With the pen tool selected, draw a multi-point arc around the object:

Now, with the text tool, hover over the very beginning point of your arc, and click. You’ll notice, again, that it has that dotted circle around the I. Now type in or paste in your text. “Command-Enter/Return” will set the edit. If you wind up getting a selection active after, just deselect. You’ll wind up with this:

Now, you’ve got the text placed! You’ll notice that at the pivot point, things can get a little cramped, so if you so desire, you can do two paths, one for each word. Each path itself can be as wavy or angular as you like–customization is endless.

The final result, after some editing: