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Sometimes, it seems absolutely impossible to keep up with all the design work you’ve got coming in. But, other times, it may seem like you just don’t have enough work to meet your income goals.

In these times, it makes sense to offer a few more services to your clients — to make sure that you can make a little more money.

The ten services below can make it easy to boost your income and take advantage of the design skills you’ve developed.

1. Blog Setup

Everybody and their dog wants a blog these days — but a lot of these would-be bloggers aren’t up to much more than opening a free account on Blogger or WordPress. Setting up a hosted blog, installing plugins and customizing a theme are all beyond them. But if you can provide these services, you can pick up some easy cash.

While setting up a blog can require a little technical knowledge, it’s generally a fast process, especially when you get a little practice. In general, customers looking for blog set-up services don’t necessarily want a custom design: they usually have a theme in mind that they just want to slap their own images on. WordPress takes about five minutes to install, making blog set up surprisingly lucrative.

2. Hosting

Many web design clients don’t really want to worry about hosting their own website. If you’re willing to take on that worry, you can make plenty of money and increase your chances of repeat business. After all, if you both designed a website and are hosting it, a customer is unlikely to go to someone else to update his or her site.

You don’t have to mess with servers of your own, either: using a virtual server from one of the many web hosts available can handle the needs of many small websites. There is a little worry that goes along with hosting — if a client’s website isn’t up, it’s on your shoulders — but it remains a relatively easy source of income.

3. Ad Design

For your clients who are buying ad space online, it’s worth their while to use ads that match their website’s design. Offering an online ad design service saves your clients from trying to turn their logo into a banner ad and puts some money in your pocket. Because there are certain common ad sizes, you can offer a single ad design or a package of several common sizes.

4. Templates

Many web design customers aren’t actually looking for a unique design for their website. Instead, they’re more than happy to accept a template — especially if they’ll pay less for it than for a custom-designed site. Some customers are just looking for files they can set up themselves, while others want to hire a web designer to fully implement the template.

Either option allows you to continue making money off a design long after you’ve finalized it. In addition to selling your templates on your own, there are many market places with significant traffic for specific types of templates (i.e. WordPress, Joomla, etc.).

5. Icons

There are certain icons you’ll spot all over the web — such as the RSS icon. While there’s one set symbol, though, there are thousands of design variations upon that theme. Not only can you sell such icons to individuals setting up their own websites, but you can also sell them to other web designers to help them speed up their work. Icons are commonly sold in sets related either by theme or design qualities: you can often earn more with scalable vector icons. There are thousands of potential icons you can work with, as well.

6. Sub-Contracting

Design is not the only aspect of a website that a client might hire out. While you might be given all the text the client wants included in a website, you may not. Rather than trying to help your client find someone up to writing copy, you can agree to take it on as part of the website design. From there you have two options — write it yourself or sub-contract to a writer.

You effectively earn a finder’s fee from providing a writer with the work, and if you have a writer you can work with regularly, you can take on more projects than you might otherwise. You don’t have to limit yourself to writing, either: web applications, marketing and other projects associated with setting up a new website all offer sub-contracting opportunities.

7. User Testing

Putting a website through its paces can require money, leading many web designers to simply skip it. But if you offer this service to your clientele you’ll be able to provide another layer of quality work. User testing can be as simple as sitting down with a couple of people and asking them to try to use the site. It can be as cheap of offering them lunch in exchange for their time. You may have to spend more time explaining to your customers just what user testing is than you might need to spend on your other services, but that bump in income is often worth it.

8. Training

Especially when you’re setting up a website that a client expects to update on his own, you have to expect lots of questions on how to use the site. Those questions don’t have to be just another cost of doing business, though.

Instead, you can offer a client the service of walking him through every part of the completed website and explaining each step. If you and your client are in the same area, it might be worthwhile to go in and educate the client in person. However, with all the various online conferencing applications that allow you to share your desktop with an observer, physical proximity isn’t necessary.

9. Search Engine Optimization

The methods search engines use rank websites change quite often. Part of good website maintenance is updating a site as necessary to keep up with search engines’ needs. Offering search engine optimization offers you a chance to revisit past clients’ websites: they may not need visible changes, but a little tinkering under the hood may get a website better search results. You can also offer SEO services to potential clients who already have well-designed websites.

10. Marketing

While web marketing can be a full-time job, you can provide your clients with a basic web marketing package: setting up accounts on social networking sites, emailing bloggers on your client’s behalf and other small tasks. Most designers don’t have any interest in doing a large amount of marketing, but a few simple services can help a client get started as well as generate a little income.

If you’re interested in adding any of these services to your web design offerings, consider starting with your existing clientele. Send out an email explaining what you’re adding to your offerings and see if you get any bites. From there, you can start thinking about new customers. It may not be practical to add all ten services in one go (and you may need to brush up on a few skills before marketing your work), but these options can give you a starting point.

Additionally, there are far more than ten services a web designer can offer. Think about how you might combine your non-design skills with your web work and see what you come up with — you might find an option that works better with your skill set than those listed above.

Bonus Income Source: Passive Income

If you’ve still got a couple of hours left over after you finish helping your clients, consider passive income opportunities. Every service you offer results in active income: you’re trading your time directly for money.

With passive income, however, once you’ve established an income source, you get money with only minimal time and effort. Traditionally, passive income came from investments — you needed a large amount of money in order to earn income. However, these days there are plenty of opportunities for web designers to create passive income streams: most require an upfront investment of time (rather than money), but can continue to pay off indefinitely.

• Stock Graphics: You can sell a variety of graphics through stock graphic sites. You create one image, upload it and the stock graphic company sends you money whenever someone purchases a copy of your graphic. You can often sell website templates in much the same way.
• Niche Websites: You can create a website on a specific topic, fill it with content and set up either ads or affiliate programs. With ads, you’ll get money whenever someone visits your site and clicks on an ad. With affiliate programs, you’ll get paid whenever anyone purchases a product through your website.
• Web Application: Projects like web applications can take a lot of upfront work. But, depending on your payment model, you can earn money for every person who uses your web application.

These are just a few examples of passive income streams. There are thousands more available to you, and they’re just a matter of figuring out how you can sell your skills without selling your time.

Remembering the good all days, when me and my friends were playing Doom, Mortal Kombat, Quake or War Craft on a Pentium 133 MHz computer with Sound Blaster and a 4MB video card. A lot has changed since then.

Video games actually are a lot older than that we used to play in the 90s. The first video game was created in 1947 called Tennis for two and it was played on an oscilloscope like device.

With the release of Apple II, Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum in late 70s early 80s people could afford to buy such devices and to play video games from their own home. By the mid 80s the video game industry started to evolve in a fast phase releasing games such as Zork, Battlezone and Bard’s Tale.

 

he 1990s became the golden age of computer video games and gave birth to a large number of game developers and publishers such as Activision, Electronic Arts, Blizzard and id Software

From design and graphics point of view, video games greatly evolved and continue to do so. Writing about 90s computer games in 2008 is somewhat nostalgic and in the same time it’s funny, because what can you expect from a 16 bit graphic display and a 100 MHz machine, but remembering that in those days these configs were king just as 3,6 GHz and Nvidia GeForce 9400 nowdays.

Most web designers and getting more and more requests from clients to design custom blog themes.

While designing a blog theme isn’t entirely different from designing any other type of website, there are some unique challenges that blog theme designers face.

There are plenty of sources available for designers who are seeking inspiration from high quality blog design, but it’s also important to understand specifically what will influence and determine the success of a blog theme design. In this article we’ll examine 13 characteristics that separate great blog themes from the rest.

1. Readability

Since blogging revolves around content, readability is a critical priority. Even great content with poor readability will struggle to attract and retain readers. While a blog theme’s design is important, it shouldn’t detract from the content itself. When designing a blog theme, areas of the design like the header, navigation and sidebar often get a lot of the attention, and styling the content within the post itself is frequently overlooked.

There are a number of factors that influence readability, all of which should be considered when designing a blog theme:

Padding – The padding or margin that separates the content of a post from the edges of the content area can help the reader to visually separate the content and focus on it without distraction.

Freelance Switch uses plenty of padding to keep the content easy to read.

 

Short Paragraphs – Readers will have an easier time with short paragraphs. Long paragraphs on a screen can be difficult and intimidating to readers. Short paragraphs often draw readers in because they can be reader faster.

Lists – Use unordered (bulleted) lists or ordered lists when appropriate. Instead of using paragraph format exclusively, lists help to break up the monotony of the text and allow for easier scanning. The points will also stand out more as they grab readers attention.

Bold Text – Having a screen full of text that is all the same weight and size makes it more difficult for readers to quickly see what’s important. Many blog visitors are not going to read posts word-for-word, so your options are to make it easier for them to scan, or watch them leave.

Line Spacing – Especially for blogs that publisher longer, more detailed posts, it’s important to have sufficient space between the lines of text. Not spacing the lines properly causes the text to be crammed.

Sub Headers – Blog posts can be broken up by sub headers (usually h3 or h4 tags). When designing and styling a theme, these sub headers should be given plenty of attention. When done correctly they will help with readability, scanning, and they’ll help the writer to make points clearly.

Mirificam Press styles its sub headers to make a visual impact.

2. Useful Sidebars

Sidebars are an important part of blog design because they play a large role in navigation for visitors and because they provide the opportunity to add some creativity to the design. Additionally, they give the theme designer and the blogger a chance to determine what content or pages on the blog get exposure to all of its visitors. A good sidebar will feature an attractive design, be easy to use and navigate, feature the appropriate content, and encourage a high number of pageviews.

Some common elements in blog sidebars include:

• Popular posts
• Recent posts
• Blogroll/friends lists
• Advertisements
• Category links
• Date-based archives
• Link to RSS feed
• Recent comments
• Promotion of products/services

To take sidebars a step further, some blog designers create multiple sidebars or use conditional tags to include dynamic content based on the page/post the visitor is viewing. This helps to make the sidebars more relevant and useful because the information and links contained in the sidebar are more likely to be of interest to the visitors.

A growing number of blogs are revamping their sidebars to encourage more reader interaction. Some bloggers are posting links to user-submitted community news items. Others are including Flickr photo streams (Flickr groups are now pretty common for design blogs) or possibly streaming information from Last.fm. Additional social media integration is another possibility, from sites such as Twitter, Delicious or Digg.

The PSDTUTS sidebar includes images from its own Flickr group as well as user-submitted community news items.

 

3. Unique

With millions of blogs and thousands of different blog themes out there, it’s pretty easy for visitors to have a hard time distinguishing which blogs they have been to before and which ones they have not. Great blog designs will stand out from all of the free themes and similar designs in one way or another. The designer can take a number of different approaches to accomplish this goal, but the important part is that the design will not only be memorable, but it should also fit with the message and purpose of the blog.

Possible Approaches:

Artistic/Creative

One way to make your design stand out is to design something extremely creative that will easily give your blog it’s own distinct mark.

 

Of course, these are only a few different styles and options for designers. There are countless ways that you can go about creating a unique theme, however, the blog should have some type of distinct look that helps to brand the site and keep it from blending in with all the other blogs.

4. Comment Design

The comment area is often a last priority for theme designers, but a well-designed comment area can give the blog a totally different feel for readers, especially those who comment themselves. Designers have the options of including avatars for commenters, styling author comments to stand out from others, alternating comments with different styles, using speech bubbles, etc.

Avatars are becoming increasingly common on blogs, in part because of the ease of doing so with WordPress and Gravatars. Avatars help to give the comment area a more personal touch and to give each commenter more of a personality of their own.

Pro Blog Design makes excellent use of avatars and color in the comment area.

Darren Hoyt uses smaller avatars and different style for author comments.

5. Integration of Ads

Most blogs today (at least those that are professional and not personal) are using advertisements of some sort to monetize the site. This could include AdSense, affiliate ads, or direct banner ads. While ads are a necessity in most cases to keep the blog going, they can also have an adverse effect on the design and the user experience if they are not implemented properly into the design.

Some bloggers and designers choose to place ads in locations that will draw a lot of attention, such as within the context of the blog posts. While this may help to produce more ad revenue, it will decrease the overall look of the blog and will put off some readers. This is a decision that will need to be made by the blog owner, but from a designer’s perspective it’s best to keep the ads in places that are specifically designated for ads.

Location of the ads is important, but styling the ads, or the area around the ads, is also an option for the designer. The ads may feel as though the are more a part of the theme and less intrusive if they are treated as part of the design.

CSS-Tricks uses a border on banners in the sidebar that changes to a red color on hover, and the header banner is placed on a grungy background that also has a hover effect.

 

6. Effective, Usable Navigation

Navigation is one of the most significant factors in determining the user’s experience on the site. Nothing is more frustrating than not being able to find what you’re looking for, and visitors are bound to leave if this happens to them. On the other hand, effective navigation can lead to more pageviews and a more resourceful blog that takes advantage of the content that is available.

Developing and maintaining effective navigation is a challenge for blog theme designers, because content will be continually added to the blog, making it easier for posts to get buried in the archives. In some ways, maintaining the navigation is up to the blogger, in terms of using internal links within posts and updating older posts with new links. However, there are some steps the designer can take to improve navigation.

First, there should be a primary navigation menu that takes visitors to any major page on the site (such as an About page or a Contact page), and secondary navigation menus are often used as well.

Second, the sidebar should be used to nudge readers towards the most important content on the blog. Popular posts are a common way of doing this.

Third, the sidebar should also include some standard blog navigational elements that visitors will expect to find, such as category links or a link to an archive page.

Fourth, the bottom of the post area can be used to include links to related posts, or this can be done manually by the blogger when desired on specific posts.

The header of Noupe includes category links as the primary navigation, which makes it easy for visitors to find content that they want, plus it makes the navigation feel less like a boring category list.

 

7. Images in Posts

Part of a blogger’s effort to get their posts read and noticed is using pictures within blog posts. Of course, the use of images is outside the control of the blog theme designer, but the designer can have an impact on this aspect by including styles for post images. Images can be much more effective and attractive when styled with CSS to give them a nicer touch.

Designers may want to provide a few different classes for images that can be used, or for many bloggers it may be easier to style all images alike. Use of a border and padding are common, sometimes in conjunction with background colors.

Fuel Your Creativity uses about 10 pixels of padding and a gray border around images.

Spyre Mag uses a light gray background and a slightly darker border.

 

8. Footer Design

When designing a blog theme, or any website for that matter, the footer is one area of the design that typically gets very little attention. Most blogs include a copyright, a link to the homepage, and maybe a few other links to pages of the site (or to the theme designer and/or to the blogging platform). While many visitors won’t scroll all the way down to even see the footer, those that do will be able to benefit from a well designed footer.

What should a blog footer include? There are no absolutes, but in general, some blogs are using them essentially as an extension of the sidebar. By this I mean that many of the same elements that you would find in the average sidebar are also showing up in some blog footers. Social media integration, such as recent entries to Twitter are popular. Additionally, some blogs link to popular posts, recent comments and even blogs of friends from the footer.

In addition to just using the footer to be a home for more information and links, designers are also using this area to get creative with the theme. The footer is much like the header in that it provides a large canvas for a motivated designer to experiment.

Blog.SpoonGraphics uses a footer that points to popular content with a stylish design.

 

Productive Dreams includes links to recent posts and comments, as well as Twitter and Vi.sualize.us integration.

 

9. Color Scheme

Color is, of course, one of the most significant factors in any kind of design. Finding the right color scheme for a blog theme is something that doesn’t usually happen instantly, but getting the colors right is crucial. The colors will sometimes make the look, and other times they can destroy the design. Fortunately, there plenty of tools and resources for finding color schemes.tools and resources for finding color schemes.

The color scheme of a blog will play a considerable role in the branding of the blog, and thus it is very important for the long-term success of the blog. Some blogs use a bright and vibrant color scheme, while others use fewer colors, or a monochromatic scheme. Like most things when it comes to design, there is no right or wrong, just different choices for different situations.

Web Design Ledger features an attractive color scheme with several different shades of neutral colors accented by orange and blue.

Mr. Diggles uses a very basic color scheme that includes very little color, but it works very well.

10. Icons

Icons can be used to improve the look of a site and to improve usability at the same time. The whole point of icons is to present a message to visitors without even using any text. For example, an icon of a home is commonly understood be to a link to the homepage without saying so, and a speech bubble is often used to represent blog comments.

When used properly icons provide somewhat of a subtle improvement to the design. Icons are rarely the highlight of any blog theme, but all blogs could make use of well-designed icons. Blog theme designers can either design their own icons, or use any number of free icon sets that are available.

NETTUTS, and the other sites in the tuts family, use the free icons from Function.

 

11. High Content

Because blogs are so dependent on content, the blog theme design should allow for the content to start above the fold. Oversized headers allow for more creativity in design, but for blogs it typically works best to focus on getting the content in view quickly. This is my personal preference and there are some well-designed blogs that push content down, but as a general rule it’s best to keep the content high in the layout.

The theme of Devlounge uses a small header area that features the start of the content very high on the page.

 

12. Subscription Areas

RSS and email subscribers are the lifeblood of blogs. For this reason it is obviously important for blogs to be able to convert visitors into subscribers. Many blog visitors will be accustomed to the standard blog convention of including links to RSS feeds and email subscription options in the sidebar. Usually these areas are located at the top of sidebars, but sometimes they’re a bit further down.

The benefit to staying with the norm here is that it’s easier for people to find the links, and you don’t want to make it difficult for people to subscribe. Most blogs also include RSS icons along with the link. There are countless RSS icons available for download in all kinds of variations.

Darren Rowse of ProbBogger includes RSS and email subscription options at the top of the right sidebar, a fairly standard location.

 

You the Designer uses the right side of the header for subscription links and an icon.

 

13. Social Media Integration

More and more blogs are starting to include buttons, badges or links to encourage readers to vote for their content on social media sites. When it comes to these items, overkill can harm the look of the blog. Too many buttons can cause the theme to look cluttered and unorganized. The best method is to use a design the implements social media elements, such as voting buttons, subtly without overpowering anything else in the design.

Six Revisions includes a small Digg voting button, and text links to Stumble or bookmark at the top of each post. The smaller Digg button is more friendly for the design than the bigger “Digg This” button that many blogs use. The StumbleUpon and Delicious links are placed below the title where they have very minimal interference. Additionally, the small StumbleUpon and Delicious icons help the links to be found by readers.

Calabria is a set of 20 free and exclusive vector icons that can be used on websites, logos and more.

These icons are absolutely free for both personal and commercial uses and you can go ahead and download yours now.

If you’d like to share these icons, please refer your friends to this page.

Here’s a full preview of all 20 icons for quick reference. Download yours below and enjoy!

Liked the icons?  Have you used them in a project? Do you prefer vector or raster based icons?
Share your comments and links below and let us know what you’d like to see next!

Today we’re going to demonstrate how to peel a hand in Photoshop. You can use this technique to peel other objects of course. This is the final image preview..

 

Step 1

 

Let’s get started, first download this picture of an open hand. You can use any other if you want to. Start extracting the hand from the background and pasting it into a new document, 1280 x 1024 pixels. Then create a new Black Fill Layer below “Hand” layer.

Step 2

Now, what we need is to make all the fingers larger. Using the Lasso Tool, select only the thumb on “Hand” layer, then press V key to activate the transform options and distort the thumb a little bit, you can Command (Ctrl) – Click one of the selection corners and transform the shape.

Step 3

With the Clone Stamp Tool fix the distortions on the finger, also Erase the bad areas.

Step 4

Repeat the same process than step 2, but this time select the rest of the fingers, distort them and fix the details.

At this point you must have a nice hand with long fingers. Now it’s time to start the peeling process.

Step 5

Duplicate the “Hand” layer, hide the original for a while and then adjust the Hue / Saturation values of “Hand copy” layer, set Saturation: +20 and Lightness: -40.

Step 6

Now select “Hand” layer on Layers palette and go to Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All.

Step 7

Now start peeling, select a 20px brush (Hardness 100%), set a black foreground and start painting on the hand’s layer mask.

Step 8

Paint more stripes on hand’s layer mask across the finger.

Step 9

Now select “Hand copy” layer and apply to it a Layer Mask > Reveal all.

Step 10

On “hand copy” layer mask, paint some black stripes. Check the tiny red circles, those will be the visual join points between the two hand layers.

Step 11

Repeat the previous steps as many times as needed, try to get something like the images below. Remember, take care of the join points because those will give realism to our design.

Step 12

Now repeat the peeling on all other fingers, wrist and palm.

Step 13

Then select the Burn tool, set the brush to 20px Hardness 0% and Exposure to 50%. And paint over “Hand copy” layer, burn all the areas next the joins. Burn some areas of “Hand” layer aswell.

Step 14

To improve the torn sensation select the Dodge Tool, set an irregular brush and paint on “Hand” layer edges.

Step 15

Burn with a huge brush, the palm and fingers on “Hand copy” layer, also Burn the fingers and palm of “Hand” layer to increase the deep sensation.

Step 16

We’re close to finish. After burning here and there you should have something like this.

Step 17

Now, draw a Radial Gradient background below “Hand” layer, use these colors (#996938 – #000000). Then change the “Gradient” layer Opacity to 35%.

Step 18

These are optional steps. Create a new layer above “Hand copy” layer and name it “Red Veins”. Then with the Pen tool (just the paths), draw lines across the fingers. Then select a red Brush (Hardness 100%), hit the A key, then Right click (or Control Click on a Mac), click on Stroke Path option, select Brush – Simulate Pressure and then OK, do the same for all the fingers.

As an additional detail, just Burn some shadows over the “Red Veins” layer.

Finally Repeat this step but with “Blue Veins” this time.

Step 19

Now apply the following layer styles to “Veins” layers.

Final result

And that’s it! just try peel another stuff, or add more interesting things inside a peeled object. Good luck!.

DOWNLOAD PSD FILE

Feel free to post links and examples of stuff you peeled and leave us some feedback. Thanks…

You have a picture of a stuffed penguin. It’s not just any stuffed penguin, though. It’s the  latest and greatest in stuffed penguin technology, the hot item that everyone will want under their Christmas trees this year. You’ll make a fortune with this penguin, if only you can start selling it online in time for the holidays. “But wait!”, you say. “I can’t just put this picture on the Internet looking like that! It’s too big! It needs a border! It needs a drop shadow! What shall I ever do?”

OK, maybe not. Your penguin won’t lead to fame and fortune, and you can easily edit your image with Photoshop. So let’s change the scenario a bit: your client has a picture of a stuffed penguin, and a picture of a stuffed owl, and a stuffed gopher, and a stuffed wallaby, and a stuffed flamingo… You get the idea; hundreds of pictures from their Stuffed Animals from Around the World catalog.

Before you can load all of the pictures into your client’s fancy new e-commerce site, you need thumbnails with simple borders and drop shadows for each and every image. Simple, yes, but tedious. And you’ll get to do it all over again when they release next year’s line of stuffed animals.

Photoshop Droplets Save the Day

Fortunately, Photoshop includes a helpful tool for processing large batches of images: droplets. By creating a droplet, you can tell Photoshop to perform the same set of operations for every file in a folder.

Note: The instructions below are for Photoshop CS2. Menu items may have moved or had their names changed slightly in other versions of Photoshop.

Step 1: Plan Your Action

Before you create your droplet, carefully plan out what you want it to do, sparing no detail. Start by specifying what you have and what you want the results to look like.  In our case, we start with folder full of product images of various sizes. We want to end up with another folder full of product images that all have the following characteristics:

• No more than 200px wide and 200px tall
• A 1px grey border
• A 5px drop shadow cast to the bottom right of the image on a white background
• JPEG compression

Open up your first image and determine exactly what you need to do with that image to get the results you want.

1. Resize the image to fit within your maximum dimensions, minus 5px in each direction to allow room for the shadow.
   1. Select File->Automate->Fit Image.
   2. Set the width and height constraints to 195px.
2. Add a border to the image.
   1. Select the whole image (Select->All).
   2. Modify your selection so you have the border selected.
      1. Select->Modify->Border, and set the width to 1px.
   3. Fill the border with your chosen color
      1. Edit->Fill.
      2. Use->Color… and set the color to #808080.
   4. Deselect everything
3. Add a drop shadow to the image.
   1. Make the background into a layer.
   2. Add the Drop Shadow layer style.
   3. Set the angle to 135 degrees, the distance to 3px, and the size to 5px (this will fit within our extra 5px).
   4. Resize the canvas, adding 5 pixels to the right and bottom, so the shadow will be visible.
4. Flatten the image.
5. Save the image in a different folder.
6. Close the image.

Step 2: Record Your Action

You can save your process as an action, which is simply a series of steps that you record and then play back as many times as you like. The process of recording a new action is quite simple.

1. Open one of the images you want to edit.
2. Open the Actions palette (Window->Actions).
3. Create a new set of actions, called “My Actions” (or anything you want).
4. Create a new action in that set, called “My Neat Action” (or, again, anything you want).
5. Make sure Photoshop is recording (if not, press the “Begin Recording” icon in the Actions palette), then go through the steps listed above to modify your image, save it, and close it.
6. Press the “Stop Playing/Recording” icon in the Actions palette.

Step 3: Create a Droplet

Now that you have your action recorded, it’s time to save it as a droplet. Select File->Automate->Create Droplet… There are a few options you’ll need to set, such as the file name for the droplet and the location to save your modified images. It is very important that you check the “Override Action ‘Save As’ Commands” box. This will let the droplet save the files with the name and location you specify, rather than the name and location specified in the action you recorded earlier. When you click “OK”, Photoshop will create an EXE file. You use it by dragging images or folders onto that file’s icon.

 

Step 4: Let the Droplet Work Its Magic

You now have your droplet all set up and ready to go. Now, simply take a folder full of images and drag it onto the droplet file you created. Photoshop will run the set of actions you recorded earlier for each image in that folder, sending the results to the folder you specified when you created the droplet file.

A special note for Windows Vista users: when you first try to run a new droplet, you might get an error message from Windows, saying “Adobe Photoshop CS2 has stopped working.” If you get this error, Windows’ User Access Control restrictions are preventing the droplet from running properly. To fix it, right click on the droplet file and choose “Properties”. On the Compatibility tab, check the box labeled “Run this program as administrator”. You’ll have to click the “Allow” button every time you start a new batch.

Do More with ImageMagick

At this point, you’ve impressed your client with your quick turnaround on the project. So much so that you get an even bigger job. More than just stuffed animals, their full catalog includes stuffed fruits, stuffed rocks, stuffed small appliances. You name it, they stuff it. You need to prepare tens of thousands of images for your client. Try running that folder through your droplet and you’ll come back to your computer a few hours later to find that Photoshop has crashed. There is no hard and fast limit to how many files you can process at once; but the more you have, the more likely it is that Photoshop will get overwhelmed and stop responding. If you need to process extremely large batches of images, you might want to consider using ImageMagick.

What is ImageMagick?

Like Photoshop, ImageMagick is software for creating and editing raster images, featuring a rich set of tools. Unlike Photoshop, you’ll do most of your work in ImageMagick outside of the comfortable embrace of a graphical user interface. Instead, you open a command line, tell ImageMagick what you want it to do, and it goes about doing that without the need to display the images to you. ImageMagick is freely available open source software, with versions for Windows, OS X, and Unix. Chances are, if you have shell access to your web host, you’ll find ImageMagick already installed there.

Working with Files

You call ImageMagick from the command line using the command “convert“, along with various options to tell it exactly what to do. We’ll start by going through the commands necessary for each of the modifications we want to make to our image.

1. Resize the image to so it is no larger than 192px x 192px.

   convert input.png -resize 192x192 output.png

2. Add a 1px grey border to the image.

   convert input.png -bordercolor "#808080" -border 1 output.png

3. Add a dropshadow to the image.

   convert input.png »
       ( +clone -background black -shadow 75x2+2+2 ) »
       +swap -background white -layers merge +repage -chop 2x2 output.png

4. Save as a JPEG

   convert input.png output.jpg

Now that we know exactly how to do the individual step, we can mash everything together into one command to turn our original penguin into the thumbnail we’re after:

convert input.png -resize 192x192 -bordercolor "#808080" -border 1 »
    ( +clone -background black -shadow 75x2+2+2 ) +swap »
    -background white -layers merge +repage -chop 2x2 output.jpg

We need an easy way to apply the command to every file in our folder. The simplest way is to create a loop that grabs every file name in the folder (”%f” in the example below) and calls our command for that file name, creating an output file with the same name in a different directory (”../out/%~nf.jpg“).

This example works in a Windows command line; it can be modified to work on OS X or Unix:

for %f IN (*) do convert %f »
    -resize 192x192 -bordercolor "#808080" -border 1 »
    ( +clone -background black -shadow 75x2+2+2 ) +swap »
    -background white -layers merge +repage -chop 2x2 ../out/%~nf.jpg

Written exclusively for WDD by Jonathan Brinley.

Have you worked with ImageMagick or Photoshop droplets? Share your experiences below.

 

About the Show

6 months ago we had an epiphany. We had no idea that this idea would get us so far within the community of designers and developers.

In this episode we pop a bottle of champers and show an outtake or two of the last 100 episodes.

Gary Vee, as he is affectionately called, is gifted with many things including wit, charm, and charisma. His name on the other hand was definitely a hurdle for this loud and sometimes obnoxious (meant with love) social media champion.

He started his early online career with Wine Library, a brilliant and easy to remember name. When launching his first video blog Wine Library TV I’m sure he was faced with the retching decision on how to handle his own name. Most hoping to make a career on screen and being faced with a difficult name would opt for a much easier to remember screen name.

But not for Gary… this little fireball decided to tackle online media with sucky name in tow.

Turn liability into assets
His tenacity has turned the liability of his name into a household word… at least for us geeks and social media freaks. For those of us who follow his wisdom, we couldn’t imagine him with any other name. The name Gary Johnson just wouldn’t fit.

He built a brand on his name right down to GaryVaynerchuk.com. How can you have success on a domain that can’t be spelled correctly by 99% of the world?

Easy, Gary’s favorite word ‘hustle‘.

Doing the hustle
The first thing your eyes go to on his website is his name. His last name is broken down by syllables vay-ner-chuck. When he introduces himself on video he pronounces his last name Vay… ner… chuk drawing out and dropping dead air in between each syllable.

Not afraid to laugh at himself, Gary is constantly making fun of his own name. Making it possible for the rest of us to laugh with him.

Gary worked tirelessly to make his name as easy to understand as the message he was preaching. The end result of this is a near impossible name that we can remember. He has successfully turned his liability around.

What can we learn from this?

Gary’s success wasn’t overnight. Too often we want to go through the motions for a while and when success isn’t beating down our door we give up. Of course, we blame the failure on our liabilities.

Embrace your liabilities and turn them around so you too can also claim success. Quit hiding them under your bed hoping the world won’t notice. Trust me they will.

What makes you different is what sets you apart. Frankly, I’m tired of all the sameness out there. The web is becoming as boring as the traditional world. Everyone is more concerned with a formula for success rather than being yourself and doing what you love (wisdom stolen from Gary Vee).

Be unapologetic and be yourself… liabilities and all.

MIX ‘09 has kicked in and “The Gu” just had someone show SuperPreview something that does what we saw with Meer Meer.

SuperPreview let’s you do the same onion peel overlays to see differences across browsers, and you can have everything run in the server (same as Meer Meer). This means that you don’t need to run VMs with various browsers to get your testing in. On Windows and want to see what your app looks like in Safari Mac? No problem.

The demo also showed the nice visualization of seeing where DOM nodes actually are, allowing you to see how the CSS is different. Promising!

There has been a bit of a code war going on or at least a some what heated debate on code quality and programming principles.

I’m not going to rehash everything but I will sum up the two sides and throw my opinion into the ring. Why does my opinion matter? I’m not so sure that it does but you can be the judge of that. What I do think is different about my opinion than the opinions that I have heard/read so far is that I can’t place myself in either camp. I am not a coding cowboy that just cares that “it works” and I am not a bureaucratic standards Nazi either. I’ll talk a bit more about why I am ducking for cover in no man’s land in this battle of opinions.

The Coding Cowboys Say

Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky sure hit a sore spot when they suggested that learning programming principles just wasn’t worth it and just getting it done was more important.

Jeff likened principles and guidelines to the Ferengi and their 285 Rules of Acquisition saying that every situation in programming cannot be governed by a set of rules and there isn’t a one size fits all pattern to solve everything.

Joel refers to the SOLID principles as “extremely bureaucratic programming that came from the mind of somebody that has not written a lot of code.”

The Craftsmen Say

Jeff and Joel’s comments sparked a lot of rebuttals from the ALT.Net community. It is understandable since those comments attack the very foundation of TDD and DDD. I am not going to bore you with a list of everyone that chimed in but I want to highlight a post that I think sums up this position in a clear and nice way.

Justin Etheredge made a great post is response to the criticisms. I have been reading Justin’s blog for a while and I like the way he views software. He likens software development to carpentry and woodworking, both are a learned craft. You don’t get good a carpentry by throwing things together and ignoring building codes. Patterns and principles are like building codes.

My View On The Whole Thing

I was a bit surprised at first to hear Jeff and Joel’s comments because they are some smart guys that have produced some successful software. I highly doubt, regardless of how it came across, they intended to imply that you should ignore all guidelines and just string together your code. Unfortunately, the comments of their posts make it all too clear that this is exactly the way a lot of programmers took it. What’s worse is bad programmers will use this as a defense for their resistance to improving their skills.

Like I said, currently I am somewhere in no man’s land. For too long I had the mindset that would take Jeff and Joel’s comments and use them as an excuse to ignore patterns and principles. From the beginning of my education in software development, no importance was placed on “good design.” My college training only focuses on teaching the syntax and considering that “knowing” the language.

After a few years of living in denial, I had to accept that their was far more for me to learn and I began my journey out of the cowboy coding camp and started striving to develop software in a TDD manner. I still have a lot to learn but facts cannot be ignored. Since making an effort to improve my craft I have seen a significant drop in the amount of bugs found in new software I am producing and the bugs that are found are smaller and much similar to solve. So that is my take on the whole thing and I hope that this at least peaks someone’s interest to dig a little deeper in regard to becoming a craftsmen and taking pride in the code they produce.