The Pat Man

Pandora Sculpture Keepsake

2011-03-10T19:28:00.000Z

One of the new range of Cast Carrara reproduction Sculpture Keepsakes.

Pandora. Sculpture Keepsake

Pandora – a bust. (1900), French.

Made from dry cast white Carrara marble, over 90% of the finished sculpture is natural marble. Authentic to the eye, smooth and cold to the touch, with fine crisp detail, exactly like the original.

52 cm Tall this sculpture will hold a token amount of ashes in a small chamber cast into the marble. Access through the base and secured with a screw lid.

Proudly made by hand in Staffordshire, Great Britain.

Individually made to order. Delivery in 8 – 12 weeks.

£139.99Price:

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Flat Top Doves in Flight

2011-03-03T10:20:00.000Z

Flat Top Doves in Flight: "

A perennial favourite the doves in flight range of urns has undergone a slight makeover. In addition to the normal range a new flat topped shape has been introduced.

Doves in flight cremation urn (Flat top)

£109.99Price:

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Golden Acorn eco-urn

2011-03-01T09:16:00.000Z

Golden Acorn eco-urn: "

A stunning urn, made from moulded recycled paper. colured red and then has gold leaf applied, so the rich redness of the colour shows through the gold and crackling patern.

Acorn Eco-urn. Gold Leaf

The specially designed lid and base of this Acorn Urn are manufactured from moulded recycled paper and the stalk of the lid is made from a twist of recycled paper.

The Acorn Urn is light weight, fully biodegradable and produced to a standard 10″ high x 8″ wide. The close fitting lid makes it ideal for the storage or burial of ashes.

Gold – The gold Acorn Urn is prepared with a dark red base paper onto which Dutch metal gold leaf is applied. As the leaf is applied cracks and small breaks naturally appear in the surface, which allow the underlying red surface to show through and add to the overall richness of the finish. The stalk of the lid is made from a twist of recycled paper.

£74.99Price:

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Forever loved

2011-02-26T10:12:00.000Z

Forever loved: "

The forever loved cremation casket. This exquisitely detailed urn has beautiful Angels depicted on all 4 sides. Ornamental detailing around bottom and top of urn give this piece an elegant feel.

Forever loved cremation casket

This exquisitely detailed urn has beautiful Angels depicted on all 4 sides. Ornamental detailing around bottom and top of urn give this piece an elegant feel.

Height:28.5cm

Width: 17cm

Depth: 17cm

Capacity: 3.75 Litres

£129.99Price:

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Mahogany Patina Cremation Urn

2011-01-02T00:06:00.000Z

Mahogany Patina Cremation Urn: "

This adult sized cremation urn is made from solid brass. Hand made and finished it has a mahogany patina gloss finish with golden band accent around the neck, under the lid. The urn is filled from the top through the lid which is secured with a screw thread.

The finish has a glossy mottled effect which I hope you can see in the picture. Gloss finished urns are notoriously difficult to photograph and I hope you can see the detail as well as the photographer reflected on the centre.

Mahogany Patina Cremation Urn

This Cremation Urn is hand cast and made of solid brass. This urn measures approximatley 11″ tall and will hold the full ashes of an adult. The ashes are placed into the urn through the top which is secured by a threaded lid.

£99.99Price:

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Round leaf urn

2010-12-21T21:11:00.000Z

Round leaf urn: "

Here is the perfect solution for those wanting the minimum impact on the environment. These leaf urns are made from a fibreboard case and decorated with real leaves, either natural or coloured. They are made from sustainable materials and degrade very quickly when buried or exposed to moisture. They hold the entire ashes of an adult.

Round leaf urn

Round urn decorated with real coloured or natural leaves.

Colour:

Natural
Blue
Green
Red

£34.99Price:

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Turquoise band keepsake urn

2010-12-20T20:15:00.000Z

Turquoise band keepsake urn: "

This keepsake is presented in a protective display box.

It is solid brass and is filled through the top via a scre thread lid.

It has a turquoise patina with four golden accent bands on the top, base, middle and shoulder.

Turquise band keepsake

Brass Keepsake urn with turquoise finish accented with golden bands

£24.99Price:

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Spanish cross keepsake pendant

2010-12-17T10:30:00.000Z

Spanish cross keepsake pendant: "

This beautiful pendand is in the design of a Spanish cross. It’s hand made from sterling silver. Gold accents are optional.

Includes 2mm, high quality sterling silver neck chain.

Dimensions are approx 25mm x 18mm and weighs 6.0 grams.

Ashes are added via a screwed plug in the back of the pendant.

Comes in a luxury cherry display box and includes a sterling silver funnel.

This pendant is hand made to order, approx production time is 10-14 days.

Spanish cross keepsake pendant

Hand made sterling silver.

Style:

With Gold Accents
Without Gold Accents

£209.99Price:

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Dignity angel keepsake

2010-12-17T00:05:00.000Z

Dignity angel keepsake: "

This keepsake holds 0.16 litres. That is sufficient for a token amount of ashes. It can also be used to keep other precious items.

Made form Polyresin this tough durable urn holds fine detailing. You can almost see every feather on her wings and hair on her head.

Dignity angel keepsake

Honour the memory of your loved one with this beautiful Angel.

Use this beautifully detailed keepsake to hold a portion of ashes or your most precious token of remembrance.

· Photographs · Wedding Ring

· Lock of Hair · Poem

· Special Notes · Special Piece of Jewellery

These are only suggestions, follow you heart to do what is right for you.

Height: 21.5cm

Width: 13cm

Depth: 12cm

Capacity 0.16 Litres.

Made of high quality cold cast polystone.

Urn cavitiy is set between the wings and is accessible by a removable lid.

£49.99Price:

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Winter Ceramic urn

2010-12-16T10:33:00.000Z

Winter Ceramic urn: "

The winter urn from unforgettable ceramics. This is in the four seasons range from ceramic artist Paul Thorne.

In ice white this urn has a bare trees motif running on the face. It is suitable for complete adult ashes. The urn is filled from the base and sealed with a plastic stopper.

Unforgettable ceramic sculpture urn "Winter"

Inspired by Winter, this contemporary urn reflects a time or place. The individually designed Urns are hand-finished making each one, truly unique.

Besides providing a lasting memorial and a beautiful addition to your home, the urn can be interred or employed as a scattering vessel. Designed to hold the full remains of a cremated adult, the urn can be supplied with an inscription of your choice. The urn can be placed outdoors but is not frost-proof. Height: 30cm Width: 25cm

£199.99Price:

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Paw Print Heart pet urn

2010-12-15T15:38:00.000Z

Paw Print Heart pet urn: "

A hand cast and finished solid brass heart shaped urn with paw prints “walking” across its face. This is keepsake sized and will hold a small amount of ashes. Ask your pet crematorium about the volume of ashes to expect as this could well hold the whole ashes of a small breed of cat or dog.

Paw print heart pet urn

This brass pet urn is hand cast and finished. It has a lovely engraving of paw prints. This urn measures approximatley 2.5″ tall and will hold a small amount of ashes. The ashes are placed into the urn through a threaded plug in the base.

Tweed casket

2010-12-14T13:39:00.000Z

Tweed casket: "

The Tweed ashes casket is a timeless piece. It will find it’s place in almost any setting. From historically period rooms to slam up to datt contemporary. It’s shape is both traditional and has clean modern lines. Accented with dark inlays and a brass escutcheon.

Tweed ashes casket

A traditional shaped urn with dark inlay and an antiqued brass lock.A timeless piece.

Capacity: 3 Litres.

£149.00Price:

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Wooden urn

2010-12-12T11:27:00.000Z

Wooden urn: "

Here is an urn that is quite unusual. It is normal for urns (Round) to be metal or ceramic and caskets (Cuboid) to be wooden. Here I hav a round wooden urn. It’s made from teak root which makes the pattern of each one unique. It is a rich dark colour, as you would expect of teak. This urn comes with a complimentary plinth, also of teak root. Each example of this urn, although carved to the same shape, will be truly unique.

Dee antique round ashes urn

Carved from teak root to give each one a unique pattern. The Dee stands on its complimentary teak root plinth which itself will be unique.

Capacity: 3 litres. Access from the top.

£149.00Price:

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Books on beareavement

2010-12-10T15:22:00.000Z

Books on beareavement: "

Selecting an urn can be a big step in the grieving and healing process. But it is only a step. If you need help coming to terms with bereavement there are plenty of books available. I have grouped the most appropriate into an “Amazon Store”. Please have a look, there are books about the practicalities, how to understand your emotions, other peoples personal experiences, advice from experts and inspirational prose and poetry. There are also materials for those interested in helping others through their grief by becoming councilors http://astore.amazon.co.uk/cremationurnsdirect-21. Or click in the links on the right hand sidebar.

Companion Urn and Keepsake sets

2010-12-10T10:16:00.000Z

Companion Urn and Keepsake sets: "

Where a couple have spent many years together it seems only fitting for their ashes to be together. You could select Two complimetary urns, Two identical urns or you could select a companion urn set.

These sets are pairs of urns with a base that both unites and compliments them.

Keepsakes are also available.

Companions

Golden companion urn set

Each Urn and base is hand cast from solid brass and has a silver pewter finish. Each urn measures approximately 28cm tall and will hold the full ashes of an adult. The ashes are placed into the urn through the top which is secured by a threaded lid.

Matching keepsake urns set is also available.

£199.99Price:

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Silvered pewter companion urns set

Each Urn and base is hand cast from solid brass with a silver pewter finish. Each urn measures approximately 28cm tall and will hold the full ashes of an adult. The ashes are placed into the urns through the top which is secured by a threaded lid.

Matching keepsake urn set is also available.

£199.99Price:

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Silver Companion Keepsake set

Each Urn and base is hand cast and made of solid brass. Each urn measures approximatley 7.5cm tall and will hold a small amount of a loved ones ashes. The ashes are placed into the urn through the top which is secured by a threaded lid.

Matching adult companion urn set is also available

£49.99Price:

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Golden Companion Keepsake set

£49.99Price:

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Silk copper corn cremation urn

2010-12-06T17:36:00.000Z

Silk copper corn cremation urn: "

This is my Silk-copper corn cremation urn. It’s a full sized adult ashes urn. It is made from solid brass and has a screw secured top and felt base, to protect delicate surfaces. It has a rich copper colour with golden band highlights around the lid and pedestal. on the side it has an illustration of three ears of grain. It is hand cast and finished. It is 28 cm tall and has a capacity of 3.5 litres.

Silk-copper corn cremation urn

Hand cast and finished.

Solid brass cremation urn.

Height: 28cm

Capacity: 3.5 Litres

Access from the top. Secured by screw thread lid.

Has felt base to protect delicate surfaces.

£119.99Price:

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Medway ashes casket

2010-12-03T20:42:00.000Z

Medway ashes casket: "

This is the Medway ashes casket. It has a capacity of 3.5 litres, enough to hold full adult ashes. It has a tapered design with exposed dovetail corner details. The lid has contrasting teak inlays to give extra interest and style. Secured by a small brass lock with matching escutcheon, this casket could also be used as a large keepsake box to hold important papers, jewellery, mementos and the like.

Medway ashes casket

Interesting shape and contrasting teak inlays make this casket stand out. Secured with antiqued brass lock.

Capacity: 3 Litres.

£149.00Price:

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Cat group

2010-12-03T11:27:00.000Z

Cat group: "

I am always trying to find better ways to arrange the urns on CremationUrnsDirect.co.uk so you can find exactly what you are looking for easier and quicker. Here are the urns that have been designed with cats in mind. However, as with all my urns, there is no rule about which you can choose. If you think a cat urn would suit a human, or a human urn would suit your cat, you are welcome to use whichever you prefer. The only considerations would be, do you think it is suitable and does it have enough capacity.

Cat

Paw print lid pet keepsake

This brass pet urn is hand cast and finished. It has a lovely engraving of paw print on the lid. This urn measures approximatley 2.5″ tall and will hold a small amount of ashes. The ashes are placed into the urn through the top which is secured by a threaded lid.

£24.99Price:

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Paw print heart pet urn

£24.99Price:

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Paw Print Walk Pet keepsake

This brass pet urn is hand cast and finished with a slate colour. It has a lovely paw print engraving around it.. This urn measures approximatley 3″ tall and will hold the a small amount of ashes. The ashes are placed into the urn through the top which is secured by a threaded lid.

£24.99Price:

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Paw Print Walk Pet Urn

This brass pet urn is hand cast and finished with a slate colour. It has a lovely paw print engraving around it.. This urn measures approximatley 9″ tall and will hold the full ashes of an average size dog or cat. The ashes are placed into the urn through the top which is secured by a threaded lid.

£39.99Price:

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Paw Print Lid Pet Urn

This brass pet urn is hand cast and finished. It has a lovely engraving of paw print on the lid. This urn measures approximatley 6″ tall and will hold the full ashes of an average size dog or cat. The ashes are placed into the urn through the top which is secured by a threaded lid.

£39.99Price:

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Ready to pounce pet urn

This brass pet urn is hand cast and finished. This urn measures approximatley 10″ long and will hold the full ashes of an average size cat. The ashes are placed into the urn through the threaded plug in the base.

£39.99Price:

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Cat Pewter Pet Urn

This pet urn is hand cast and has a pewter effect finish. It has a lovely engraving of a outline of a cat which is highlighted in black. This urn measures approximatley 7″ tall and will hold the full ashes of an average size cat. The ashes are placed into the urn through the top which is secured by a threaded lid.”

£39.99Price:

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Lomond ceramic urns

2010-12-01T14:07:00.000Z

Lomond ceramic urns: "

Here are two contemporary ceramic urns. Thl Lomond in gloss Black or gloss White.

These urns have capacity for adult ashes. Each sits upon a matching plinth with a plaque for the persons details to be inscribed.

Unusually, these urns have a recess in the top for a tea-light candle. So on special occasions one can have a flame burning, perhaps a birthday, memoriam day, anniversary or religious festival.

Lomond black gloss ceramic urn

High gloss black finish with insert for tea light. On a matching plinth.

Height: 15cm. Width: 28cm. Plinth length: 30cm. Plinth width: 15cm.

£95.00Price:

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Lomond white gloss ceramic urn

High gloss white finish with insert for tea light. On a matching plinth.

Height: 15cm. Width: 28cm. Plinth length: 30cm. Plinth width: 15cm.

£95.00Price:

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Swipe cards for school walk "appalling"

2010-11-30T14:23:00.000Z

Swipe cards for school walk "appalling": "

'We really are being governed by madmen,' said Godfrey Bloom today in response to the latest Health White paper. 'This government is so convinced that it has the right to hector and harass people that it has lost all grasp of commonsense.'

'Its plans are to encourage children to walk to school by setting up a system of swipe card readers at lampposts up and down the country. The idea they say is to get children to swipe new cards on the lampposts, in order that they can prove that they have walked to school rather than taken a car or bus.

'The thought of sheer cost of this idea near brings me out in hives,' said Bloom. 'But that isn't the half of it,' he said.

'The civil liberties implications are appalling, that the school doesn't just know what the children are doing at school, but can now know how they got there, to the lamppost. It is of course none of their business.

'Worse still, nobody trusts this government, or its agencies with sensitive data, for very good reason given its track record of losing data hand over fist. It doesn't take a genius to work out who might like to know the times and routes of children walking too and from school now does it? If one set of data went missing, just think of the horror. We have had examples of school staff being involved in pedophile activities in the past. Not many thank God, but it happens.

'The main reason that children do not walk to school is because of parent's fear of precisely this problem, according to the last survey on the subject. We recently had the case of Isabelle McCullough whose parent's were threatened on 'child protection' matters about letting their daughter walk 45 yards to a bus stop. Now we have the government wanting to collect data on the routes and times of every child in the country.

'The fact that this idea is bonkers is one thing, but it is all of a piece with the now almost ubiquitous fingerprinting of children in schools, the checking of lunchboxes to make sure nothing tasty has slipped through and the general belief that the state knows best. It doesn't.

'It is the duty of every parent to look after their children. It is the duty of every school to teach the children about their liberties, how over centuries the people of this country prized them from the hands of their governors, and the threats that the safety agenda now comprises to those hard won freedoms,' said Bloom.

Heart of gold keepsake

2010-11-28T17:32:00.000Z

Heart of gold keepsake: "

Not all keepsakes are miniature urns in design. Here is an interesting item. It’s a love heart shaped cushion. Presented in a display box. This is no less a keepsake than any of my urn shaped keepsakes, just a little different. The heart symbolising love in it’s most universal form. Made of solid brass and coloured with gold.

Heart of gold keepsake

£24.99Price:

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Copper Marbled cremation urn

2010-11-28T17:31:00.001Z

Copper Marbled cremation urn: "

This solid Brass urn is hand made and finished. It has a copper marbling effect all over with quite a high gloss finish. It is accented with leaf designs etched around the lid, the shoulders and the pedestal. It is a heavy and robust urn. The ashes are inserted through the lid which is secured with a screw thread. It’s 28cm tall and hold 3 litres, which is enough for adult ashes.

As I keep writing, what you put in your urn is completely up to you, the only considerations are do you like it and has it enough capacity?

You could put letters, soil from a special place, jewellery, mementos, documents or anything else. If it fits with the style of your house you could have it as a beautiful object in its own right, or why not have a pair?

Copper Marble Cremation Urn

£99.99Price:

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Urns and Keepsakes

2010-11-28T17:31:00.000Z

Urns and Keepsakes: "

If you have the ashes of a loved one you want a beautiful urn or casket in which to keep them. But if a token amount of those cremated remains are to be elsewhere how do you choose a suitable keepsake?

It’s simple. For many of my brass urns there is also a matching keepsake, considerably smaller, to the same design. It gives a coherance to the final resting places. Have a look through my range and keep an eye out for the matching keepsake is available link. It will take you stright to the matching keepsake. Of course should you be browsing the keepsakes there is a reciprocal link to the matching urn.

Here is the Blue alloy Band urn and it’s matching keepsake to illustrate.

Blue alloy band cremation urn

Matching Keepsake is available

£99.99Price:

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Blue alloy band keepsake

Matching full size Urn is available

£24.99Price:

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Unforgettable Ceramics

2010-11-25T10:25:00.001Z

Unforgettable Ceramics: "

The Unforgettable Ceramics range of beautifully sculptured ashes caskets. This new concept in Urn design provides a lasting memorial or an appropriate vessel until such time that you or your family are ready to let them go. Tastefully designed to blend in with your home, the Urns can also carry an inscription of your choice.

An Urn from Unforgettable Ceramics is a real work of art and provides a truly individual focus for your most treasured memories.

Principal of the business and designer, Paul Thorne, worked as an independent funeral director for nearly 20 years before returning to his love of sculpting. His knowledge and understanding of the needs of both the bereaved families and the funeral industry was key to the development of the concept. Paul studied at Watford School of Art in the late 70s developing a keen interest in sculpting and a passion for ceramics.

Click on any image to see an enlargement

Unforgettable Ceramics

Unforgettable ceramic sculpture urn "Autumn"

Inspired by Autumn, this contemporary urn reflects a time or place. The individually designed Urns are hand-finished making each one, truly unique.

More Details

£199.99Price:

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Unforgettable ceramic sculpture urn "Winter"

Inspired by Winter, this contemporary urn reflects a time or place. The individually designed Urns are hand-finished making each one, truly unique.

More Details

£199.99Price:

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Unforgettable ceramic sculpture urn "Summer"

Inspired by summer, this contemporary urn reflects a time or place. The individually designed Urns are hand-finished making each one, truly unique.

More Details

£199.99Price:

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Unforgettable ceramic sculpture urn "Spring"

Inspired by spring, this contemporary urn reflects a time or place. The individually designed Urns are hand-finished making each one, truly unique.

More Details

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Most products are hand finished and may differ in detail from the illustration. All sizes are approximate. Colours may vary due to photographic lighting and monitor settings.

Angel urns

2010-11-25T10:25:00.000Z

Posted By CremationUrnsDirect.co.uk on November 21, 2010

I am delighted to offer these polyresin urns. These urns are all in a similar style with Angel figurines featuring heavily. Some are mini statues of Angels while others have angels entwines around them.
Being Angelic they convey a deeply spiritual sense. Their polyresin material makes them extremely durable and some have found their way outdoors. Some have even been used just as beautiful objects, the ashes chamber being ignored.
Of course, they don;t have to be used to contain ashes. They can be used to house photographs, a lock of hair, jewellery, precious documents… the list is endless. Choose one of the Angel urns for their purity and beautiful white finish and you will not be disapointed.

cremation urns

2010-11-19T15:59:00.000Z

I have recently launched an online shop specialising in cremation urns, ashes caskets, keepsake jewellery, pet urns, keepsakes and the like. There is free postage to the UK. Hundreds of items so there should be plenty for everyone. www.cremationurnsdirect.co.uk

cremation urns

2010-10-26T09:41:00.000+01:00

Cremation urns direct online shop

Industrial Alliance: It's Good To Have A Partner You Can Blame

2010-09-27T20:30:00.000+01:00

Industrial Alliance: It's Good To Have A Partner You Can Blame: "
So is our ad ready? Yes, it's up now. Awesome, super, and the printing went OK? Yes, the printing went very smoothly. And you swapped out the placeholder swipe images like we discussed? Hello? Hello?

Thanks to Adi Ashburner!

Star Wars: Turn To The Dark Side

2010-09-27T20:26:00.000+01:00

Star Wars: Turn To The Dark Side: "
I find your lack of Flip Horizontal disturbing.

Thanks to Diego!

YouTube - The world's deepest bin - Thefuntheory.com - Rolighetsteorin.se

2010-08-12T20:53:00.000+01:00

YouTube - The world's deepest bin - Thefuntheory.com - Rolighetsteorin.se

UK Travel Blog � Live train map for the London Underground

2010-06-24T10:37:00.000+01:00

UK Travel Blog � Live train map for the London Underground

This Is The Man In Charge Of Communications In Australia…

2010-06-09T23:47:00.000+01:00

This Is The Man In Charge Of Communications In Australia…: "

Speaking at the National Cyber Security Awareness Week on Sunday, Senator Conroy announced that his three year old daughter had altered the settings of his iPhone, and he hadn’t been able to work out how to fix it. Confidence inspiring, don’t you think? (more…)

3D Projections on Buildings

2010-06-03T23:59:00.000+01:00

3D Projections on Buildings: "

3D Projections on Buildings from NuFormer Projection.

________________________________

eye candy... named a top 100 Architecture Blog, included in MOPO 2008 and 2009, published in Architectural Review, The Architects Journal, Architect Magazine and featured on the Australian radio show: 'The Architects'.

How to Get Your Camera Back When You Lose It

2010-05-27T22:44:00.000+01:00

How to Get Your Camera Back When You Lose It: "

Most of us photographers have a few ‘worst nightmare scenarios’. One of them is losing our cameras.

Andrew McDonald has a strategy just for you that will increase the chance of getting your camera back. He took the following series of images and leaves them on his camera so that anyone who finds it and scrolls through his pictures will see them.

Enjoy.

Thanks to Andrew for allowing us to share these images.

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

How to Get Your Camera Back When You Lose It

flame | peter blaskovic | escape motions

2010-05-27T22:37:00.000+01:00

flame | peter blaskovic | escape motions

One in three Derbyshire construction sites fail safety inspections

2010-05-19T22:37:00.000+01:00

One in three Derbyshire construction sites fail safety inspections: "

Almost one third of construction sites visited in Derbyshire during March failed safety inspections.

Inspectors from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) carried out checks at 62 construction sites across Derby and Derbyshire during two days of intensive inspections.

View press release ‘One in three Derbyshire construction sites fail safety inspections’

Experimental Gummy Bear Surgeries

2010-05-02T18:32:00.000+01:00

Experimental Gummy Bear Surgeries: "

Gummi Bear surgeries(heart transplant, brain transplant...) by Instructables member fungus amungus.

Cool Photos and Artworks for Your Inspiration #11

2010-05-02T18:27:00.000+01:00

Cool Photos and Artworks for Your Inspiration #11: "

This post is part of our weekly series: showing some interesting Photos and Artworks around the Web so you can get inspiration for your design. If you want to share your great Photos or Artworks with our readers, just send them over via email with image source link using “Weekly Photos and Artworks Inspiration” in the subject. Enjoy the post.

If you see a photo or artwork that is yours and you want credit or it to be taken off, just let us know. We don’t take credit for any of these, this post is just for collecting cool photos and artworks for design inspiration.

Astonishing Paper Illustration by Yulia Brodskaya

2010-05-02T18:26:00.000+01:00

Astonishing Paper Illustration by Yulia Brodskaya: "

Yulia Brodskaya is an artist and illustrator born in 1983 in Moscow - Russia. She is very recognized for her astonishing, elegant and detailed paper illustrations. Currently based in the UK, where she went to continue her education in art at the University of Hertfordshire with a Master of Art in Graphics Communication degree in 2006. After getting her degree, Yulia continued to experiment and explore ways of bringing together all the things she likes most: typography, paper, and highly detailed hand-made craft objects. She has swiftly earned an international reputation for her innovative paper illustrations and continues to create beautifully detailed paper designs for clients all around the world.

“Typography is my second love, after paper and I’m really happy that I’ve found a way of combining the two. Having said that, I don’t want to exclude non-typobased designs, I’d like to work on different projects.” Yulia for Computer Arts

I bumped into Yulia's work during one of my explorations looking for inspiration and was impressed by her pieces. The colors, details, swirls and the movement of her artworks, everything matches perfectly catching our attention and enchanting those who love the combination of creativity, talent and unique ideas. Well, enough said is time for you to enjoy the images! And don't forget to visit her website for more. Hope you like it! Enjoy. =)

About the author

Someone with a bachelor degree in Foreign Trade that really likes technology, design, photography and creativity. A person ‘digging’ a new way as a ‘geek apprentice’, blogger 'wanna be' and a communication lover! Current location: Porto Alegre, RS – Brazil

Twitter user: gismullr

This Picture of Earth from Mars is the Most Amazing Thing Ever. EVER.

2010-04-28T20:05:00.000+01:00

This Picture of Earth from Mars is the Most Amazing Thing Ever. EVER.: "

I can’t stop looking at this. It might not look like much as far as beauty goes if you compare it to, say, the Hubble photos, but dudes, the fact that we’re taking pictures of Earth from Mars is a complete mind-eff. Wow.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/ / CC BY 2.0

Click something, quick!

Time machine

2010-04-27T20:13:00.000+01:00

Time machine: "

£3,000 fine after worker suffers electric shock

2010-04-27T20:08:00.000+01:00

£3,000 fine after worker suffers electric shock: "

A Cannock company has been fined a total of £3,000 after one of its employees suffered a serious electric shock from one of its machines.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) prosecuted Hickman Engineering Ltd after Ben Roberts (21) from Cannock was taken to hospital suffering from burns to his legs, chest, fingers and wrist.

View press release ‘£3,000 fine after worker suffers electric shock’

Esquire: Hello Dali

2010-04-27T20:05:00.000+01:00

Esquire: Hello Dali: "
Of course it's entirely possible that Christina Hendricks does actually only have one foot and no one has ever noticed.

Thanks to Eric! Original is here!

The worst typo ever?

2010-04-20T23:45:00.000+01:00

The worst typo ever?: "

Publisher destroys 7,000 copies of The Pasta Bible after 'silly mistake' causes outrage

A recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto has proved a little too spicy for Penguin Australia, after a misprint suggesting that the dish required 'salt and freshly ground black people' has left the publisher reaching for the pulping machine, rather than the pepper grinder.

It's a one-word slip that only came to light after a member of the public got in touch, and which has sent all 7,000 copies of The Pasta Bible at Penguin's warehouse to be destroyed, an exercise which head of publishing, Robert Sessions, told the Sydney Morning Herald would cost $ 20,000.

There are, as yet, no plans to recall copies that have made it into stores, which according to Sessions would be 'extremely hard'. He was 'mortified that this has become an issue of any kind', adding that 'why anyone would be offended, we don't know'.

Sessions defended proofreaders for letting through a misprint that he suggested came from a spell-check program, explaining that since almost every recipe in the book calls for black pepper at a on each page it was an error he considered 'quite forgivable'. He went on to attack those who might complain about what he called a 'silly mistake' as 'small minded'.

Meanwhile, the clean-up operation continues, with the publisher releasing a rather more emollient statement on its website offering sincere apologies 'for any offence this error may have caused readers', and suggesting that proofreaders 'would have been concentrating on checking quantities, a common source of error in cookbooks'. Penguin also offered to 'willingly replace a copy of The Pasta Bible owned by anyone who feels uncomfortable about having a copy of the book in their possession'.

Speaking to the Guardian this afternoon, Sessions was unwilling to add to his earlier remarks, explaining that he had 'nothing further to say', and referring to the Penguin website.

Richard Lea

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

How To Create Quick Silhouettes In Photoshop

2010-04-17T17:14:00.001+01:00

How To Create Quick Silhouettes In Photoshop: "

A silhouette is a drawing of the outline of an object, filled in with some solid color. From silhouette portraits to the famous iPod silhouette ad, they are as common as graffiti on walls. Or even as traffic signposts or as symbols of his and hers on lavatory doors.

A silhouette may be cast in dark colors; it may be just an outline sans any other feature; but silhouettes still manage to communicate mood and mystery.

On a very basic day to day level, silhouettes find a lot of uses in presentations and displays. As silhouette cliparts go, we have quite a few in the MS Office Clipart gallery itself. Gathering silhouettes with a Google search is not a problem.

You can enter a search like “free silhouettes” or “free vector art” to garner more than a handful of results. Some of these websites find a place within the first few pages of Google results:

All-Silhouettes.com

GoMediazine.com

FreeVectors.net

Brands of The World

Snap2objects

But what if you needed a particular type of silhouette and a search turned up dry? You need to call up your neighborhood designer or fall back on your own design skills. Your Photoshop skills may be rusty, but thankfully creating a basic silhouette doesn’t call for a Picasso. It’s just a few easy steps.

The 10 Steps To A Silhouette

First, we head to a site like Flickr to pick the image we can use for our silhouette. The ideal image would be of your object framed against a uniform background. Sifting through the thousands, I picked this image:

The tool that we will be using for creating a basic silhouette is the Pen Tool. The Pen Tool is the most precise tool in Photoshop’s arsenal and just the thing for the job of following the outline of an image. The Pen tool may seem difficult to maneuver at first, but with some practice you can click points around the image and draw around the shape. The great benefit is that, using the Pen Tool allows us to create vector shapes which we can scale up or down as required without loss of image quality.

Open the image in Photoshop and select the Pen Tool from Photoshop’s Tools palette (or press the P key). Three options (Shape, Path and Fill Pixels) are associated with the Pen tool as seen in the Options Bar at the top. To draw vector shapes, opt for the Shape icon.

The aim of the exercise is to create a black filled shape from the original. Set the foreground and background colors to their defaults of Black and White by pressing the D key or by manually selecting the color from the swatches on the Tools palette.

With the Pen tool start tracing the outline of figures. As we begin shaping with the Pen tool, Photoshop fills the shape with the foreground color (Black). As the Pen tool starts going around the curves, the foreground color blocks our view.

To offset this, we can change the Opacity of the Shapes layer in the Layers panel. The Shapes layer (where we are using the Pen tool) is selected. Move the slider to change the Opacity to anything between 50%-60%. Now we can see our way around the image.

After completely going around the image, we have the following result. Raise the opacity slider to 100% to get your black filled silhouette.

The shape is still a part of the original image. To create a new silhouette document, create a blank Photoshop document with a white background (or any solid color) from File – New.

To move the silhouette from its old location to the new document, keep both document windows side by side. Select the Shapes layer and drag it into the new document. The silhouette layer now occupies a new shapes layer above the white background.

Using the Free Transform command (Edit – Free Transform Path) we can resize the vector shape to any proportion without loss in image quality. Press Shift while using the Free Transform to keep the silhouette in proportion to its width and height.

Save the image file for use in your presentation.

This is just a basic tutorial for drawing silhouette shapes. The web is chock full of interesting variations, like combining silhouettes or filling them up with psychedelic patterns.

As a teaser, check out – Creating a Rocking Silhouette in Photoshop . It’s a great silhouette tutorial on one of the Photoshop sites we had featured in 10 Websites To Make You A Photoshop Ninja. But even a ninja needs basic training.

That’s where our free eBook – An Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop could be a great stepping stone. Don’t forget to visit our previous posts on everything that’s Photoshop.

Do you have your own method of creating silhouettes? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credit: World Economic Forum

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Top 10 Blackberry Storm Applications You Can’t Live Without

2010-04-17T17:14:00.000+01:00

Top 10 Blackberry Storm Applications You Can’t Live Without: "

I recently wrote a post called The Best Free Software For Your Blackberry. After reading the comments from one of our readers, Andrew Johnson, I found a bunch of new applications and some forgotten ones. My wife recently got a Blackberry Storm and I decided to load it up with some applications.

Once you start using these there is no going back; hence the title. We will be covering applications that help you find local restaurants, update Twitter, find out your local weather, find where you are and how to get to where you are going and much more.

Stick around and read through the post. I am sure you will find something that you will love!

And here we go in no particular order:

1. The first application we will be taking a look at is called UrbanSpoon. The developers of UrbanSpoon describe it as a restaurant slot machine. What makes this application awesome is the fact that it uses your location data to populate the slot machine with local cuisine and restaurants. Just give it a shake and it will decide for you!

No more fighting and bickering with your loved ones over where to go! Just let your Blackberry decide.

You can find UrbanSpoon here, you can download the JAD file directly to your Blackberry or you can visit their site and have the application emailed directly to you.

2. Next up is Google Maps for mobile. You can use all the features Google Maps has to offer right on your Blackberry. You can take advantage of your Blackberry’s GPS and get turn by turn directions as well as seeing images of where you are going.

Google Maps has set the bar pretty high for free GPS enabled applications. Take advantage of it and do not pay for another application!

Download Google Maps from here

3. Now for those of you that go outside on a regular basis we have Berryweather to tell you what it is going to be like out there.

Get useful weather updates auto-magically on your Blackberry each and every day. You will see the forecast for the upcoming week as well as the current temperature and outlook. It will also tell you what it feels like with the wind chill. This will let you prepare for the day or week at a glance.

Download Berryweather from here.

4. Then we have JiveSlide for the photo lovers out there. If you love to share your images with friends and family and you store your pictures on Flickr or Yahoo then this is the application for you.

JiveSlide is a photo viewing, slide show application. It lets you pull items saved to Flickr or Yahoo!. It makes viewing pictures very easy. Point it to where you want it to go and it will start streaming your pictures to your BlackBerry.

The best part of JiveSlide is how quickly your images come in. Check out a live demo of it on the web here.

Download JiveSlide here.

5. Piconews is a news aggregator that makes feed reading easy and fun. It is no secret that I love reading news feeds on my handheld. It doesn’t matter if you are a RSS junkie or you don’t know what RSS means, PicoNews will help bring the news directly to you. This reader helps you locate feeds by keywords or category.

Once you have the feeds you want, your Blackberry will download all the articles in it. This enables you to use it when you do not have a signal to read your news. This is awesome for the train.

Download Piconews here.

6. Then we have a little application some of you might have heard of called FourSquare. Now I need to add a disclaimer that I do not use FourSquare and I think location services can be troublesome to say the least. But some of my followers have told me that they absolutely LOVE FourSquare. The premise behind the application is that you can check into a certain location and compete to be king of that spot.

You can earn badges and participate in the hype. The app can also show you who is near you and your friends locations.

You can download FourSquare here.

7. If you use FourSquare you are probably all over Twitter and every Twitter user needs a Twitter client – right? Well we have an application called UberTwitter. It offers what you would expect from a Twitter client such as being able to tweet, see your friends tweets, send direct messages and more.

You have to love being able to tweet on the go, after all that is what Twitter was meant for right? Download, install and start tweeting away to your hearts content! Twitter user’s name removed at my wife’s request.

Download UberTwitter to your Blackberry.

8. What do you use for instant messaging on your Blackberry? I have been stuck on AOL Instant Messenger for some time now. A lot of my old friends and contacts refuse to give it up so I normally have an AIM client with me on the go.

Now you can have one on your Blackberry as well. It is as easy as downloading the client, setting up your username and password and you are good to go.

Download the Blackberry AOL IM client here.

9. Do you use Google Voice? If you do and you have a BlackBerry, you can now make phone calls using your Google Voice number, read your transcribed email, send free text messages as well as complete Google Address Book integration.

Download the Google Voice Application from here.

10. SMRTGuard helps protect your investment in your BlackBerry. They offer paid services as well as their SMRTGuard. SMRTGuard can track your Blackberry remotely as well as remotely wipe all data on your device via their website. They also talk about being able to track your loved ones (with their permission of course).

Once you get this installed you will wonder how you lived without it!

Download SMRTGuard from here.

Do you have any other favorite applications for your BlackBerry? We would love to see them in the comments!

Got Questions? Ask Them Now FREE on MakeUseOf Answers!

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How To Read Your Camera’s Histogram And Take Perfectly Balanced Images

2010-04-17T17:13:00.000+01:00

How To Read Your Camera’s Histogram And Take Perfectly Balanced Images: "

Digital photography provides us with a variety of tools to help make better photos. Unlike the old film days, we now have ways to review how well exposed or metered our shots are before actually printing them.

Most photographers contend with reviewing images on the back of the LCD screen to assess how well exposed they are. But because the LCD screens can be rather small and well illuminated, they can make photos appear better than what they actually look like on much larger computer screens.

Furthermore, sometimes viewing photos on the camera’s LCD screen might not show a loss of detail in the shadows or dark areas of an image, nor in the white or bright areas. When we’re really concerned about getting the best exposure for our photos, we might use the camera’s zoom-in feature to assess exposure and sharpness of our images. Additionally, we could use the Histogram tool of both our digital camera and image editor to see how well exposed our images are.

To some novice shooters, the Histogram may look like something a technician would use to see if your camera’s functioning properly. While the Histogram feature can be found in all 35mm digital cameras, the tool might not be easily visible; with some cameras you may have to push a button or two to bring it up. But that’s okay, once you learn how to interpret the Histogram, you might find it worth accessing and using a regular basis.

For this tutorial we’re going to primarily in Photoshop to understand how it works. The Histogram in a digital camera works nearly the same way it does in an image editor like Photoshop, so this tutorial also details how to read camera histogram.

What is the Histogram?

The Histogram is basically a graph showing the brightness distribution of an image with pure black on one end, pure white on the other and grey in the middle. Because measuring light is what photography is about, the Histogram works pretty well in a digital camera, but it also may be a little confusing, so I’ll try to clarify with a few image examples.

Over-exposed Images

Many images we capture might tend to be over or under-exposed. It’s easy to tell when a shot is way overexposed because most of the detail in the image in blown out. In scenic images, a loss of detail often occurs with clouds and the sky in the background, such as with photo below. If you expose for the buildings, the background sky gets overexposed.

In the Histogram, the graph shows a bias to the right end. When the graph is bunched up against the right side (pure white), it indicates the areas of the image that are overexposed, or clipped—a technical term meaning a loss of detail or information in an image.

Underexposed Images

When the Histogram is bunched up toward the left (pure black), it indicates that areas of the photo are underexposed, and that details are clipped in dark and shadow areas.

Balanced Image

A more balance Histogram depicts a graph with the pixel representations spread across the graph and tapering off on both ends, such as in this image.

However, it’s often difficult to achieve a balanced graph for most photos. Significant contrast in the light, dark, and mid-tones in the foreground and background areas of a photo typically makes it difficult to get a balanced exposure.

In the first photo example above, it’s nearly impossible to expose for both the background and the foreground of the image. So one solution is to meter for the sky, which means under-exposing the photo to capture the details of the sky, and then open up the shadow areas of the foreground in an image editor.

Sometimes the Histogram may show exposure clippings that are not a particular problem in the photo. In the image below, the graphs depicts a bright spot in the corner of the photo and some loss of detail in the dark areas of the flowers. But these are not major problems for this image. The details in the foreground are pretty much where you want them to be.

By the same token, in this photo below, the light on the subjects was even, and the Histogram depicts an exposure with no clippings. And because the graph is spread out and not bunched up in the middle, it indicates that the photo also includes a nice contrast.

Again, the Histogram results don’t have to be perfect, but when you see clippings on either side of the graph, you will want to review your images to see if there’s a loss of detail in important areas of the image. The Histogram is also useful when it’s difficult to review your photos such as in bright sunlight on the LCD screen. The Histogram can give you pretty good indication about the accuracy of your exposure.

Reading the Histogram is not as difficult as it might first seem but let us know what you experience has been with using this tool. Do you us it often or is the first time you have heard of it?

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7 Things That Are Easier To Do In Ubuntu Than In Windows

2010-04-17T17:12:00.000+01:00

7 Things That Are Easier To Do In Ubuntu Than In Windows: "

When the average computer user hears about Ubuntu or Linux, the word “difficult” comes to mind. This is understandable: learning a new operating system is never without its challenges, and in many ways Ubuntu is far from perfect. I’d like to say that using Ubuntu is actually easier and better than using Windows.

This doesn’t mean you’ll experience it that way if you’ve used Windows for a long time: at a certain your habits begin to feel like conventional wisdom, and any system that doesn’t match your current habits will seem difficult.

If you’re a MakeUseOf reader, however, you’re undoubtedly a fan of free software. Most of the very best free software is open source. If you’re a Windows user who primarily uses free software, Ubuntu’s going to feel more comfortable to you than Windows once you get used to it. And once you do get used to it, you’ll realize that in some ways Ubuntu is simply better than Windows in terms of ease of use.

Don’t believe me? Here are some examples.

Finding & Installing Software

There’s a misconception out there that installing software on Ubuntu, or any Linux platform, requires a PhD in Computer Science. Nothing could be further than the truth; in fact, I’d argue installing software on Ubuntu is a great deal easier than installing software on Windows.

Let’s examine the typical installation scenario for Windows users. Pretend there’s a person named Sally, and that Sally wants to install VLC Media Player. Sally Googles the name of the program, finds a webpage related to it, browses that page until she finds a download for Windows before finally downloading an executable file.

Assuming Sally is pretty tech-savvy, she verifies that the site she downloaded from is a proper place; if not, it could come from anywhere and be infected with any number of spyware, trojans and/or AOL toolbars. Once the file has finished downloading, Sally double-clicks the executable she just downloaded, tells Windows it’s okay to install the program, then follows the series of prompts and clicks “next” several times.

Now let’s pretend Sally is an Ubuntu user. To install VLC, all she needs to do is click “Applications,” then “Ubuntu Software Center” then search for “VLC“, double-click VLC and click the “Install” button at the bottom of the description. She’ll enter her password and then Ubuntu will download and install VLC for you, letting Sally know when it’s done.

Best of all: because the software is all coming from one place, and not some random website, you know with complete certainty that the file doesn’t include any spyware or trojans.

In my opinion, Ubuntu’s method of installing software is far simpler than Windows when compared side by side. The main reason people new to Ubuntu have trouble installing software is because they try to apply the Windows method to Ubuntu, searching the web for programs to download instead of consulting the Ubuntu Software Center first. Packages found online could indeed be very hard to install, but considering the Ubuntu Software Center gives you access to thousands of programs there’s very little reason to ever bother with it.

Initial Setup

When I first install a computer, there are certain things I want installed right away: codecs for all my music and movies, Flash for my web browser, Java, and something capable of opening RAR files. On Windows, ensuring I have all of these things means going through the process above for all software mentioned individually. On Ubuntu, all I need to do is install a single package: Ubuntu Restricted Extras. To install Ubuntu Restricted Extras I simply open up the Ubuntu Software Center, search for “Restricted” and find the package.

Click the install button, and with that simple step my computer is pretty much ready to go.

It should be added that on Windows systems I usually have to install a PDF Reader and a photo editor before I can really use the system, but Ubuntu comes with a PDF called Evince Reader and a photo editor called The Gimp by default.

Installing Drivers

This point is perhaps less relevant for users of Windows 7, which offers pretty good driver management through Windows Update, but it needs to be said that managing drivers on Ubuntu is a breeze. Since Ubuntu is upgraded every 6 months, if you use the latest version you probably won’t need to install a single driver to use your computer. If you do, it will be because the drivers you need are proprietary and as such cannot be included with Ubuntu for legal reasons.

Don’t worry, though: Ubuntu comes with a built-in program for downloading such proprietary drivers for your system. The first time your computer boots Ubuntu, it will inform you of any drivers you need, and install them for you with the click of a button.

I fix Windows PCs professionally, and wish XP had a similar feature. If my client has his or her driver CD it’s not too bad, but if not I’ve little recourse but to download the drivers the annoying Windows way, as described in the “Installing Software” section.

Using The Menu

While we’re talking about installing software on Windows compared to Ubuntu I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out my Windows pet peeve. When I install a program on Windows, it is added to the Start Menu. Where is the program added? In a folder named for the company that made the software.

This is infuriating to me, because knowing which program made the software doesn’t tell me what the program in question does. There are so many sub-menus that I frequently don’t know where to begin. Compare this mess to Ubuntu’s menu, which arranges programs by what they do:

Only five sub-menus, and all with a certain logic to them.

To be fair, the Start menu in Vista/Windows 7 is a little better than this in that I can search for a program. This means I can avoid ever looking at the terrible menu ever again. But this seems more like working around the issue instead of repairing it.

Changing Your Theme

Changing your color scheme on Windows is easy, but if you want to customize beyond changing the palette some work is in order. I use a custom theme on my Windows XP system, but installing it was anything but easy. I needed to hack a certain DLL to achieve this, something I should probably highlight in a future tutorial.

I’ll never need to write a tutorial explaining how to do this on Ubuntu, however, because it’s dead simple. Just click “System,” then “Preferences,” then “Appearance.” You’ll be shown a number of quality themes, and switching to any one is as easy as clicking it. If these themes aren’t enough for you, head over to Gnome-Look and find something that suits you. Installing the theme is as simple as dragging the downloaded package to your “Appearance” window.

I should make a confession here: I’ve never attempted to do this in Windows 7. By the looks of Karl’s article about the top 5 Windows 7 themes, customization is now Ubuntu-like in Windows 7. Good to hear!

Getting Updates

When it comes to updates, Windows is a jungle. Adobe, Apple, Google and many more companies will all install their own update managers to your computer, most of which will bother you every time you boot your computer asking you to update various products.

On Ubuntu, there is only one update manager. This means keeping all your software up to date is simple, and that you don’t have 30,000 programs bothering you every time you boot your machine.

Sharing Your Wireless Connection Via Ethernet

Recently I wrote an article about sharing your wireless connection in Ubuntu. Since then I’ve switched the computer on my desk to Windows, and I cannot for the life of me figure out a way to achieve the same thing. Maybe you commenters can help me out, but every configuration I’ve used to share my wireless Internet connection via Ethernet in Windows resulted in my wireless not working anymore.

So I’m going to go ahead and say this is easier to do in Ubuntu, half because it’s true and half because I think this will cause one of you guys to recommend a Windows method that works for me.

Conclusion

In many ways, Ubuntu is easier to use than Windows. Does this mean Ubuntu is superior to Windows? Of course not, and I wouldn’t suggest so. You should use whatever operating system works best for you.

All I wanted to do was challenge the conception that Windows is easier to use in every aspect. Ubuntu has become easier to use every year, and I think even inspired a few of the changes in Windows 7 (I’d love to see a Windows 7 ad in which a Linux developer claims Windows 7 was his idea, because unlike the people in those silly advertisements the Linux developer would probably be right.) This isn’t a bad thing: competition makes everything better. Whenever new improvements are introduced to the operating system market, eventually everyone wins.

Please also note that most of the things described here are true of other Linux distributions as well, and the only reason I left these distributions out is that saying “before you install Linux you must choose from the thousands of distributions out there” hardly helps the argument that Linux is easy to use. For the vast majority of new Linux users Ubuntu is an excellent starting point, and that’s why I’m highlighting it here.

What do you guys think? Do these things sound easier to do on Ubuntu than Windows to you? Can you think of anything else easier in one operating system than another? We have a comments section, so comment!

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10 Ways How Photoshop Changed The History Of Photography

2010-04-17T17:11:00.000+01:00

10 Ways How Photoshop Changed The History Of Photography: "

In the past, you had to be very patient as a digital photographer. If you wanted to catch something spectacular you had to carry your camera with you everywhere until you saw something special. To capture a sunrise you had to get up at the crack of dawn. Models had to spend hours in the makeup room and studios had to be well lit. Everything I just mentioned changed instantly with the invention of Photoshop.

Photoshop has changed the history of digital photography. Nowadays, when you look at an amazing photo or image your first impression is still “wow” but your immediate second thought is “that has to be photoshopped”. When you think of the history of Photoshop and everything Photoshop did to change the game, it’s pretty insane.

In this article, I’m going to cover some of the ways how Photoshop has changed digital photography forever.

How We See The World

The most significant effect Photoshop has had on us is how we see our world. Digital artists and manipulators know how to take an ordinary photograph and turn it into something completely different and extraordinary.

Images that are photoshopped really have me doubting reality sometimes. Whether they have to do with people, places, or things, you can’t argue with the creativity and time that goes into some of these images. They give you a new perspective on the world.

How We View History

Aside from the historical significance of digital photography, Photoshop has changed the way we view history in general. Historical photographs can be photoshopped just as easily as any other image, which leaves you wondering if you are viewing a historical painting or a modern piece of Photoshop art.

How We Advertise

I bet you were wondering when I was going to get to this part. Advertising has changed forever due to image manipulation. You can’t look through a magazine without seeing dozens of photoshopped ads (I dare you to try).

Think about what this means. To me, this says that companies that used to run text ads or had to hire a photographer to take their photos can now just pay someone to make their ad on a Mac or PC. Photoshop has changed advertising and business as a whole.

How We View The Human Form

Photoshop has also changed our image of what the perfect person looks like. With models and celebrities – most notably – we have seen Photoshop go into every magazine cover and spread in modern existence. Allow me to touch on a few examples of this.

Erasing Blemishes

Ever wonder how your favorite actor looks so perfect all the time? Well, they don’t. Image editing has led us to believe that some people are actually perfect in appearance, when in reality these photos have been doctored. You want to look perfect in all of your photos? Start learning Photoshop.

Adding Style

You can do anything you want to a person on Photoshop. Hair color, eye color, fashion, you name it – you can change everything.

Age Progression

Want to see what Katie Holmes might look like in a few dozen years? Someone’s already thought of that.

You can use Photoshop for practical means like predicting age progression. It takes a bit of talent, but nonetheless it’s a possibility.

How We Witness Nature

If you’ve ever seen Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel you know that there are some beautiful places on this planet with some crazy looking creatures living there. Photoshop has allowed artists to get even more creative with nature and create their own species and landscapes. See the skull in that tree?

What We Find Humorous

A lot of photoshopped images are meant to be funny. Creators use irony and humor to adapt digital photos to make us laugh.

To Make Fantasy Reality

Aside from all the real world examples of Photoshop history, images are constantly created to invoke our imagination. When you look at one of these pieces of art you are able to visualize the artist’s dreams and fantasies. What did we do before this?

Conclusion

These are the 10 ways I’ve noticed that Photoshop has changed the history of the digital photograph. There’s got to be more but these things just don’t jump out at me anymore due to the norms I’m accustomed to in the Photoshop era.

What do you think about Photoshop? Has it affected your life in some way? Leave your thoughts, ideas, comments, and praises below!

Image Credits: Gizmodo, Village of Joy, BestPhotoshopTurotials, Hongkiat, catfish08

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3 Impressive Photoshop Effects Performed In Less Than 5 Minutes

2010-04-17T17:08:00.000+01:00

3 Impressive Photoshop Effects Performed In Less Than 5 Minutes: "

Photoshop as we know, is the mother of all image editing software. Rarely does a software achieve so much competence and popularity in its niche as Photoshop has done.

One of the downsides of so many features in a single piece of software is that it gets cumbersome and difficult to learn for newbies.

Well fret not, here are 3 Photoshop effects that you can do in under 5 minutes to make your photos look a bit more stylish!

Edge Vignetting

Edge vignetting is another common and very impressive Photoshop effect. While purists may argue about its classification as an edge effect, it definitely adds to the overall image and can catch the eye onto the subject of attention. Here is how to achieve it:

Create a new layer atop of the photo layer and fill it with black.

Select the elliptical marquee tool and draw a large selection that covers the majority of the photo. Alternatively, you can choose to draw over the subject you want to get all the attention. Lowering the opacity of the black layer might help in seeing what you are doing.

Feather the selection by visiting Select > Modify > Feather. The pixel value you choose here depends largely on the resolution of the photo you are working with.

With the selection in place and the black layer selected, hit the Delete key, now change the blend mode of the black layer to soft light. If the effect is too intense you can play with the opacity to tone it down.

The effect is in place. You can make the final tweaks by moving the black layer or scaling it up if you need to move the vignette.

The Polaroid Photoshop Effect

A very common effect and very easy to achieve at the same time. Assuming you have the photo you want to work on open inside Photoshop, here are the steps you need to take to get the Polaroid Photoshop effect:

Hold down Alt and double-click on the background layer in the layers palette, this should unlock the layer. Now Hold down the Ctrl key and click on the new layer icon in the layer’s palette, this would create a new layer beneath the current layer.

With the photo layer selected, hit Ctrl+T to activate the free transform tool. Hold down Shift, Alt and then click and drag one of the corners inwards so as to make the photo smaller, you can also crop some parts of the photo to make it a square and rotate to add some realism.

Double-click on the photo layer. In the Layer Styles dialog that opens check Drop shadow, and stroke, change the stroke to inside and increase the width till you get a decent border going along the edges.

Now hold down the Ctrl key and click on the layer thumbnail of the photo layer to load it as a selection. Head over to Select > Transform Selection. Hold down the Alt+Shift key while you drag one of the corner handle inwards

Leave the selection as it is and click on the layer mask icon in the layers palette You will notice that the are outside the selection has been hidden.

You can now apply different kinds of transformations, brushes, filters on the layer mask (note) to get different kinds of borders. As an example, click on the layer mask and grab the brush tool. Select one of the natural or special effect brushes.

With white as the foreground color, start painting over the black portions of the layer mask. You will see the hidden part of the photo revealing itself albeit in the form of brush strokes.

Optionally, you can add custom backgrounds or gradients to the layer beneath, add an extra white strip to the bottom of the photo before the transformation in step 2, add some text or whatever seems right! You can also stack more than one photos on top of each other and follow the above steps to get a cool collage

Cool Borders

You can also use Photoshop to create cool borders for your photos quickly and easily. Here is how:

Alt + Double-click the background (photo) layer to unlock it. Ctrl + click on the new layer button in the layer’s palette to create a new layer below the photo layer. Fill this newly created layer with white.

Now, hold down the Ctrl key and click on the layer thumbnail of the photo layer to load it as a selection. Head over to Select > Transform Selection. Hold down the Alt+Shift key while you drag one of the corner handle inwards

Leave the selection as it is and click on the layer mask icon in the layers palette. You will notice that the are outside the selection has been hidden.

You can now apply different kinds of transformations, brushes, filters on the layer mask (note) to get different kinds of borders. As an example, click on the layer mask and grab the brush tool. Select one of the natural or special effect brushes.

With white as the foreground color, start painting over the black portions of the layer mask. You will see the hidden part of the photo revealing itself albeit in the form of brush strokes.

Do you know of some other Photoshop effects that can be done just as quickly? Share them with us in the comments!

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Myth of the month – April 2010

2010-04-17T17:06:00.000+01:00

Myth of the month – April 2010: "

Dispelling the myth that HSE still bans this, that and the other.

In reality HSE has banned very little outright, apart from a few high-risk exceptions like asbestos, which kills around 4000 people a year.

View the myth of the month for April 2010

HSE Chair Judith Hackitt urges schools to take more risks

2010-04-17T17:04:00.000+01:00

HSE Chair Judith Hackitt urges schools to take more risks: "

In an article in the Times Educational Supplement, HSE Chair Judith Hackitt sets the record straight on school trips.

View ‘Putting the record straight’ article ‘HSE Chair Judith Hackitt urges schools to take more risks’

Top 10 Atheism Quotes

2010-03-23T23:35:00.000Z

Top 10 Atheism Quotes: "

There are hundreds of great atheism quotes out there. Like most skillful turns of phrase, they all sound good. But there are many I disagree with, for example 'All thinking men are atheists' (Ernest Hemmingway).

Or consider this Julian Baggini quote: 'Goblins, hobbits... truly everlasting gobstoppers... God is just one of the things that atheists don't believe in, it just happens to be the thing that, for historical reasons, gave them their name.' Actually, no. Perhaps we could say that God is just one of many things that naturalists don't believe in, or something like that, but atheism is defined only by a lack of belief in gods.

There are hundreds of other atheism quotes to choose from, but these are the ones that strike me most deeply right now.

My 10 favorite atheism quotes

When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

Stephen Roberts

When I was a kid I had an imaginary friend and I used to think that he went everywhere with me, and that I could talk to him and that he could hear me, and that he could grant me wishes and stuff. And then I grew up, and I stopped going to church.

Jimmy Carr

Believe nothing,

No matter where you read it,

Or who has said it,

Not even if I have said it,

Unless it agrees with your own reason

And your own common sense.

Buddha

To understand via the heart is not to understand.

Michel de Montaigne

I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.

Jules Renard

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish.

Anonymous

Do not pass by my epitaph, traveler.

But having stopped, listen and learn, then go your way.

There is no boat in Hades, no ferryman Charon,

No caretaker Aiakos, no dog Cerberus.

All we who are dead below

Have become bones and ashes, but nothing else.

I have spoken to you honestly, go on, traveler,

Lest even while dead I seem talkative to you.

Ancient Roman tombstone

An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question.

John McCarthy

Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.

Blaise Pascal

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

Anonymous

HTML clocks using JavaScript and CSS rotation

2010-03-14T20:14:00.000Z

HTML clocks using JavaScript and CSS rotation: "

Warning: This isn't going to work in any currently available version of Internet Explorer* or many older browsers. The two clocks below are just HTML. There are no Adobe Flash files or my beloved <canvas> going on, just regular <div> and < img> tags. The way it works is by taking those images in an { overflow: hidden } <div> and rotating them, via JavaScript, using the proposed CSS transform property. Clock second-hand Clock minute-hand Clock ...

Kitchen Hack: One-Minute Bread

2010-03-14T19:42:00.000Z

Kitchen Hack: One-Minute Bread: "

Oven-fresh bread is one of life’s simple joys. Ciabatta, a crisp-crusted Italian bread with hints of sourdough and loads of crannies longing for butter, is one of the easiest breads to make at home.

Why are we talking about baking bread on Lifehack? Because kitchen hacks aren’t just impressive, they often have very tasty results! In this instance, I’m going to show you how to make ciabatta with less than one minute of prep time. How is that possible? Like many great hacks, this one uses simple ingredients and as few steps as possible to get the job done.

You may have heard of “no-knead” bread before. Mark Bittman and many others have promoted their versions of an artisan bread that doesn’t require any heavy labor. While those recipes also create delicious results, they involve too many steps to be considered a real hack.

I wanted something very, very simple that delivered great results in 60 seconds of prep time or less. It may take you a few tries to get below the one-minute mark, but I think you’ll enjoy the results every time!

For your ciabatta you’ll need:

4 cups of all-purpose flour
2 cups of warm water
1 teaspoon of salt
1/4 teaspoon of granulated yeast (or equivalent)

You’ll also need a medium-size mixing bowl, a 10×15 cookie sheet or baking stone, a hand towel or plastic wrap, and whatever you’d like to keep your bread from sticking (if you’re using a pan, I use flour and corn meal).

Have everything handy? Good. Let’s do this!

1. Mix Water & Yeast

Pour the warm water into the medium-size mixing bowl and stir in the yeast with a spoon. No need to be particular, just dump and slosh.

2. Add Flour And Salt

Add flour and salt to your bowl of yeasty water. This, after measuring out the flour, presents another prime opportunity to get flour on your person. This will be regarded by many as a sign of your culinary determination. You’ll need such signs because anybody who actually watches you make the bread will think you’re one of the laziest bakers in existence.

3. Stir Into A Heavy Batter

Use a spoon. You could use your hands if you wanted but you probably didn’t wash your hands before starting this anyhow. Start with a quick run about around the perimeter of the bowl with your spoon. A few quick strokes through the middle and you should have a heavy batter. If it looks too thick to be pancake batter and not thick enough to be playdough, you’re right on target.

4. Set It And Nearly Forget It

Cover your project with a hand towel or plastic wrap and set in a safe place for a few hours. After the dough has rested for 8 to 12 hours, it will have nearly doubled in size. (If you add a bit of sugar at the start and you’re in a hurry, you can rush this process but I don’t recommend it for your first try.)

5. Preheat Oven & Prepare Your Pan

There’s a lot of room for variation at this stage. The goal is to place the dough onto a surface that will keep it from falling through the oven rack and not stick on. I use an old cookie sheet sprinkled with flour and corn meal. You can use a buttered pan, pizza stone, or baking paper. It’s up to you. The flour/cornmeal method takes only a few seconds.

Before you start prepping your pan/stone, set your oven to 400F. (For those of you using wood stoves, don’t stress the particulars. Pull a few cedar shingles off the back porch roof and get that fire burning hot!)

6. Pour Out The Batter

This is the fun part! Uncover the bowl of dough and slowly pour it out onto the pan you just prepared for it. You’ll want to use a spoon to guide the dough into place and get the last bits out of the bowl. The dough will be very wet and sticky. That’s okay! Get the dough out onto the pan and if you’re lucky, it’ll look something like this:

7. Add Spices (If Needed) & Place Bread Into 400F Oven

If you’re trying to stay within the one-minute prep, you probably won’t have time to sprinkle some of your favorite herbs onto your ciabatta before baking. If you’re not worried about time, some dried oregano, basil, and rosemary make a nice addition.

8. Remove Your Ciabatta From The Oven

Check on your ciabatta after about 25 minutes. Once it’s golden brown on top and looks good to eat, take it out of the oven and set it aside to cool for at least 10 minutes. You can cut into it immediately but if you do it’ll collapse and won’t look as pretty.

Wait! You really thought I wanted you to take a hot pan out of a 400F oven without some sort of protection? Craziness! If you don’t have an oven mitt handy, take off your shirt, fold it so there will be at least 6 layers of cloth protecting your hand, remove the pan from the oven and place in a safe spot to cool.

9. Slice & Enjoy

Move your ciabatta off the pan or baking stone and onto a proper cutting board for demolition and devouring. Ciabatta is famous as a sandwich bread but, like most breads, it’s absolutely delicious right out of the oven.

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Feedback Time!

What do you think of this hack?
Will you try it? (Let me know if you do. I’d love to see a photo of your results, too!)
Would you like to see more articles like this on Lifehack? If so, is there something in particular you’d like us to cover?

Follow @lifehackorg on Twitter

I'm an editor here at Stepcase Lifehack. I know the value of long walks, good books, joyful repartee, and a well-made martini. Say hello in the comments here, find me on my blog or hit me up for a follow on Twitter.

6 Scary Emails To Send To Friends As A Practical Joke

2010-03-14T17:35:00.000Z

6 Scary Emails To Send To Friends As A Practical Joke: "

April is coming up and you know what that means, don’t you? April Fools’ Day will be celebrated around the globe on April 1st. For you that means that it’s time to prepare pranks to play on your friends!

If you have friends that live too far away to literally play a practical joke on them, you could send them an email instead. Here is a list of 6 scary emails to send to friends.

Scary Stories

Do you know someone who is scared easily? Then you don’t have to come up with anything smart, you can simply send them a scary story just in time for bedtime. Maybe spice it up by adding some pictures or by sending it anonymously. Scary For Kids has a neat collection of scary stories.

Dead Fake

Dead Fake is a service that lets you send anonymous emails. That alone is not a prank. The thing with this site is that you can make your email appear to come from anyone you choose. Do I need to say more?

You could pretend to be your friend’s boss or a government official and I’m sure you can come up with content that will scare your friend. After all, you know them best!

If you’re short of ideas, check out this Prank Ideas site.

Fright Gauge

Do you have a friend who is very proud of their “visual acuity”? Send them this “Find the Fiend” gauge to reveal how well their eyesight is. It will show them just how much higher-than-average their perception skills really are.

A similar page better suited for a younger audience is Where’s Waldo.

Online Hearing Test

For this one to work, you have to embed the code on a website or one of your social network profiles and then send your friend the link. Unfortunately, the source website gives quite a few clues to this being a fake test. However, if you manage to set this up somewhere, it’s one of the most scary tests to email a friend. Fortunately, the code to embed the test is included.

A similar test is Color Vision Deficiency.

Driver’s License Search

This is a website prank. The site claims that the National Motor Vehicle License Organization is now required by law to provide public access to all US driver’s licenses online. It’s the perfect prank to play on someone who has been refusing to show you their passport or driver’s license with the claim that their picture was so ugly. You can now tell them how shocked you were by how ugly their photo really was.

WOT warns that this page has a poor reputation. Well, does it really surprise you?

The Dexter Hit List

If you want to scare someone in the UK, take advantage of this ingenious video generator. Be sure to enter your victim’s full name, their real age range, an actual occupation, and a real characteristic of them into the form.

Your friend will receive a link to icetruck.tv, a video webpage. The video is that of a press conference in which a serial murder is described with hints to potential future victims. At the end of the video the prank is revealed, so no reasons to worry.

The preview for the video did not work for me, the link that is emailed, however, worked perfectly.

Do you want to remain anonymous when sending scary emails to friends?

Simon showed you How To Send Completely Anonymous Emails

Are you looking for more scary stuff? Here is some material for you:

Ryan found the Top 5 Sites With Scary Stuff That Makes You Jump

I gathered up the Top 5 Spooky Websites That Will Keep You Awake At Night

Sharninder listed the Top 6 Sites To Watch Horror Movies Online for Free

If, however, you’re looking for more pranks to play, check out these articles:

Justin described Four Funny Ways To Prank Your Parents With The Family Computer

John wrote about the Top 3 Fake News Prank Story Generators

Simon explained Two Great’n Simple Nerdy Office Pranks to Play On Friends

Ryan has written about 4 Really Popular Prank Call Websites & How They Work

I compiled a list of 20+ Prank Phone Numbers To Hand To A Bad Date

What is the best prank you ever played on someone?

Image credits: svilen001

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

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New RoSPA Website Launched Today

2010-03-14T16:40:00.000Z

New RoSPA Website Launched Today: "RoSPA's new and improved website will be launched today. Subscribers to the current RSS Feed will need to visit the new site - due to be launched at 1.30pm (GMT) and re-subscribe."

20 Most Popular Open Source Software Ever

2010-03-11T19:28:00.000Z

20 Most Popular Open Source Software Ever These days, you can quite easily buy a brand-spanking-new computer and install all the software you need for free, using applications offered under the Open Software License. You can get a free image editor, a free sound editor, a free word processor, media player, file archiver, PDF creator… the list goes on and on and on. While some of these free apps do not offer quite the same level of polished functionality as their commercial rivals, others far exceed the capabilities of everything else on the market. Below, we take a close look at the cream of the crop: 20 invaluable and indispensable open source applications that you really should be using, if you’re not already. The vast majority of them are cross-platform and absolutely 100% free! You’re bound to find several that are perfectly suited to your needs.

1. WordPress

WordPress is the world’s most popular blogging platform, used by a staggering 202 million websites. As simple or as complex as you want it to be, WordPress is supported by a wide array of plugins which can be used to transform a standard blog into anything you could possibly desire. Besides blogs, WordPress can be used as a straightforward content management system to power anything from an e-commerce site to a social network.

2. Magento

Magento, used by 30,000 merchants, including Samsung, Nespresso and The North Face, is the world’s fastest growing e-commerce platform. Magento Community Edition is offered for free under the Open Software License. The Enterprise Edition, for which you have to pay, offers features like multi-store capability, store credits and gift cards, out-of-the-box.

3. Mozilla Firefox

Firefox currently accounts for 24.43% of the recorded usage share of web browsers, but this figure is on the rise. Already the browser of choice for most web professionals, Firefox’s popularity is growing thanks to its vast selection of third party add-ons, which let users tailor their browsing environment down to the finest detail.

4. Mozilla Thunderbird

With its speedy searches, built-in RSS feeds, strong security and superb add-ons, Thunderbird has to be the best, free email application available. If you’re prepared to spend some time tailoring your email environment with add-ons, you’ll absolutely love it, but it’s probably not ideal for complete novices.

5. FileZilla

FileZilla is a hugely successful, cross-platform FTP client. It’s also available as a server, for Windows only. Created in January 2001 by Tim Klosse as a class project, FileZilla has gone on to become the 5th most popular download of all time from SourceForge.net.

6. GnuCash

GnuCash provides a great, free alternative to paid-for accounting software. Designed for personal and small business use, it offers bank account, stock, income and expense tracking, in addition to double-entry accounting.

7. Audacity

Music software like Cubase and Logic Pro can be incredibly expensive, which is why an increasing number of people are turning to Audacity, a free, cross-platform sound editor. Users can record and edit live audio; cut, copy, splice and mix sounds; and convert ageing tapes and records into digital format.

8. GIMP

Just like sound editors, industry standard image editing software is prohibitively expensive for a lot of people, but GIMP provides a free alternative. It performs every major function you could desire, except for, vitally, CMYK separation functionality necessary for prepress work.

9. OpenOffice

With the ability to create text documents, spreadsheets, presentations and databases, OpenOffice is an accomplished rival to Microsoft Office, which clearly influenced OpenOffice’s design. Microsoft Office users will feel completely at home and find that OpenOffice performs just as well, if not better.

10. VLC

At last count, VLC media player had been downloaded 300 million times. Unlike some paid-for alternatives, VLC supports practically every audio/video codec and file format. The most recent VLC release also offers live recording of streaming video, frame-by-frame advancement and superb speed controls.

11. Handbrake

Handbrake rips/converts DVDs to MPEG-4 for playing back on your iPod or archiving. It doesn’t have the ability to decode DVDs, but can do so if you have VLC, which includes a DVD encoder, installed on your computer.

12. Pidgin

Pidgin is the ultimate, free instant messaging tool. It provides you with one window through which you can simultaneously interact with different people, whichever instant messaging platform they’re using.

13. Freemind

Freemind is a terrific mind-mapping tool, which lets you get all your thoughts down as quickly as possible with the use of icons, shapes and colors. Besides the ordinary nodes and links, you can add hyperlinks and even documents to your maps.

14. Notepad++

Reliable, customizable, intuitive and free, Notepad++ is the most popular Windows-based CSS editor around. It offers everything: syntax highlighting; folding and auto-completion for CSS, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, XML and PHP; multi-file viewing; tabbed editing; zoom in/out; and bookmarks.

15. 7-Zip

7-Zip is an extremely popular file archiver for Windows, which, although free, outperforms Winzip. It can unpack the vast majority of archive formats and can create TAR and GZ archives, commonly used on Unix and Linux systems, as well as its own 7z format, which easily outshrinks ZIP files.

16. Blender

Blender is a 3D content creation suite which can be used for everything from modeling to skinning, particle simulation, animating and texturing. Unlike some other free apps in this list, Blender has not been designed to “imitate” other 3D graphics software, which means it takes a bit of getting used to, but once you’ve familiarized yourself with all the shortcuts, you’ll be hooked.

17. PDFCreator

Windows users can consider PDFCreator a credible rival to Adobe Acrobat. Creating PDFs is as easy as printing, literally, as once installed, you can select PDFCreator as your printer, letting you create PDFs from practically any application.

18. Calibre

According to Calibre, it’s the “one stop solution to all your e-book needs”. I’m inclined to agree. Besides letting you catalogue and manage your e-book collection, sorting, tagging and commenting on them as you please, you can download content from the internet and convert it into e-book form.

19. TrueCrypt

TrueCrypt really is the best free encryption program around for anyone worried about their security. It offers 11 algorithms for encrypting your files, as well as a comprehensive help manual, which gives advice on complex password creation, hidden volumes and erasing encryption giveaways.

20. Ubuntu

Named after an African philosophy of community, sharing and generosity, Ubuntu is a free operating system for Linux that’s quick and easy to use. Recent figures suggest that around 50% of Linux users have Ubuntu installed. With its focus on usability, Ubuntu comes with OpenOffice, Firefox Empathy, Pidgin, GIMP and other tools pre-installed.

Author : Tom Walker

Tom is a designer and writer who works with a UK based online shop specialising in Epson printer ink, toner, paper and other printing accessories. You can read more of his writing on their blog.

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Placing An Ad For Free – Affiliate Programs Don’t Always Work

2010-03-11T19:19:00.000Z

Placing An Ad For Free – Affiliate Programs Don’t Always Work: "

If you’re like me, while you enjoy blogging, you would also appreciate receiving a little bit of income for your efforts. Google Adsense is probably the most popular tool beginning bloggers use to generate revenue from a website, but what about all of those unbelievable stories about affiliate programs that can generate thousands upon thousands of dollars of income a month?

Just like every other industry, Internet marketing has its share of marketing schemes and scams. Countless websites out there promise that if you purchase their e-book for $39.95, you’ll become an Internet millionaire in less than two to three years. And just like every other industry, those who get sucked into the scam quickly learn the basic truth of life that Thomas Edison left us many years ago – Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration. That, my friends, is the gods-honest truth.

With this basic truth in mind, I’d like to provide those of you who are looking for such a way to make at least a decent level of income online with a glimmer of hope in the world of affiliate business – let this be your 10 percent of inspiration, and then I’ll leave the 90 percent of perspiration up to you.

Putting Up an Ad for Free – Affiliate Program Mistakes

Before I get to a system that does work, I’m going to cover my own early online advertising mistakes so that others can avoid them. I’m not too proud to admit to these – it’s important to fall before you can run when you’re starting out with your blog or website, as you know you will not have hundreds of thousands of clicks every month.

Mistake #1 – Ads Unrelated to Content. Making money with affiliate advertising when you have a high-volume website (like MakeUseOf) requires far less work and creativity than making money from a small blog. Does that mean that it’s not possible? Not necessarily. But the one biggest mistake many new bloggers make after signing up for numerous affiliate programs is just to publish the advertisements along the side of their blog and call it good.

Sometimes blogs will include ads that are relevant to the content in the blog, but other times the ads really make no sense. For example, what’s a National Geographic ad doing on a blog about SEO and web content?

Mistake #2 – Unfocused Affiliate Campaign. Another common mistake beginning bloggers make is that they’ll head out and try to sign up for as many affiliate programs as possible, and then place those ads on every single website across the net that they are affiliated with. Unfortunately, most visitors to a blog or website are already inclined to ignore sidebar or banner advertising, so using ads that run the entire gamut, and for the most part are unrelated to the content, simply increases the odds that the ads will be ignored.

Mistake #3 – Ignoring the Advertising Potential of Your Content. If you travel through the amateur blogosphere, you’ll see countless blogs with ads plastered across the top, bottom and sidebar of the blog, and not a single advertisement within the content itself. Ironically, it’s actually the inverse that serves as a more effective method to get people to click on the ads. Most website owners across the net have recognized this truth in terms of the dramatically higher click-through rates with Google ads that are situated within the content itself.

This one subtle change in your website advertising tactics can easily increase your clickthrough rates by 10 to 20% or more. It doesn’t only work with Google Adsense – it will work just as well with your affiliate advertisements. So, keep your header and footer banners if you must, but remove those gaudy sidebar advertisements and start carefully and tactfully inserting your affiliate ads into your content itself. After all, this is where your readers are focused on when they visit your site, so it’s exactly where your advertising should go.

Focusing On A Niche & Showing Me The Money

Now, for the secret weapon that will take your carefully placed affiliate ads and send the click-through rates into the stratosphere. The secret to “winning” the traffic game as a little guy on a newer blog with lower pagerank is by identifying online niche areas that have little competition but very high demand. Yes, there are tools that the big boys have which provide targeted insight and SEO analysis, but quite honestly anyone can perform a similar analysis for free – it just takes a little bit more effort.

Just remember the two principles – high demand (search engine searches) and low competition (other high-ranked websites offering content). If you think that every popular topic already has something written about it online – think again. To find high volume keywords, we will once again turn to Google Adwords.

Here, I’ve conducted a search for “dog” – a very generic and popular term. As you can see, if you sort by “Search Volume,” you will have the terms with the highest monthly search rate. While the competition numbers in here may not look too promising, don’t worry. Just scroll down the list and look for high volume keywords with at least less than 3/4 bar of competition. Once you have a good list, the next step is to really examine the actual competition that’s out there. To do this, I recommend a great free tool called Niche Watch.

To show what you’re looking for, I’ve conducted a search for a highly popular and highly competitive term – “ghost hunting.” Niche Watch gives you the top 20 ranked competitors for that search term. As you can see here, the Anchor, Title and Text columns are filled in pretty well. This means that not only are the top competitors ranked highly for the term – but Google likely ranks the site highly, and your little blog will have a lot of difficulty “beating out” those sites to the top of Google results for that term. On the other hand, you will eventually discover that one of your high-volume keywords have Niche Watch results that look like the following.

Here, you’ll notice a lot of empty spaces under Anchor, Title and Text. These are the terms where you can easily skate up to the top of Google results on a very popular term, so long as you use the SEO techniques that we’ve discussed earlier. If you perform your optimizing better than those competitors (who are, for the most part, already not valued very highly by Google) – you will get the majority of that traffic.

How High Traffic Benefits Your Affiliate Business

Forget about the $39.95 book about how to get rich quick with an affiliate business. You can get rich, but by working smart, not quick. The recipe for success is no secret – these are the only steps you need.

1. Simply identify those niche search terms that so many people are searching for, yet there’s barely any useful content online for.

2. Register a domain name that capitalizes on that specific keyword phrase.

3. Create optimized (and valuable) content on the website, with your content-relevant affiliate advertisements embedded tastefully throughout.

Obviously, there’s much more to developing a successful website from scratch – but if you don’t already have a highly popular website, then focusing on an underserved niche is the only path to success for an entrepreneur like yourself.

Please share your experiences with your own affiliate business efforts and any tips that you would offer anyone who is new to the business in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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(9)How To Value Your Blog Or Website To Sell It (Part Two)

Subscribe to the HSE Newsletter

2010-03-11T19:16:00.000Z

Subscribe to the HSE Newsletter: "

Subscribe to HSE’s Health and Safety Newsletter and you’ll find out the best ways to tackle today’s key health and safety issues. The newsletter is published six times a year and all subscribers are eligible for a 10 per cent discount on all other purchases from HSE Books.

For example, in the latest issue, you can read about controlling health risks in the workplace, find out about our new stress website…

Subscribe to the HSE Newsletter

Press Release : SAFE AT HOME PASSES MILESTONE OF 100 LOCAL SCHEMES

2010-03-11T19:15:00.000Z

Press Release : SAFE AT HOME PASSES MILESTONE OF 100 LOCAL SCHEMES: "More than 100 local schemes have been approved to join Safe At Home, the national home safety equipment scheme run by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents."

Google killed Bambi

2010-03-04T22:28:00.000Z

Google killed Bambi: "

So much for “Do No Evil”…

via reddit.com

Want to see more Google Streetview fun? Check out our collection of ”The Best Google Street View Fails, Wins, And WTF’s“.

Refreshing The Ubuntu Brand

2010-03-04T22:27:00.000Z

Refreshing The Ubuntu Brand: "

The new style of Ubuntu is driven by the theme “Light”. We’ve developed a comprehensive set of visual guidelines and treatments that reflect that style, and are updating key assets like the logo accordingly. The new theme takes effect in 10.04 LTS and will define our look and feel for several years.

Ubuntu has seen a tremendous amount of growth and change since it was conceived in 2004. Back then it was a small project with strong ambitions and a handful of developers passionate about delivering a world class Linux Operating System that can compete on every level with Microsoft and Apple. We adopted a style based on the tagline “Linux for Human Beings”, and called it “Human”. Six years on we have made incredible progress. Ubuntu is a global phenomenon: we have carved out a pervasive culture of quality and design, thoughtful usability and great technology all fused together in a project that maintains the same commitment to community and collaborative development that we embraced back in 2004.

In 2009, a small team lead by Mark Shuttleworth, conducted a review of our key brand values and identity. Based on that work, a set of visual treatments were produced, and shared with key members of the Ubuntu Art community, spanning the core distributions, derivatives, and aligned efforts like the Forums. Representatives from Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Mythbuntu, SpreadUbuntu and more came to London and worked with the Canonical design team to refine the designs and work together. The results of that work are presented here.

This collection of community representatives worked with the design team and created some great work. Some examples:

In addition to this we also worked with our key governance boards: the Community Council, Technical Board, Forums Council, LoCo Council and others around this work to ensure that our community can use it to it’s best advantage.

Brand Values

The key values we believe are reflected in the Ubuntu project are:

Precision. We ship high quality software, and we ship it exactly on schedule. Our Debian heritage means that the individual components of our platform are tightly defined and neatly arranged. There is no excess, no fat, and no waste in Ubuntu. We are a community that thrives on delivery.

Reliability. We are building Ubuntu for serious use. Whether it is being deployed on the desktop or in the cloud, we care that Ubuntu is secure, reliable and predictable. We deliver updates to Ubuntu that are rigorously tested. When we make a mistake, we learn from it and put in place good processes to ensure that it does not happen again.

Collaboration. Ubuntu is the result of collaborative work between thousands of people, and it is both the beneficiary and the public face of the collaborative work of tens of thousands of free software developers who build individual upstream components, or aggregate them in Debian. We go to great lengths to ensure that anybody, anywhere, who is passionate about Ubuntu and competent to participate, can do so. We enable virtual participation in our physical Ubuntu Developer Summits, we use mailing lists and IRC in preference to over-the-cubicle-wall communications, and we welcome contributions from both companies and individuals. Our governance bodies reflect the diversity of that participation, and leadership or permissions are based on proven merit, not corporate employment.

Freedom. We strive to deliver the very best free software platform. Our highest mission is to accelerate the adoption and spread of free software, to make it the de facto standard way that people build and consume software. We celebrate the work of other groups committed to collaborative content development, and open content licensing. While we are pragmatic about this (we ship proprietary drivers when we believe they are a requirement to get free software working well on PC’s) we expressly do not include any proprietary applications in the default installation of Ubuntu. We want people to love and appreciate free software, and even though we work to make sure that Ubuntu is compatible with, certified with and iteroperable with popular proprietary software, we do so to facilitate the adoption of free alternatives to proprietary solutions.

While the branding has changed, the freedoms and rights have not: our global community will still maintain access to the resources needed to construct logos that use the branding. We will be providing the new font, images, colour specs, and a set of recommendations for creating branding for websites, t-shirts and the other needs of our community. As before we will protect the integrity of the Ubuntu brand with the Ubuntu Trademark Policy.

Light: Ubuntu is Lightware

The new style in Ubuntu is inspired by the idea of “Light”.

We’re drawn to Light because it denotes both warmth and clarity, and intrigued by the idea that “light” is a good value in software. Good software is “light” in the sense that it uses your resources efficiently, runs quickly, and can easily be reshaped as needed. Ubuntu represents a break with the bloatware of proprietary operating systems and an opportunity to delight to those who use computers for work and play. More and more of our communications are powered by light, and in future, our processing power will depend on our ability to work with light, too.

Visually, light is beautiful, light is ethereal, light brings clarity and comfort.

Historical perspective: From 2004-2010, the theme in Ubuntu was “Human”. Our tagline was “Linux for Human Beings” and we used a palette reflective of the full range of humanity. Our focus as a project was bringing Linux from the data center into the lives of our friends and global family.

Go and see the full details of the brand refresh here, with more images.

9GAG - What The Fun!

2010-03-04T22:25:00.000Z

9GAG - What The Fun!: "

9GAG - What The Fun!

New Managing for Health & Safety website launched

2010-03-02T23:34:00.002Z

New Managing for Health & Safety website launched: "

The site is designed to appeal to both those who are new to health & safety management and also to the more mature organisation. It brings together HSE’s current material on managing health and safety in one hub, and also identifies stakeholders’ best practice.

The site shows reasons why health & safety should be managed, what needs to be managed, (linking the New Strategy themes), and points to some management solutions. It’s the first step in developing the revision of HSG65 Successful Health and Safety Management.

New Managing for Health & Safety website launched

March 2010 myth of the month

2010-03-02T23:34:00.001Z

March 2010 myth of the month: "

Myth: Risk assessment is too complicated for me to do!

The reality: Carrying out a risk assessment should be straightforward. It’s about focusing on real risks and hazards that cause real harm and, more importantly, taking action to control them.

View March 2010 myth of the month details

HSE Safety Notice – electrically powered gates

2010-03-02T23:34:00.000Z

HSE Safety Notice – electrically powered gates: "

An incident involving the death of a child has highlighted the need to identify hazards in relation to gate design to ensure risks are managed and controlled.

HSE Safety Notice – electrically powered gates

Blackpool's highest window cleaner backs national safety campaign

2010-03-02T23:33:00.000Z

Blackpool's highest window cleaner backs national safety campaign

5 Websites To Play Music Matching Your Mood

2010-02-18T22:06:00.000Z

5 Websites To Play Music Matching Your Mood: "

In movies, music is used intensively to set the stage for a dramatic appearance or a sad goodbye. Just imagine Pretty Woman without Roy Orbison, Wayne’s World without Queen, Robin Hood without Bryan Adams, Men in Black without Will Smith, or Kill Bill without the entire soundtrack. These movies wouldn’t be the same.

Music can be entertaining, bring back memories, trigger strong feelings, distract, and comfort. Music creates moods because it betrays your brain and you can use this little trick in your favor. Apply music for your mood, in order to promote or change it.

Here are the 5 best websites that play music matching your mood or the mood you desire.

AUPEO!

AUPEO! was launched just over a year ago in Berlin, Germany. This explains the funny language on great parts of the website. However, the mood categories are pinned down in English, so you’re all set to go!

As you can probably guess by the screenshot, you can also play music you like by entering an artist you enjoy listening to. The stations are grouped by genre and are compiled by AUPEO!’s music experts. Within personal you can play your personal station, which is based on whatever you have previously listened to and requires that you sign up with AUPEO!.

MeeMix

MeeMix plays music you like. So it basically works like Last.fm or Pandora. You start a station by entering a song or artist, then you rate whatever MeeMix plays to you, and it will further refine its suggestions.

In addition to playing what you like, you can also push some sliders in the Mood Control on the bottom left to finetune the algorithm that picks the next song for you and plays music for your mood.

Moodstream

The start page of Moodstream has the following introduction:

Moodstream is a powerful brainstorming tool designed to help take you in an inspiring, unexpected direction. Whether you want images, footage or audio, or just need a stream of fresh ideas, tweak the Moodstream sliders to bring a whole new creative palette straight to you.

Moodstream is not only an audible, but also a visual experience. Getty Images has skillfully combined a clever interface with fantastic background pictures and animations. It’s a pleasure and I bet you’re ready for this!

You can select one of eight presets, including inspire, excite, refresh, intensify, simplify, or stabilize. You can also manually push the sliders to define your mood in various terms. Don’t forget to refresh the stream to activate changes.

A little drag is that Moodstream doesn’t play entire tunes, but only short snippets. However, you can add whatever you like to your Moodboard, save any combination of image/sound snippets, and play your board over and over again later.

Stereomood

Stereomood works on many different levels. You can use the inconspicuous search bar at the top and select music for your mood or activity. From the resulting playlist you can either play single songs or the entire list.

You can also pick a tag from the cloud and get a playlist with all matching songs.

A menu on the left reveals which songs with that tag are found in artist or mood categories. When you’re logged in you’ll see a like option and you can add songs to your library by clicking the plus icon. You can create custom playlists based on items you have added to your library.

Musicovery

Musicovery delivers the entire package. Pick genres, decade, and mood or dance-ability. The result is displayed in a visually inspiring cloud, which rapidly changes as you adjust your settings.

As a registered user you can like and ban songs. With a premium account you can also play any song you want from the playlist, play your favorite songs only, and all in hi-fi quality.

If you have a Mac, you can download a beta version of Musicovery and use it with your iTunes library. As a Mac user you might also want to try Moody. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, have a look at Moodagent.

What songs make you smile?

Image credits: 0GuaRDiaN0

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Photoshop Tips For Black & White Photography

2010-02-18T22:05:00.000Z

Photoshop Tips For Black & White Photography: "

One of the great features of digital photography is the ability to convert color images to black-and-white, or what some photographers call monochrome conversion. There’s little or no need to shoot digital photos in black-and-white when color images can easily be converted to black-and-white in Photoshop or a similar image editor. In this article, I’ll offer some black and white photography tips for Photoshop users.

So why would you want to convert an image to black-and-white? Well it’s pretty much an aesthetic decision. For me, I might convert to black-and-white because it conveys the mood of the subject I‘m shooting. This is the case for the image I use in this tutorial. Other times, the colors in an image simply might conflict with one another and distract from the focus of the image, so converting to black-and-white gets rid of the distracting color conflicts.

In some images, black-and-white conversion just has more aesthetic appeal. There’s no rule or equation you can apply to determine if a photograph will look great in monochrome. But it’s not a problem in digital photography. You simply make a duplicate copy of the color version, and then experiment with the monochrome version.

There are entire books devoted to black and white photography tips using Photoshop, but I’m going to describe a couple of pretty easy ways to make monochrome conversions in Photoshop that provide good results. I’m using Photoshop CS3 for this tutorial, but it should work pretty much the same way in CS4.

Quick Desaturate

For the bottom line quickest way to convert a color image to black-and-white, simply open the image in Photoshop, go to Image>Adjustments>Desaturate and viola you have a monochrome conversion. If you need to do it even faster, use the keyword shortcut or create an action that can do it in one click.

Black-And-White Converter

If you want more control over the conversion, you will want to use the black-and-white converter in Photoshop. Here’s how:

Duplicate the color version of the image you want to convert. Open the duplicated copy in Photoshop. Use whatever tools you need to correct exposure and contrast in the photo. I used Levels to lighten up the image some.

Now select the Black & White Adjustment Layer located at at the bottom of the Layers panel. Click on the black and white circle icon and choose Black & White. When you release the mouse, the converter will pop up.

If this is your first time using the converter, don’t let all the controls overwhelm you. First off, you can simply click the Auto button on the right side and see what Photoshop does to the image. That might all you need. If the shadows, highlights, and mid-tones look okay for you, then click OK and you’re done.

Another option is to try the pop-up menu of Presets in the converter. Just try the various menu items and see which one works best for your image. Typically, if you have a photo with lots of red or blue in it, you might try the High Contrast Red or Blue Filter, respectfully, first. But just play around with the presets. They are nondestructive. If you end up not liking the results, simply cancel the converter or delete the adjustment layer all together after you applied it.

Sometimes you might not want that stark monochrome look in an image. You might want to warm it up some. I use the Saturation slider at the bottom of the converter to mix in a little sepia into the black-and-white. Simply click the Tint button and it will apply the effect. The sepia will probably be too strong, so just move the slider back toward the left until you get the effect that you want.

Now for something a little more advanced. Notice that the converter has six color sliders. When you move those sliders to the left, it darkens the corresponding color in your image. Move it to the right, and it lightens the areas of the photo with the corresponding color.

If there is a particular part of the photo you want to lighten or darken, simply drag your cursor over that part and Photoshop will know which color slider to move and apply (note: I couldn’t get a screen capture to pick up how the cursor looks when I slide it across a part of the photo. But just hold down your mouse button on a part of the photo, drag it right and left and you will see a tiny hand icon appear. As you drag, you will see the changes take effect in the image).

In the case of this image, I wanted to lighten the man’s face, so I dragged the cursor over his face; Photoshop selected Red and lightened that part of the image.

Custom Preset: Finally, if there’s a particular black-and-white color mix that you want to use again in other photos, you can simply save your mixture as a custom preset and re-use it. See the screenshot below. You can also create a Photoshop action for your black-and-white mix to speed up the process even more.

Let me know if this process works for you and what questions or suggestions you have for black-and-white conversions in Photoshop. There are more advanced methods to use such as working with Channels, but that’s the subject of another article.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Myth of the month – February 2010

2010-02-03T21:27:00.001Z

Myth of the month – February 2010: "

Dispelling the health and safety myth: There’s nothing you can do about slips and trips and they don’t really hurt anyone anyway.

Most slips and trips are preventable and many happen when spills aren’t cleared up or clutter tidied away. Last year, there were four fatalities and more than 10 000 employees were seriously injured when they had a slip or trip at work.

View the February 2010 myth of the month

Slips, trips & falls caused 1,117 injuries to workers in the East Midlands

2010-02-03T21:27:00.000Z

Slips, trips & falls caused 1,117 injuries to workers in the East Midlands: "

Slip, trip and fall incidents in the workplace caused injuries to 1,117 workers and cost a worker’s life in the East Midlands last year, HSE warned today as it launched a hard-hitting campaign.

HSE figures show that slips and trips are the most common cause of major workplace injury in Britain and cost society an estimated £800 million each year. More workplace deaths are triggered by falls from height than any other cause, according to official statistics.

View press release ‘Slips, trips & falls caused 1,117 injuries to workers in the East Midlands’

From paper shreds to toilet paper

2010-02-01T18:41:00.000Z

From paper shreds to toilet paper: "

Now this is a machine that I just had to report about. A company known as Oriental (yes, it is an Asian company) has created a machine that is very appropriate for offices called the White Goat.

Yes, I would have gave it a nicer name, but honestly, White Goat is probably the most descriptive name for a machine that can turn shredded paper into toilet paper.

I am being completely serious here. All you need to do is feed the machine 40 sheets of AR office paper, and let the machine do its work of shredding, dissolving the strips in water, thinning it out, and then drying it out and winding it into the rolls.

In just thirty minutes, your office TPS reports are a roll of TP, without the tube in the middle. There is a video after the jump if you would like to see it for yourself, and I highly recommend that you do.

It only costs eleven cents to make a roll, and regular use of this easy-to-install machine can save you up to 60 cedar trees per year.

Of course, you have to ask yourself if the price is worth it. Right now, this machine weighs 600 kg and is 1.8 meters tall. So not only does it take up a lot of space, but it costs a lot of money at $100,000.

Source

Coolest Gadgets UK – For all your UK centric tech and gadget news.
[ From paper shreds to toilet paper copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Coffee Foam Art

2010-02-01T16:44:00.000Z

Coffee Foam Art: "

Look at these lovely animals-cats, seahorse and beautiful landscapes-the sun, the moon, they’re actually appearing on the surface of coffee, isn’t that amazing?! They’re created by simply ‘drawing’ on the top layer of foam. And when we got such cups of coffee in hands, we’ll definitely smile and celebrate for so nice a day:)

5 Free Awesome Graphic Design Tutorial Sites You Should Check Out

2010-01-30T20:33:00.000Z

5 Free Awesome Graphic Design Tutorial Sites You Should Check Out: "

Whether you’re a graphic designer or a wannabe just starting out life with Photoshop or other image editors, you’ll surely need a helping hand. One of the easiest ways to get started with image design is to follow online guides and graphic design tutorials.

Due to the vastness of the Internet, there are literally hundreds and thousands of graphic design tutorial sites for building design skills. Some better than others but which is the best? Save your time — don’t bother searching.

I’ve selected five sites in which the tutorials are easy to follow and provide both basic and advance skills for novices like myself.

Ideabook.com

Ideabook is one of the most long standing and recognized design idea resource sites. It’s produced by Chuck Green, who has written numerous desktop publishing books and other resources, most notably the Before&After Page Design book that provides very accessible ideas for designing newsletters, ads, brochures, fliers, stationery and more.

His site provides over three dozen free graphic design tutorials on topics, including logo design, using grids, readable pages, typography, using clip art, and finding the right commercial printer. A few interesting tutorials includes, Sell your site with a ‘Webcard, Logo ideas: A transparency project, Step-by-step logo design and Grids: an invisible foundation.

CreativePro

I’ve been subscribing to Creativepro.com for a few years now, mainly because it offers a variety of tutorials and reviews on a wide of variety of creative content ideas. While this site is not exclusively focused on graphic design, its how-to section is chock-full of tutorials on topics and skills including, Drawing Paths with Photoshop‘s Pen Tool (a required skill for any designer), bold vs. italic typeface, or one for simply designing a custom Twitter Background. You can sort the site’s how-to topics by “print and design” to make it easier to find specific articles.

The Graphic Reporter

Author Lesa Snider’s The Graphic Reporter doesn’t have lots of tutorials, but she has three very useful ones for novice designers, including Picking the Perfect Palette: How to choose colors that go together, Basic Design principles for the design challenged, and Let Your Graphics Do the Talking. Snider has written a Missing Manual tome for Photoshop CS4, and she’s a regular contributor to Layer’s Magazine.

About.com: Desktop Publishing

I’m a little hesitant about recommending About.com because I find the ads and layout of the site somewhat obtrusive, but its Desktop Publishing section provides hundreds of step-by-step tutorials on topics including choosing fonts and artwork, working with images, designing for Web and On-Screen, working with text, etc. Many of the graphic design tutorials are not well illustrated, but if you can follow step-by-step instructions, it’s a useful resource site.

A few examples include: “Five Ways to use Dingbat Fonts“, “Creating an Embedded Clipping Path,” and understanding Kerning and Tracking.

Psdtuts+

One of the most prolific free tutorial sites is Psdtuts+. Its design tutorials will blow you away, but I would say they are largely for intermediate and advance graphic design application users. That is, if you have experience using Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign; you will find the well illustrated tutorials highly accessible.

A few recent tutorials that stand out for me include, “How to Design a Print-Ready Flier with Photoshop and Illustrator“, “Creating a Set of Digital Painting Icons“, and “Dirty Design: Creating a Grungy Thriller Book Cover“.

All the sites tutorials are produced by professional designers and they typically the resource files used in the tutorials.

So what graphic design tutorial sites do you recommend? What do you look for in a useful tutorial?

Image credit: //endless∞

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Cassette and Film Tape Portraits by Erika Iris Simmons

2010-01-29T19:57:00.000Z

Cassette and Film Tape Portraits by Erika Iris Simmons: "

Creativity is everywhere and Erika Iris Simmons is here to show us a new look of art by creating some portraits with weird stuff. Her first project, which is also Simmons’ favorite work, is a portrait of William Shakespeare made out of the writer’s books. And after that, Simmons has tried to make portraits with other materials and finally come up with some impressive portraits made out of cassette and film tapes. So what are you waiting for? Check out more cassette and film tape portraits after the break.

【Melora Creager】

【Michael Jackson】

【Jim Hendrix】

【John Lennon】

【Marilyn Monroe】

【Betty Page】

【Audrey Hepburn】

【Betty Davis】

【Bob Dylan】

【The Beatles】

Designer: Erika Iris Simmons

Ghost in the Photo Machine

2010-01-29T19:56:00.000Z

Ghost in the Photo Machine: "

Oh so you’ve got old photos at recognizable places, yes? So you’d like to reawaken the ghost in the machine? That’s scary. Let’s do it! First, get an old photo you can place. Next, get a camera. Then let’s go to the location you know connects to the photo. OK! Now, stand in just the right place and angle, hold that photo up somehow, and take a photo. Foosh! Look what you’ve done! This is friggin magical!

I think it’s really creepy too. It gives me a strange vibe, like I’ve never seen anything like this before, other than in horror movies with mirrors and such reflecting things you can’t otherwise see. I believe photographs have strange powers too. But don’t worry about that, you aren’t afraid of satan are you? Naw!

Let’s look through a whole gallery of these sorts of photos for some amazing inspiration to see what we’re gonna do!

The following contributions are from: Tinflower, KeithW, UWGB Admissions, Gordon Calder, alfieyork, Haunted Snowfort, hairyegg, AldenC, hawkGaar, Hombertho, AmyCox000, Jennifer Glass, Cory Templeton, Fuxe73, 4Durt, BenD, XsuperflyX, Tom5, and probably the most bad mofo of them all, JasonePowell.

Powell isn’t necessarily the guy who came up with the idea to put an old photo in front of a new scene to take a picture, but he’s REALLY GOOD AT IT, and he does have a gigantic pool of these sorts of photos floating around on flickr. This pool grows everyday, and it’s awesome and amazing. When you take some of these photos, be sure to contribute to Powell’s group for the most massive thumbs ups and such.

When you take photos like this, you might want to start with some stock photos if you havn’t already got a supply. A good resource for these sorts of photos to put in front of photos, is Powell’s source list. This is where to start if you havn’t been collecting what we in the industry call “instant relatives” from estate sales and rummage sales for 23p apiece.

So! Let’s get to it! Glance your way through these lovely examples below, then get yourself on the road to bringing the past back alive! Don’t wake up any terrifying zombie ghosts though, or I’ll tell em we didn’t send ya!

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies celebration category.

The Pat Man

Pandora Sculpture Keepsake

Pandora. Sculpture Keepsake

Flat Top Doves in Flight

Doves in flight cremation urn (Flat top)

Golden Acorn eco-urn

Acorn Eco-urn. Gold Leaf

Forever loved

Forever loved cremation casket

Mahogany Patina Cremation Urn

Mahogany Patina Cremation Urn

Round leaf urn

Round leaf urn

Turquoise band keepsake urn

Turquise band keepsake

Spanish cross keepsake pendant

Spanish cross keepsake pendant

Dignity angel keepsake

Dignity angel keepsake

Winter Ceramic urn

Unforgettable ceramic sculpture urn "Winter"

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