this post is more of a topic for those of you locals here in san antonio, but - it would also be nice if some of you not-so-near gals were offer up your comments too! don't wanna leave anyone out!

i am looking ahead to what classes i'll be teaching in 2009. it's REALLY not too far off. you know how it goes, everything snowballs towards the holidays come october. so i'm asking you for your input. what classes would you like to see?

i will be keeping my photo-full class and my daytime sketch class, but after that - everything is up for discussion.

i am considering the following:

--- teen crop or sketch class on a Sunday afternoon

--- teen "all about me" layout series class

--- another daytime class - maybe a layout class based on odd sources of inspiration (like color combos pulled from magazine ads, spacing based on a restaurant menu, etc.)

--- continuing my mom and me class on saturday afternoons - about every other month; the project would be holiday or seasonal related.

and that's about all i've dreamed up! so --- i'm hoping some of you will SHARE your class wishes with me. what classes would you like to see added to a scrapbook store's roster? and again, even if you aren't a "local", i'd love to hear your ideas!

you can just post a comment, or click the "contact me" button and send me and e-mail!

please help me plan my calendar!!!

One of my favorite scrapbook sketch artists is Becky Higgins, who is often featured in Creating Keepsakes magazine.    I used her June 2008 sketch (example and top sketch) as my inspiration for a Halloween page.  I found this great rub-on K& Company Halloween art at Michael's and I decided to use it in place of the sun & title in the lower right-hand corner of the layout.  This is a 12X12 layout, my preferred size.

Here's how it went...

I cut all my pictures using a small paper cutter (old skool Creative Memories brand).  The largest one I kept at 4X6, the middle size is 3X4, and the smallest is 2X3.

Then I gathered supplies.  Not sure where anything came from except the rub-on mentioned earlier and the small discs, which came from the $1 section at Target.  The rest is just in my stacks.

From there I layered the three papers together.  Green was the base, then a three inch strip of orange pattern on both green pages.  I tore the shiny black paper on one side and glued it over the top of the seam of green & orange. (sorry for the pic quality)  It really is just solid green paper.

I placed the pictures in the format from Becky's original sketch.  I tucked the top edge of the uppermost pics under the torn border to give it a little something.  I did not mount any of my pictures, nor did I use any of the spiffy clips she had in the example.  I would have, but I used what was on hand. (again the photo quality is poo)

For the last step, I went hog wild with the rub-on art.  In addition to the main title at the bottom, I sprinkled a few ravens & cats along the black edge.  And there are three spiders dangling where the original sketch had the circle & flower.  I also used the orange paper and plastic discs with brads to replace the journaling boxes in the original design.  I felt like these pictures spoke for themselves.  And I hate the writing part.
Left Page:

Right Page:

Close up of the embellishments:

And for the record, the future Mr. Lanigan did indeed carve a Miller High Life pumpkin.  At Easter he made a Coors egg.  Are we sensing a pattern?  Perhaps beer themed crafting will be a future post...

www.arccriacoes.com

Desenvolvimento  de sites. muitas dicas e tutoriais diversos temas.

Layout para lançamento das facas Ônix.

Criação: Martina Valle, Maurício Oliveira, Felipe Lermen e cia limitada.

Three backgrounds used for the cartoon Charles Bronson is Shatterproof (currently in production)

Two backgrounds created for an independent animation

So first the forward.  I, as a Mac user, have a me.com account.  If you use me.com with a combination of iWeb, you can build your site there.  Once you upload your site to iWeb, what you can then do is simply go in iDisk, look for the web -> sites director and in there you'll see an index.html.  If you edit the index.html to forward to your blog on wordpress, then you'll effectively have the www as your root domain for your wordpress blog.  Just try it with this one:  http://www.therecordingroom.com.  Now, keep in mind that if you ever publish your iWeb site again, the index will change, so you'll break that.  So while not a total solution, it is nevertheless a workable one that is reliable.  You can try that with many different free hosting services of course.

Second, as I wanted to have my home page show up first, as opposed to my blog, you can easily set that up in wordpress 2.5 under Settings -> Reading and then choose what page is the page you show, and what page is your blog page.  As per the instructions, you just create a blank blog page in wordpress and set that as your blog reading page in the Reading section.  Then setup a Home page with what ever you want in there, and set that as your start page and voila.  However, there remains a problem:  Some of the templates on the wordpress site will show a double Home tab at the top or even in the Navigation Widget.  There are many suggestions on how to make that work properly around the web, but I found that even with those solutions, the highlighting of tabs gets all screwed up where essentially you get 2 tabs highlighted.  I get around that in a bit of a funny way, but it works.  here is how:

Create a page and call it hidden.

Create a sub page for your Home.

Publish both.

Then go to Settings -> Reading and make the Home page your main page

Edit the hidden page and mark it as unpublished and save.

When you look at your home page now, you'll see the tabs, and when you go to other pages the highlighting is OK.

This works like that thanks to the fact that WordPress doesn't seem to update the preference of which page is your home page regardless of its published status (bug?).  So if you first set the hidden page to unpublished, and then add the Home page under it, you won't be able to choose it in the dropdown of which page is your main page.  However, if you first publish the hidden page, then hide it, the setting for which page is your Home Page doesn't get affected... until you go in and try to change it again.

Kludgy in both cases, but it works well.

R

http://speedanime.de/cms/modules/news/index.php

What's interesting on that page however, is that there is an Gundam 00 S2 torrent there! How does that sound? Yeah, now I don't care too much about the design, since they got what I wanted! :D
Wohoooo!

Click image to enlarge

The project is all about myself and augmented reality is related to technology.  I enjoy all new technological products and within the entertainment industry, adding these combinations I'm hopefully to be able to express my personality in this form.

This Augmented Reality Book, gives me an idea to use the same style and create symbols in my book and make it into an interactive book....Podcast maybe?

A background used for the Predators of the Sprawl #5 comic made for FormatMag.com

These backgrounds were used for the Predators of the Sprawl #5 comic made for FormatMag.com

Your instruction booklet will combine "explanatory" writing and paragraph development (in the Introduction) and "process-oriented" composition (in the Instructions section). Include graphics, as appropriate.

Our general schedule of events for the next several class periods will center around making this piece happen. As we discussed in class on 10/6, this could be an example of a portfolio piece, in that it may demonstrate your ability to perform a combination of highly transferrable writing skills.

A suggested timeline:

1. 10/06 - Brainstorming, Drafting
2. 10/08 - Layout, Graphics
3. 10/13 - Feedback, Revisions
4. 10/15 - Finalize and Submit.

It’s a very strange business to be in at the moment. Going from working with the wonderfully logical CSS based website work we as designers carry out, to suddenly having to go all “old school” and work with tables. But alas, yes, tables are the only way of assuring any kind of continuity and success with email designs.

I read a little, then improvised somewhat and patted myself on the back at the result that my designs worked in a small number of email clients. Job done I thought.

How wrong.

The following is a brief introduction in getting your emails to work across a wide range of email clients.

set up your testing environments

Ensuring you thoroughly test your emails before they land in your customers’ inbox is vital to the longevity of your email-relationship with your clients or customers. If your emails don’t work, they’ll unsubscribe, simple as that.

We recommend that you set up as many email clients as necessary. Look at your client email list of all the people you will be sending emails to. Dave.name@hotmail.com, dave.name@yahoo.co.uk etc. Obviously from this you deduce that it would probably be some form of an idea to test your emails in these clients.

Where name@somecompany.com happens then you quite rightly assume that these people may be using Outlook (Express, 2003, 2007), Apple Mail, Thunderbird or desktop app based users. You don’t need to go mad. You could be there for a week testing on every conceivable platform if you wanted to.

We suggest the following to start with:

Web based email clients:- Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Aol, GMX, OperaMail, etc

PC: – Outlook (express, 2003, 2007) AOL 9, Thunderbird

Mac: - Mail, Entourage, Eudora

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="451" caption="Results of a table based email design"][/caption]

Testing with "real" email clients as apposed to using services that emulate how your email will look in the different email clients, gives you much more control to check for errors and discrepancies in detail, plus you'll get a better experience of how your some of your customers will see your email.

If you use the table based approach your results should be pretty constant throughout most email clients as demonstrated below.

tables. no longer the enemy

The email standards project carried out an Acid test using a template created using cascading style sheets. The results can be found at http://www.email-standards.org/acid-test/ . Without going into lengthy autopsy of the test, the results, it seems that if you want consistency in your emails, then using tables is best.

Through multiple, erroneous decisions I have learned that the quickest and most bullet proof method of making your design look like it’s meant to for as many people as possible, is to use tables. For almost everything. Without going into the logistics of which browsers/clients/apps support which css styles, http://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/archives/2006/03/a_guide_to_css_support_in_emai.html I have found that the best way to retain control of the integrity of your email design is to lay everything out in rows and columns.

The goal, is of course to create a HTML email that looks as near as damn it to the design that you or client wants the recipient to see.

Yes it’s painful. Yes it feels like we’ve stepped back about ten years. But if you don’t want to spend hours wondering why a heading or piece of text has somehow moved 40pixels left, then these next steps and diagrams should help.

nested tables?

You may or may not know about the multitude of issues that exist regarding the different rendering engines employed by all the different email clients out there. Many have written on this subject and there is plenty of resource information available out there. For the sake of this article I am purely going to discuss some of the solutions, as opposed to causes and problems.

In order to retain consistency from your beautifully photoshop-ped design to what actually lands in someone’s email client you can’t leave anything to chance. Whilst inline css styles DO WORK for a fair number of elements, it is best to use these to a point, for such things as text styles, sizes, etc. For the majority of layout issues it is best, and much quicker to create your layouts using tables and nested tables than to use any css. This will only lead to frustration when it comes to checking your email. In some clients it will look how you wanted it to, in others it won’t and therein lies the hours of problem solving that you can ill afford to spend.

Once you get your head around going back to table based layouts you will find that you can quickly output the kind of work you want in a short period of time.

round of applause then for the shim!

Yes, the trusty old “shim.gif”, spacer.gif, whatever you called it, makes a welcomed come back. Use a transparent gif (1px X 1px) which you can resize to force table widths and heights. Use these anywhere where you feel there might be some misinterpretation with the email rendering. The use of these invisible shims negates any ill effect that the use of “padding” or “margin” creates in certain email clients because of the fact that they are not supported.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="344" caption="Example of transparent GIF images being used to force widths"][/caption]

use images to force position

Another little trick you can use is to include white space on your images to force spacing of columns or rows. This cuts the mess of added rows or columns to create guttering or margins.

A useful tip here is to use ...

“<img src="http://mywebsite.html/newsletter/images/ice_logo.jpg" alt="ICE Broadband Logo" width="154" height="85" border="0" style="display: block;" />

...where images are used. This prevents top and bottom padding being put on the image in Hotmail.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="453" caption="Extra space on images can be used to force space"][/caption]

Obviously, don’t forget to add your alt tag descriptions to your important images so that your users will now what to expect, even with “images turned off”.

HTML text and text as images

The best way to retain consistency with text is to specify the properties for each block of text you use. Unlike css where we actively want text to resize depending on what the base font size the user has set, with emails we need to be specific about text sizes, heights etc in order for our designs to work properly.

The following example demonstrates how I usually arrange text:

<p style=”font-family:choice; font-size:24px; line-height: 26px; color:#333333; margin:0px; padding:0px;”>This is my sentence</p>

Forcing 0 margin and padding goes some way to creating a uniform representation in the different clients.

We can then take this further for paragraphs.

<p style=”font-family:choice; font-size:24px; line-height: 26px; color:#333333; margin:0px; padding:0px;”>This is the first sentence of my content</br>

This is the second sentence of my content</br></p>

The use of the </br> removes the need to repeat the in-line css code for each paragraph.

Sometimes it is necessary to set text out in rows and columns in order to get the same layout as your design. Setting row heights (with the help of the shim.gif!) will give you that extra bit of control over how your text is spaced vertically.

Although you can achieve perfect layout using graphic text placed within an image you also have the trade off that your email recipients won’t be able to see the text until they download images. Unless you have a loyal client base that you are sure of opening your emails, you should use HTML text as much as possible.

The success of an email that relies heavily on images and text within images lies with having a very strong subject line, and company reputation. Email’s from Marks & Spencer, Littlewoods, Argos etc employ image heavy email content, but given their widespread popularity they can expect a vast majority of their customer base to have a look at their emails. Lesser known companies should evaluate whether this approach will work for them.

plan your emails first

It might seem odd having this point at the end of the article; however, planning your email requires a little knowledge and thought based on what we have just discussed.

In this instance, I am referring to “planning” in terms of the actual execution of the email in HTML as opposed to any marketing sense. I shall leave the marketing theory for another discussion entirely.

Planning your first email could be as basic as using a pencil a ruler and a piece of paper. Draw out the kind of layout you want, with images and text placed out in an appealing way and then with your ruler, work out how your rows and columns are going to fit your design in, remembering to avoid any use of background images, plus leaving enough “jiggle” space for text . For all of you out there who are old enough and wise enough to remember the old days of web design, this will all come flooding back to you.

Like riding a bike.

Simplify your email design to at least give you a fighting chance of an easy life. If you do have complicated elements to a particular design you might find that using these within a larger image can overcome time spent trying to fix minor detailing.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="356" caption="Fore thought in planning your table structure can cut down on time and allow you to be clever with layout"][/caption]

By spending 10 minutes or so working out how you are going to arrange your email using those lovely tables, rows and columns can save you a lot of time later on when you suddenly realise that you haven’t allowed enough space for an important strap-line. More times than not, there is always a better, simpler way of arranging your nested tables, and with practice you’ll also begin to identify where and when you may need to use strategically placed rows, columns and spacers in order to keep the integrity of your overall design.

Segue nesse post o modelo criado para os personagens:

This is the way to proceed :
You first have to take one specific card out of the deck.
This card is representing the theme of the reading and act as a
"Significator". (more to be read on that topic : how to choose a theme card).

Example 1. for a reading about love : the Heart (24) will be taken out of the
deck and be the Theme card.
Example 2. for a reading about travelling : the Ship (3) will be the theme card.

Your theme card will be placed in front of you, as you shuffle the deck and concentrate on your question and the 2 options you are considering.

You should know what is path 1 and path 2.
Example : concerning traveling, option number 1 would be "traveling to Italy during this summer", and option number 2 would be "not going on holiday this year and saving the money" !
And the cards for each path will give you insight of what is best to do.

When you are finished with shuffling,you cut the deck in two parts.
I personnaly take a look at the cut, as I found it sometimes give an extra info about the reading.

After replacing the deck together as one; the first 5 cards will be for option / path 1 and the next 5 cards will be for option / path number 2.

Some may prefer to place all the cards of the deck into a fan shape on the table, and pick 5 cards for the first option, and then 5 others for the second option. Again, this is how you feel about it, but should be decided before shuffling. The reading may now take place.

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

The theme card

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

Hope you will find this helpful, I will post case analysis for this spread so we can study with real life example.

Cheers
Jayce

While I'm here visiting my folks, I thought I would take advantage of their super-speedy-and-really-really-fast internet. It's very fun. But when I stopped by my blog, I noticed that it's all squished up and the words are all rolling over each other! Is this happening to you to? On my Mac and pc at home, everything looks fine, so I don't know what's going on. PLEASE let me know if this layout is jacked up, cuz if not, then it's just my mom's moniter smokin' crack. I really, really appreciate it!

Nous voici à moins d'une semaine de la finale de la manche Millennium Series de Disney. Toutes les équipes sont dans les startings bloc avant les premiers matchs, certaines vont être reléguées d'autres vont montées.

En attendant de voir les premières billes volées voici les layouts des terrains...

 Plus d'informations sur la dernière manche du millénnium series ici

NOVA PROPOSTA

Layout antigo:

One of the things that I really like about this is the "About" page is right there for all of my visitors to see. I also like the color scheme, which for me seems to be more soothing than the last one. Below the "About" there are 2 columns, whereas the previous one only had 1 column to the side. As my blogroll got bigger, things were being pushed further down the page. Not a problem with this layout. I am pretty satisfied with it, I have to say :)

Now for some talk about wood, which I'm sure you were all just waiting on the edge of your seats for :p I have 2 8 foot long boards of 1x5 Mahogany that I am ITCHING to use.

I was hoping to make some great kids version toys with them (unfinished, so they are not toxic), but keep thinking it would be such a shame to let the true grain and color not shine through. There are some wood workers who use salad bowl oil, which is non-toxic after it cures, but I don't trust the quality control enough to use this. If I made toy with salad bowl oil as the finish, sold it then found out that oil was recalled because of contaminants, I'd be ill. As a father, I refuse to sell toys for other kids unless I feel safe letting my own kids use the toys in the same condition.

So, I while I am working on my current project I am keeping the wheels turning on what might be some good projects for the Mahogany. This inlay for the Bell-Tel truck was done with Birch and Mahogany- you can see how the richness of the Mahogany really pops with some hand rubbed Tung Oil:

Well, OK- maybe it's hard to tell there. After all, that bell is only about a half of an inch square lol. Feel free to leave any suggestions!