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The featured image was NOT created in MS Paint (Photoshop, of course!), although, with enough patience it could have been. MS Paint. Seriously?! Well, sometimes you don’t have your fancy Mac with all your downloaded versions of Photoshop and the like handy. In fact, you might be in one of those rare situations where you have to use a PC (gasp!). What ever shall you do?!
Well, fortunately for you, the dear folks at Microsoft have a built in bitmap editor that is absolutely terrible and almost useless. But, there is hope and a couple ‘o tricks are available to you if you find yourself in a pinch. |
Posts Tagged ‘photoshop’
10 Uses for MS Paint You Didn’t Think of!
Tuesday, November 15th, 2011A Decade of Design Evolution
Saturday, July 10th, 2010 |
Web design styles have been evolving rapidly in recent years, and the design industry has sprouted up like an over watered Chia Pet, incubated in an industrial green house, and crammed full of Miracle Grow laced with crystal meth. I clearly remember the time (circa 1990′s) when the only sites available to help you put up your website were along the lines of cgi-resources.com and htmlgoodies.com. You got a basic script that did mostly what you wanted, hacked away at it, and tried to figure out how to make some sort of basic layout nesting and re-nesting tables until finally a family of birds moved in. |
Themes? Templates? Skins? There were a few “free template” sites around back then, but they were fairly obscure, and commercial templates were virtually non-existent. A script came with one look – plain, and if you wanted to change it, you spent a few weeks in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop pasting together graphics and inserting rotating gifs. If you have no idea what I’m talking about then you haven’t been webmastering until sometime in the 2000′s when starting up a site had become easier and prettier.
Since commercial template design entered the scene in the 2000′s, the styles on the market have been constantly changing, especially over the last few years. Below, we’ve compiled a comparative sampling from 2001 through 2010 showcasing the evolution of designs. You’ll be shocked at where we started with our layouts and just how far we’ve come.
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A Handy Guide to a Carpenter’s Logo
Saturday, June 12th, 2010It takes the right tools to make the right tools, and using those tools can be easier than you think. Today’s tutorial guides you through the making this handy carpenter’s logo, and shows you that you can make a design pop with several simple but invaluable methods. In conclusion, you should keep these techniques near the top of your tool bag, as they might just be the right tools for your next job.
You can download the Nailed it Logo or the Nailed It Promotions Products Set with full PSD and AI source in BoxedArt’s members section, as well as thousands of other website templates and web design products. Get a membership here. (more…)
Designing the Cover of a Lingerie Menu
Saturday, May 29th, 2010We’re now well into spring with summer on the way, and nothing represents warm summer beauty better than dark black leather bras and panties. Today’s tutorial teaches the effects we used on our Flower Blossom Lingerie Menu, including the use of water color brushes, creating the look of movement in color, applying tanner looking skin, using glow to pop a figure out from a background, as well as a variety of other effects and brushes. However, our research indicates that 0% of our users will have read past the word “panties”, and will have immediately begun scrolling thereafter. Therefore, it will not matter what I write past this point, so I will simply post part of a poem written by Data on Next Gen: “Felus catus, is your taxonomic nomenclature, an endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature? Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.”
You can download the Flower Blossom Menu Template with full PSD and AI source in BoxedArt’s members section, as well as thousands of other website templates and web design products. Get a membership here. (more…)
Create a Rockin Photo Frame and Collage
Sunday, April 18th, 2010In the world of photography, you will often hear the term framing relating to the positing of the subject matter of an image. In today’s lesson, we take things more literally and create a graphical frame around the musician of our Tight Music website template to draw attention and emphasis so that we highlight the photo’s beauty and style. It also just looks really cool.
You can download the Tight Music Template with full PSD source files and sliced table free HTML pages for this template in BoxedArt’s members section, as well as thousands of other website templates and web design products. Get a membership here or take a quick tour. (more…)
Make a Print Ready Easter Greeting Card from Scratch
Monday, March 22nd, 2010Easter is upon us, and what better way to celebrate then by sitting in front of the computer and learning new Photoshop techniques for creating festive holiday greeting cards (at least it will get you away from the Wii for a while and let your knees recover from the balance board step-ups – amirite?). By the way, if you happen across the Easter Bunny, ask him if he saw that Leprechaun that stole my vodka last week. Anyway, today’s tutorial will show you how to design most of the Painted Egg Greeting Card.
You can download the Painted Egg Greeting Card with full PSD source in BoxedArt’s members section, as well as thousands of other website templates and web design products. Get a membership here. (more…)
Design a Traditional St Patrick’s Day Logo Inside a Texturized Flyer
Saturday, March 6th, 2010Top o’ the mornin’ to ya! For the rest of this tutorial I will be speaking with an Irish accent, however, you probably won’t notice because there is no audio in this lesson; oh well. Anyway, where’s that leprechaun that stole my vodka… now I forgot what, oh yeah, the tutorial thing. Sorry about all of the confusion, I started celebrating St Patrick’s Day early this year. Moving on, this is the tutorial will show you how to design the wood grain style logo of the St Pat Promo Flyer.
You can download the St Pat Promo Flyer Template with full PSD source in BoxedArt’s members section, as well as thousands of other website templates and web design products. Get a membership here. (more…)
Create a Fantasy Village Suitable for the Smurfs
Thursday, February 25th, 2010WARNING: This tutorial will increase the chances of a Gargamel attack on your website. Today we learn to create a mushroom-hut fantasy village suitable for habitation by the Smurfs, as seen the Fantasy Village Template.
You can download the Fantasy Village Template with full PSD source files and sliced table free HTML pages for this template in BoxedArt’s members section, as well as thousands of other website templates and web design products. Get a membership here. (more…)
Faking a Dental Ad: From Gorgeous to Gross – Reverse Cosmetic Dentistry
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010You’ve seen those dental ads – the ones where they take a wicked nasty smile and make it look kissibly fresh. Are the dramatic changes in the patient’s once monstrous mouth representative of the pinnacle of dental precision or were the pictures photoshopped to perfection? We’ll probably never know, however we thought it would be fun to go the other way with this reverse cosmetic dentistry tutorial, where we made an ugly set of teeth for a dental template’s “before” photo, and kept the original spotless smile as the after in the Delicious Smile Template.
You can download the Delicious Smile Template with full PSD source files and sliced table free HTML pages for this template in BoxedArt’s members section, as well as thousands of other website templates and web design products. Get a membership here. (more…)
Building the Beautiful Bikini Model Competition Template Header
Thursday, February 4th, 2010The competition for the hottest bikini body is on, and these ladies are in it to win it! Of course, every girl can do with a little enhancement for that competitive edge. In this Bikini Mode Competition Template we use Adobe Photoshop give these sexy ladies a leg up by performing a number of color enhancements, background improvements, and add some general glitter and glow.
You can download the Bikini Contest Template with full PSD source files and sliced table free HTML pages for this template in BoxedArt’s members section, as well as thousands of other website templates and web design products. Get a membership here. (more…)
