Living Today and Preparing for the Future

Started to apply for jobs and keeping busy. I went to the Lake Wilderness Arboretum Thursday to help them prepare for the spring plant sale and the PR person asked me to design their fall plant sale flyer. She was very pleased with the spring plant sale flyer I did. Her comment was "very pretty" and "grabs your attention".  I created the flyer using Illustrator. A friend of mine wants me to design two websites for her and she will pay me. So I have plenty to do and I'm starting to get paid for my work!

A Day Off

My schooling is done and today I decided to celebrate by taking the day off. Total relaxation.  Tomorrow I'll get back to work. There are two internships I'll be finishing up, a book to illustrate and a flyer to design. These are all pro-bono work. There is one possible paid job designing a business card.  I will also be looking for work.

Themed Interactive Text

This is how the text looks before the texture was applied. In Flash, I applied an interactive mask so you can mouse back and forth and watch the text change on a web page. This technique reminds me of advertisements I've seen on the web.  Usually they are trying to convince women to use an anti-wrinkle cream and you mouse over the image to watch the woman's face change from horribly wrinkled to young and smooth. Yeah, right.

Themed Text

I took the word blood and, well, made it bloody. This was created in Photoshop and saved into two png files in preparation for the interactive flash assignment. A couple of images of splattered blood were used for the texture and masking was used to define the image and drips of blood. Doing this was kind of relaxing for me as I used patches to apply the texture, smoothed out edges and masked to reveal what I wanted in the image.

Web Galleries

Galleria is a good source for creating web galleries especially if you have a lot of images. I created about four galleries for my website and organized them by photo, photomanipulation, illustration, and flyers. The galleries were customized in Dreamweaver. Here is a screen capture of one of the galleries.  Now I have an online gallery to show to clients.  http://leftofcentergraphics.com/

Web Template

How do you use a web template? First you can find many free already designed templates on the web and you can customize them for your own style and purpose. I grabbed "Tomatoes" from http://www.freecsstemplates.org/ and changed the header, body color, and text in the content using Dreamweaver. I'm not sure that this was faster than creating from scratch but some people think you can save time. It would depend on what the client wants. You can show a client web templates and use one that they like instead of re-inventing the wheel.