Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
Sunday, July 20th, 2008 |
In this tutorial I will explain how to create a relatively realistic looking galaxy with Photoshop. I was searching the web up- and downwards to find any tutorials that could tell me how to get a similar fantastic result. There are like 100.000 planet tutorials out there and the few tutorials which were about creating a galaxy where either very basic or the result looked like everything but a realistic galaxy. The galaxy I wanted should have looked massive and intricate … just like the real ones but with a slightly more artistic touch. I’ve needed a galaxy that I could use as a star map for a space-themed roleplaying game design and the image you see above is a part of the result. Let’s go try to do such one …
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Sunday, May 18th, 2008 |
Fontstruct is an online font creator whose editor has been obviously developed with Flex. Users can register and design their own fonts which are made available for download. Looks slick!
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Thursday, December 28th, 2006 |
Filter Forge is a new software for Windows that allows creating Photoshop filters in a tree node based editor. Yep, thats right! You design filters by connecting components together with virtual wires. Imagine the possibilities! The application ships with a standalone tool as well as a Photoshop PlugIn and after you played around a bit with the trial version you might want to file this tool under “apps with that I could spend the whole day long, experimenting with it”!
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Monday, July 17th, 2006 |
Centered Selection is a simple but neat little JavaScript for Photoshop CS+ that can be used to create a rectangular or elliptical centered selection while maintaining the aspect ratio (i.e. width and height of the selection stay the same). Several options can be changed like the feather amount and the padding around the selection, whether using Antialias or not, creating an inverse selection and if an alpha channel should be created from the selection. This script can save a lot of hassle when trying to create a centered selection (imagine all that shift-, control- and space-holding and pressing to resize and drag around the selection)! As always a screenshot says more than thousand words.
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Friday, June 30th, 2006 |
MainType is a relatively new font managing tool (for Win only) that puts Extensis Suitcase to shame! I’ve been trying Suitcase for a while but finding and activating fonts with it was a major pain in the butt. You had to dig around in the preview list on the right and then to activate the font you once again had to search for the same font in the left side list (all with no mousewheel support).
After I was fed up with Suitcase I went with OT1 fontmanager for quite a while but this manager, while a crapload better than Suitcase, runs a bit unstable and doesn’t support some important formats. It also can only install/uninstall fonts but not activate them temporarily. There are also a ton of other font managing tools out there but almost all I’ve came across so far didn’t fulfill my requirements.
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Monday, July 25th, 2005 |
As a one-man-game developer of worldclass (exaggeration intended!) it’s good to have a bunch of tools at hand that help with the tasks for creating games! In this series I will introduce helpful ‘nice to have’ or even ‘must have’ tools that make a game developers/designers day easier. In this part I will cover Alias SketchBook Pro …
I’ve bought myself a periphery some days ago about which I was pondering to buy for a long time already, a Wacom Intuos 3 graphics tablet! I choose the smallest version 4×5 since I’m not a drawing pro and have limited desktop real estate and the smallest one suffices pretty well for just some sketching.
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Saturday, June 12th, 2004 |
I’ve installed SuSE Linux v9.1 a couple of days ago on my now secondary PC and after 2-3 days also managed to get rid of that ugly default KDE desktop look and turned it into a somewhat bearable view.
Honestly when do the interface designers stop smoking strange things and come back to a neat and clear GUI design? The icons of the default KDE were huge (48px) and even looked way to big on my 1280×1024 resolution. The initially chosen color palette can only be described as atrocity and the default wallpaper was of minor quality! When flapping out the kicker menu (that’s basically the same as the windows start menu) again huge icons and text is thrown at you and shine in a multitude of fancy colors with soft edges as if they want to compete with the Teletubbies! Who ever had the idea to introduce 24 bit colored icons: here comes my hand and whips to your face!
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Filed under Dataleak, Design | 1 Comment »
