You could draw your own post-it graphic by following a photoshop tutorial . . . 

. . . Or you could generate a post-it note using a free web site set up for the purpose.

I bit the bullet years ago and bought the full version of Adobe Photoshop then set about trying to learn the basics.

Photoshop V6.0 was about £400+VAT when I first bought it back then. Of course, the upgrades have not been cheap in the meantime – but now I can at least do everything I ever need to do graphically. And of course Photoshop is a GREAT program – the industry standard and reassuring to have in my toolkit.

Learning Photoshop won’t of course turn you into a graphic designer. That’s another problem.

An Alternative to Photoshop?

If Photoshop is beyond your means, you may want to look at the subscription services that are starting to look like they might one day rival Adobe’s offering.

I like the look of Aviary. It costs between $7.99 and $14.99 peronth, depending on the applications you choose to include in your package, and is an online image editing service. You edit photos and create original images online. There is no software to download.

Interestingly, and probably obviously, your creations can be held online for other people to use. You will always own the rights to your image, but other people will own the rights to any images they create out of yours. This is very inspiring. Surely as this service grows there will be more and more creations available to use as jumping boards from which to roll your own.

That is truly collaborative.

Sign up – at the time of writing the Aviary people are trusting us, the public to trial the product until we are confortable, and only start paying when satisfied the product is right. I hope people do not abuse this approach to trialing.

Start with the FAQ.

The new blog layout can be seen here with a nice dotty background image.  By the way, How To Get Hosted uses a theme called Thesis which is fairly customisable.

This useful web site allows you to generate backgrounds with dots that either run the whole way behind a page, or fade out to a single block colour as the one I have used at How To Get Hosted does.

This tool only produces repeating background images for a single dot design, but very useful and striking, neverthless.

Ever seen a font you’d like to use in a logo or graphic and not known it’s name? Enter Identifont – a site that helps you identify fonts.

You answer a series of questions about the font you’d like to find and Identifont will try to find it.  

The good thing is that even if you do not precisely identify the font you are looking for, you will find many that are of a similar quality, style and type.  The site tells you where to go to buy any fonts you may find (some are free), and you can shop around for the one that suits your needs and your budget.

If I really needed a long and drawn out flash presentation I would have to outsource it to someone with the right skills. And I can only imagine that would be if I wanted to build a full flash web site.

Mostly what I need, like many other people, are tiny flash movies that I place within an ordinary XHTML site. That way you get the benefits of free search engine traffic (because XHTML websites offer far more opportunities for search engine love than do, pure flash sites).

The product I love to use is called 3DFA. It is relatively cheap, and the interface has been improving over the years. It doesn’t take long to make a flash movie using the tools provided in 3DFA. The only disappointment is that the help is relatively terse.

That said, my advice is to spend an hour just trying to use the product.

Here is a page from a site I did for a client. The animation at the top is a flash animation made using 3DFA. The image slideshow in the bottom right, in case you want to know was achieved using this product.

Note that the curved edge to the slideshow animation was achieved by using 3DFA to create a flash mask for the slideshow.

When you bookmark a site, the favicon appears next to the name of the site in your bookmark list. Most sites have a favicon now, but when they don’t they stand out for the wrong reasons.

You can generate your own favicon by using an online tool, very easily.

Just pick an image you want to use – maybe an icon or your logo and then submit the image to a favicon generation tool.

When you get your favicon returned to you, simply put it in the root directory of your web site.

I used this service from favicon.co.uk to generate mine. You can also add your icon to the gallery – I did, and five months later they wrote to me to say the icon had been accepted.

Wanna Get That Understated Inner City Look and Feel?

Wannabe no more – you too can add these images to your site. (For any urbanites reading this – I am just jealous of you living in the bustling city whilst I am stuck here in a field. A comorant ate my pondfish today.)

Instead of the usual site home page snapshot that I normally include in each post, today I have created my own, nugatory, (nevertheless cool) image. You do it by visiting typoGenerator, and specifying a keyword or phrase of your choice.

Here are three I generated using the phrase “drop dead gorgeous”

And Three More Using “Marilyn Monroe”

Of course if you choose to type words that have a strong Google appeal – for example Google Images is bound to turn up some photos of Marilyn Monroe if you use the term “Marilyn Monroe”, your generated image will contain recognisable elements.

So visit the typoGenerator Website and type in a phrase. The site uses the words to find images in Google’s Image search – so the images can sometimes  be relevant to the words you choose. Also the characters you type will be used in the image.  They seem to be in many cases, mostly illegible so feel free.

I started with the character string “Drop Dead Gorgeous”, because this is how I am feeling today, but “dragged through a hedge backwards” would work just as well. Give it ago.

Please Note . . .

The site is a little erratic. So to get your generated image, start with the home page. The home page should look like the image above.

If there is a big black rectangle on the home page, it won’t work. You need to start with the home page looking like this image here.

You do this by clicking on the home link.

Here is a site that analyses and lists the fonts and characteristics of some famous web 2.0 logos.

Using this as your starting point (assuming you are as useless at logos as I am), you can almost manage to piece some ideas together to achieve an original logo. Maybe.

Visit The Font Feed for more information.

Today I am pointing out a post that lists 51 text techniques in Photoshop. These are great tutorials for helping you to design your own logo with Photoshop.

The shiny floor example is a great example of a web 2.0 style technique, as is the sticker effect.

And the water text on any background looks very good too.

. . . needs a colour co-ordinated RSS button. to attract your visitor clicks.

Here is a time-saver.  Look no further – WordPress have kindly drawn a whole bunch of RSS buttons for us to use. Take your pick from those shown here.