Design Tips

Photographing college graduation

Eloine

2015grads

example gallery from weebly
example gallery from weebly

I was asked to photograph the Los Medanos College 2015 graduation ceremony a couple of days ago. It happened to be the largest one they had yet and that meant over 400 graduates! Needless to say I have over 2,000 images I needed to whittle down through and make sure I tried to show most everyone while still capturing the fun of the event. We use these photos not only to document the night but they are great marketing pieces to remind potential students what they are working towards.

The trick to getting maximum exposure is to get through these photos fast before the momentum of the event wears off and that is where some handy software can help. I used Adobe lightroom to quickly star the photos I was going to keep based on the thumbnails. Then I batched adjusted the exposure on some that were a little light struck. Then I did a little cropping and then exported them as decent sized jpegs.

Here is where the cool part comes in. To make a web gallery or a slideshow can take hours but not so when you use the free templates that weebly offers you. They offer free blogs and web hosting and what’s even cooler is you can download the pages and keep a copy for hosting elsewhere.

Another free little tool I just found out about is Pro Show Web that allows you to quickly make a slideshow with 15 images or less and set it to music.

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Web store sneak peak

Eloine

I don’t usually show a website until it’s mostly finished but I am excited about my new pet photo stock store I am setting up. As of this post I have only formatted 6 photos for sale because I wanted to focus on getting all the details right before adding more. I am using gumroad for the store engine and I coded the page to be responsive so hopefully when you view this on any device you can see the thumbnails fairly large in either 3, 2 or one column. Be sure to sign up for my mailing list to be alerted when I add new photos at the bottom of the page!

store

Stained Glass Illustration

Stained Glass Illustration

Eloine

glass4blog

I was asked to take this pencil illustration (see art here) and create a graphic for a poster that will advertise a newly written opera. I’m not much of an illustrator myself but I at least had the pencil sketch from the client to work off of. I used Adobe Illustrator to outline and ink in the illustration and then photoshop to apply textures.

The name of the opera is the Voyage of Mary Magdalene. You can view the hatchfund project and see a video about the opera here. It will be opening March 21st at the Clayton Valley Presbyterian Church.

Since the play was biblical in nature I thought stained glass would be appropriate and also would explain the blocky chunks of color. I chose to follow this tutorial which was a perfect choice!!

 

 

2015 Lunar Year of the Ram Graphic Freebie

Eloine

I was asked to make a little web graphic for a Chinese New Year festival. It’s the year of the ram or goat or sheep – that seems to be up for debate.

I am really fond of sheep when I witnessed two sheep in a herd on either side of another sheep being its support. That sheep in the middle appeared to be blind and the other two sheep helped guide it to where it could eat. Witnessing that entirely changed my opinion of these animals and I hope that anyone born in this year learns the value of that kind of support we can give to one another.

The stylized flowers are the lucky primrose and the lucky color red in basic astrology. Feel free to download and do with it what you wish!

ram

Tutorial on making a thought bubble, new card design & and a puppy

Tutorial on making a thought bubble, new card design & and a puppy

Eloine

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pupI recently took pictures of an adorable Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy and some of the photos have been accepted at Shutterstock.

This one of of the sad puppy pose in particular I am making into a greeting card for when you are missing someone.

The front of the card shows her as a sad little puppy with a thought bubble above her head saying “When you’re not here…” and in the inside it says, “I feel a little sad.”

I thought I would also take the time to do a quick tutorial on how to use Adobe Illustrator to make a thought bubble. There are a bazillion ways to do this but this is a nice quick and easy way I thought I would share. Read more →

Highlight link to current page with javascript

Eloine

If you have a menu on your website and you would like to provide some visual feedback with that one of the links in the menu bar is the page you are on it’s pretty easy with some HTML and CSS.

All you have to do is add a class name to the HTML for that link and then style that class name with CSS.

For example just style the class of “current”:

<li class="current"><a href="http://www.somepage.com">some page</a></li>

Unfortunately if you are using a common navigation system where you have one file that has all the navigation elements linked to hundreds of pages it’s not possible to change the link style for every link. It defeats the purpose of a common shared file.

Thankfully I found an old blog post by Jonathan Snook that had a script that worked perfectly to strip the link from the current page button. See how “Drama Club” in this screen shot is now light gray and slightly out-dented? It is now an inactive link so if you hover your mouse over it the cursor will not change.

Screen Shot 2015-02-04 at 4.11.16 PM

All you need to make this work is a link to your JS file in your HTML document in the head section like this

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”clearlink.js“></script>

Then in the JS file this is the below content is all you need. After that the rest is styling with CSS!

/*
CLCP v2.1 Clear Links to Current Page
Jonathan Snook
This code is offered unto the public domain
http://www.snook.ca/jonathan/
*/

window.onload = clearCurrentLink;

function clearCurrentLink(){
    var a = document.getElementsByTagName("A");
    for(var i=0;i<a.length;i++)
        if(a[i].href == window.location.href.split("#")[0])
            removeNode(a[i]);
}

function removeNode(n){
    if(n.hasChildNodes())
        for(var i=0;i<n.childNodes.length;i++)
            n.parentNode.insertBefore(n.childNodes[i].cloneNode(true),n);
    n.parentNode.removeChild(n);
}