Have you been working hard? Well, it is time to take a break and be inspired. Carsonified is hosting a party (actually, it is an event called Future of Web Apps) at South Beach, Miami. The event will take place between Feb 28^th — Mar 1^st. There will be workshops, conference, and beach party (yes, beer and volleyball on the beach!). Some of my favorite speakers include: Kevin Rose from Digg, Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch, and Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress. For more details, visit their website FutureOfWebApps.com (designed by Elliot Jay Stocks).

by http://www.webdesignerwall.com

Someone emailed me and asked how did I do the illustration background on Next2Friends. It inspired me to write this article. He asked "Did I do it in Photoshop or Illustrator?" Well, it is a mixture of both. First I created the artwork in Illustrator, then polished it in Photoshop. Here I will unveil all my secret techniques. This tutorial includes 9 Photoshop techniques that will show you how to add more depth, color, contrast, and texture into your vector art.

Why do I need to polish the vector art?

Vector artworks are usually very flat, dull, and lack visual effects due to software limitations; thus they look very boring. Unless you want that "flat and dull" appearance, otherwise you should polish your vector in Photoshop. By polishing vector art, you can: make the color more vivid, bring up the contrast, texturize the artwork, and add more life and depth to the image. Here are some of my work samples (before and after polish).

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Technique 1: Lens Flare Effect

First technique, let’s start with one of my recent work on Next2Friends. I will show you how to create a stunning lens flare effect in two simple steps.

I assume you have the vector artwork ready and you want to add a lens flare layer on top. First create a new layer on top and fill it with black color. Go to Filter > Render > Lens Flare. Then, set the layer’s blending mode to Screen. Done. Isn’t that nice and easy?

If you want the lens flare to focus on specify area only, you can delete the unwanted area. Make a circle selection, feather the selection (Cmd + Opt + D) by 10 to 20px, inverse selection (Cmd + Shift + i), and hit Delete key.

Sometime just the Lens Flare filter alone is not good enough. You can make it even better by manually adding more colorful circles and glows.

Technique 2: Colorful and Dusty Effect

This is one of my common styles that can be found in most of my design work. Again, it is very easy. It can be done in two easy steps.

Use the Radial Gradient tool, randomly draw some soft edge glows on a layer and set the layer blending mode to Dissolve.

Repeat this step and create different color overlapping layers. Try to use bright colors such as yellow, megenta and cyan. Tips: you can control the dissolve level by adjusting the layer Opacity.

Technique 3: Rainbow

If you ever wondered how I did the rainbow effect on my Phoenix illustration (currently displaying on N.Design Studio). It is done by a Photoshop plugin, Polar Coordinates.

Create a new square dimension file (ie. 800 x 800px). Make a spectrum gradation in the middle of the document using the Gradient tool with the default "Spectrum" preset. Go to Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates. There you go, a perfect circle spectrum!

Now, you have to blur the sharp edge. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, apply 5 to 10px radius, depending on the size of your document. Bigger document size will require more blur.

If you only to show partial of the rainbow, you can use the layer mask to hide the unwanted area. In the Layer palette, click on the "Add layer mask" icon. Use Gradient tool, select the "black to transparent" swatch, drag from left to right to mask out the unwanted area.

Technique 4: Glowing Lights - Background

This is the quickiest and most easiest way to create a colorful light glowing background for your vector work.

First fill the layer with any dark gradient you desire. Use the Radial Gradient tool and start making soft (transparent) glows on separate layers. This effect works best with cyan, magenta, and purplish colors.

Experiment with the blending modes and drag the layers around (you will get unexpected results): Overlay, Color, Multiply, Screen, and Color Dodge.

Technique 5: Particles

Particle Tail

Here is a technique on how to create a tail of particles as seen in my Flow artwork. This technique is also commonly used in the fairy tale books/movies (you know, the typical magic wand effects).

Select the Pen tool, and draw an opening path. Select the Brush tool, set any brush size you want (ie. Brush size 3px). In the Brush panel, turn on Scattering and Shape Dynamics (you can play around with these settings to get different results).

In the Paths palette, right-click on the path layer and select "Stroke Path". It will fill the stroke with your active brush setting.

Tablet Drawing

Of course you can manually create the particle effect by brushing with various brush sizes. If you have a tablet, this will be fun. In the Brush panel, turn on Shape Dynamics, Scattering, or any other controls to Pen Pressure and experiment the results. If you don’t have a tablet, have fun clicking and dragging.

Technique 6: Color Dodge

Vector artworks usually look very flat, by color dodging, you can bring up the contrast and create a focus point.

Paste your vector artwork in a new layer, use the Eyedropper tool and pick a bright color from the original image. Set your Brush mode to Color Dodge and brush Opacity 5 to 10%. Gentling click on the area where you want to be dodged. Be easy and try to over-dodge the image.

Technique 7: Blurred and Darkened.

As mentioned earler, vector artwork is usually very flat. You can add more depth to the image by blurring and darkening the background objects. Examples can be found in my Flow illustration. Notice the floral patterns in the background are blurred and darkened?

Just duplicate the foreground objects and apply 3 to 5px Gaussian Blur.

Technique 8: Watercolor

As seen on this site, watercolor texture and vector can mix very well together. Here is how I did the watercolor effects.

Choose any pastel colors, such as pink, green, purple, orange, etc. Select the Pencil tool, set the brush size to about 100px, Opacity 10%, and randomly draw on the layer.

Repeat this step for different colors. This technique is also posted in the previous tutorial, Watercolor Effect Menu.

Technique 9: Vintage

Here is a technique on how to create vintage effect to give more texture to your vector work. Although I have never used this technique in my illustration work, but I have seen it a lot. So, here is it.

Paste your vector artwork in Photoshop. Select the Erase tool, set the mode to Pencil, select one of the grunge/splatter brushes, and gentling erase partial of the layer.

Credits: The brush sets used here are splatter and watercolor, from Bittbox. The icons are from my free Christmas Holiday Icon Pack.

Attitude Design Journal
Online graphic design thoughts and latest news

Ladies and Gents, hello and welcome to the Time Machine where we take a look at some examples of graphic design from other eras to help inspire and influence us. Today it’s the WW2 years and we are focusing on British design for that era.

Obviously these were difficult years but they called for strong messages to be communicated. The simplicity and cleverness with which many of the below designs have been executed can only be marveled at. Many elements of the design were originally hand drawn and in regard to style we can see influences from modern art being made into expressive visual statements. Notice how the messages are clear and concise – something that’s worth bearing in mind in all marketing communications. Enjoy…

If you liked this Time Machine post then you might also like this one: Time Machine Part 1 / Victorian Design

February 22nd, 2008 - Articles, Attitude Design, General Design

Logos are everywhere. The marks that define a business or company. The general idea is that they are recognizable and portray a feeling for what the company behind them is all about. Nearly all designers hold to the idea that “keeping things simple” is the best way forward. Clutter is a thing of the past and clean design is the thing to aspire to. The question for the modern designer is, “In a world so full of logo designs what is it that we should put into a logo design and what should we leave out? Here are a few of our ideas on logo design for the modern business…

Stop Being So Literal - Literally!
Consider some of the worlds most famous brands. Do they depict what the company literally does. Does “Nike” have an emblem of a trainer for it’s mark? Does “Coca-Cola” have a picture of a glass of liquid for it’s logo? Does “Vodafone” have a mark depicting a mobile phone, “Apple” or “IBM” a computer? No. Why is this you may ask? Well for a start the products and services of a company change over time which may mean that a literal logo would need to change on a regular basis. Why not an abstract representation then, you may ask. Well, the truth of it all is that the modern logo is not something that depicts EVERYTHING that a company does. The modern logo is more about how the company does it.

A logo needs to embody the culture of the company and most of the time the culture of a company has little to do with the products it sells. For example apple are a computer company but their name and emblem has nothing to do with computers. Their mark is an apple with a chunk taken out of it. This maybe suggests having a ‘bite of the apple’, getting ‘your teeth into something special’. Normally the brand is very clean and non obtrusive. This again gives the feeling that this company creates products which integrate seamlessly into their customers lives and that they offer a slick and professional service. All of these things are portrayed in the simplicity of their logo.Coca Cola on the other hand have a brilliantly swirly typographic logo. This gives the feeling of history, movement and fun. Again these are all attributes of the culture of their business but does not depict the literal products which they produce.

So when considering a new logo, or even an update from an old logo, why not try to think about the culture and qualities of your company rather than what you literally sell. What your logo doesn’t say can be more important than what it does say! Your logo will become cleaner, more attractive and will have longevity. It will also have a quality about it, a self assurance which breaths professionalism.

Placement Of The Logo

“Hang on a moment”, we hear you say, “but if my logo doesn’t say exactly what I do then how will people know exactly what I do”? Well, this all comes down to placement.

How many times do you see a logo all alone? Not many at all. Logos are often placed alongside an image and a marketing message which normally display, more literally what your company delivers. On a website for example, your logo will appear but will be accompanied alongside information which tells people what you literally do. On an advert your logo may appear next to an image of a product you are promoting. Again the literal is seen in the image and message but not in the logo.

This way of communicating is far more effective than trying to communicate everything literally in a logo. For a start you can keep your message very simple and direct it to a key audience. For example you may deal differently with a blue chip client than you would with a small or medium sized business. If you can target who is looking at your messages you can make sure you are appealing in the right way to the right people. A simple logo will be able to appeal to all audiences even though it may be placed on advertising directed to different classes of consumers.

Other Ways To Portray What You Literally Do

It’s also a good idea to remember that what you literally do or sell can be adapted an built into your over-all branding style. For example you could develop a series of icons which depict different product areas. You could also have a slogan or catch phrase which you can sit next to your logo. These things can be updated or changed at little or no cost.

Conclusion

So we have shown that what you include in the design of a logo can be just as important as what you leave out. We have seen that in a modern logo, aspirational ideas, rather than literal ideas, are portrayed and that this has many benefits.

Do you agree? Or maybe dis-agree? If you have any comments or suggestions please feel free to leave a comment below…

February 22nd, 2008 - Articles, Attitude Design, General Design

The single largest problem that continues to hinder interactive design from really coming into it’s own is the fact that designers allow their work to be led more by technology or production techniques and not creative thinking.

As a creative director I have had tons of interactive portfolios come across my screen over the years and I see the same problem over and over again. Unfortunately most of this work has been produced in Macromedia Flash and that technology has taken a huge amount of criticism over the years. I personally believe that pointing to Flash as the reason for ineffective web design makes about as much sense as blaming paper for creating junk mail or the telephone for creating the solicitors who call during dinner. The fault should fall to the designers who have not taken the time to use a creative strategy as the basis of their work.

A good on-line creative strategy should define the values and brand attributes that need to be communicated to the consumer in a distinctive and compelling way that takes advantage of the medium. I use answers to the following list of questions as a starting point when I meet with a new client or start on a new project.

What are we advertising and why?
When you meet with your client about a new project, get a thorough understanding of the focus of the communications efforts such as: the brand, a specific product or service, a promotion or new news. Make sure you understand their reasons for wanting to be on-line. Often the rationale clients provide are expressed as marketing objectives not as communications objectives. Communications change the way people think and influence their behaviors. That is the difference between a marketing objective and a communications objective. What is it they are trying to achieve? Increase market share? Drive awareness? Increases frequency or penetration? Increase sales? Focus on uncovering the single most important obstacle the communications must overcome.

What is the brands communication past?
Get a clear understanding of where the brand has come from and where it is now is critical to determining where the brand needs to go. Look at the brands past advertising to gain a solid understanding of the it’s positioning, personality and focus. Research if the target of the brand’s activities have shifted and why. What are the reasons for this change?

What do we need to do?
It is a simple as it sounds. What are the deliverables that need to be created to fulfill the clients marketing and communications needs?

Who are we talking to? (Demographics)
What are the physical characteristics of your clients market? Your client should be able to provide you with some statistics that provide a snapshot of the consumer you will target with the creative work. Common demographics include: age, gender, religion, income level, education, and family composition.

Who are we talking to? (Psychographics)
What are the mental characteristics of your clients market? Your client should again be able to provide you with some information that provides a snapshot of the consumer’s mindset regarding: their personal values, their beliefs, their habits and their activities. Psychographics are often more powerful influences upon how a consumer views your clients category, brand or product as attributes often affect behavior, and attitudes typically cross age groups. Take time to know your consumer so your creative will be more impactful.

What is the personality and tone?
A brand’s personality should be a reflection it’s behavior, character, and manner. This personality should drive the style and tone of all our communications in writing, photos/illustrations, typography and style.

What is the selling idea?
The selling idea is a way of saying the most persuasive thing you can say to get consumers to alter their behavior towards a client’s category, brand or product. The selling idea should be the starting point for the development any compelling, original, and successful creative ideas. The selling idea can be about: ways of using the product, disadvantages of not using the product, satisfying needs (physical, social, psychological, new ways), product heritage / where or how it was made or generic benefit you want to own.

What do we want the consumer to do?
With any advertising you want to be able to evoke and emotion or action. What is the emotion you want them have? How should they feel about the brand? What do you want them to do?

Conclusion
This list is just a starting point. To create a great strategy you have to be able to distill and refine the answers to get at the insights and core brand attributes. The more accurate and concise you are able to become the better your ideas will be. I also recommend if possible to share your answers and thinking with a team of your peers or co-workers because the more people thinking about a project, the more new ideas can be generated.



Written by Stephen Gates
Stephen Gates is an interactive creative director with t:m interactive and founder of StephenGates.com. His work has been recognized by the Clios, Ad:Tech, the New York Festivals, Communication Arts, National ADDYs and Macromedia.

Labels: brand, brochure, business card, design, product design, web, zatik

from Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox

Summary:
Having a good designer doesn't eliminate the need for a systematic usability process. Risk reduction and quality improvement both require user testing and other usability methods.

Labels: design, genius, jakob nielsen, problem, web

We Introduce new Project called DesignLive.tv, it worldwide portal for creative media professionals to share their videos, it can be Commercials, Video Showcases, interviews, company presentations etc....



Get Your Account and start uploading

Question: What should I look for when hiring a professional designer?

Answer: Good professional designers are hard to find. It’s not that there aren’t pleny of good designers out there to choose from, it’s just that sometimes it can be challenging to sort through all the companies and freelancers out there to find the best ones to suit your specific eCommerce needs. The fist thing you should look for when hiring a professional is examples of their work. Ask if you can see an online portfolio or some live examples of completed projects they have done for others. Depending on the size of the portfolio, you may even find examples similar to the ideas you have or the layouts you like. Some designers discourage contact with their previous clients, but depending on their policy you may wish to contact the site owners to guage their interaction and experience with the designer you are considering.

Take time to research the professional designer or company to find out how long they have been in business, how many satisfied clients they have and if they had any disatisfied clients (chances are they do, but you can at least see for yourself what the main complaints were about). You may also wish to price compare, shop around or barter price, but you should expect to get what you pay for (meaning don’t expect a $10,000.00 store design for pennies).

Another imortant aspect of hiring a professional design team is to research how marketable their storefronts are within search engines and other avenues of eCommerce marketing. Quite simply, you want a store that is considered ’search engine friendly’ as opposed to a store that may not perform as well in search engines. Designers who build search engine friendly stores will take the time in the beginning to set it up right for search engine marketing which will save you time and money down the road. If the designer you are considering does not build search engine friendly stores you may wish to re-think hiring them for the project (ie. if they build strictly flash sites you would not want to hire them).

source: http://www.ecommerceoptimization.com

Labels: professional designer

If You need a Visa logo or other credit card logos for your website? this site can help. If you own or operate a website in conjunction with your business, consider posting a Visa logo, credit card logos or both Visa / Master Card logos on your website. Visitors browsing the site will be more apt to linger and shop when they know you offer the convenience of buying on credit cards.

http://www.creditcardlogos.com

The reason why this site is so great is because they allow you to specify a background color for each loader before generating it. This is a reall useful feature. I hope that you like it as well.

Animated Ajax Loaders

Labels: ajax, animated, animation, gif, javascript, loader, loading, please, transparent, wait

Article written by Michelle Echevarria of Bronxplanet.com

"How can I get more hits?", "I need leads!"
These thoughts run through web designers heads all the time. How can a web designer get their services in front of people who are actually looking for web design services? The answer is the web design directory.

What is a Web Design Directory?
These directories are specifically designed to bring together web designers and showcase their work on one site. The people who visit these sites are actively looking for web design services, thus they are all potential clients. Some of the directories categorize sites by either state, county and/or web specialization. This is a grand advantage because it allows you to hit your target market more efficiently than if you were to submit your site to just a general business directory. What's even better is that all of the sites I have listed in this article are absolutely free to post your link.

Finding Web Design Directories
Well where the heck do I find these directories? Besides the ones I have listed here your best route would be to log on to Google.com, type in the key phrase "web design directory" and you'll bring up a ton of listings. Shift through them and decide which ones you feel will help your web site get hits. And just as an aside even if the site doesn't get you hits it will help you with your search engine ranking. So it's a win win situation. Try several different search engines with that same key phrase or any alternatives you can come up like "web designer listings" or "web firm directory" and submit to your heart's desire.

What do I have to do to get listed?
Some directories will ask for a reciprocal link, which is not much to ask given the amount of new traffic your site will draw in as a result of being listed. I know as a designer you may fear that adding someone's banner, icon or slogan to your site will look tacky or even make you seem like a novice. The majority will not ask you for a banner, none of the sites listed here do, but if they do it's up to you as a designer to make that decision. This was a concern for me at first but I figured out a way to get around this.

Instead of placing the directory image on your site simply place a text link with a title and description of the site you are linking. For most directories this will suffice, they have their link and your have your listing. Everyone is happy. I haven't had any complaints yet so reciprocal links can work for you as a designer. The only other challenge is finding a tasteful way to present the links on your site. The way I handle it is by creating an "affiliates" link on my contact page. You can view the technique I used on my site for an example. This way the user has to pass through your site before they can access the reciprocal links page. There's no need to disrupt the aesthetic value of your site by placing a link on your homepage.

Submission Must Do's and TipsHere are a few things you should prepare before you start submission frenzy. You will want to have the site title, URL, description, keywords and contact information ready in a word processing program so all you have to do is cut and paste into the online form. It will make the process a million times faster if you have the information ready because while you're submitting it will be requested time and again. In addition to your regular description you may want to have a truncated version just in case the site doesn't accommodate lengthy descriptions.

Another tip for submittal is to submit your own domain name link like www.yoursite.com, not www.somebodyshost.com/yoursite. Your link may be rejected and not to mention it's unprofessional. Also keep in mind that some of the submissions may take a while. Any where from instantaneously to a couple of months so don't get antsy when you don't see your link after a week. However, if you feel it's taking too long to see your link on their site feel free to email the administrator and inquire about when they think the link will be up. After all you're generating business for them by having their link on your site. It's only fair. If you don't get the response you want or no response at all feel free to delete the link from your "affiliates" page and make room for a reciprocal link that is going to bring you potential clients.

Web Design Directory ListBelow are some of the sites that really worked for me. All of them combined provided an at least 200% increase in my site traffic and resulted in a surge in client inquires:
http://www.luckpages.com/
http://www.marketingtool.com/
http://www.firmlist.com/
http://www.1234-find-web-designers.org/
http://www.designfirms.org/

Other Web Design Directories:
http://www.designers-network.com/
http://www.designerindex.com/
http://www.comparewebdesigners.com/
http://www.a2zwebdesignsource.com/
http://www.iwdp.co.uk/
http://www.webdesign.ittoolbox.com/

Labels: design, directory, freelance, leads, submit, traffic, web

by Scott Pamatat of DesignMore.com

I have noticed that many web sites are trying to portray themselves as if they were a TV network. They put top-notch graphics and sound into their web page. What these companies are missing is that their visitors are not watching TV. This works fine for those with broadband high speed connections. The fact is, most are viewing your web site on a screen that is between 15 and 19 inches wide, can only see 216 colors, and can only download at 28.8 kb per second.

What does all this mean?
You as a web site owner, designer, CEO, or any one who has control over a web site should follow a simple rule. Are you ready? Here is the rule: make sure you are on a 28.8 connection; type in the URL for your web page; hit enter, and hold your breath. If you needed to gasp for air before the page was fully down loaded you really need to cut down on the size of the page. I'm sure some of you can hold your breath for a long time. So I will give you all a suggestion that your web page should be no larger then 50K. I would shoot for less than 30K. The number one visited web site home page is under 21k. That's right, Yahoo's home page is only 20k. This might seem like very little but you really can do a lot within that size.

How can I get it under 50K? 30K?
First, all your graphic images should be as small as possible. Try to get them smaller than 4k. Going up to 6k is reasonable. When designing a graphic for the web site keep in mind the number of colors being used. I know, as a graphic designer, it was hard for me to go from millions of color to only 216. Yes, 216 is the number of colors you have on a web safe color pallet. Use solid colors when designing your image. PhotoShop has made the gradient such a popular tool. It looks good to fade things in and out. I always see a background border made up of this gradient. I always right click on that image to see the size. The 8k-12k is not worth the space. The problem with the gradient is it uses many colors and dithering. Both take up big time K. The more color you have in an image the bigger it's going to be. Use design more, graphics less. For a web page to be successful it needs to download quickly and look good. Here is the dilemma download quick or look good? Instead of designing graphics and taking pictures and turning them into jpgs to make your web page look good, try using color schemes. Use cell colors to make boarders. Use the negative space on your web site. What is not there is just as important as what is there. Remember sometimes less is more. When in doubt think of a typical visitor coming to your web page. Would that extra graphic sell them or keep them coming back again and again. If the answer is yes, by all means keep it. If the answer is "well maybe" or "it just looks good there", yank it. Viewers will appreciate not waiting more then they have to. The web is here to make our life easier not to sit in front of a screen waiting for heavy web pages to download.

I think many developers had a problem making Worpress UTF-8 (unicode) compatible, I have spent about 3 hours to make it unicode, tried to download unicode templates and understand what's goung on.

The problem was that Wordpress by default creates database on server in Sweedish encoding, you just need to change them to Unicode UTF-8 from phpmyAdmin in your Cpanel.

Labels: armenian, multilanguage, multilingual, problem, russian, unicode, utf, utf8, wordpress

Graphic design is the art of combining design principles, technology and ingenuity to arrive at solutions for a variety of visual communication needs. It is used in making business cards, logos, movie title graphics, websites, user manuals and signage. An attractive graphic design enhances visibility of the product and generates revenue for the client. Therefore, the graphic designer is an important member of the core team working on the campaign.

Most clients would need proof of one’s designing abilities. It is not as much about the list of former clients or award-winning work done before. It is about what the designer is capable of. Hence, every designer needs to compile his design solutions into a portfolio. The portfolio should be put together with care. It is like the business card for a designer.

The potential client is more interested in knowing whether you have the skill to translate his design needs into an effective campaign rather than your list of qualifications. The portfolio should, therefore, reflect the type of work you are comfortable in doing. A beginner or a person who does not work with many clients may not have much to show. In such a case, it is better to include most of the designs, which the person has done in the past.

The most important aspect of compiling the portfolio is to decide the pieces that would go into it. If you do not have many products to show, then it is better to include work, which you had done for friends. As we said before, clients are not concerned about who hired you before. They are just interested in knowing what kind of design capabilities you possess. For a newcomer or a freelancer, there could be possibilities of work done for close family, community organizations and friends. It is wise to accommodate such pieces in your portfolio. They reveal the ability to come up with acceptable solutions within budgetary constraints.

The portfolio should contain actual samples. For example, include brochures, fliers, book covers etc. On every project, obtain one or two copies for sample or portfolio use. File it away neatly. If your work was part of a larger design, such as illustrations in a book, include only those pages, by tearing them off. In case, you are not able to obtain originals, take printouts from your digital files or photocopies. More and more designers work in the area of web design. Include screen shots and high-resolution print outs from the website.

Once the pieces are chosen, one has to assemble them in a portfolio case. The case should accentuate the work rather than distract from it. Size of the case depends on the size of the materials. Place your best work at the beginning and at the end. You can also arrange according to clients or skill types. Always update your portfolio as you complete new projects.
A well-thought out and neatly presented portfolio is the first step towards establishing your business credentials. It indicates your methodical approach and makes you dependable in the eyes of prospective clients.

Author: Vincent
Website: http://www.graphic-design.in

The profusion of online Arts websites allows anyone to explore thousands of art galleries, museums and art expositions from around the globe. Search by subject, medium, country of origin and more. Public listings of expositions and online ticket sales make it easy for even the busiest people to enrich their lives through enjoyment of art and artistic performances.
The internet serves not only traditional artists, but also those specializing in computer art. There are many web sites solely dedicated to art created on computer, and even museums of computer art. This is an entirely new venue for the new global media art community, and supports the creation, presentation, discussion and preservation of modern art that uses computer technology in original ways.

Many are free community sites which offer opportunities for the presentation of digital art from multiple digital artists as well as discussion forums for artists and members of the public. These provides a guide for both amateurs and professionals interested in exploring and using digital media and computers for creative purposes. Look for sites offering free downloads of images to enhance your personal or commercial website with photos, clip art and animations.

Read online critical history of computer graphics and animation. The internet is a global communications forum, providing professional advice from worldwide experts on creating digital art and illustrations. This advances the concept of digital fine art while promoting public interest and knowledge about this new medium.

For those more interested in traditional art, many museums now have digital photographs of their collections posted online. Without leaving your home, tour a virtual art gallery with information about the artists at your fingertips. If you are curious about a given work of art, it only takes a mouse click to find a biography of the artist and other information about the art.
Appreciation of art is greatly enhanced by knowing the artist's motive in creating it, as well as an social factors influencing the subject matter. For instance, to understand medieval paintings, it helps to know the preoccupations and perceptions of people living in this era. Many older works of art use symbolism not readily apparent to modern viewers, and an online guide brings to life the meaning behind many seemingly minor items in these paintings.

Don't forget about online ticket sales. It is so much easier to buy tickets online than over the phone. This eliminates waiting in line and guessing whether or not you are going to get a good seat for the performance. You can see a map of the theater so you can pick out exactly where you want to sit.

For those interested in learning new art-related skills, there are numerous online courses in fine arts, interior design, graphic design, art and art history master's courses. With more people engaged in distance learning than ever before, many large universities are now offering their courses online. With so much available, there's absolutely no excuse for not participating.


Author: Jimmie UsmaraeWebsite:
http://www.layoutvenue.com

Author: Marcus
Website: http://www.thagodz.com/

PPC Search Engine Search engine marketing is fast becoming one of the easiest methods of marketing your products and services via the internet. Although as a medium the Internet is an indispensable tool yet the whole marketing shebang is quite difficult because your audience is a nameless and faceless entity that you really don’t know anything about. All you know is that a certain type of website appeals to a certain type of user but that’s about it. When you go about physically marketing your products in the real world there are a number of marketing techniques that you can use but in the case of Internet marketing the options are limited.
The best and the most versatile tool available to businesses on the net is the Pay per click search engine marketing technique. This technique has its roots in the Pay per click concept. What is this pay per click concept? Let’s take a look at it before we proceed any further. Pay per click basically means that you have a banner or an Icon that is displayed on the website of a related service provider or on a search engine results page. When the banner is displayed on a Search engine results page it is referred to as Pay per click search engine marketing. Whenever someone clicks on that banner or Icon the advertiser has to pay the person carrying that banner.
The payment is calculated on the basis of the number of clicks that the banner receives. One issue that all new Pay per click search engine marketing users are unable to digest is the issue of fraudulent clicks that can jack up their bills. When you go in for a pay per click search engine marketing option you should gather as much information about that pay per click search engine marketing option as possible before you actually hand over any money. This will save you the frustration and embarrassment later. One thing that you need to remember is that the search engine marketer should have a fraudulent click grievance redressal system in place. If you are thinking about Pay per click search engine marketing then the first thing that you need to do is decide when and where you are going to advertise.

By “when” we mean in which season. By “where” we mean on which search engine marketing tool. The most popular and versatile pay-per-click search engine on the internet with wide reach is Yahoo! Search Marketing ( this was previously known as Overture), which provides paid results to many of the major search sites such as MSN, AOL, Yahoo! and Lycos. Another very popular program is the Google's Adwords program. This program will give you access to the search engine result pages of Google. The two search engine marketing programs are the best in the field and will give you the best possible results. Another search engine marketing tool that is very popular in Europe is Espotting. The major drawback with using these search engine marketing programs is that if you want to go in for some of the more popular search queries, these search engine marketing programs will prove to be quite expensive. In case you have budget constraints the smaller PPC services may be able to help you out.

This is a fact that most of them do not reach any of the major portals, but they do deliver results to a wide range of metasearch engines, and you will get desirable results for a very reasonable price indeed. You would do well to remember that although organic Search Engine Optimization may generate traffic, it is not "instantaneous." By making use of search engine marketing programs such as pay per click, you can receive the desired results and clicks a few days instead of months. If you want to get instantaneous results it would be highly beneficial for you to have a PPC Search Engine Advertising. pay per click search engine marketing program for your targeted keywords even if it is on a smaller Pay per click service.

Author: Manish Sharma
Website: http://www.spiderlogics.com/

You may have heard of SEO services and how Web business leaders are using them to market their sites. Almost every Web site that provides SEO services and products needed to offer. These sites require visitors to promote their products and continually improve their sales and profits. Because of these reasons, almost all of the site owners are candidates and working with business to achieve SEO precious than the first page ranking. The site owners are becoming more familiar with the benefits of SEO services to their customers. Through the optimization of search engines also known as referral SEO services of a website is strengthened and improved in order to achieve its full year and more search engines. There are several SEO services that a company can offer its customers.

These services include analysis of the customer's site, analyze the site competitor, work on improving the website of the client, and the ongoing maintenance of the Web site to retain its ranking in the search engines. SEO services as they start to analyze your site. This is where SEO services providers learn all parts of your site. They study his present rank PR, competitors, and most of the links and check the contents of the site. They also find the flow from the audience to your site. If and when these factors are properly implemented, they will lead to higher rankings and more traffic. These are the reasons why SEO services are needed to be able to generate traffic and improve revenues and net profits. Traffic is the life of a website.

Remember, the greatest number of visitors who come to visit your site, the more likely to convert them into a sale or a sign of belonging. They can disseminate information to others through social networks that can serve as reference system. There are several ways on how SEO services help increase traffic to a website. It is through the Internet marketing strategies such as pay-per-click, construction and link organic search engine optimization (SEO). The pay-per-click strategy is the process of purchasing space on the site where ads are displayed for the advertiser pays for the traffic on pay-per-performance. In addition, the better the keywords you use in regard to your products, the better the chance that your site will be visited. For example, if your products are pieces of jewellery, with the use of strategies SEO services, you can use the keyword search and keywords popular to go at a low price, such as diamonds, gold Pure jewelry or even alliances and engagement rings for your site is discovered during the first search.
On the one hand, if your product is related to travel, you can use keywords such as packaging or cheaper group rates and other seasonal. SEO services providers will give you the reasons why you should use these keywords well documented that must be well written in the site content. What are all these SEO services strategies? Mainly, the most informative of your site is the most common and visits that you will receive thousands and millions of online users globally. You will get all the help you need in the optimization of your site's contents thanks to the valuable support of SEO services providers. What did these providers? On the one hand, to enhance the effectiveness of keywords, SEO services try to find keywords that are related to your products. You can also use the keywords that people frequently use when searching for your products by search engines. Another way on how to increase traffic to your website is to use link building strategy.

Remember, SEO services are designed to increase traffic on your site or allow visitors to your site to be accessible wherever possible. SEO Services determined that this strategy may be paid link or a free. The paid links are usually associated with membership in the membership of a certain directories or sites offering links. Web sites within these directories are generally high places who make profits by accepting links. They allow new sites to be linked with them, but require payment in return. These sites usually have an area as part of their site where the links are associated interchangeably. On the other hand, other sites allow truly free links, as site owners to provide an exchange links to their site or they have the freedom to share links with other dealers as well. There are also other sites that link, but free to link exposure is not usually long as the comparison with paid sites. These sites are alternated with the pace of other sites wishing to be bound as well. This strategy of interconnection is one of the best marketing and promotion of the strategy of listing of SEO services providers. Finally, SEO services providers have this organic search engine optimization.
It is the slow but sure strategy for Web sites. It is slow, because it implied a link construction, which is a very long consuming. It is the most effective strategy in the top three. It works with a design worthy of the largest search engines and from this ranking, you move slowly upward. The site is enriched and improved by SEO services used to be able to achieve a ranking in the search engine. For its first tier, this will gain traffic and increase slowly in grade over time. It may take a lot of time compared to the strategies mentioned above, but it will last longer, too. To invite the traffic to your site must be attractive and filled with necessary information to your target audience. It is important to consider the information written about her, as she will in the ranking of your site in the future. SEO services needs to be continuous and used on an ongoing process in order to maintain the rank of your site.

Author: king marsh
Website: http://www.minterest.com

So, you want to start up an internet business. You are now ready to approach a web-hosting company for hosting your website.
Be selective when choosing your web hosting company. Web Hosting isn't like buying groceries. Why, because there are a lot of areas that you have to consider even for a simple and straight forward web page.
It would be helpful to you if you could consider the following areas when approaching your potential web hosting company I have also included some of the rational behind just for your knowledge.
Any sound customer support systems in place? Nowadays, there are many web-hosting providers in the market. Some of them serve their customers promptly while some don't.
One of thing you could do here is to ask some pre-sales questions. Wait and see their response period. The industry standard calls for 24hrs respond time. If they don't respond within 24 hrs, you may likely do not have a good services in future if you subscribe to their host.
Knowing their Server systems, technology, Data Centers, and Back-up schedules. Web-hosting provider typically uses a server to host the websites which forms his basic infrastructure. Back-systems are scheduled to run automatically and these servers are backed-up as frequently as daily with some hosting providers.
Check out with your potential hosting company what kind of technology they use and whether they have any reliable back-up systems at traceable data-centers. You could also check out whether they are equipped technically and whether they have technical people on roll.
Understanding their company data, financial standing and profitability: You must be thinking what is it to do with the web-hosting provider's financial standing. This is just to make sure that you will not be talking to that fly-by-night operator.
Checking the scope of service provided Of course, you must also know what type of services your potential web hosting company can offer to you. Do they have the range to suit your requirements with your allocated budgets?
If you intend to expand your internet business, you may like to check with them different application platforms such as forum, shopping carts, autoresponder, etc Some of the web hosting company may have difficulties providing autoresponder.
If you intend to add in video, audio clips, and those interactive contents into your webpage, you will need to more about the bandwidth that they will be providing.
Hosting reliability and up-time guarantee This is the most important areas that you should be consider. What is Up-time? Up-time is the time (expressed in percentages) the host is available to access through the Internet.
You would have seen a lot of hosting providers mention a 99.9 % up-time guarantee. But then, you ought to realize that any hosting application environment calls for maintenance too. You should ask how the web-hosting provider manages to shuffle this time efficiently and how do they manage their maintenance.