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The holiday season is upon us and another year draws to a close.
It's time to get together and share traditions with family and
friends. Oddly enough, it has often been my lack of time and
survival skills that spur many a great family activity. 
Hemera Image express 
Send out beautiful holiday cards with a personal message. It's easy and it's free! 
The images in Hemera Photo-Objects 50,000 have become essential tools for
class preparation and presentation at Educarium, an alternative elementary
school in Ottawa, Canada. Both students and teachers appreciate how easy it
is to use the large image collections for school projects like exhibitions
and class certificates. 
Save $50 on AbleStock CDs priced at just $139
(regularly $189) - a special limited time offer! 
Save $25 when you purchase Hemera Photo Clip Art by Hemera
and The Big Box of Art 350,000. 
Get your photos out of your camera and into your life with Paint Shop Photo Album, a member of
the Paint Shop Family of digital photography and imaging software. Now you can quickly and
easily make the most of your digital photos. Get your photos from camera to computer in just
two clicks. Then enhance, organize, and share those digital memories in a flash with Photo
Album's fast and easy-to-use tools. 
High Impact eMail Holiday Edition 2003 just arrived in time for the holidays! Send holiday cards,
greetings with portraits, invitations or even holiday themed newsletters - all in an email. |
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 I'm sure it's happened to you more than once - you have to create a brochure in less than a day, and you're restricted to a client's color and tone preferences. Here's a little trick that helps me create collateral fast, with some quick and easy tone work. In the example I'm using here, I first met the client and defined their objectives. The client wanted soft colors and a de-saturated effect. From there, I visited AbleStock.com to look for images that matched the client's idea of color tone (even a thumbnail image is perfect for this exercise). Then I opened the image in my bitmap editing program (e.g. Photoshop®) and followed these steps for using the color palette (most bitmap editing programs have similar features).
Bio Sylvain Lambert has been head designer and Creative Director at Hemera since 1998, and has acquired a solid experience in photography and branding within the organization. He holds a Bachelor with Honors in Graphic Design from the University of Quebec in Outaouais (1996).  Graphics on the Web need to look good but they also have to work well. To make your graphics look their best, you need to follow a few technical tips. Formats & File Sizes First, virtually all static graphics you see on the Web are in one of two main formats: GIF or JPG. Choosing the right format helps your graphics look better and display faster. File size is very important. The larger your graphics files are, the longer it will take for someone else to see them. How long? For dialup modems at 56K, divide the file size by 4. So a 40K file will take about 10 seconds. For Cable or DSL, divide by 40, so a 40K file should only take a second (in the real world, though, it will take longer!). Choosing the right file format is easy if you remember this tip:
 GIF is the choice for things like charts, graphs, cartoons, illustrations with flat colors, and type. GIF files can have "transparent" backgrounds, so that the background of your page can show through. They can also contain animation.  JPG is always the best choice for photos because it makes them smaller and faster to download. To do this, JPG is a "lossy" format, which means the more compression you choose, the smaller the file--but also the more quality you lose. Amazingly, you can lose a lot of quality and still have the image look good. Graphics programs let you choose how much compression you want to use. I start at 70% and then experiment to find the best mix of compression and quality. Resolution Almost all graphics on the Web are made up of thousands of tiny colored dots called "pixels." If you hold a magnifying glass up to your monitor (or TV screen) you'll see them. "Resolution" can get confusing, because when you scan images the scanner software asks for "dots per inch" but there are no real inches on the screen, only pixels. So Web images are always measured in pixels. Most people view the Web on a screen that's either 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high, or 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels high. You want your graphic to fit comfortably on the screen, so it should never be larger than these sizes, and most often will be a lot smaller. An image that's 600 pixels wide will be considered "large" by most people. Images from Hemera Image Express™ or The Big Box of Art® tend to be in JPG format, and under 600 pixels wide. TIP: You can always make images smaller. But making them larger will make them either jagged or fuzzy. Make images smaller and they'll still look sharp.  But if you make them larger, they'll become either jagged or fuzzy.  Resizing graphics While Web building programs let you take any graphic and make it larger or smaller on the page, that's not the best way to size graphics for the Web. They won't look their best or have the optimal file size for fast downloading. It's always best to resize images with a graphics program before you place them on your Web page. Programs like The Big Box of Art (or the other Hemera image products on CD or DVD) let you size graphics to the exact dimensions you want as you export them. Or you can use programs like Photoshop, PaintShop Pro, Corel Draw, Xara, or even free graphics programs like Irfanview to "resize" or "resample." Bio Daniel Will-Harris is a freelance writer and designer who lives with his wife and a large family of chipmunks in Northern California. His clients include Bitstream, Corel, Microsoft, Prentice Hall, Xerox and small businesses around the world. His Web site, www.Will-Harris.com, features his design work, and you can sign up for his entertaining email newsletter at www.SchmoozeLetter.com. ® 2003 Hemera Technologies Inc. All rights reserved. If you unsubscribe, you will no longer receive information on updates, upgrades, special offers or technical support notification from Hemera. Click here to unsubscribe. |
