Slightly Remarkable

After a few days, Mike Rundle emailed me the following response.

Hey Jonathan-

Thanks for the inquiry about the 9rules logo, Paul sent your email over to me so maybe I could answer some of your questions :)

The original goal with the 9r logo was to give the organic sense of a growing community, so I chose the concept of many leaves coming from one stem to show the organic part, and then made the leaves larger as you go from bottom to top to give the sense that they are a living, breathing part of the logo.

As for the color choices, 9rules has a ton of different members talking about all different topics so I wanted to visually represent the diversification of our members within the mark itself. I chose many different colors to show the different types of members, and I happen to like green because of the obvious leaf association :)

Let me know if there’s anything I can answer Jon, thanks again.

Best,
Mike

My initial logo design looked cool, but was virtually meaningless, which makes “just cool” not good enough. Thanks to Mike’s excellent response, I’m further on the road to understanding how to better design logos.

Oh, and while I’m talking about logos, some may be interested in learning how Fedora created its new logo. Good stuff there.

So, does anyone else have any tips or resources on designing logos? If so, please share them!

Reportedly the best thing to use is Illustrator — and for those of you who have Illustrator, this should be a snap — but if you only have Photoshop… what do you do?

In the process of creating this header, I’d searched around for a long time, and only found one solution (well, the same solution among different tutorial sites, but I linked to the best one). It was to create a new image with a transparent background, make identically spaced (this isn’t said in the tutorial, but it won’t come out right if the spaces and widths of the stripes are not the same) stripes, and then run a Polar Coordinates filter on it. This works, but if you look at it up against a background, the edges are very rough and pixelated — it just looks really, really choppy. I don’t know about you, but I cannot stand that. I hate it with a passion. Yuck!

The fix, though, is extremely easy. Instead of making a 400×400 (or whatever size you want) pixel document, create a 2000×2000 one (yes, that’s right, 2000). Zoom out to about 25% or so, and work as if it were a 400×400 pixel document. Be careful as computers without sufficient memory may crash (oh yea, disclaimer dealy: I’m not responsible if it does). Now once you’ve evenly spaced your stripes, run the Polar Coordinates filter on them (as shown in the tutorial I linked to). After that, you have what you want, except it’s WAY too big… and if you zoom in all the way, it’s still pixelated on the edges, but you’ll notice at 25%, the edges are smooth as butter over warm bread. Now all you have to do is go into Edit – Image Size, and set the pixel dimensions of the size you want your spanned stripes to be. Now if you want to make it a gradient or add other effects, it’s a snap!

A client of mine is looking to have online quizzes powered by Flash on his web site. Myself not being a Flash developer, I’m seeking someone who’s capable of creating an effective, clean interface for online quizzes in Flash. Web standards advocation preferred.

Also, if anyone could point me to some tutorials on digitizing images (as in, converting photographs into coloring book-like drawings), I would appreciate it. If I can’t extract and digitize images in time, I may also be in need of a graphics developer who can do this.

Please contact me if interested. Thanks.

So, I take about 140 pictures on my digital camera, and I want to resize them all and apply the Unsharp Mask filter to get a crisper image. Opening each individual image (sequentially or simultaneously) is definitely out of the question. This is where Photoshop comes to the rescue (in more ways than one).

Open one of the pictures in Photoshop, and begin recording an Action (it’s basically the Adobe term for “macro”). You should be able to hit the “Actions” tab in your History/Actions/Tool Presets window to see the default Actions that come with Photoshop. All you have to do from there is hit the circle (record), resize the image to the dimensions you want, apply the Unsharp Mask filter, and then hit the square (stop) in the Actions window. Now that you’ve recorded the action, you can tell Photoshop to open a large number of images, run the specified Action, save the images (or copy them as changed to a new directory), and close them, all automatically.

To make Photoshop run a batch operation, go to File → Automate → Batch… Select the Set you saved your Action in, and then select the Action name from the drop down menu. You can play around with the options from there, but what I did was I picked a folder of images to change, left all boxes unchecked, and changed the Destination to a new folder (so that instead of editing the images, it opened copies, edited the copies, and then saved the copies to another folder on my computer, preserving the original images). Unless you opened, saved or closed the image while you were recording the Action, it’s very important that you do not check any of the boxes.

So there you have it. It’s very quick and simple, but hopefully it’ll help out some of you who had the same problem as I did. Figuring things out on your own isn’t always fun, especially when you’re pressed for time!