Farewell 2009

It's that time of the year I guess because all month I keep catching myself reflecting on everything that's happened in 2009, the good, bad and everything I've experienced and learned. Although I've definitely had some ups and downs, I really feel I've got a good list of things to be thankful for. And since I'm a list-making type of girl, you must know what I've been thinking about and working on a lot lately. Goals, resolutions, you get the idea.

With that said, the latest post on my new, favorite blog, White Hot Truth by Danielle LaPorte kind of stopped me in my tracks - "What's on your Stop Doing List?" I've been so obsessed with setting new goals, making new internal promises of what I'm going to try harder with, do more of and become better at, I hadn't even though of sorting through the things that really didn't and don't work for me and probably even get in my way. So now, I have more lists to make, and Danielle LaPorte is on my "Favorites of 2009" for sure.

To get to the main reason for this post though, thinking about all I'm so thankful for = the awesome clients I got to make web sites for. Please accept my huge and heart felt THANK YOU to everyone I had the pleasure to work with in 2009. I really feel lucky to have had the opportunity to work for such great people. I was constantly inspired by your drive, your ideas, your kindness and your creativity. You made work not feel like work and made me want to be better and do more!


Now for the business part - A few Announcements for the New Year.
No big changes but a few items I wanted to post:

Payment Plans
I love being able to help people with their business or projects, especially new ones starting out and am happy to work with you to reach your goals so I decided to be formal about it. Payment Plans will be available in 2010 for larger projects, redesigns or for anyone who requests them. I'll even send a formal payment plan form where you can tell me how much on which day of the month. Don't need a plan, that's ok too, payment is due in full within 30 days of receiving your invoice for updates and maintenance, etc.

Get free work just for telling a friend about me!
Need updates or work done on your site? I'll do it for free when you send a new client my way!
Get 4 hours of free work for anyone you refer who becomes a new customer. Just have them give me your name when they call or email, if I ended up building them a site, doing a redesign or any paying work on their site, you're all set.

Hope everyone has a wonderful Holiday Season; enjoy the people around you, eat too many cookies, make your lists for the New Year. Wishing you peace and happiness!




















Pinup By Gil Elvgren - A Christmas Eve (waiting for Santa)

Disclosure Statement

Ok, here's my official blog disclosure statements (generated at www.disclosurepolicy.org

Basically, I'm not getting paid or any free gifts for what I write about. Everything is just my opinion and anything I've recommended or said "Hey - it's that awesome?" about was again, just from my point of view. I like to write and wanted to share views and information so I started this blog, just for you to enjoy! But since I do love to link and recommend and say "It's the best!", I thought I better get this posted already.

Anyway, here's the official real deal:

This policy is valid from 22 October 2009

This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. This blog does not accept any form of advertising, sponsorship, or paid insertions. We write for our own purposes. However, we may be influenced by our background, occupation, religion, political affiliation or experience.

The compensation received will never influence the content, topics or posts made in this blog. All advertising is in the form of advertisements generated by a third party ad network. Those advertisements will be identified as paid advertisements.

The owner(s) of this blog is not compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the blog owners. If we claim or appear to be experts on a certain topic or product or service area, we will only endorse products or services that we believe, based on our expertise, are worthy of such endorsement. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider.

This blog does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest.

So I guess maybe next year if someone does want to start paying/gifting/being really cool to me so I'll write good things about them or their products, I'll be changing this but for now, it's all just from the bottom of my heart, to you from me!

Choosing Colors for Design

I'm always excited when I start on a new design project about experimenting with colors. It's definitely an important element, the right colors and images can help you communicate more effectively and can make the site. For some projects, I'll be given an existing logo or images that will point me in a certain direction but I've also worked with pretty much a blank slate, nothing but ideas to run with. This can also be as challenging as it is fun though and I always find myself spending a surprising amount of time switching out colors and trying different shades or scraping an idea all together and going in a totally new direction.

So I was really happy to run across this article from good old Sitepoint!
21 Stimulating Color Palette Tools For Designers

A few of these I'd heard of and used before but some were completely new to me and since I love finding resources like this - had to share!

A few I really like:

ColorCombos.com
Just click on the color palette and it provides hex codes, lots of search options as well and tons to choose from. You can even enter a url to grab colors from a site.

ColorBlender.com
Enter a color and the system creates a palette for you

Jeff Minard’s Color Palette Generator
Upload a picture and system generates a color palette based on the .jpg. Here's one I tried - love it!



Again, just a few but some really cool ones!


From a Vintage Christmas card, inside - Forget the sweet nothings, where's the present?

Removing White Backgrounds in Photoshop

Removing backgrounds is probably one of my least favorite things to do. I always feel like it doesn't quite look the way I want the picture to look or I just don't have enough patience to get in to the pixel level and very carefully erase, view and erase some more. So honestly, I avoid it if possible but lately I've been forced to do quite a bit of this and thought I'd post a few ways that have been fairly pain-free.

There are several different ways to do this in Photoshop, it'll depend on the type of image you're working with to determine which technique will work the best for you.

The one I've been using the most lately is the Magic Wand tool.

1. Copy and paste my image on to a transparent background of the same size as my image

2. Click on the Magic Wand tool to select it and click once on a section of white background you want to get rid of. This should highlight the entire section around your picture.

3. Hit Delete and you should see the checkerboard - transparent background.

4. Sometimes it will look like there is still a weird shadow and/or line that makes the image look very "cut out" To help get rid of this, Click on Select at your top menu bar, select Modify and Expand. Leave the setting at 1px and hit delete on your background area again. This should expand the area the magic wand traced around your image and trim things up!

Another way that has worked well for me in the past is using the Extract feature

1. With your image open, select Filter from the top menu bar and select Extract.

2. On the next screen, you'll use a highlighter to outline your image. You can play around with the size of the highlighter here depending on what will be the easiest to use with your image.

3. Once my outline is done, I usually click on the eraser tool and go back on the inside of the outline to correct any areas where I marked too far over my image.

4. Once you're ready, click on the Fill tool (looks like a paint bucket) and click on your image. It'll now be colored in but that's ok. Click on "ok".

5. You should now be left with your image on a transparent background.

6. You may still need to use the eraser tool to clean up any white around the picture that may have been missed (I hate that!)

With both methods, save your image as a .GIF with transparency and try it out.

You may still need to do a little smoothing or experiment with blur or feathering to get rid of any jagged lines (the feathering has never worked for me but I keep reading about it so maybe it's just the images I've been working on.)

Neither of these are new but have come in handy and worked pretty easily for me so I thought they were worth a post. As I discover easier or more effective ways of smoothing things after removing the background, I'll post that too! Enjoy :)

December 9 - Update
Ok - here's a little more info and a few more steps that have worked great for me so far.

If the jagged outline still remains on images, after removing the background with the Magic Wand tool:

1. In Photoshop, Select "Image" from the top menu bar

2. Select "Trim" from the drop down.

A menu box will appear and should have the following settings already selected:
Based on - Transparent Pixels
Trim Away - Top, Left, Bottom, Right (all boxes should have a check mark. If not, select them.)

3. Click Ok

4. Save as .gif with the following settings:
adaptive
Diffusion
Transparency (should have a check mark)
Lassy (0)
Dither 100%
Matte - None

Nothing has worked for me as well as this has and believe me, I've tried everything I could possibly find. Hope this comes in handy for you as well!