Future Plans

Over the past little while I've been thinking about redesigning my blog, getting my own domain, and advertising for free-lance web and graphic design. While that's still a little ways in the future, I did come up with an idea for a sleeker logo.


This idea is still preliminary, but I like the red and blue, and I'm still toying with the RS (I may change to another shape or fade it out a bit). For inspiration I love the sites faveup.com, design shack, and best web gallery.

We'll see how this progresses, but I am definitely going to work on this in the coming months.

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Web Design

My latest fetish has been web design. I found a new blog to follow, blog.spoongraphics. There are a couple of really great tutorials on making a web page in photoshop and then turning that page in xhtml.

Just last night I finished a project that I did for Kylie (my sister in law) as a Christmas present (so don't tell her yet). In case someone doesn't know, she's obsessed with Batman.




Right now it's at http://kylielovesbatman.blogspot.com, but we'll see where she ends up putting it.

I made three separate images, one for the header, one for the footer, and one for the middle. With some tweaking in the blogspot code, I was able to get it turn out. I was happy with how it looked for my first truly customized blog. I still have some other smaller things to add, like Icons and font stuff, but I'm pretty sure Kylie will love it. Hopefully in the future, I put together a tutorial on how I did this and modified it for blogspot.

I found the bat shape off of a deviant art site, the batman font (that you can find on many font sites), used some textures overlayed for the header and some brushes for the footer, and finally used a brushed metal style that I got off of the adobe site as the overall background.

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Family Picture

Well ... I haven't posted since school started (imagine that), as I haven't really been just playing around with photoshop lately. I miss the summer, but this is my last full semester of school, and I'm excited to be graduating in April.

Nevertheless, I found a project this past week. Our little family's been wanting to take a nicer picture lately, and we ended up just taking one at my inlaw's house. We set up a blanket behind us, and tried to get a pose like another picture we'd seen, but Kamryn was just a little too spirited. Katrina talks about the whole experience in our family blog. We finally got a picture we liked and this is how it turned out all finished:



I love photoshop. I found the tutorial on doing custom sepia from pshero. I like the tutorial just because you can customize the actually sepia tone instead of just using a default from a photo program.

I also took some wispies out of Trina's hair and adding some to me :)

Ading a gradient map was all I had to do to add the sepia tones.

Finally, I added a curves adjustment layer to paint with light (or in this case paint with dark). I just used the 'darker' setting for curves, making the whole picture darker ... but beacuse I only wanted the people to be darker (not the background), I added a mask and used a fuzzy brush with white to 'color' in the darkness just on us and show some more skin texture.

Overall we were really happy with the picture and have had people ask where we went to take it. When we tell people that my wife's parents took it in their kitchen, they are pretty surprised.

Here's the original:


Photoshop is Great!

Scott Kelby's 7-point System

So yesterday I was waiting for a test photo to print at Costco, and I had a few minutes to kill. I ran into this book and had a few seconds to browse through it:



I was really impressed because Scott Kelby simply goes through 21 separate photos and exactly what he does to make them go from ok to outstanding. He shows you how to use the same tools again and again instead of taking one chapter to show everything about one tool ... which you proceed to forget next time you need to use it.

I considered ordering it on amazon, but then thought about the BYU library. As it turns out they have an online copy of the book, so I can just read it there! I've only been through the first chapter, and I've already learned a TON about some tools in photoshop that I'd never heard of or rarely used before. Camera Raw 4.5, lab color, using actions ...

I've tried a few things, and while I'm not even really into the book, I'm pretty happy with the results 12 hours later. I took all of these pictures in Thailand, and while I like them, the colors didn't turn out exactly like I wanted them too (especially China Town and Bangkok)

Before:
After:

Buddhist Idols in Phitsanulog Thailand

Before:

After:

China Town in Down Town Bangkok

Before:

After:

A view from the tallest building in Bangkok

It's amazing how much you can work with the lighting and color in a photo. As you can see, the book shares some pretty impressive stuff. I'm already converted and can't wait to learn how to work photos even more.

DNA Barcoding

I decided to combine 2 things I'm doing now and make a theoretical logo for the bio project I'm doing. I'm working in Dr. Keith Crandall's evolutionary biology lab on a DNA Barcoding project. We are building a micro array that will aid in identifying primer sites for the CO1 gene across animalia. More simply, we're aiding in the quest to identify animals by their dna alone.

Because I've been working a lot on the project lately (downloading and aligning thousands of sequences from online databases), I thought it would be cool to make a logo for DNA Barcoding. This is how it came out:

I found this really cool barcode font, and the rest it just shapes and effects.

Business Cards

The past week has been the business idea week. After a recent baby shower, my wife and I realized that diaper cakes aren't just fun to make (more fun for her I think), but generally the markup is Enormous! (diaper cake businesses charge anywhere from $50 to $150 for a cake made out of diapers) We've thought about making diaper cakes and selling them locally on craig's list, just to see if the idea could go anywhere. So between that idea and me still toying around with the idea of freelance web and graphic design, I decided to make business cards for our hypothetical businesses.



I used a business card design tutorial from psdtuts.com (my favorite Photoshop Tutorial site). We'll see if either of these ever actually happen, but designing the business cards was fun!

Baby!

So we had a baby this week. I really liked how the annoucement turned out.

I also put together a collage.

Bangkok Thailand

I served as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for 2 years in Bangkok Thailand. I took around 5000 pictures, so I'm sure that I'll have a few things that come out of those pics.

Collages are fun. For the text I found this great collection of adobe gradients (original link). I also used a displacement filter to get the cool edge effect.

Anniversary

For our anniversary I wanted to make a unique, memorable gift.

This I made based on a tutorial with pictures from high school, engagement, wedding, and a Disney cruise.

My wife is a Disney Princess nut and I thought she'd like this.

Family Logo

For a little family reunion, I took the family brand and made it into a logo. (my family heritage is steeped in cattle, dairy farms, and ice cream)

This is the document detailing the family brand (literally a cow brand).

And here's the modern result!

Tree of Life

In the Book of Mormon 1st Nephi 8 is recorded Lehi's Dream.

10 And it came to pass that I beheld a tree, whose fruit was desirable to make one happy.

11 And it came to pass that I did go forth and partake of the fruit thereof; and I beheld that it was most sweet, above all that I ever before tasted. Yea, and I beheld that the fruit thereof was white, to exceed all the whiteness that I had ever seen.

12 And as I partook of the fruit thereof it filled my soul with exceedingly great joy; wherefore, I began to be desirous that my family should partake of it also; for I knew that it was desirable above all other fruit.

I'd like to do more art about what I believe in. Lehi's dream is representative of much, but the tree and fruit especially stand for the Love of God and how happy we can be when we willingly follow His plan.

Happy Fathers Day

For fathers day my wife and I wanted to make personalized cards for our dads. We got my dad a day of slave labor in the yard and my wife's dad a night out with his girls and Italian food.

I got the idea for the grass text from a psdtuts tutorial.

The Italy design was just my own idea with a gradient, a crumpled paper background, and a brush I made from an image of the Italian Coat of Arms.

Photoshop Tutorials

After piddling around with photoshop a bit, I realized that it's not the most trivial program to use. After learning how to use it, it's great! So many powerful features and so many different ways to achieve desired effects. That said, the learning curve is steep.

So I played here and there, but couldn't really make sense of much. Luckily, I ran into some tutorial sites online. I eventually found psdtuts.com (which is still my favorite Photoshop site, hands down).

Even with tutorials, I had to constantly look up what tools they were talking about ... but after a little while it gets easier. So after my first full Photoshop Tutorial, I came out with this:



I learned a TON in this tutorial about layer effects, perspective (the floor), and how to copy effects (each letter is actually about 20 different letters on top of each other ... so you add it all up and that a lot of letters!). I love Photoshop and am excited to see where else I can go with it.

Icons and Buttons

Because of the site I am designing for ARUP, I first started searching the web for buttons to spice up the site. I found TONS of resources, among which include:

Cocoa Grove
jrdesign
studiomx
icondesigner
Louie Mantia
pixel press icons
yellow icon design

And the best I found were:

iconspedia
iconbase
deviant art

After a lot of looking, I decided to give my own buttons and icons a chance.

Not the best, by any means ... but a start. The more I've looked into icon design, the more I've realized I have to get a better eye for light and how it interacts with objects. Get the lighting and shadows right and you're already half way to creating a convincing icon.

My First Try

My first attempt at Photoshop Effects was letters. I found a tutorial somewhere (I can't remember now), and played around.



The second letter is a 'g' in Thai. Simple start, for sure ... but I started to learn about layers and blending options.

Why Did I get into Photoshop?

It pays to take initiative. I had been back off my mission for a couple of months, when Brigham Young University held a career fair. I had dropped a calculus class, could barely remember how to program, and was hating my chemistry class ... I was not on the top of my game when it came to academics because I'd been in Thailand as a Mormon missionary for 2 years. Despite my academically rusty mind, I'd heard that there were going to be internship opportunities at the career fair, so with nothing to lose I put together a resume last minute and skipped a class to peruse the booths.

Out of the 3 companies that I knew where in the bioinformatics field (my major), only one told me that I had a chance at landing an internship. I had my eye on one of the companies that didn't: ARUP Laboratories.



ARUP Laboratories is a medical testing company in Salt Lake City associated with the University of Utah. They recruiter told me that they didn't offer internships. I asked him who I would talk to if they did, and after looking at me for a moment, he gave me a contact.

The rest is history. I was offered an internship after interviewing with them and had an awesome summer rubbing shoulders with tons of scientists in their R&D department. They liked what I did so much that they kept me on as a consultant to work on small projects here and there.

Just before this summer, they said that they needed someone to design a web based database for them, and wondered if I was interested. I took the project, and because of it needed to buy adobe web design premium. Dreamweaver has been a great tool for me this summer in building the database, but along with it came Photoshop.

I didn't know squat about Photoshop before this summer, but after finding loads of tutorials online, I've learned a few things. I love graphic design and hope that I can keep up graphic and web design as a hobby or side job for years to come.