What drawing / painting program(s) created the gifs/jpegs in these URLs?
Quintessence
Below are some URLS that contain small gifs arranged in tables to create quite
nice looking html pages. The creators won't tell me what tools they used. I
cannot spend thousands of dollars trying everything on the planet to find the
right tools.
I am QUITE familiar with drawing and painting programs in general. As
a programmer I have written both types of software. I am familiar with all the
various file formats and even their inner workings. I am not a newbie.
So check out the following pages. Please let me know what tools you think
might have been used to create their graphics and/or what tools you think would be
capable of creating them. From looking at them, it is apparent that they were
created in some kind of drawing tools and then converted to gifs and jpegs
later. The Microsoft pages mix gifs and jpegs a lot. But notice the smooth
gradient shadings and the anti-aliasing on the text in them. On windows you
can use ZOOMIN.EXE to look at them in fine detail. The Mac has some FatBits
utilities to do this too. Try looking at them magnified. The first one, the
access developer's forum, has a really button graphic at the top. Then it has
cool looking shaded button graphics down the left. Everything has a wonderful
anti-aliased sheen to it. What tools can do these things? Which tools with
greater ease?
http://www.microsoft.com/isapi/redir.dll?Target=%2Faccessdev%2F
http://www.microsoft.com/kb/default.idc?Product=Access&Database=KB_access
http://www.microsoft.com/support/search/
http://www.fedex.com/
http://www.installshield.com/
Freehand 5.0 for Windows 95 has been recommended.
Someone mentioned KAI Power Tools. Can anyone give more background information
about what it is like to work with? How much direct manipulation drawing does
it provide? I am aware that it includes tools to create 3D images and
texturing but can you describe its user-interface in more detail?
Jerry Kindall
<quinte...@halcyon.com> wrote:
>Below are some URLS that contain small gifs arranged in tables to create quite
>nice looking html pages. The creators won't tell me what tools they used. I
>cannot spend thousands of dollars trying everything on the planet to find the
>right tools.
Maybe it's because you're a programmer that you're so fixated on the
tools. But, as the slogan at OSC (the publishers of Deck II before
Macromedia bought 'em) says: Tools != Talent.
I would suggest, as a start, a raster-graphics manipulation program and a
vector-graphics manipulation program. Photoshop is king of the hill for
the raster-graphics stuff, although other programs like Painter and XRes
also have features to recommend them. (For example, Painter lets you
easily produce work that looks like it was really painted or drawn, and it
has a feature which allows you to assign URLs to "floaters" and
automatically write your Web image map for you. It can use many Photoshop
plug-ins too, although I'd check to make sure it's compatible with the
ones you intend to use before getting it. Oh, and if you get Painter be
sure to get a Wacom table too. There are bundles available. A Wacom
tablet's a good investment even if you just get Photoshop, though.)
If you were using a Mac I'd recommend Illustrator for the vector-graphics
program, because both Illustrator and Photoshop are published by Adobe and
you can do some nifty tricks with the combination (i.e. drag a vector
image from Illustrator directly into Photoshop to import a path) but I
have no idea what the situation is like on the Windows forefront, other
than the fact that this trick would be impossible since Windows (as far as
I know) doesn't support dragging directly between applications. Whether
you go with Illustrator or FreeHand, however, you're going to have to
learn how Bezier curves and such work to get good results. People
actually produce quite sophisticated illustrations by adjusting these
curves, which you will find completely counter-intuitive to work with.
You can do good work with just a raster-based program, but your images
will tend to look a little... square. Horizontal. Curved and rotated
text is much easier in a vector-based program.
Now, once you've got Photoshop and, say, Illustrator, you spend several
weeks or months learning to use them. They're deep programs and you will
NOT master them in one day. At the very least you should get Deke
McClelland's Photoshop Bible (which is for the Mac, although there might
be a Windows edition -- but who cares, the programs are essentially the
same on both platforms) and absorb it.
Once you have learned your way around the programs, you will want to
investigate some time-saving plug-ins. Kai's Power Tools is a set of
plug-in tools for Photoshop which allows you to do nifty-looking gradients
and textures painlessly (among its many other attributes). Some of the
things you can do with KPT you could conceivably do without them, but once
you've used KPT you will no longer want to sprain your brain even thinking
about how to get the same effects the old-fashioned way. Want to make a
button look like metal? Pick a metallic gradient from the Gradient
Designer. Want to make a button look like marble? Pick a marble texture
from the Texture Designer. (A nice CD-ROM of textures doesn't hurt
either.)
Almost as valuable is Alien Skin's Black Box, which gives you quick tools
for bevels, glass, cutouts, drop shadows, and so on. Again, nothing you
couldn't do using "naked Photoshop" if you wanted, but very
professional-looking and tons faster than the old way.
If you do a lot of text you might look at Xaos Tools TypeCaster, which is
a very cool plug-in that renders three-dimensional type right inside
Photoshop. I'm not sure if they have a Windows version of it, though.
Finally, I might suggest KPT Vector Effects (from the same people who
produce Kai's Power Tools) to go with your vector-graphics program. This
plug-in package can take ordinary text or clip art and extrude it, twist
it, explode it, and so forth, for radical effects. This is the power of
vector-based images: you can do that all you want and everything will
still be smooth (then you can rasterize it inside Illustrator and bring it
over to Photoshop). Again, I'm not sure if there's even a Windows version
of this one.
But again... once you get all this stuff, you will not start churning out
pro-caliber work instantly. The tools don't do the work FOR you, they
allow you to do the work yourself. You are still in total control.
You've got to remember that the images in sites like the ones you're
talking about were designed by people with tons of experience and, in most
cases, DEGREES in art -- at least a Bachelor of Fine Art, frequently an
MFA. You can pick up their skills but it will take a long time before
you're as good as they are, and you need a good eye for detail to catch
the nuances of what they're doing. (Nuances are the key. Without the
nuances all you can produce is an amateurish caricature of what they're
doing.)
The sites you mention don't look like they were created with any more than
a suite of good general-purpose graphics tools and some good, solid
TALENT. The only reason they won't tell you what tools they used is
because they're snickering at you for thinking their choice of tools is
all that important.
--
Jerry Kindall (kin...@manual.com)
Manual Labor: We Wrote The Book!
http://www.manual.com/home/
PALINDROME #7 IN A SERIES: Collect 'em all!
Golf? No sir, prefer prison-flog.