This past week, I got started working on the Organized Chaos website. I made a first impression of its design on gimp, using a few dozen grunge brushes all around. It’s another two column design overlaying a decent grunge background (which I think is the only good part of the design). I put the logo and navigation in a pitch black top section, with the links set in the Times New Yorker font. I’m not completely satisfied with the outcome. The top section and the content areas seem fairly plain and bland, but I’m sticking with this current version of the design until I can get out of my temporary loss of ideas…

Please, please leave a comment with your opinion, because I desperately need advice/encouragement/criticism/whatever if I want to do a good job on the website!

I’ve returned from the horror and darkness of the realms of homework (temporarily, just so I don’t get my hopes up that high) and managed to write something here for the first time in a month. A lot has happened in the past few weeks, besides me having to get through every single tedious project, stressful test, hour-long piano practice, and grueling soccer game. As for the website, 1,900 people have visted Shadow Logic 2,753 times. (As of June 16th, 10:15 PM EST)

After spending two weeks researching water filtration and writing a 10-page report on it, I was devastated from exhaustion. Then I had to perform an experiment on it and put stuff about it on a triboard. The Science Symposium was on June 5th, and I spent 6 hours standing up, explaining my wonderful findings to dozens of students, a third of whom weren’t that interested in hearing a 3-minute long lecture on a water filter that only half-works (and I don’t blame them). I scraped an 88 for my efforts, with my only decent part of my project, the research paper, not being graded yet.

I updated the Randomness and Boredom gallery with a couple of photos (half of which are from more than a month ago). It seems to be my most popular photo gallery, so I’ll be sure to add some more photos on there soon. I also took down the poll system, since it took up too much space. I took a final poll to gather opinion on whether I should take it down or not because people weren’t voting a lot. 75% of the vote wanted me to keep the poll system up, but 4 people voted out of the 20+ visitors that come here everyday =P

I’m excited about my new project for my friend/client (can amateurs have clients? I’m not so sure), Manas. I’m currently setting up and designing a website for his recently formed punk/alternative rock band, Organized Chaos. I’m hoping to have the website done in 2-3 weeks, complete with some of their performance footage and a blog. I’ll fill you in on its progress until then.

In the mean time, happy five days till summer! (and five days until my piano recital)

To those of you mothers out there, Happy Mother’s Day! And this applies to mothers, grandmothers, and godmothers only. I greeted my friend “Happy Mother’s Day” earlier, forgetting he was a boy, and if a boy was a mother, well, um, you know…

I had enough time today to make something nice for my mom. Obviously, since I like to make graphics, and this website is mostly about graphics, and posts like this always have something to do with graphics, I made my mom a wallpaper.

I’m not in a very good mood though - I played one of the worst soccer games of my life in the rec league, and my science symposium project is getting me stressed out. My topic is water filtration, and it’s really interesting, even if it’s just dumping a gallon or two of water into a hollow bucket filled up with a pile of gravel and charcoal that catch all the water’s dirt and chemicals. But I have to build the filter and the triboard in less than two weeks, and pressure from my parents, teachers, and classmates already way ahead of me isn’t going to help me at all. I can’t wait for June to come =/

Don’t let my complaining ruin your day. Again, happy Mother’s Day! And for those of you who’ve come here for my graphics tutorials, you gave Resizing Fade Effect 1,056 pageviews in the past 30 days, which is more than double the pageviews for the rest of the entire website. Guess I should say thanks for that, and I’ll be sure to add a new one soon.

This weekend I spent a couple of days toying with the IFS Fractal filter (I know, such a dorky name!) on Gimp and came up with a nice wallpaper that I decided to put on here:

Download: 800 x 600 // 1024 x 768 // 1280 x 960

Once I was done adding that to the Resources page I logged on to Google Analytics. (For those of you who don’t know, it’s a service that lets you track visits, pageviews, etc. on your website.) I clicked View Reports and the first thing I saw was this:

Apparently the number of visits to my website had jumped from 5 to 71 in one day. Confused, I went to the Referring Sites page. Gimpology gave me 65 visits, so I went on there and saw my tutorial smack on top.

So thank you Kasrak for earning Shadow Logic a bit of attention! You got me thinking for my next tutorial already. I’ll make sure it’ll break the 70 hit mark again. And thank you to everyone who visits my website. I’m always open for feedback, so keep those comments coming!

I love my life. Definitely can’t wait for more good luck to befall me. XD

Btw, I added a couple of photos over the weekend. Check them out if you don’t have as much homework as I do right now =P

This tutorial is about that fade effect I use in a lot of my images, like my Lionel Messi picture and the iPod Bunny. At first glance it’s just a blur effect. At second glance one can see it’s actually the same image resized a number of times. I came across this technique with some experimenting while I was making the Lionel Messi picture. This effect works best with pictures of definite figures, such as logos, people, and solid objects. So start up Gimp, grab a picture, and get ready do some photo editing!

Difficulty:
Medium
Program
The GIMP (2.4)
Needed Time
about 15 minutes (+15 minutes for cutting the photo)
Materials
A photograph (200-600px)

Step 1: Cutting the photo

The photo you have should have a central subject, which you will be fading. First we have to separate that subject, whether it’s a person or an object. Select the Paths tool and zoom in to about 800% for a better view of the pixels. Draw a path around the outline of the central object. Take your time, you want the cut to be as clean as possible.

Whew! That probably took a while. The hard part is done, but there are still quite a few steps to go. Click Path to Selection to select the object you just outlined with the Paths tool. Copy the selection (Ctrl+C) and go to Edit » Paste as » New Image. This is what you should have so far. You can now close the original photo you just worked on, so it doesn’t get in the way.

You’ll need a bit of room to fit the fade effect and the object you just cut out is probably kind of squished, so go to Image » Canvas Size… and add about 100-200 pixels to the current width of the image. Look at the image on the right for reference. Be sure to click the Center button. The image has been expanded, so now all you have to do is fit the layer to the full size of the image (Layer » Layer to Image Size)

Step 2: Adding the fade

Now that you have the object in place, it’s time to add that fading effect. Duplicate the layer and go to Layer » Scale Layer… Change the units from pixels to percent. Set the new width of the layer to 105%. The height should scale to 105% automatically, but if it doesn’t change it as well. The duplicated layer should be slightly larger in size compared to the original layer. Repeat the step twice more, adding 5% each time (the second duplicated layer being 110% and the third 115%).

You want the fade to be situated behind the original layer, so move all the layers you resized below the original layer descending by size. To make the resized layers fade out, change the opacity of the second topmost layer to 35. Adjust the layer below that to 25, and the layer below that to 15. Using the Merge Down function, combine all the faded layers into one layer. This leaves two layers: the original and the fade. You should have some like this.

The fade is coming about nicely, but it’s still a bit too sharp and solid. Duplicate the fade layer. Go to Filters » Blur » Gaussian Blur… and set the value to 50. This adds a bit of a glow to the fade effect. Merge the fade layers again. For another touch of luminosity, duplicate the original layer and apply a Gaussian Blur to that as well, with a strength of 50. Move the blurred layer below the original layer. The fade effect is finally finished! It needs a background now, so create a new layer, name it Background, and move it below all the other layers. Fill it with the gradient or design of your choice.

You should get something like this:

Some finishing touches:

I’ve got some more plans for the website, including some fixes to the not-so-amazing eye candy at the top right corner of the page. The About Me page is still unfinished, so that’s on my to-do list. I still have yet to post another gimp tutorial, and I need your help! Tell me what you want the tutorial to be about in the comments, I’m always open to suggestions and feedback. Another list of appealing web designs may be on the way as well, so stay tuned since I’ve got a whole week to myself for blogging!

Until then, happy Easter/spring vacation/whatever!

Mood: Relaxed
Listening to: Leave Out All The Rest » Linkin Park

On the subject of the license: Since I’m really just starting out in the graphic design realm and forcing people to give credit would just get them annoyed, I’ll say that these brushes are free to use. Credit to me or a link back won’t be necessary, but if you’re feeling unusually generous feel free to add one!

Thanks to Jason for stuffing all 7 brushes into one abr package!

Download for Gimp 2.4 or Photoshop

That’s it for now, so bye for now. And for those of you whom it may apply to, have a wonderful week of standardized testing!