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Art Tips For Programmers?
An anonymous reader writes "Recently I've found myself in a bit of a bind with artwork. My programming contracts have been rather small, barely enough to pay myself let alone an artist. The art needs aren't intensive, mostly icons or sprites depending on the project. Despite owning a few key apps (Photoshop, LightWave, Maya) my art production output is rather poor. Are there any other developers who have learned to be self-sufficient? Are there any resources available to educate me on the finer points of making graphics that look professional?" One resource for the less-artistic among us is the collection of free SVG clip art at freedesktop.org, though it won't give advice for creating new art. What are some others?
On place to look for art and helpfull artists is Deviantart
-- If you actually say LOL instead of laughing, maybe it's time to go outside! --
Sounds like you have all the right tools, but are lacking the finer points of graphic design. Might be worthwhile to take evening classes on computer design. I've personally found these to be helpful.
I highly reccommend inkscape, which is pretty good for creating svg art, even for those who are not very artistic. It make drawing really easy.
Also, try openclipart.org, where there is a lot of public domain licened content you can use.
I offer you the following advice: 'Infringe' them off the internet.
Buy one of the icon collections at StockIcons.com for only $350usd. They can be used royalty-free for any personal or commercial projects.
Personally, I find any tutorial online a very weak foundation to build on. They teach you specific tricks but nothing about being 'artistic'.
Better would be for you to play around with the different tools. Experiment and keep the results, they might come in handy. And it's best not to start on the computer. Do a hand drawing of what you have in mind.
I heard this quote from my prof. once:
"Laborers work with their hands,
Crasftmen work with their brain,
Artists work with their heart."
m2c
When working on graphics just let your creative juices flow. If what you wanted isn't the result, perhaps what came out is better? When I am working on graphics for a program or website I come up with a basic idea for where I want to go, and just play around and experiement. It doesn't take as long as it seems like it would, and some great creative products result. With Photoshop the best way to really get a feel for it is to have a bit of fun. Experiement, see what comes out. If you can't seem to be creative go look at a free tutorial online, many can both educate and inspire you.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
Sounds like you shouldn't have bought the tools.
Torrent, my friend. Torrent.
Outsource it to India *duck*
(Seriously, their time is cheaper than yours, unless you get sub-min. wage.)
Table-ized A.I.
All the money in the world doesn't buy you personal artistic talent. Leave it to someone who has it. You could give my grandma a copy of Eclipse, VS.NET, EditPlus and vi and she'd still suck as a coder.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Just as in programming, or any other field, amateurs create amateurish output. There is a tendency among technical people to devalue the skills of non-technical people (and the other way 'round as well). This is a mistake. People with training in anything are going to produce better product than people without training.
Invest in a professional. You'll be surprised how cheaply (sadly) good graphic artists will work.
http://carriedaway.typepad.com/carried_away/images /Pirate.gif
If that doesn't prove to you the utter lack of graphics skill in the Open Source community, I don't know what would convince you. Coming here asking for help from Open Source "artists" is like going to a Sci-fi convention asking for tips on literature: you'll get a lot of input, but it will be mostly useless.
If you want to have professional icons, hire a professional. There are people that do this for a living. They studied and practiced and now are eking out a living doing it. Same as how you studied and practiced and are now making a nice living writing code. Let those people do their job, and concentrate on your job. The product will be better if you let everyone stick to their area of expertise.
http://www.povray.org/ POV-RAY can make art. kpovmodeler is (or was) included in kdegraphics to help with simple scenes. If you are a programmer, then you may like povray - which is basically like a programming language. I installed kdegraphics on my fedora core 3 laptop, but kpovmodeler wasn't installed :(. Either it was taken out of kdegraphics or fedora screwed up somehow. I didn't see any notice of its removal on the kde website - nor the kpovmodeler website.
Don't mix up ownership with pirate ship. Huar huar huar... err, yes.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
For programmers especially, this should already be a well practiced method. For myself, I do this with web-based applications by making regular trips to CoolHomePages.com I am sure there are similar sites out there, anyone have any good sites that they use for inspiration?
A great untapped resource: college students. If you know folks in college, or there is a local college with a decent art program, contact their career advisor (or anyone at the art school) and let them know that you've got work that needs to be done.
Generally, you'll find one or two students who have the budding (or more developed) skills and know-how, and who will be more than grateful for the opportunity to earn a little extra cash or, more importantly, who will work for free in exchange for being able to use a "real world" project or two in their portfolio.
Not only are you "giving back" to the community, but you get what you need for cheap/free.
Two words of caution though. First, don't be a condescending ass. A lot of non-artistic, business-types tend to think of art students as starving-scum-of-the-earth, and they end up coming across as assholes who don't get the best they could. Second, realize that college students aren't always 100% reliable (were you?), and budget for that time-wise).
Ack!
All the Wacom models work reasonably happily with Linux+X and the relevant drivers at http://linuxwacom.sf.net/ - wacom is not at all linux-hostile.
Using a tablet means you can draw like an adult on your computer (directly on the screen if you spring for a Wacom Cintiq...).
I used to think a mouse was okay for GIMP and Blender use. It's not. It _utterly sucks_ . I got myself a tablet on a whim and now I can draw as well on my computer as on paper (okay I'm not brilliant at drawing on paper, but like most people I've ever seen, I'm far better on paper or a tablet than drawing with a mouse!)
How ridiculous would it sound to hear a designer say: "You know, I've got some really nice icons, but I just am not that good at the code thing. Anyone know where I can get some quick tips to slap some code on this icon?" If anyone could program, everyone would. If anyone could design graphics well, everyone would.
... then you can afford to commision a graphic designer ;)
don't bother with photoshop. While it has the tools to deliver the goods, it's not really designed for people unless they already have extensive experience using it.
I'd REALLY suggest trying GIMP. For a newcomer it's far easier to create good quality (and standard format) images. I've been in the same situation as you, and getting used to the way PS works for my own needs takes just a little too much time I could be spending coding.
One resource that has been invaluable to my company is http://glyfx.com/. They make icons, splash screens, etc. It costs money, but it is not that expensive and you can use them for all your projects after just one purchase. The icons are also high color and very modern, give them a shot.
Free Art Test. Are you an artist? Find out Free. Premiere Home Study Program. aff.
--that's all i got from google's sponsored link.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
Students are a great resource - high school or college-level art-school.
Depending on your project, I might be willing to help out - you can see some cartoons, etc on my site: www.taylorcustom.com
greetings earthlings
As someone who makes my living as a digital artist, it's really just a matter of practice, practice, and more practice. Anyone who can write their name can potentially draw a good picture, but it takes time to train your eye and your muscles to accomplish that. Chuck Jones once said everyone has 100,000 bad drawing inside of them, so it's best to get the bad ones out of the way early. It's kind of the same for digital art.
If you don't have the time to practice, I'd say spend a few bucks get some good looking clip art. The stuff you buy at Fry's and Office Depot pretty much sucks, but there are some collections out there that look pretty darn good.
"Despite owning a few key apps (Photoshop, LightWave, Maya) my art production output is rather poor"
Oh, yes, he's struggling as a programmer but can afford thousands of dollars in digital imaging software. Not only that, but he "owns" both Maya and Lightwave and still doesn't know what he is doing? Who the hell owns both?
I'm actually in a related bind myself. I've written a small freeware app for Mac OS X; nothing too fancy, but it does have users. I'm about to come out with version 2.0 soon, and I'd like to give it a real icon. Since this is OS X the standard of art expected is way beyond my limits, so I'd probably have to hire a a real icon designer.
So for others who have done this: Are the prices for this sort of thing reasonable? What are the typical licensing terms for the art? Will some designers give discounts for freeware/OSS apps? Is there somewhere you can solict bids? I can't really afford to spend serious money on this, since it'd be coming out of my own pocket.
Yep. You heard it.
Write your applications such that the artwork can be easily added/updated later. Make it clear that artwork is NOT your forte, and that you'll structure your application to allow this later improvement without requiring (much of) your assistance. Make sure it works OK, and doesn't look TOO bad.
If anybody asks about looks, point to the contract. Also, maintain a good relationship with a good graphic artist, and don't forget to recommend him/her.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Sorry, programers suck at art and artist suck at programing.
Ever wonder why OSS interfaces are so ugly and hard to use? Because there's no such thing as an open source artist. Best off you hire someone to do a good job instead of trying to half-ass it yourself.
For the love of god, please don't use photoshop lens flare effects! Unless of course you're going for a retro look.
As a web developer, I'm expected to be able to handle the web server updates (as well as security), do the database development, build applications and do web design as well.
It didn't use to always be this way: sys admin, web developer, database developer and web designer used to all be separate jobs. But in the modern economy, yes... the more self sufficient you are the better. Take some graphic design classes, start drawing in your spare time, etc.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
If the product allows, there's a certain quasi-postmodern charm in "programmer art", if it is cohesive as a whole. Stick figures and such. It has to be completely confident in its kitchiness, though... amateurish art that is supposed to look professional is awful.
If it's for an office-esque app, though, the highly "modern professionalist" users would likely cringe in self-righteous disgust at such a suggestion.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
If you are a better telephone sanitisers than the competition, there is still a career for you in that.
He just wants to pick up a bit art skills to supplement his programming, "mostly icons or sprites" He isn't trying to be an artist.Don't try to sound all old and wise here. We all know you are just a highschool kid like the rest of us.
Anyways check out http://www.computerarts.co. uk/ for forums and tutorials. Very slow site though.
You're comment is great and all, but the question wasn't about how to become a professional artist. It was about how to make an icon that doesn't suck when you are a programmer and not an artist.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Wait, you don't have enough money to hire an artist, but you have enough money for Photoshop, Lightwave AND Maya? These packages cost... oh... a couple GRAND together? Hell, just PS (not studio) is $300-400.
Fortunately a trend at the moment is to keep icons simple - simple icons look modern. My icons are not ambitious: they are created in MS Paint, are small, simple and deployed on global corporate systems - always with positive feedback. I use The GIMP for tinting and simple effects, and text based logos; if I used any more of it's features my graphics would be laughed out of the offices.
As long as the meaning is clear and they don't look like they've been drawn by a child (tip: use straight lines!) they should look fine.
I know this isn't what is being asked, but I would make some artist friends. A practiced artistic eye is the best way to acheive professional looking icons and other graphics. Helpful hints will only get you so far.
"Bishops and Bookies live off the irrational hopes of mankind." Bertrand Russell
Sometimes you just have to compromise by doing a job you don't really enjoy and leave your hobbies as just that - a hobby.
Did you even read the post? The guy has a job. He's a programmer. The only reason he wants to draw is because he's too cheap to hire an artist.
If the other suggestions given here are still beyond what you can realise, here's one no-cost solution that can work in a pinch (depending on the requirements of your application, of course):
1. Use Google images, a scanner, or any similar appropriate source to get stuff that looks as much like what you want as possible.
2. Open that image in GIMP, add a new layer over it and trace the outline of that image.
3. Delete the original layer (which you have no right to appropriate), and colorise the new layer with all your knowledge of gradiants, textures, etc. that you can muster. (Read up on what the GIMP has to offer in this department if necessary.)
This works especially well when you're developing for mobile applications or other situations where the loss of fine artistic ability is not likely to be noticed. If your needs go beyond this, however, it will not be adequate and many of the other suggestions presented here are far more appropriate.
The poster's comment about having the "right tools" (PS, Lightwave, etc.) exemplifies most programmer's and the general publics incorrect view on computer graphics and technology and art. IT'S JUST ANOTHER PAINTBRUSH.
All too many people think that if you have the right "digital tools" amazing Pixar quality art will pop-out. Its simply not true. The primary reason that pixar is so unbelievable is not because John Lasseter and co. are incredible programmers but because they are amazing artists that understand how to use their paintbrush-the computer-to the fullest extent.
Some posts have mentioned taking evening classes and such. That's a good idea, but all too many of them are stuck in the rut of teaching you how to do different tricks on a particular piece of software.
As a programmer who has dabbled in art my suggestion is to try and forget your programmer self. Don't look at Lightwave and see all its cool features, its extensibility, effects, etc. Approach the project just like you would if someone were to hand you a paintbrush and say paint a picture or a camera and say make a movie. In other words, understand the medium you are working with, but don't get engrossed in it. It's still just art.
Mod parent down. Way down; Poster was saying he wants to develop artistic skills for creating, e.g., icons for applications that he writes.
Just as you wouldn't hire an oil painter to write you a Sun Java interface engine for your 100 or so interface apps, you wouldn't hire a programmer to know much about sign, signet, and symbol. Please hire a graphic designer... www.aiga.com is a good resource.(I'd love to do your design for a relatively low price, but this comment will get modded down if I promote myself too heavily :)
If you can't do what's required of a job, then you shouldn't be saying you can. Sell what you do best.
Partner with those who can, and offer up combined pricing to your clients, splitting the take.
The reason you aren't making enough money, is that your business skills are lacking. Very few tech have business chops too.
I've done a few (as in as I can count the total jobs I've done on my left hand) projects for programmers who couldn't design their way out of a wet paper bag. Problem is that not too many programmers have approached me with work, so it remains a hobby for me. It's been my experience that programmers simply don't want to deal with giving even small parts of their projects to others, quite likely out of fear that someone will shanghai their hard work. It's a legitimate concern, sure, but most graphic designers/artists aren't looking to burgle your code...
If you're having trouble with with your graphics, then by all means give the job to someone else. Please. There are plenty of folks who speak the same language you do who will do the work you need on the cheap.
Despite owning a few key apps (Photoshop, LightWave, Maya) my art production output is rather poor.
I started out adding graphics elements to widgets, ie command buttons and toolbars on a windows platform and used regular MS paint. I learned my limited skills by looking at toolbar buttons, learned how color and shading were used to give objects different effects like raised, sunken, etc. I even borrowed an old trick used in the 80s on 8 bit game consoles and created the colors I needed by dithering others, (this was needed in the early to mid 90s because not all icon editors or development tools allowed more than the basic 16 colors, esp on toolbars.
Although it can take a while to learn more advanced functionality of Photoshop, I believe your problem is not knowing the best technique to accomplish the job...you just need more experience.
I'm a professional designer with much experience with web sites. I've also worked on many other projects including a familiar theme for Enlightenment back when Enlightenment was popular.
I've seen a lot of sites designed by developers and I can tell you what to do - listen to what I say and you'll be better than 90% of the sites on the net: keep it simple.
This works on so many levels it's ridiculous. The most well designed sites with the most expensive designers do this as a matter of course. It's not only refreshingly easy on the eyes it's also good business.
Don't try to be gabocorp or razorfish - those guys already have the look-at-me-look-at-me-look-at-me market saturated. Most paying clients want something more professional. Stick to what you do well - developing, hopefully - and it'll get the recognition it deserves with a design that lets your real work shine through.
Pick a nice color scheme, stay away from comic sans and courier and you're halfway there. Leave the graphics for photos and logos, use color sparingly, and limit yourself to as few different colors and fonts as possible.
If you're really interested you could pick up a few design or mac magazines - really! even if you don't use a mac - just to get an idea of what clean & simple design is like.
Yeah, Art Students are a great way to get what you need on the cheap. I should know. Several of my friends - myself included- got fucked over right out of the gate because we believed what the contractor told us- that it would be "a good portfolio-building experience."
So's sitting in my bedroom jacking off into the GIMP, thank you.
"Portfolio Building Experience" means it pays a pittance if you're lucky, and you can totally forget about having any rights to your work. Oh, and PBEs are typically long hours with shit pay and no benefits. My first field experience was one of these- a contract job to do some multimedia work. After the dust settled, my hourly for the project was somewhere around eighty cents.
You get what you pay for- if you get into the habit of taking advantage of art students, don't be surprised if the talent pool suddenly dries up on you.
You must first be an artist, before you are a digital artist. Learn the fundamentals of the work you're trying to accomplish, if your area is in logo design, research effective logos, get a sketchbook, and jot down any ideas that come to mind. Don't be afraid to venture from the digital realm, that's where the magic happens. Let yourself design on paper, and create and articulate in the computer. (I've spent the past year at art school overcoming that very concept) good luck with your passions
He doesn't want to be an artist. He doesn't want to make a living by art. He just wants not to have to hire an artist to make minor icons/interface elements in his programs.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I don't know what you're smoking but the commercial (note 'commercial', not fine) art industry is doing quite well in the States. Unlike programing, it's not one of those things that everyone can do and is easily outsourced.
One thing I've consistently noticed about programmers is that they have no grasp of color theory. Witness the countless ridiculously low-contrast Blackbox themes. Hell, look at Windows XP's primary color-filled default theme.
In general, get to know the basics. Just looking cool doesn't make something usable, and the best art brings together prettiness and usability.
That saying is attributed to Hippocrates, it means "life is short, but art is long [enduring]." There is a more modern version I heard in art school (which, incidentally, had that motto carved in marble over the entrance). It goes, "life is short, art is long, and success is very far off."
And there's the point. It takes long, persistent study to develop your artistic skills. And there is no other way than to do it the same way it has been done for centuries: by studying the works of other talented artists, and trying to figure out how they made those works, studying their techniques and tools, and emulating them.
I have always asserted that it takes much more effort and talent to become a great artist than to become a great programmer. Almost anyone with a logical mind can develop the skills to become a programmer. But an artist needs a spark of imagination and talent, and the ability to think a BIT differently than anyone else, that is one of the rarest commodities on earth. There are a lot more talented programmers than talented artists, which should give you some idea of the rarity of those respective talents.
In short, you do not have the time to develop artistic skills and still be a programmer. Find a real artist and hire them.
Its all I can do to stop from flaming at the sight of this post. I see design as a very democratic medium, but looking for shortcuts to something that is extremely complex and people have been devoting their entire lives to for hundreds of years seems a tad presumptuous. Call me elitist, but I am not eager to share my knowledge for someone who sees what I do as unnecessary and unprofessional. Lie in it. I did say I was democratic right? So look at /., does it look "professional"? Stop trying to look professional because you aren't a professional. If you are truly devoted to the craft then get off of slashdot and into a classroom, or to a library. Graphic design isn't something you can fake, sorry. You need either talent or experience... a pirated version of Photoshop means bupkus.
Robin Williams has several great design books that help the beginner. This one is really good...so are the others.
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1. Stock photos. A good picture is worth a 1000 design elements. Start scavenging for stock photos NOW. A good place to start is here: http://sxc.hu/.
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2. Avoid excessive effects and filters when not needed. Nothing ruins a good design like trying to emboss everything or making it 3D.
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3. Keep it clean and simple. Think Apple.
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4. Learn from the experts. Visit places like http://www.deviantart.com/ You can even post designs and get peer reviews. Also, http://http//www.alistapart.com will help.
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5. Use and abuse CSS. The separation of design elements from everything else will help immensely. You will be amazed by this site: http://www.csszengarden.com/ Change the themes and be amazed by the power of CSS!!!
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6. Buy graphic design books, preferably those with collections of commercial art made by different designers. Get inspired
;-)
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7. Get a digital camera and take lots and lots of pictures of the world around you. Current examples of designs and logos and ads will help.
I hope that helps!Cheers,
Adolfo
[Doing my best Mako impression:]
"Once upon a time, when the WWW was whipping across the business landscape like a cold wind from the North, nobody in business had a clue how to wrangle it. Was it an IT thing? A Marketing thing? A New Business thing? It was a Time of Chaos, and still-moist script-jockies were christened "Web Masters" and given the imprimatur, "Um, do your thing. And here's a six figure salary, cuz we haven't a clue what 'your thing' is. Oh, and make it look 'cool,' cuz we heard it's supposed to look 'cool.'"
And they did their thing.
And it looked dreadful.
Happily, business recovered, bean counters and Marketing Directors finally found something upon which they could agree, and color-blind code-jockeys were partnered with art-types so the WWW could outgrow its purple-orange acne-encrusted adolescence and mature into pseudo-suave 'white-is-the-new-black' twenty-something hipsterism."
Bottom line: I'd rather teach an artist how to code (and have done so), then let a coder try to "do art." But if you want it to look remotely professional, you prolly need at least two heads involved.
Well, what advice would you give an artist who had to do all their own programming? You'd tell them to keep everything simple, don't get too ambitious, don't try fancy architectures or get hung up on optimization.
The same thing is true of you: keep it simple. Go for clarity, not ethereal beauty. Pick a font and stick to it. Pick one very, very simple color scheme and stick to it. Eliminate anything that is unnecessary, especially anything "decorative."
And don't be discouraged... Oddly enough, if you focus on simplicity and consistency and forget about beauty, you may have the best chance of creating something people call beautiful!
Admit it, you don't own licenses for these apps. You stole them you stinking bastard!
This is a wonderful style guide to building icons meant for Windows XP, and the techniques are good for icons of all sorts. You can figure out how to build good looking icons out of simple design elements.
put a link to your site if you get a blurb on Slashdot... otherwise you just missed your shot
Edwards based her book on the results of experiments performed by Roger Sperry of Caltech. Sperry's experiments used people whose brains had been severed in the middle to treat severe epilepsy. By studying how these "split-brain" patients reacted to stimuli sent via the sense organs to one side of the brain or the other, Sperry was able to deduce that our artistic ability is centered in the right hemisphere of the brain, while our logical and verbal ability comes from the left.
Most slashdotters are heavily left-brained people. But artists are right brained people. To create artwork for your software, you have to learn to think with your right hemisphere.
Edwards says in her book that anyone who can learn to think in what she calls "R-Mode" can learn to draw. The earlier lessons in her book focus on stimulating that sort of thought while quieting the interference from the left hemisphere.
She teaches drawing with pencil and paper, but once you've completed the exercises in her book I'm sure you will have a much easier time using computer graphics applications.
The right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for more than just visual art. At the same time as I learned to draw from Drawing on the Right I taught myself to play the piano. In 1994 I borrowed some recording equipment from a friend and recorded my album Geometric Visions, which you can download in MP3 format. (Ogg as soon as I get off my lazy arse and encode it.)
Request your free CD of my piano music.
What the fuck good are those supposed to do for icon design?
Draw on paper, scan, trace in Illustrator.
What's that? You can't draw? Well shit, I guess you better hire someone who actually knows what the fuck they are doing instead of failing like you will.
As a computer engineer, I can usually draw better than my peers. Unlike picking up another porgramming language, I don't think artistic talent can be learned readily, because you need an eye for colors, shapes, and style that I notice my scientific peers just do not possess.
Ever since a kid, I would try and copy styles from mecha comic books. I worked very hard when I was little to draw something as close to the original as possble. Not to sound discouraging, but I don't think it is possible to "learned to be self-sufficient" before your contract is over. What you can do, however, is follow the numerous art tutorials on the net and try your best to duplicate the Photoshop effects to something usable.
As a side-note, here are some of my artwork:
deviantART or My Website
The drawings from my sketchbook are mostly redraw of original artwork by other artists. If you do decide to learn art for future uses, I think the best way to start learning art is to try duplicating a professional artist as close as possible. Once you get an eye for colors, shapes, and line distances, you should be able to realize art concepts in your head.
Probably half (maybe a little bit more) of the kids that pass through graphic design programs at major art schools are talent-less. Even if you have talent, the advantage that a bad designer from some art school has over you is that they are a bad designer with an *education*. Odds are that they are still going to produce better results simply because they've been taught how to. You don't need to be taught "art", but by building upon the work and teaching methods of others, you will progress far more in 3 years that you would in a decade otherwise.
So suck it up, and hire someone else for the job. It doesn't make sense to do everything, and a working relationship with another professional individual (or even a student from a local art school) is going to be far more productive and yield better results.
Many people have pointed out that getting college students to do the work on the cheap is the best route for you. It really is. Here is how you go about doing it if you do not know any graphic design or fine art students. Make a flier, explaing that you need a designer to make icons for your project.
Make some copied of this flier and post them in the grpahic and art departments of the local college. You will probably get quite a few calls and ask to see some wrok they have done. The one that appears the most responsable and has the work you would think you want is the one you choose.
You probably won't have to pay over $100.00 to $200.00, depending on the scope of the work. If it's just icons you need, $50.00 may be fine. Let them know they can use this work for their portfolios and use you as a reference in the future.
It benefits everyone. You get cheap design labor and they get beer money/positive references.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
/.ed I just have to remember to check tomorrow ..... that site sounds like just what I needed.
As a digital artist, it's nice to see the tables turned. I'm used to being shat on and talked over by UNIX admins and coders who just assume I know vi, or emacs, or where network interfaces are on bsd or various linux distros, et ceteras.
And the programmers are looking for art tips? Nice.
My advice : If you can't do it yourself, make a deal with someone who can. It doesn't even have to involve money. Could be barter or whatever.
Just remember that an artists time is just as valuable as yours, if not more so- and artists are typically subjected to the harrowing horrors of Art Direction. "Make it smaller! Make it rounder! Can I have it in cornflower blue? It's too complicated! It's not complicated enough! It's not what I want but I know fuckall about how to communicate my vision to you so I'm just going to keep requesting changes until you resign from the project and tell all of your art friends I'm an asshole!" and so forth.
I do video and admin work for a living, and I share my work area with a designer who gets pushed around and shat on daily. I love working for myself, but from what I've seen, having someone else in charge of my visual output is a special kind of hell- which is why I don't do contract work.
Know exactly what you want and be prepared to produce several "along these lines" or "kind of like this, only..." examples to illustrate your point. Give the contractor too much free reign and you're likely to get some whacked out thing that bears no resemblance to what you want- wasting their time and yours in the process.
...you HATE programmer art?
The absolute best art learning book I've ever seen is "[url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/ -/0874774241/qid=1100569243/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/10 2-9640388-0042521?v=glance&s=books&n=507846]Drawin g on the Right Side of the Brain[/url]" by [url=http://www.drawright.com/]Dr. Betty Edwards[/url]. It teaches "how to see" instead of "how to draw"... rather, instead of saying "see this? draw it. keep going, eventually you'll figure it out. Maybe"; it teaches you how to start seeing the same way artists see (which is ultimately what allows people to draw well).
I highly reccomend it. The before and after images are just asounding -- in just 5 days Dr. Edwards' students show simply AMAZING progress.
I don't think they allow free software programmers to release them under the GPL.
jimmac has a nice site on this very topic
Much more to it that you probably guessed.
This guy basically claims three things:
1. He owns Photoshop, LightWave, and Maya. A cursory look at pricing reveals that buying those programs would cost about $3200 total (assuming he buys Maya Complete and not Maya Unlimited).
2. He only needs some icons or sprites.
3. He can't pay an artist to make those things.
I haven't priced custom artwork latetly, but assuming it's -anything- like custom software, I have a damned hard time believing he can't get what he needs for much, much less than $3200. I think it's much more likely that he is using illegal copies of those programs, in which case I think he needs to get out of the commercial software business if he's not willing to respect the copyright of other programmers. In any case, if he's willing to infringe software copyright, he might as well just copy some artwork, too.
Sorry for the harsh language, but this guy is either an idiot not to have done the math or a crook for copying software illegally.
The Iconfactory offers royalty-free icons and design services. You may want to look into them. They have some nice-looking stuff.
I'm sure that http://www.rentacoder.com/ has sections for photography / artwork. You could probably make a good enough offer (recnogition, free copy, etc) that you don't need to pay anything.
Get students to do your artwork for free or near-free. Many high-school or college students have impressive skills with CG art. Go to the local high school and see if there are any stand out students.
asking for a tutorial on how to be a professional graphic artist is like asking for a quick guide on how to program high quality, bug free commercial software. it can take years of practice and learning. you eventually find what's right, or what works for your needs. there are countless tutorials online that will teach you little tricks on how to achieve various visual effects with photoshop. you simply need to find a way to apply them in a way that suits you. people don't spend four or more years in college for a BFA or design degree for nothing.
One of the advantages to Gnome's nazi UI guidelines is they provide a large # of attractive stock icons, and highly encourage you to use *only* those.
As a non-artist programmer that's what I do. Retreat into non-creativity, use the stock icons for folders. Where you can be creative is thinking about how to use that cool "Folder" icon to mean an entity in your application, and how you can use that cool "Tools" icon to invoke an operation.
For your application Icon just use some tiny font and an icon editor to make a text based icon on a solid color background. Everything else will look lame.
If you have greater needs, enlist the services of someone with skill.
An anonymous reader writes "Recently I've found myself in a bit of a bind with software. My contracts have been rather small, barely enough to pay myself let alone a programmer. The software needs aren't intensive, mostly file or network I/O depending on the project. Despite owning a few key apps (Visual C++, Eclipse) my software production output is rather poor. Are there any other artists who have learned to be self-sufficient? Are there any resources available to educate me on the finer points of making software that works?" One resource for the less geeky among us is the collection of free code at the code project or code guru, though it won't give advice for creating new application. What are some others?
Get a camera and shoot stuff like what you see here.
Or give up with the art and get a job here.
I've had graphic designer friends come to me for minor-incident tech support or other small software-related tasks, because they don't have the money or budget to get a full-time software partner. The same problem occurrs with smaller developers. budgetary restraints in software projects simply eliminate the ability to hire a graphic artist for minor work.
In a perfect world, only graphic designers would design graphics and only software developers would develop software. As it is today, some people have to do a little of everything to get by. Some of their required tasks they're trained in, and in others they're not. I'm sure you can design the most beautiful icon ever seen by mankind, but if you can't do it for $100 or less, then you're not going to get many requests from programmers working alone.
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
It's not a big book. It is easy to understand. The best thing about this book is that it shows that good graphic design, like good programming, has a purpose. Understand what you are actually trying to do and doing it becomes much simpler.
I'll also echo what others have said here. Keep it simple. If you're not sure what effect your design will have on people, at least don't prove to them that you're a clueless amateur by getting in over your depth. Also, copying is good. If you see something you like, try to copy it. You will probably learn a lot about design in the process.
While what others say about not having talent meaning not having any talent, that doesn't mean you can't do something passably basic.
Find a muted colour palette, and STICK TO IT, then do all your icons in an EXTREMELY SIMPLE style - start with just square boxes - you may not even need borders. Do things on the pixel level, and don't, please don't add any 'flair'.
If you're feeling adventurous, try some isometric '3d' icons - it's pretty easy to do simple non-shaded ones.
That all said, if you're building an app, stick to default widgets - they may seem ugly to you, but you can be sure that more people will like them than your attempts at icons.
The end result may look average, but that's all you want - if your app works out well, you can hire an artist later. People understand that not everyone is an artist, but people do not forgive those who try to be.
NB If you're building a non-abstract game that requires 2D sprites, there's no debate - you need an artist, a damn good one - even commercial artists have trouble doing game sprites successfully, since all the sprites have to work in the context of other sprites and the background. Creating game sprites is no small feat.
If you are trying to create icons with those tools, you have a basic misunderstanding of the medium.
Photoshopping is for editing, well, photos. It's fine also as a finishing tool for icons that are already made.
Maya is used for making 3D models, which is almost always overkill for an icon. (I've never used Lightwave, but I recall it being a 3D app as well).
What you need is a vector graphics editor. I would have to recommend Adobe Illustrator myself, although Inkscape is coming along quite well (and is free, so start there if you just want to see what I'm talking about). As for Macromedia Freehand, it seems to be a good program. However, I've always found it awkward (many will disagree) and at the school where I work it has incredibly many printing errors, so I can't really say.
And, beyond all that (as others have said) the key problem is most likely that you are an amatuer, not a professional. So, take an art course. Just go to a local college and sign up for a 2D design course of some sort.
Everything looks better if you shrink it. Can't color in the lines? Does it matter for shrinky-dinks? Same idea.
Get a scanner, a pen carousel, a ream of paper, and a wide variety of thick colored markers. Keep them thick so there isn't the temptation to draw small, or do fine detail.
Then after that economy of expression. Like anime, the product is not a picture, don't expect, or try to make, it to look like one. Just let it be simple, and clean.
Be honest with them, treat them well, and they often produce near professional quality work for nothing. Make sure you give them a good title and a nice rec letter.
Harsh but true. Also: Why accept a job without a proper budget? If you're getting paid peanuts to be chief, cook and bottlewasher let the client go find a sucker programmer to do it. Oh wait - he did.
I work around 3000x3000 or so, which makes for a nice 10x10 portfolio piece of a REALLY HUGE ICON which can be re-used pretty much however you like.
Sounds like overkill, but lemme tell you- nothing sucks more than needing a graphic at a larger scale than you have on hand!
clicky. The initial post has a great collection of what I believe to be all (or mostly all) royalty free, legal sprites, backgrounds, and tilesets.
Funny you should mention Tigert, who does use the Gimp.
I know a lot of artists for free/open source software projects use non-free programs like AI or 3DS, but not all.
Different people are used to different tools, and I primarily use Sodipodi, with a couple of extra programs on the side (most notably the Gimp).
Wait 5-10 years before using the free art tools? That's crazy talk. They're usable enough to do great art now. (You know that Susan Kare, one of my favourite artists, did a lot of her most beautiful work using only MacPaint or Windows Paintbrush?)
Good artists copy, great artists steal... programmers buy.
Well good programmers should look into buying royalty free icons, there's some great icon foundries that offer them and the quality is much higher than most could replicate.
I firmly believe that anyone can draw or paint with the right instruction, but who has that kind of time? Crack open the pocket book. Pay a starving artist, feed them, that's why they are so skinny and pale. No one ever feeds them!
Almost every single Mac OS X application out there, down to the tiniest, simplest freeware applications, have awesome icons and graphics. I'm not kidding, go look. Surely some of those guys coupld point out who helped them. And also, it may not be quite what you're looking for, but the guys of iconfactory.com might surely be able to point you on the right direction. Their stuff is meant for Mac, but just being graphics files, making the cross-platform hop is a snap. You'll find that a lot of the mac guys are willing to lend a hand. Since OS X came out and they all started playing with unix, there's been a LOT of interest in programming and open source projects. Most mac users can't do basic, but can own you in Illustrator. Of course, the flipside to this is Mac users who learned cd and ls and think they know unix. I was one of them. I tried to install Slackware on a borrowed PC. It was NOT pretty.
I find the 3dbuzz VTMs very usefull for creating 3d related content (they even have vtms for concept art among other subjects).
You just have to register at 3dbuzz.com and you have a lot of video tutorials at your fingertips.
Here's my advice:
Learn to draw; understand basic design principles, make lots of mistakes. Play. Go slow. Understand and appreciate art. Go to a museum. Pick up a magazine, or a book at a library. Art isn't easy, it's Hard. Very Incredibly Hard. Make time for it, because it will not make time for you,
Cheers,
Dada Mail - Program, Art Project or Absurdity?
"Open Source Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. Helping to make the internet a prettier place!"
study some category theory...
To hire all the people that need to be involved. Writing, programming, and iconagraphy are three different skills, and have really no overlap. Writers, do indeed write better. Programmers do indeed program better, and artists do indeed art better.
It sounds as if the guy that writes your proposals and specs the jobs (who is that in the mirror?) could use a lesson in resource requirements.
you get what you pay for.
if you hire a programmer and tack on the designers job, you might get both done, but probably a piss poor job of the second.
if you hire a designer and tack on the programmers job, I'm not even sure you'll get the second job done.
Of course my friend who are designers would argue that the sort of hackery that I try to pass off as web design isn't "getting the job done" either.
Just pay a designer.
~a
In a language that you programmer people can understand...
good art = practice + practice + practice
"If you pay an artist $200 for a couple of simple graphics, you'll save yourself tons of time, and your project will come out much, much better. So reduce the number of graphics you need, and get the best ones you can."
Great Advice and absolutely true, HOWEVER, for the "DIY" types, i would add:
1. AVOID THE HIGH-LEARNING CURVE TOOSLS, SUCH AS:
A. Photoshop
B. Dreamweaver
C. Flash
D. ALL THE 3D Products; Lightwave, Maya, 3dFX
i'm a programmer/developer, and i've been using some of the above for years in high end web design, and find that if i don't use them for a few months, i have to relearn big chunks of the program, sometimes ending up with a 3:1 ratio between learning and designing.
2. USE THE MORE "AUTOMATED DESIGN PRODUCTS, SUCH AS;
A. Ulead PaintShop Pro -- http://www.jasc.com/products/?
B. Macromedia Fireworks
C. Adobe Photoshop Elements
D. Cool Button Tool -- http://www.buttontool.com/
E. Cool FX Menu Tool -- http://www.buttontool.com/
These programs are substantially cheaper $$$$ to buy then the "Biggies", and are designed to take some of the load off some of the design choices that can drive even highly skilled designers (Choices such as; opacity, blends, masks and moires)....
STEAL, uh, i mean "homage" any image (OBEY ALL PERTINENT COPYRIGHT RULES, AND DON'T "HOMAGE" FROM MAJOR SITES THAT ARE KNOWN TO EMPLOY LOTS OF LAWYERS!!!!!!!!!)
you can be a good citizen and ask, or you can homage them and alter them enough to make them "yours"
3. LEARN HOW TO FIND HELP FROM PROS: there are a # of websites designed to provide such help, for example http://creativepro.com/ is used by pretty much every designer i've worked with or known. everyone of the major software provider has both developer programs and tutorials and community BBs, forums, etc..
some companies such as Adobe and Macromedia really push these developer forums and you can frequently get better/faster/smarter solutions from these forums, than from the companies' Tech Support programs!!!
4. SELECT A "LOOK AND FEEL"; from a product/service/??? similar to what your product/service/??? and use that to extract GENERAL guidelines about how to present your design. Chances are these folk have paid good monety to learn lessons about to sell your similar product/service/??? -- go to school on them, BUT DON'T copy their design (Lawsuit City), extract their approach and see how you can apply it to your particular project...
Good Luck!
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
the best way to get good is to copy good artists. then throw the copies away.
you learn how it was done, and over time you kinda obsorb the techniques.
at least that's how I learned when I was a kid. copy what you like...but don't try to pass it off as your own..just do it for educational purposes.
Try Sitepoint. is a very good web design site. At first there were only technical articles, but they added an art column, and now they got their art and design newsletter.
Here's the article: Good designers copy, great designers steal. Two thumbs up for that one. They even give you examples of how to do it right.
Might wanna try.
I can know...
I am webmaster, programmer and artist...
This is way too much for a human to be involved in... lol...
But serious, less is more also from a design perspective, don't be afraid to use big empty spaces in your work.
Another thing not to be afraid of is looking at other people's work, unlike what corperations try to tell you there is nothing wrong in getting inspired by other people's work as long as you do something with that instead of being a dead copy.
Go find photoshop and or gimp tutorials that handle most situations in modern graphics, a lot of them are free accessible.
If despite all of this you are not able to do a thing then admit that you are not a artist and hire somebody else...
I've had the same trouble as you! There seem to be a damn lot of books catered at teaching design people to write good HTML, or work in Flash, or do CSS, but hardly any books giving code monkeys a good basis in design.
Like some other posters, I am dating a boy who is a designer. Hearing about some obscure designers in Oslo a billion times a day is sooooooo worth getting him to do my design work for me :D
plus, creative types can be very, um, inventive, in um, other, um areas.
...and actually listen to what they say? I've been looking for intersting projects to work on so I can get a little more experience designing UIs but every porject lead I've approached has either ignored my offers of help or has been downright rude. Projects need to make artists more welcome and they just might offer their time in exchange.
Another thing to try is to not follow the trends in UI design just to follow the trends in UI design because you think this will make your app better. There are far too many OS X look alike icons and buttons designs and even worse knock-offs that try to not look like what they're knocking off.
I use sodipodi. It's actual a decent and quite capable tool. Tigert uses (or has) GIMP, but when he started it was much much less capable than it is today. Think about that.
Larry Ewing, the designer of the Linux pengiun, used GIMP 0.54, which is about where Sodipodi is compared to something like Adobe Illustrator today.
GIMP 0.54 and pengiun
Sodipodi complements GIMP *greatly*. It's a joy to use both together, since GIMP vector tools aren't that useful for actual drawing purposes and can be tedious.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
How? By not being artistic. If you find that you can't seem to get the right look, try a minimalist approach.
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
Idiots. The original poster asked for help on artwork for his programs/sites. He is not looking to become the next van gogh. He is not looking to become an "artist". He is looking to make his graphics better. There is a big difference. Fot starters, the former will take some inspiration and much work. The latter: just a bunch of filters and the right amount of clicking in any program of your choice save the Gimp 'coz we all know how worthless it really is. Ok ok ok ok j/k about the gimp - never used it. :)
For most websites, unless your site is for museums or to showcase design and the like, I believe that the architecture is much more important than design specifics. If you spend the time to correctly establish all the elements on a site and how they will work together, it is very elementary to then design a simple banner and colour scheme (which is all most sites need). Spend time concentrating on the layout, not the design and drawing, and the rest will fall into place eventually.
As for digital art... I started at the age of 7 on MS Paint and the like. There's something to be said for starting out with very limited tools and only progressing to PhotoShop etc when you have the basics down. It's like in art class... you would never start with oils on a canvas, but with a pencil on paper.
Simple tips -
Use one font. One standard font.
Three colours max to start with.
Easy!
This is the big thing for me, I started breaking out my programming from the design in all my bids about 6 years ago and make it very clear that I'm a coder not a designer and that I will give any designer an easy method to change the look and feel all day long but don't expect mine look and feel to be perfect. This way the client knows exactly what they are getting, they know the system will work, and they know they can spend more later for a better look if they want to.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I married an artist, BFA and all. From her I learned how color works, about negative space and positive space and a million other things that these "non-scientific" people know that make art as much as a science as programming is an art.
This is my sig.
#1- avoid too much 'clip art'. Anyone with an eye for art usually thinks it looks like ass.
I'd say that largely depends on who's ass we're talking about.
Clip-art porn. Kinky.
Well, I would still like a different set of tools. Not one that has more features or whatever, but one that's easier to use (at least for me.) Like a tablet instead of a mouse. Or 3D skinning that doesn't involve unfolding polygons. Being able to paint on a hologram would be pretty nice.
And if it could read my mind, then I wouldn't be as limited by my complete lack of technical artistic skills and lousy eye-hand coordination. Pretty much I'm too lazy to learn and practice using existing tools, but hey, some people just don't have the technical skills despite artistic vision.
Just don't worry about all the "professional" artwork like icons and crap like that. Go straight to the nude art, like me!
Use Blender to make Cool Nude Art! Or, check it, Sodipodi (vector graphics) and/or Pencil,Paper,GIMP for all your nude art needs.
*THAT* is what Linux was made for, folks.
Yep. That's wholesome geek work. And if you want a job at Pixar or something, making a cult hit animation with my rigged meshes from that site would probably get you there. Just talk to me first, because I have some ideas...
fifth sigma, inc.
"The art needs aren't intensive, mostly icons or sprites depending on the project. "
The Icon Book: Visual symbols for Computer Systems and Documentation.
There's more to icons than just being pretty pictures.
You're too sensitive, 5cameron. Don't mistake judgements of your person as judgements of your vocation as a whole-- i.e. those people weren't talking about design when they said those mean things. You see 5cameron, you're one drop in a veritable sea of people who fancy themselves as 'artists' just because they know a variety of keyboard-shortcuts.
Your ibook does not make you an artist, 5cameron.
You're a graphic designer because the other classes were "too hard." Your teacher also knows this and secretly detests you, as well as your bandwagon-humping.
1. Colors, Colors, Colors: Understand Colors and what works and what Doesn't Red Green Blue for Displays Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black for printing. Red and Green make Yellow and Magenta and Yellow make Red. Warm Colors are Red and Yellow, Cool Colors are Cyan and Blue. Black Gray and Whites are Neutral. Green, Magenta are in the middle of Warm and Cool. Avoid mixing inverse colors except for Black and White. (A way to find the inverse color is to use a graphic program and take a negative image of it)
2. Don't Go Crazy: Often for a programmer who starts dabbling with Art they like to go crazy and put as much artwork as possible. Look at companies known to have good interfaces like Mac OS there are plenty of graphics very pretty but they keep it under control.
3. Try to use as many of the standard widgets for your platform. Depending who your platform target audience is, try to make your graphics fit their OS Platform. If you are programming for apple stick to the gray stripes or the brushed metal look (Stripes are easier). In Windows stick to the Blues, Grays, Whites, If XP add some orange in the mix.
4. Animate for a reason. Animations in a program should help the user follow the flow of the information (Such as a box that needed to get bigger or some extra text inserted) Dont animate for the sake of animation.
5. Anti Aliasing goes a long way: Make your graphics big then shrink it with anti aliasing turned on. It makes it look like it is not from MS Paint.
6. A little rounding or making it a little edgier sometimes is all it is needed to make the customer feel that they have a good product. Just take a shape control and give it a curve of 15 make it White with a Black border and put it underneath a group of widgets and they will think it looks super cool.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
take an art class at your local community college
I have spent the last 7 years as a painter/graphic artist/art director in NYC and twice a day I have to reply to a non-creative (Account, Copy, Admin etc.) about "why cant I make art look good too". Webster: Art: 1. skill acquired by experience, study, or observation 2. a branch of learning. That doesnt mean you cant do it - you can - but its hard work. You never "get there", but you can certainly get better. Its a continuous process and you will probably feel vaguely uncomfortable for a very long time. Just keep trying to learn and improve. Only a pretentious bastard believes everything they do is a holy nugget (it never is) and you do not want to be one of those. Find and hang out with the kind of people who do what you want to do and learn from them... Take basic drawing and design classes... Most of all, PAY ATTENTION to what you like and learn from it. On the other hand, if its a big professional deal ($$$) and you need the help - hire an artist. We all want to learn and grow but sometimes you need to call in a professional. PIXAR has specialized division of labor - why not you?
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Wouldn't hurt to take an art class or two, get those cross-brain neurons firing. Think "precise creativity". Save money and get a new hobby to boot.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
... you could always spend a lifetime multi-classing, but don't go complaining to the DM when you discover that divided XP means you make only half the progress in each of your classes. Who cares how many hit-dice you have if HR is only looking at your class-skills!
That old standby justification - "Well they have lots of money and are evil and are just a big, anonymous corporate entity, so its ok." doesn't work here. How do you justify ripping off some Joe-Schmoe's artwork, changing it just a bit, and calling it your own?
"Insightful"? Try "Immoral".
We tried hiring a lot of graphic artists for doing the job of icons and themes. Most of them did it as if they were making a cartoon show or art exhibition. The result was unusable and had to be thrown away in many cases. So if you do hire an artist, ask to see some icons they have created first. 1) icons need to be functional first and foremost. Simple is better,and it should always be obvious what the icon does. (Vodofone, you guys suck at this). 2) for toolbar icons pick a color scheme of 3 colors for your icons and stick to it where-ever possible. E.g. any set of icons that are supposed to be of a set, should look like they are of a set. The current default gimp icons mostly achieve this and are a good example of icons that look like they are part of a set. Again Vodafone are an example of abusing this notion. 3) think style, not art. You are designing something to be used, not admired. Get that right first. Trying for 3d or intricate looking objects almost always fails, (too much detail in too small an area, Vodafone, looking at you again). Sometimes its better to pick a shape than an object. Sometimes you will have a bunch of similar icons so make sure you emphasize the differences rather than the commonality (again, my Vodafone phone has 4 nearly identical icons, so I always have to double check if I want to use any of them). Oh, and create at double size than scale down.
don't forget to add GIMP 2.0 to your #2! hey, and it's even free!
Google the windows installer, it's out there O.o
"And so the Trekkies were executed in the mannor most befitting virgins - thrown into volcanoes" - Futurama
I've found Wings 3D to be an easy jump for a programmer to make into 3D modelling, if that's a form of "art" you're after as well. The texturing modes are a breeze also.
Mutant Freaks of Nature: "Frighteningly Addictive"
"# In addition to Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain..."
And it's sequal.
Drawing on the Artist Within.
Here are some tips that I found invaluable in improving my own artwork.
1. When drawing stick figures, make sure that arms and legs emerge from torso at different points.
2. Heads aren't perfectly round -- make them kinda egg-shaped.
3. Sure, they're called "smiley faces", but don't let that limit your creativity. "Mildy grumpy face", anyone?
4. When drawing pictures of your house, make sure that the little swirly lines coming out of the chimney don't just go straight up. If you have big scary clouds (go ahead -- use that black crayon!), there's gonna be wind -- make the swirls go to the side.
5. Use shortcuts. Even though the sky is blue, and clouds are white, it's a pain in the butt to color in all that blue. Instead, take advantage of the human visual system's poor chroma response, and draw the clouds blue, and leave the sky white!
6. Practice, practice, practice! The Van Halen logo kicks ass -- draw it as much as possible. Same goes for block letters receding into the distance (cool idea -- use your own name to practice with!)
Good luck!
Try sponsoring a design contest at Worth1000. You'll get several people submitting entries that way, in a wide range of styles. You can arrange to get the use rights to the images free and clear. It's not that expensive, and you won't even have to leave the house.
John Hancock wuz here.
I recently took some evening classes through my local museum in basic drawing and composition. It did not make me any kind of an artist, but it made me more aware of the techniques and terminology. A very enlightening class for a geek such as myself.
Yes but GIMP has an even higher learning curve than Photoshop and lacks some important features.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Ok, so I'm a coder, and I could probably write a ray-tracer that would do what you ask, that doesn't make me an artist.
I can proof designs and give good feedback and even get into the mental flow of art, but when I just haven't got it in the brain paper co-ordination department the coding sucked it out of me long ago and no amount of teaching will help get it back.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
And here is an analagous HOWTO for those of us of the KDE persuasion.
Raj Against the Machine! http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/
Seriously. Artists are not that expensive to hire, and a HELLUVA lot cheaper than buying Maya/Photoshop/etc. If you want something creative done, then why not get a Creative to do them? You're a professional, right? You wouldn't expect an artist to be able to code his/her own database, why do you expect to be able to create your own art? A big reason why we all hate those banner ads and billboards and posters and signage plastered all over our lives is just because the person making them was too cheap to get the right person for the right job: when I see ads created by actual designers (i.e., with talent) it doesn't offend me, I actually *enjoy* looking at the ad, and as a result am interested in the product. It's all about attitude. Do you want your app to have a unconfident, backseat attitude, or do you want to grab the user's attention, hold their interest and give them a good experience with your software (to the point that they want to use it and tell others to use it too)? Professional designers and artists can do that for you (me included). In this tough world of competition you need to stand out from the pack to be successful and your first line of attack is the look and feel of your product (i.e., the art of it). So go out get yourself some good artists on your project and reap the rewards of impressive attitude. www.whitehaze.com www.designiskinky.com www.k10k.net www.pixelsurgeon.com www.surfstation.lu zed.cbc.ca www.24-7media.de www.iconbuffet.com/stock_icons/index.html www.superfamous.com/empire/ These sites should give you some ideas of what can be done with the right creative consultancy. Us artists are hurting for work. Give us a chance man.
Robert McLarty Multimedia Designer
"So I guess what you're saying is that we're all born with the same potential. It just matters where we spend our time. That seems a bit idealistic to me. You want to explain why some people are more athletic than others? Why some people have higher iq's than others? Do you want to somehow argue that this is purely and totally environment and has nothing at all to do with genetics?"
It's both. That's humanity's strength, and weakness. The difference between one with the "knack" and one without isn't that they can't achive desirable results. The difference is that one has to work harder than the other to achieve comparable results.
IMHO I think we all start with a base pool to draw upon, and the environment pares this down to the way we are in adulthood.
One barter option I've offered on free software projects is "free advertising". I put the artist's name, web address and e-mail address prominently in the READ ME file, documentation, or whatever.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
as term suggests, it's art. go with your gut. trying to do otherwise will cost you much time, and result in unsatisfactory outcome. there is a beauty in engineering aesthetic as well. if your client is not satisfied, hire an appropriate artist to handle the work. i would bet that you'd be able to find someone approrpriate, and it will save you much time /effort in the long run.
In the past I have looked towards open source oriented themes sites.... You'll find a variety of things like icon collections listed under bsd, lgpl, or gpl licenses although what exactly that means is beyond me.
Another source is the Stock Photo Exchange. They have a variety of independently listed photos most of which you have express permission to use however you want. Quality varies.
Real professional graphics designers will usually have massive paid-for multimedia collections to draw upon.
The submitter knows this and that is why he is asking slashdot.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
[just published this past August]
ISBN:1585422193
ISBN: 067163514X
ISBN: 0874774241
I also purchased the following at Linuxworkd NY this year and found it a good read that would be germane to your needs:
- The Art of Interactive Design
Once you have an idea of what you need to illustrate, you should be able to use any application (I recomend using the same Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) standard used at Open Clip Art because:by Chris Crawford
ISBN: 1886411840
- Edges;
- Spaces;
- and Relationships;
(Read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brian)Relationships (yes there is some crossover);
Lights and Shadows
Gestalt
Don't confuse art with graphic design which uses artistic techniques to solve problems.
If you need to make icons, yes, you need some creativity, but you also need to understand some basic things about icons: the way people recognise shapes means you shouldn't make them all square, for example.
If you are trying to express your inner angst, or to speak about the indescribable horrors being wrought upon poor innocent $VICTIMS in $COUNTRY, or you wish to share the calm serenity of the spirit (I'm not actually mocking), and you do so in pictures, in words, in sculpture, in music, you're making art.
If you're designing a dialogue box, a window, a page of text, you're using techniques like composition, alignment, framing, proximity, similarity, contrast and you're doing graphic design.
Of course, an accomplished artist also uses these techniques, so graphic design is really just a subcategory of fine art, but with a stronger focus on purpose - often a purpose imposed from outside.
There are lots of good books on technique, and if you use them you can produce solid, workable designs, just as studying how to write will help you to produce workable essays or documentation without making you into a poet.
I have a short reading list (uses Amazon referrer links) that may help.
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
If you're a programmer looking to expand on the artistic side, in particular a web programmer, I would suggest looking into print design. The artistic aspect is fairly simple and it translates directly into creating better, more visually pleasing, more usable web applications. The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams is an excellent start.
This is one topic where, for most programmers, following a few simple rules really can make a world of difference.
As a designer I have exactly the opposite problem. I have a strong foundation in (and teach) graphic design however my programming abilities are limited at best. Essentially I can install and configure scripts but that's about the limit of my abilities.
Since I own and operate a tiny web design studio (on a shoestring budget) this often leaves me in a bind when it comes to development projects. I can't afford to keep a full time PHP programmer on staff so I'm forced to sub things out on a project per project basis. Even though this work method is prone to failure (my experience has been that development projects are rarely, if ever delivered on time) I know well enough that programming isn't something you can just 'pick up' by reading a book. Like any other trade it requires training, dedication and at least a little bit of skill.
In my opinion this is the major problem with developers who "design" web sites. They marginalize the actual design of the site as if it's an afterthought (eg. who needs a designer, I have animating clip art!). The truth is, a successful site is a marriage of good design and solid programming. And until you realize that, and accept it, you're belittling all the work involved in either trade.
DigiSquid Design.
To be honest, I don't think you can be more 'professional' without the practice. I used to be a programmer and the only way to make the shift over is to constantly be busy with new projects that would help you develop your creative sensibilities. I went to art school for starters, and that helped tremendously. If you don't necessarily want to do something on a graphic level, you can also be a coder for 3D applications. You can learn 'mel', or 'maxscript' for instance. But if you are aiming for a professional aesthetic, then again, you have to do a lot of personal projects, experiment a lot, and push limits for clients. Clients will often limit your creativity, but to be honest, a lot of the clients keep coming to us only after they realize that you are pushing their creative boundaries as well. Don't be a downer about this. For 3D, isit creative portals such as: CGChannel, CGNetworks, CGTalk, InsideCG, Deathfall, Rendernode. Or if you are looking for more design-oriented aesthetics, visit: Design is Kinky, Three.oh, Newstoday, Surfstation, etc. I work at a studio called Tronic in NYC, and the only way to push yourself is to stay busy, look at other studios and their work and try to push limits. Good luck.
Not really perfect and still in its very early days, but already quite a bit usefull for finding some free art is the Game Media Repository, available at:
http://undone.clanlib.org/~grumbel/show.cgi
Quality of the stuff in their varies a lot, so success of your searches may variy, still might be worth a try, especially for game related stuff like sprites and 3d models.
One hat I wear is that of a designer. I probably spend about 1 - 2 months out of the year doing artwork for Web sites and applications. I have provided the design work for hundreds (if not thousands) of Web sites and programs in one way or another, as you will see below...
Steal your ideas, mine have been ripped off more times than I can keep track of and I assure you no one is ever going to be able to do anything about it.
I see it all the time, some slick looking site based on another designer's ideas, and it hurts bad when it is my own work getting stolen. I have had companies provide me with other people's conceptual sketches (in some cases, sketches from friends of mine that I already know have not been paid for) and ask if I can do the same thing cheaper. I have had people ask me how I pulled off some neat trick in Flash, gone to their email domain and seen my work being copied frame for frame. I have found watermarks in content I made showing up in other people's sites and been told no visual idea belongs to anyone. Originality stopped being a virtue in 1997, why even try?
You should steal whatever artistic concepts you think you need, cutting and pasting screenshots into Photoshop should be sufficent for any purpose. Intellectual property is a joke unless you have an army of lawyers, and it still costs too much for most companies to come after you unless you are costing them big bucks. Consider buying a scanner so you can steal ideas from magazines and newspapers as well - ESPN the Magazine is a great source of content to lift and maybe it will keep my stuff safe.
Just put 'Artisitic Genius' on your business card and tell people you are Picasso's evil twin. Go spawn children and steal... uh... 'study' their crayon drawings for use in your work. Carry Silly Putty to lift tattoo outlines directly from people's skin and pass them off as your own. Spend all your time at hotels and pay for your meals by signing them off to other people's rooms. Give up technology and just start mugging people, same thing. Phish.
If anyone ever calls you on stealing artwork, refuse to acknowledge the 'similarities', tell them to bite you and claim they stole YOUR ideas. If they still bug you, find out their phone number and threaten their families in the middle of the night. It works.
M
They aren't all real graphic design books but they really helped me improve my "design awareness".
-- Watch me working: www.magerquark.de
If you're not an artist you're not an artist and you aren't going to crank out beautiful work regardless of how well you learn any software package.
Here are my tips...
1. Keep designs simple.
2. Keep designs consistent.
3. Don't mix serif and sans-serif fonts. (Debian.org is a great example of what not to do... All the titles are sans-serif and all the text is serif. Download a copy of the page and edit the CSS file to use Verdana for the body text and look at how much better it makes it look.)
4. Don't do things for the sake of doing them, make sure any layout decisions have some reason behind them.
5. Find an artist and barter services if you can't afford to hire them.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Agreed. A developer shouldn't misrepresent their graphic skills, though. If a customer wants something to look really flashy, then they should be prepared to pay for a qualified person. It all starts with managing customer expectations ie: You Get What You Pay For. I'm sure there are developers who can do an acceptable job from a customer's perspective. There will also be customers who demand more skill than a jack-of-all-trades can provide. Ultimately if the customer is well-versed (unfortunately rare), then they determine where professional begins with their wallet.
separating UI design and graphic design is silly. Shall we seperate web design as well?
While they all require understanding of human interaction, lumping them together as identical is a common mistake and a dangerous trap. Not all web designers do good application UI and vice versa. Graphic design when dealing with print also has different issues than dealing with screen. there are large areas of overlap, but there are also significant differences. An example off the top of my head is on things you can do with the medium. A pamflet has a texture, fold and other attributes which can be accentuated and used to assist in the actions to take on the paper. A screen doesn't fold (and still work), but could have a variety of cues to perform actions (buttons, sliders, hotzones, highlights). There are actions on both, but each medium has nuances which can be overlooked when transferred.
I have to disagree. The best UI is one where you don't know what's going on on the inside! Some of the best UI's are the ones you don't notice are there, but still allow you to perform actions when you need to, without hassle or conscious thought. Unfortunately these are rare. As I mentioned, some (but by no means all) graphic designers want their 'art' to stand out. Developers want this also, but their 'art' is the software itself and its designed structure. The User justs wants to do their job, as efficiently and intuitively as possible. The key to good software design is balancing these three points of view satisfactorily.
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
This is good advice. Forget your programmer self--that is, forget the technological aspects.
Ignore the tools in your software suite. Use as few of them as possible.
Also, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of planning. Invest in a good drawing board, and sketch sketch sketch. You needn't be good with a pencil, but you draw by hand faster than you draw on screen. Set up a clean workspace with a drawing board next to your computer workstation, good lighting, and draw until you discover something you like and want to develop further.
Work in stages and save at each point--you will later discover that something you've spent the last few hours or even days working on simply doesn't work and want to go back to an earlier stage.
But above all else, be sure that the time you're going to need to spend on your artwork is worth the money you're going to save hiring a professional. They have clocked years of practice and simply know what works better than you do. You can produce great art with little technical knowledge and little creativity, but lots of time.
You can go to school for 4 years, as I did, if you want to learn how to draw, paint, and design. But you would do yourself more good if you just take the time to understand the basics. Pickup a design fundamentals book that covers things like the "Golden Section", repitition, framing, etc. The other great thing to learn is the use of color, and color combinations. http://www.pantone.com is a good place to start. You could also pick up a book about color. Other than the basics like these, you would have to spend a lot of time and energy learning and practicing how to draw, that I don't think you are looking to do. Oh. And don't design your website with programmer blue!
I am a no-talent hack when it comes to original artwork for a web page, but I still usually come up with something that gets the job done. What I do is pull out my trusty digital camera and take a picture of something close to what I want, then pull it into a paint program. I really like Paint Shop Pro as at least one other person recommended. It's cheaper than Photoshop, has most of the tools I need and is easier to use, at least for me.
Anyway, once I have it in Paint Shop Pro, I edit away. For example, I've been designing a site for a wine store. I took a bunch of wine corks and took pictures of them in various arrangements (jumbled in a pile, arranged neatly in rows on their sides, arranged neatly in rows upright etc). I found the one I liked best, decreased the color depth, decreased the contrast, increased the brightness and blurred it a bit. This left me with a nice usable background for the page. No copyright problems, no from-scratch painting in a paint program, yet it still looks pretty danged good.
But why is the rum gone?
Despite owning a few key apps (Photoshop, LightWave, Maya)
"I'm not much of an artist, but own several thousand dollars of specialized apps"
Any icon creators who think they would be interested in a BIG icon job - literally hundreds of them - are welcome to take a gander at the aging set we're using now and contemplate how you might want to go about giving our software's toolbar and toolbox a facelift.
Here are the toolbar icons (the text below the images isn't part of the icons... it's a switchable toolbar option to label them is all.)
And here are the toolbox icons.
If you think you might be interested in working on this, please give us a shout here.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
So, I'm a ballet choreographer, but I just got this contract to create an e-commerce site. Can someone point me to a couple of, you know, technical resources that will get me up to speed in a day or two?
Only on slashdot will you find a comment titled "have you no decency" that includes the phrase "jacking off into the gimp".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
WorldPaint
Anyone can plot pixels so eventually it's got to turn into something you can use.
Work Safe Porn
>> #3- Look at other designs, and borrow, borrow,
>> borrow. Very few people actually create something
>> original. Just about everything has been done
>> before, so just borrow away.
>
> STEAL, uh, i mean "homage" any image (OBEY ALL
> PERTINENT COPYRIGHT RULES, AND DON'T "HOMAGE" FROM
> MAJOR SITES THAT ARE KNOWN TO EMPLOY LOTS OF
> LAWYERS!!!!!!!!!)
This kind of attitude really pisses me off (not to mention that it's really, really stupid to suggest "borrowing" or to "homage"). Stealing art is basically the same as stealing code. You must _ALWAYS_ ask for permission. As an artist I can assure you that if I found your companies using my artwork and passing it on as your own then you might be facing a lawsuit. I would hate to resort to legal actions but if you steal my stuff, and haven't been licensed to use it (e.g. artistic license), you'd better be prepared for a bare-knuckle fight.
I'm telling you this for your own good. Just because it's there doesn't mean you can take it and use it as you see fit because you see, like code, it does belong to someone unless explicitly stated to be public domain. After all, like parent stated -- art is subject to Copyright laws.
If you asked me for permission and acknowledged me as the artist, however, I would probably be more than happy to accomodate you and grant you permission to use it. It's a matter of pride - please keep that in mind.
Thanks alot, now I feel dirty for having to spell this out in such a impolite fashion.
- Go to the thrift store and buy an action figure you like. Something posable helps to have options.
- Find a hill you like. Nuff said.
- Point your camera at the hill on a tripod. If you have some way to take a picture without touching it, great.
- Place the figure about 18 to 25 inches away from the camera so that it appears on top of the hill in a natural way.
- Take a shot with the figure in place and another shot without. Keep the camera as still as possible.
- Go home and open the two images in Photoshop.
- Select the image with the figure and press CTRL-A to select all. Now CTRL-C to copy (just being thorough). Select the other image and paste (CTRL-C).
- Now play. You should have the images in layers one on top of the other. Try fiddling with the opacity, or add a filter or cutout the figure and re-position it. Don't be afrait to try anything - especially blurs! Let people fill in their own detail. Worry about what the image is instead of how detailed it is.
(Yes, I know this is a classic special effects method. It works well for an example.)Some great Photoshop tutorials (and Maya and others too) can be found in Computer Arts Magazine. The tutorials are step by step with great examples to learn from. It's a little pricey here in the US, but worth it for a beginer.
As to how to make an icon rather than an animated GIF or a JPEG or something else, just look up the spec. Google for "Photoshop icon tutorial" or or "Photoshop animated GIF tutorial". Think of the different file specs as... well, specs. Photoshop can edit pretty much any image type you'll need.
I tend to do a lot of self contained work (Art, Music, Programming) so I can attest: Anyone can do it themselves.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Do pencil sketches. Scan. Edit and colorize in photoshop. It's the best way I've found. The pencil is still the best tool for what it's good for, and photoshop is the best tool I've found for what it's good for.
James Lipton?
Who knew we had greatness in our midst?
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Study existing art and practice making your own. Art and artistic ability are all about knowing what has already been done. Then amke anything in any medium. In order to become better at making art with computer apps you do not need to pracctice with computer apps. Use any medium you like. Really. The more you make thing in any medium the better you become at all the others.
.
-shpoffo
check this magazine out
its a digital design magazine
http://www.bamagazine.com
Higher learning curve? I'm 15, and got the hang of it fairly quickly.
I'm not exactly an experienced user, but I have always found it easier to use than Photoshop, which to me is a bitch to work with, but still, I like it better than PSP.
Plenty of staving students willing to work for free to get their names on professional projects.
Most need to get their portfolio up to date with as much variety as possible, and wouldn't mind creating some work to get their names out.
Students these days are quite talented giving that they practically were born with a mouse in one hand.
Live forever, or die trying.
Try:
Thinking With a Pencil by Henning Nelms.
Lots of quick-draw technques to help non-artist engineers visualize ideas. A cult classic, to those who know it. Accessible, informative, fun.
Helped me a lot. (I'm a geek type, semi artist.)
-kgj
-kgj
that's not ulead... at the very least it's corel, but really the product is called Jasc Paint Shop Pro.
Why? Learning to create compelling images is hard. It takes about five years of fairly intensive practice and study - figure drawing, observation, caricature of the world around you.
Anyone can learn to draw, just as anyone can learn to program, but whatever the discipline, they have to put in the time to practice. Being able to make effective small-scale graphics like icons is harder than it looks at first; theres little space to get the point across in. (Blow up screengrabs sometime; take a look.)
If its appropriate for your program, consider some kind of skinning mechanism - that can net a number of looks for the thing from users, for little visual effort on your part. Especially if youre willing to run a little archive on your site.
egypt urnash minimal art.
So one tip would be: Recognise and accept your own limitations. Sure, programming is a lot more right-brained and creative than the public assumes, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have the instincts to produce great images, regardless of the tools you might have at hand.
Another tip would be to try what I did (but maybe on a smaller scale) and take some classes. See if a nearby art school (or college with an art department) has "continuing studies" classes in digital illustration, or try to get into one of their "real" classes.
In either case, it's not your software, but yourself that needs upgrading to improve your output.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
It is the nature of being 15 that one gets the hang of things fairly quickly. For those of us with lots more miles on our brains, learning new things becomes more of a challenge.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Two things: if you're looking for artistic advice, always look at the website listed under their name. Particularly if you don't like what they have on their site, take their advice with a grain of salt.
Second point: I don't really mind the first two steps (although there are some copyright issues), but I do have an issue with step three. "Colorise the new layer with all your knowledge of gradients, textures, etc."... that's horrible advice. You want to make something look shitty? Go crazy with gradients, textures, and filters.
Simplicity is always the better way to go if you're not artistically inclined.
I'd love to provide you with art.... but I can't figure out how... your website is obtuse to say the least... no contact form in sight... contact form, please.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Let me make it simple for you. 1 tip. Pay me 15 bucks an hour, charge your client at least 20 and save yourself double the time it would take me or another artist to do it for you. I don't code anymore because I can outsource the custom code I need at even less than I charge and I don't spend 3 times what would be necessary for a competant programmer to do the same job.
This may be redundant, but did anyone suggest trying to learn Povray? It's not that hard to learn, and with it, you can create some amazing images very easily, even if you are terrible at art.
However, it's a rendering program, so perhaps using it for icons and sprites is an overkill.
Is that your first position or your final answer? You say you just want to put your toe in the water? Don't dance around the subject. Make the leap.
Okay, enough e-commerce jokes. Rob:-]
This may be redundant, but have you tried Povray? It's very easy to learn, and even if you have lousy artistic skills, you can generate some amazing images with it.
I'm a programmer but having worked in the game industry for many years I grew to know a lot about game art, both on paper (concept sketches and paintings) and on the computer.
First, it's a skill that can be learned like any other. Sure, some people have a natural talent, and others don't (like me). There are also people who are natural programmers, and they will always be the best at it; but anyone can learn to program if they really want to.
I've ended up doing tons of stand-in art for games, and a lot of it ended up going into the final game, because it was Good Enough. Usually it was character animations and interface elements, basically the easy stuff, but still - it goes to show you that there isn't as much of a line between the artistically talented and someone who can just learn to work the tools.
Here's a few random tips from my many years of hanging around with really talented artists as well as my own tinkering:
Tools - I'm pleased to say that the OSS art tools you can get today for photo art and 3D are as good as or better than their commercial counterparts for many tasks. I've used Photoshop, Maya, 3D Studio Max (and the original 3D Studio, for that matter), and Lightwave in the course of my career, but I find that the Gimp (for 2D) and Blender (for 3D) are today better, or at least as good as, most of the commercial offerings. One thing about this may be that both of these programs are geared more towards programmers-become-artists than pure artists, which may be why I find them more intuative and powerful.
Color - Color is a huge element. Crappy shapes with a good color scheme actually look pretty good; nice shapes with a crappy color scheme always look bad. Typically you want to combine complimentary colors - purple and gold, for example - in a way that is pleasing to the eye. It can be tricky to get this right, but one trick you can do is use the color wheel in Gimp. Find the first color you are going to use, and then go to the exact opposite side - that's your complimentary color. Note that a muted color (tan, for example) should fill more, proportionately, of the image than its bright complimentary color (red, for example). When in doubt, go look at a nice-looking website and steal their colorscheme.
Compositing - You can do a LOT by compositing photographs and other existing graphic elements. For example I made the header image for this website by compositing shots I had taken in New Oreans, plus a couple photos from images.google.com eg, Stonehenge in the lower left corner). Using the Gimp's color adjustment tools, scale, resize, rotate, and opacity, you can collage together a bunch of unrelated images and end up with something that looks pretty cool.
Learn Blender - A great way to make a final image is to create a central element in 3D, and then paste it into an image and edit it up with the Gimp. That's how I did the graphics for this site, for example. Blender is surprisingly easy to learn; this excellent tutorial will have you up and running in no time. I was creating elements usable for compositing in my 2D images in a matter of hours after I started learning it. (Of course, I have a lot of experience using other modelers, so it may take a complete 3D novice longer.)
Last of all, I will suggest the tried-and-true method for self-teaching yourself almost anything: duplicate! Go find a piece of art that you think is attractive. Study it closely. Pick it apart. Now try to create your own version of the same thing using whatever tools you are trying to learn. The process of taking apart someone else's image will teach you a lot about the elements that experienced creators use.
Edit postscript file yourself by hand. That way you use more of your real talent in the work.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Recently I've found myself in a bit of a bind with logging. My birdhouse contracts have been rather small, barely enough to pay myself let alone a logger. The logging needs aren't intensive, mostly redwoods or spruce depending on the project. Despite owning a few key tools (Skidder, Caterpillar, Dumptruck) my logging production output is rather poor. Are there any other birdhouse contractors who have learned to be self-sufficient? Are there any resources available to educate me on the finer points of logging trees professionally?
If you have to pay them 350USD, they are not royalty-free...
If you are good at the technical side, but are lacking in creativity.. borrow ideas from other things you see. Mimic the idea but change it slightly to be your own.
As for training to become "self sufficient". I'm both a developer and an interactive / graphic designer. Visual communication skills are not something you can simply pick-up. Those of us who are legitimate graphic and interactive designers have spent a LOT of time at universities learning how to solve problems using graphic arts, typography, engineering, psychological research, sociological research, etc etc.
;)
I don't mean to sound condescending (seriously), but most professional graphic or interactive designers have worked their ass off in order to get where they are. That typically means 60+ hour school weeks in a decent undergraduate program, and or even more grueling training in a graduate program.
Unfortunately, many in the development field think designers are talented "artists" who can make things pretty. We're not. We're problem solvers who should be helping users to interact with (your) software or multimedia. Moreover, this interaction should be both incredibly functional and emotionally immersive (ie: iPod).
(this is the part where Slashdot folks respond with "I taught myself and now I'm the head blah bitty blah designer for Company X"... don't listen to those people. Unless they're named David Carson, they probably suck. Worse yet -- they, and or their boss, probably don't realize that they suck.)
Now... what they hell am I getting at? Well, you could start learning visual communication skills in order to become "self sufficient." However, you're interface design work won't be very good unless you take the time to get some real training..... Or, you could hire a graphic or interactive designer.
Graphic and or interactive designers can be quite pricey. $35 to $200 per hour. Nevertheless, if you take advantage designers or grad students who are willing to do quality work for cheep (or free), you could be in good shape. Many designers will work for peanuts if you offer them some creative freedom and have a project they would love to include in their portfolio . Sometimes having a cool piece in your portfolio is worth much more then a paycheck.
If I were you, I would check with your local AIGA chapters ( http://www.aiga.com/ ) or graduate design programs. Look for a talented fresh designer who needs to build up his or her portfolio. Try to get them to do some pro bono work
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
You know, I hate to say it but I agree with grandparent poster eventhough he exressed his opinion in a flaimbait'ish way.
I definently see potential (technically) in some open source projects but they're often flaky, unresponsive and/or flat out unintuitive when you actually sit down to use them. This is something the artistic crowd generally don't put up with. Trust me, most of them use very carefully designed applications tailored for their needs (e.g. Photoshop). I'd love to say Gimp is the best tool out there (being a Linux user myself) but that's simply not true.. it might be some day though - I sure hope so.
(On a more one-on-one note: Intressant blog du har =P)
Don't pay for anything until you've spent an afternoon browsing through DaFont -- 4000 free fonts, many of which are worth having.
Also (and don't laugh!) get any old copy of CORELDRAW, even if the program is for another platform; it's ten years old and will be cheap as dirt. But, it has over a thousand perfectly usable typefaces in TrueType format.
I'm by no means a professional typographer, just someone with 8+ years of programming and, before that, 8+ years of graphic design, with a strong amateur interest in typography. So I appreciate real fonts, like you'd pay $400 apeice for from a professional font foundry, or the value of a whole spectrum of historically important type families. However, there is enough in these two font sources for almost anyone to get by on the cheap, as I presently do.
Taking some time (a few hours) to pick a nice sans-serif font (think Arial) for headlines and a complementary serif (think Times) for body text, can very quickly improve any project. By complementary I mean having similar letterforms. Look at the shape of the 'a', 'Q', and 'J' and especially the top of the 't', as well as the overall 'colour' (the density of the text) on the page.
One combination from the COREL CD that I'm doing a lot of work with at the moment is Context Condensed for headlines, together with Atlantix for body type. But experiemnt for yourself.
Mauve. Make everything Mauve.
http://www.yahirvite.com
You know that Susan Kare, one of my favourite artists, did a lot of her most beautiful work using only MacPaint or Windows Paintbrush?
I used to be an ascii artist, I mainly used EDIT.COM and pico.
You can still find my stuff on the web when you search for "mrkite" and "ascii", but everything I did was intented to be viewed in white text on black.
I'm a developer myself, and often in need of icons. I find microangelo studio (http://www.microangelo.us/) very easy to use. It's also not very expensive (somewhere around 40 bucks for a license) and there's a free trial available.
And I'm 54, no formal education beyond high school, and got the "hang" of it fairly quickly a couple of years ago, thanks to the great online tutorials and Grokking the Gimp.
I must admit I've never even seen Photoshop, it's much too expensive for me to even consider. Free is much more within my budget. My Mac isn't even really mine, just sort of on an extended loan.
if you can't buy him his tools. You know how you go to work, and your boss has everthing you need to do your job? Or at least those tools that are so expensive you shouldn't be expected to buy them yourselves. i.e. when I was an apprentice Electrician, I wasn't expected to carry a $500 dollar voltmeter....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
'AUTOMATED DESIGN PRODUCTS'?! I have the meaning that we speak here about the art. Did you succeed getting any original artwork using thoose kind of tools?!
An I want to play football like Pele.
I am sure I can learn.
The problem is that kicking a ball does not a Pele make.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I know how you feel....my only experience with Photoshop has been on the nice G4s at school.
You have no idea how much I missed the Gimp.
If you say you can barely get by with your assignments and don't need to produce high quality artwork, why have you bought expensive licenses for Photoshop ($500-600), LightWave ($1600) and Maya ($2000)???
You should have just picked up some free or cheap products instead since your not going to use the expensive features anyway, that way you could get along easily and perhaps invest in something you'll actually use.
I'm assuming you're not making money by using cracked versions of said software, naturally.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
And you are not making billions of your paintings becaue a marketing conspiracy.
But we are all sure you are as good as van Gogh or Picasso.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Interestingly, naturally talented prodigies are not all that uncommon.
But most of these naturally talented types I've met go absolutely nowhere unless they are also passionately driven, --and most of them are not. I think it might be because they have no wall to push against when they are young; they come out of the womb with great skill, and so there is no pain associated with not being able to create beauty (or whatever) where they think it ought to be.
With no drive, they miss out on developing all the unexpected incidental little skill caches which are not directly linked to raw talent but which are quite necessary anyway; things like printing and production technology, visual problem solving and certain types of discipline required to finish a project. The marketplace for graphic artists requires one to spend a lot of effort if one wants to succeed there, and so you really have to want to be there in order to make a go of it. Natural ability by itself is worth far less than somebody who is willing to put in the time and who genuinely wants to make a difference. --Of course, if you have the whole package including natural talent, then you can sky-rocket to the top of the field, (Superman painter, Alex Ross and Lucasfilm's current lead Star Wars visual designer, Doug Chiang come to mind), but passionm, work-ethic and smarts can make anybody a player, and a reasonably well-compensated one at that.
It sounds to me like you have far more of what it takes than most of the talented guys I've met. That's something to be proud of.
-FL
"art is subject to Copyright laws."
Absolutely and the parent's implication that it is ok to heist it is entirely wrong.
"does belong to someone unless explicitly stated to be public domain"
It's this part of your statement that is wrong and this line of thinking must be corrected wherever seen. It's particularly important to correct (even anally so) someone who creates copyrighted works and has this wrong view. When any man creates a work subject to copyright, that work is owned by mankind, not by the man who made it (although the man owns the physical object, that isn't what is subject to copyright)!
Copyright is the OWNER ie mankind (or the nation on it's behalf) granting you temporary and limited controls by contract for a limited term. It's a way of saying thankyou. You own the copyright, not the material which is copyrighted.
Your pride you may be entitled to, but it becomes arrogance to think to own the miracle of man's imagination, even the piece of it you bear through life. Human history shows in thousands upon thousands of documented instances that NO idea is unique. You can think something first, but even if you never tell a soul there will plenty of others who form the same thought.
...go to someplace like Deviantart.com and seek out artists often willing to do it for you, and in may cases for free?
Any tips? --I already have my own nun-chucks and expensive cross trainers.
-FL
> My Mac isn't even really mine, just sort of on an extended loan.
;-)
That's my excuse for not paying for PS
I'm not exactly an experienced user, but I have always found it easier to use than Photoshop, which to me is a bitch to work with, but still, I like it better than PSP.
Well, for me Photoshop is a breeze the use, the interface is VERY intuitive for me, and The Gimp is an absolute pain, I can't figure out how to do anything.
Different people learn different toolsets with varying amounts of ease.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Having studied and practiced art professionally for 8 years I can say that, just like programming, the essence of making art boils down to about 10 to 20 rules. Yet grasping these rules to the full extend and improving your skills to actually apply these rules usefully is long hard work. A basic tip I'd give is to copy the artists you consider best. The rest follows the usual pure and simple rule:
There is no secret. Work your ass off.
And, btw, no amount of powertools will bend that rule. Just as is it is with programming.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"Drawing on the right side of the brain" by Betty Edwards - get the previous edition, not the latest edition; much better - is a good book for people who dont have confidence in their ability to draw but want to and not be discouraged. The delight is it works.
I like the Index series books,/ qid=1100597533/sr=2-3/ref=pd_ka_b_2_3/002-0837367- 4741662
e.g. Color Index, Design Index or Idea Index:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1581800460
They are cheap and help you get up and running...
euXle
Don't ever say it is ugly what you are doing but keep going until you are satisfied. That means a lot of versions.
Just keep going until you find something that makes you really happy and you are proud of. Then show that to a couple of people to get their opinions. If nobody likes it than try again
to find another version or drop it completely and start a new one. If I told you I have paintings that have taken years to finish, then you get the idea. Art is not a product, art is a passion like programming which I do as well. With programming though you never see the artwork if it is well done, no bugs and good functionality. To you notepad and scanner or your ecran and file full of your searching.
This is a test!
Why does a programmer needs to waste time doing something badly when he can hire somebody else to do it properly?
The most simplistic cost/benefit analysis (for a professional, if you are a hobbyst you can waste your time in any manner you wish) dictates that your money is best invested hiring a pro.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
but I bet many slashdotters are self-sufficient.
You could go the Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst route... and pay someone vast quantities of money for programmer art :-)
Okay, you want to make art: icons, and such. First, let me point out that I have found no graphics program to be as good or as quick as Deskpaint for the old,old macintoshes, by ZedCor. I think there also used to be a PC version of that program.
... just in case. Don't throw those files away, later, either, or the standardization notes. Archive 'em. You'll perhaps want them later.
.bmp file, and let your own homebuilt program average sets of 4 colors. At this point, details that looked "not so good" will look better, even great.
However, you probably can't get a copy of that program any more. So the next best bet is to get a copy of FuturePaint (freeware--do a web search) for Macs. But if you can't do that, get something that is reasonably quick, that can import and export different file types, that can scale graphics and change the number of colors gracefully, and that has some basic drawing tools.
(Sorry, Linux folks, GIMP just doesn't cut it. Nor do the K apps, which are slow and crash too much.)
Also, save your work using different file names at every step of the way. It isn't worth the time if you mess something up. Indeed, when I'm doing outlining, I like to save my work several times during that process
Okay... now, step by step:
(1) find the dot size (like, 150 dots by 150 dots) of your desired icon. Quadruple that (600 x 600). Note that you'll have to do this whole process 4 times or so, if you have 4 different resolutions for a single icon. Don't skimp, or some of these will look lousy.
(2) Scan in a picture (a good hand drawing, or something from a magazine) of what you want. If what you want is not available, you can actually arrange picture pieces in a collage, and scan that in. I've done this to avoid copyright problems -- I can be sure that my work doesn't even look like the originals I used, because I cut a leg and turned it, cut an arm and turned that... you get the idea. Anyhow, scan it in so that it appropriately fills your quadruple-size area (600x600, above).
(3) Lighten the whole picture so that it uses only the 5/16 lightest colors. Now this will be your background.
(4) Select 2-3 standardized line sizes: for example, 5 pixels wide for outlines, 2 pixels wide for internal detail lines. Don't forget to multiply by 4, because we're working at 4 times the resolution (20, and 8).
(5) Now, using the line tool on black, draw all those lines with your sketch tool. Outline what you see, and make detail appropriately.
(6). Now print out what you have, then convert all light grays to white. Do that either by changing the color curves, or by using flood fill judiciously (which I prefer).
(6) Now, pick your colors. Again, standardize. (when I say standardize, I mean write the standards down on paper, and stick to them). Using lines of the selected colors, isolate patches and then flood fill them.
(7) You should now have an icon that is 4 times the size/resolution of what you want. Select it, and shrink it down to a quarter size. Your program should be able to handle merging (averaging) colors. If it can't, then save as a 256 color
(8) If appropriate, convert to 256 colors, 16 grays, or whatever.
(8) Retouch as necessary (probably won't be necessary).
Just as a note, I have found that I like my flood fill colors to always be in the lightest 16th of the palatte, whereas I like my lines to always be black. This makes the icon easy to see and identify.
Now... all that said... you seem to be having trouble making ends meet. Let me suggest a business website for you:
http://www.tinaja.com/
The guy also has an $8 book which is invaluable:
___The incredible secret money machine II____
To the extent which I was able to follow his advice, it created a good business for me (~17000-$30000 a year).
That said, the level of justice in our country is crashing
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Maya personal lerning edition is free (as in beer). It looses the plugin capabilities that made Maya an industry standard, and watermarks images, but in terms of seeing if you can pump out useful work with it, that's not an issue (same interface, and most of the same capabilities as full grown Maya).
I seriously expect that the submitter is talking about Maya PLE, rather than any of the proper versions of Maya in the byline, for more or less the same reasons as the parent - it's too much money otherwise.
Photoshop is prehaps not too surprising, given that it is often (not completely corretly) considerd _the_ 2D raster packege [0].
Lightwave is still somewhat anomolus, however.
[0] Photo's and photorealistic style images it's great for. Icon design, other, simpler packages might be better.
1. AVOID THE HIGH-LEARNING CURVE TOOSLS, SUCH AS:
A. Photoshop
B. Dreamweaver
C. Flash
D. ALL THE 3D Products; Lightwave, Maya, 3dFX
i'm a programmer/developer, and i've been using some of the above for years in high end web design, and find that if i don't use them for a few months, i have to relearn big chunks of the program, sometimes ending up with a 3:1 ratio between learning and designing.
As an irregular user of products A, B and C above I have to say _bollocks_. Sure, these products take a little time to learn. For example, I spent two weeks learning to find my way around photoshop, getting good workflows for using its options to best effect, etc. But now, even if I don't use it for 6 months, I can sit down in front of it and just work on what I need. It's a tool, and if you understand what it does and how it does it, it's a pretty simple one, too.
PaintShopPro is OK, but many of the techniques you can use to achieve good results in Photoshop just don't work there (or at least didn't last time I used it, which was admittedly several version ago), meaning you end up wasting your time working around the program's limitations. And don't even consider Photoshop Elements for design work. If this is the program I think it is, it is intended for end-user digital photo manipulation (rotate, crop, add borders, colour adjustment, red-eye removal) and is horribly limited in terms of what you can actually achieve with it.
hi,
you might want to have a look at FreeJ http://freej.dyne.org/ which is free software i developed myself and adopted in dance/theatre performances.
also take a visit to http://www.piksel.no/ which is a symposium held in Norway every year, gathering many free software developers engaged in the video art field.
ciao
I must admit I've never even seen Photoshop, it's much too expensive for me to even consider.
Second hand copies of out-of-date versions are much easier to get hold of. I find Photoshop 5 does pretty much everything I need. You can find copies on eBay for next to nothing.
Ok, I suppose my tone was a tad to over the top =/
I don't know law but what you're saying does make sense so I'll take your word for it. The reason it upsets me, however, is that I've seen great pieces of digital art that has been blantantly ripped off by online "groups" and then passed off as something they made themselves. I'm not the only one annoyed by this behaviour - In fact, it's so commonplace that most artist don't even have the energy to bitch about it anymore.
Your pride you may be entitled to, but it becomes arrogance to think to own the miracle of man's imagination, even the piece of it you bear through life.
Now you're being unfair, I never said nor did I imply that my work is gods gift to mankind or even that I'm a good artist for that matter. It's when people misappropriate the work unfairly without due credit, regardless if it beautiful or ugly (subjective) - if I'm proud of it of cource I'll get pissed if someone doesn't even bother to ask for permission. I'm not talking about clipart or tiny buttonimages from a webpage, these tend to be extremely generic. No, I'm thinkng more along the lines of wallpapers or such which may have taken many, many hours to make. The artwork I do does in fact usually end up being given away, mostly it's custom stuff for friends etc. I even tend to give them the Copyright if it portrays a unique quality of theirs!
NO idea is unique
How about the theory of relativity? All individuals posess some unique quality or in some cases even ideas, that's the beauty of it. Aaaw, forget it.
Is that legal? I know Microsoft software can't be resold.
Interesting point of view, going back at least as far as Plato. I often have this discussion with my spouse: are ideas created or are ideas discovered? To me it seems the argument can be approached using an OO metaphor: while classes of ideas are discovered, their instances are created via the factory of human imagination. :)
All this crap people are saying about having talent is rubbish when it comes to graphic arts. In graphic arts talent only gets in the way! If you can understand the golden ratio your set.
#1 Steal.
#2 keep your graphics simple. If your clients don't like it, add a drop shadow or whatever is big.
#3 learn how to look at your art. One of the biggest threats to graphic design is "store blindness" -- you look at it so much you don't see it anymore. The easiest way to really look at a design is to close your eyes, relax and blink your eyes open really quick. What you see in that flash is what will first catch a viewers eyes.
#4 Keep it simple: Reduce your palatte look at a book on color theory to learn the classic color compositions. Don't use more than two fonts -- a san serf for headlines and a serif for text works easy. Classic colors and simple fonts go a long way.
#5 Read the autobiography of Andy Warhol -- one of the great books on design
#6 Steal mercilessly. Steal only good stuff. Just don't rip off artists >> pay em if you contract them!
Thus speaks someone who I suspect has not created anything of aesthetic value in his life.
Anybody who has understands that we let you access/use our output on our terms or not at all. The government may think they write the rules, but if the creators don't release their product, the legislation remains just so much hot air.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
Look, he must be good at what he does since his name is easy to find, but good is not great.
I checked the IMDB and there was nothing tremendously impressive.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you're a programmer and you're successfully getting contracts, there's little reason you ought to be doing your own design - if you have extra time and not enough work you ought to spend that time working on how to get more contracts.
Renown graphic designers are expensive. There are lots of _great_ graphic designers that aren't expensive, especially if they're young. If you can't find one, email me - I have one that I retain who's quite excellent.
Put slashdot in the subject - I get a lot of mail there. Email again if you don't get a response.
Also, my inhouse stuff doesn't have his work because it hasn't been worth having him redo it.
Ben
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Pray your IT maters do not find your posting.
Your life will be misery and you will be constrained to make a living drawing portraits in a tourist spot in your town.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Not sure how old you are, and I know there are some biochemistry reasons why you may not learn as quickly, but I never liked this double standard. You don't want to be age-discriminated and then you claim "age" makes it difficult for me to learn. As someone getting closer to the supposed age-of-dislearning (29) I have done my very best to stay sharp and learn every day.
Again, I know there are physical reasons why our learning process slows but lets not mistake that for complacency. Sorry if this sounds like flamebait as that was not my intent.
-----
Web Hosting @ HostForADollar.com
ZBrush 2 is something you definitely need to check out - it's an odd program, hard to pigeonhole, it's 2.5 painting, with 3D modelling - i think it's www.pixologic.com. I've been messing with the demo (1.5) for a little bit and it's just wild - it frees you from worrying about technical stuff and you can just sort of sculpt your 3d stuff - and it does UVW mapping for you...hopefully I can dig up the $500 or so it cost though! I've also heard great things about MODO and Silo, but haven't checked them out (I'm not sure but i think MODO is mac only). My own app is Cinema 4D 8.5 with Bodypaint 3D and Mesh Surgery, great app - but ZBrush is almost something entirely new in my experience.
When I was putting together my website (www.PT171.org), I realized that my layout skills/art ability sucks. So, I asked several graphic-arts people to contract on doing a proper look and feel for the site. I was very specific in my needs - proper presentation guidance and some specific work on logos. I got two types of replies: Proposals for an all-encompassing graphic laden extravaganza, which would change the mostly-text-site into a CNN-like download pig. Or, rediculously high prices for very direct work (like converting a small gif into a vector image), for hundreds of bucks. I expect to pay decent bucks, but, the replies were so out of whack that I thought my requests for work were poorly written. After discussing it with a neighbor (who is a G.A.), he understood clearly what I wanted and agreed the replies were just out of line. So, the summary point is: Hey, G.A. people, there's paying work out there if you get your head-out-of-your-ass.
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
It's not just about masking artistic deficiencies. Sometimes the clean minimalistic look is actually the best.
The dot-com era was filled with clueless PHBs who thought that the user wants an artistic experience. Every single site had to have some horrible colour scheme (e.g., cyan on bright blue, or orange on light orange are actual colour schemes I was asked to implement.) It had to have gradients, 1 MB of animations per page, impossible to read funky fonts, and graphics _everywhere_.
Turns out that most users _don't_ want an experience. They want a simple an intuitive program that just works, or an easy to use and navigate site.
I.e., my advice to anyone would be:
1. Usability and clean layout before funky graphics. Remember that you're making a professional program, not a work of art. The purpose of that interface is functionality, _not_ expressing yourself or evoking feelings.
This is the main reason why graphics artists are bad web site designers, unless you get them to also learn proper web design. GUI design is a completely different skill from graphics design, and for that matter from programming. (Witness the many excellently programmed OSS programs, that nevertheless have an utter crap UI.)
2. Keep it simple. For a back button, a simple left-pointing arrow will suffice. For file operations, a 3.5" floppy icon works wonders.
Basically, if all you need is an icon, do _not_ try to paint the whole Book of The Dead, with the Pharaoh being led into the underworld and judged. You're making an icon, not a fresco.
3. Keep the learning curve low. If the users have already been educated that symbol X means operation Y, use that. E.g., everyone was already broken in that a left pointing arrow means "back", so use it for that and only for that. Don't try to teach them new tricks just for your program.
This may seem like a rehash of 2, but really has more to do with 1. It's all about usability. Steep learning curves are bad. Reusing the user's existing skills is good.
4. Keep it simple.
4.a. You have precious few pixels in an icon or button, so complex images tend to end up with details that are 1-2 pixels tall or wide. The images must be easy to recognize without squinting to see the details. To that end, for example, a stilized telephone symbol will actually work better than a 3D-rendered anti-aliased phone that's been shrunk to 32x32 pixels.
4.b. Remember that the role of icons, again, are to allow the user to quickly locate common actions on a toolbar. Again, functionality before artistic expression. They are _not_ there to evoke feelings or express yourself.
So simple and clear is good in that aspect too. An arrow or a magnifying glass are things that aren't just easy to draw, they're also very easy to recognize and visually locate.
Etc.
So basically what I'd argue is that often keeping it simple, abstract and clean is actually the _right_ way, and making it overly artistic is the _wrong_ way. Not being an artist or creative can actually be an advantage.
Yes, you can't take a programmer and expect him to be able to paint the sixtine chapel. But here's the fun part: you want an UI, _not_ the sixtine chapel. Someone who tries to make a sixtine chapel out of the UI is actually the _wrong_ person for the job.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Check out Scott Kelby's "Photoshop Down and Dirty Tricks". The book walks you step by step through the process of creating some killer effects. I've taught myself through books like these.
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
Either you have an artistic touch and an eye for it or you don't. If you don't you may never have the knack for it(even with the art class colleges make you take in your first year of engineering). Coding and art are on different sides of the brain.
Photoshop =~ $5.
Lightwave =~ $5.
Maya =~ $5.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
Sure, and as someone who has already gone way past that to the supposed age of encroaching senility (40 next March), I try to stay sharp as well. (e.g. I just picked up a second college degree.) In fact, I'm still sharp enough to recognise that learning new things takes me more effort than it did 25 years ago. (The good news is that I don't have to learn all the old things that 15-year-olds remain clueless about.) This isn't a double standard any more than acknowledging that I don't have as much hair as I did then, and I can't do all the same gymnastics in bed. :) I'm just good in different ways.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Personal skill at art is something that is teachable and can be learned. Objects look the way they do because of where they are in relation to the viewer and what their dimensions are. Similarly light has rules which you can learn if you are to duplicate the illusion of light in a 2d representation like a drawing. Textures also have rules and so on. It's all about drawing what you see and not what you think is there. Sure there are people who have this ability from early on but the rest of us can learn very quickly.
Math is also teachable, but that doesn't mean that everyone has a mathematician inside them.
Your viewpoint seems to be heavily influenced by Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which presumes as a basic tenet that drawing is teachable. Perhaps your mistake is then making the leap that "skill at art" is teachable. While the book offers encouragement to those who (think they) can't draw, it does not address the not-so-encouraging point that spatial intelligence can't really be taught (but maybe simulated). In the visual arts, observation requires more than just the sense of sight, and even the vital criteria of awareness, sensitivity, presence of mind, and technical ability don't inherently translate to the ability to transcode your sensory input into something personal, meaningful, powerful, and coherent; the ability to do so is "skill at art".
A great deal more can said about this, but in essence I must respectfully disagree with your hypothesis.
As for the question of what non-artists need to build consumable graphic art, lots of people have offered useful nuggets of advice, but I would add: learn some basic color theory, and appreciate the value of understatement.
I hate functional websites covered with art. (Websites designed to display or market art, movies, video games, etc are another matter.) IMO, the best functional web applications use simple color schemes to look professional. They use background colors (colored text rarely looks good) to visually distinguish functional groups on screen. Pastels seem to work best. The general principles are similar to painting the walls in your office.
Take advantage of Script-Fu and some of the automatable things in GIMP, the Windows version, too if you need.
ImageMagick's conversion utilities come in handy - don't underestimate the power of mogrify. There are plenty of apps to convert a bitmap into vector art that gives you another level of flexibility.Inkscape will give you lightning quick results when making primitive objects. A couple shapes, come gradients for definition, add a quick shadow, et voila.. Sometimes vector art is the right tool for the job, for sure.
Find a few key techniques that work for you, and develop a working style. Lastly, share what you can, so peole aren't dependant on ClipArt any more than they have to be. Also, I will enjoy the day when a Layer Styles palette as in Photoshop is worked into GIMP.. That will make it a fully usable tool for me..
We know students get discounts to get hooked.
Thanks for the eye opener, nobody would have guessed it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Spare us the ideological doublespeak. Under U.S. law and international treaty, anything that is not explicitly released to the public domain is legally controlled by its creator. That's the point being made. One could just as easily argue that when copyright expires, actual ownership changes hands from the creator to the public (as it should).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I'm a graphic design professional. I keep hearing GIMP advocates telling me it's pretty good these days. And about once a year I download the latest version and try it. I *want* GIMP to be good. But I always go back to Photoshop...
Why? Simply because the interface is too different, and I don't have TIME to learn a completely different interface.
Perhaps the GIMP guys should take note of this. Their program could be the most powerful bitmap manipulation tool on earth, but Photoshop users won't switch to it in any significant numbers until you can make it behave a little more like Photoshop.
Okay, so the GIMP developers have an irrational hatred for MDI, for example. But would it really, really hurt them to put it in as an option? Even that one change would win them many converts, as it's the most frequently bitched-about aspect of their program's design. I simply do not understand the attitude that makes these people say "you don't want to work that way, our way is better, you should want to work our way". That sort of arrogance is totally offputting, not to mention that it demonstrates a complete and utter lack of understanding about the economic constraints that require me to stick with a tool that I can use fluently instead of wasting a week trying to adjust to a whole other document management paradigm.
And whatever you do... if you're in web design, never use Paint Shop Pro or Fireworks. Paint Shop Pro will never give you the power to create the graphics you need, and Fireworks renders things so completely wrong that it's jarring and detracts from your site.
-=-=-=-=-=
I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
Might want to try these guys where you can buy a set of icons for around 35 bucks or so. You could have bought the whole mac daddy set that they sell for less than the price of one of the pieces of software you mentioned you are using.
posting to clear +1 informative on parent (oops)
There's plenty of art out there thats in the public domain by now. Just visit your local library with your laptop and a hand scanner.
Errrr.... really? GIMP, PSP and Photo Shop can all generate good to great images in the hands of a user who knows how to use the tools at his/her finger tips. And as for HTML, the only real tool to use is
If you're thinking about using Lightwave or Maya for a web site, you're probably overthinking things a bit.
Clean and simple is the rule. Think apple.com, news.com, the new site at arstechnica.com, sun.com (GREAT use of color...not everyone can design around the color purple). There are hundreds more.
My recipe for websites is easy: use gotlogos.com for the main site logo. It costs $25, they're fast, and in most cases more than sufficient for what you need. After you have the logo (or before if you know ahead of time), work up a color palette. Not too hard to do, and it is free.
Then grab some icons...you can buy icon packs for a lot less than the cost of Photoshop or similar. Or use free or GPL icons (beware of licensing issues).
Interface design for the web and most applications dictate that you don't use "unusual" fonts, especially since people can easily override your specs with their browser settings, making all your font work futile. About the only place you need a font might be on the logo, and gotlogos.com will handle that for you.
So you've got a logo, a color palette, some spiffy icons, and you've spent about $200 or less. Anything more, you'd be better off getting a designer/artist.
Most clip art (if not all) looks like ass...stay away from it.
Finally, if you need photos, take your own or hit up http://www.sxc.hu/.
As you say bollocks. Photoshop Elements has many of the features found in Photoshop and would be very useable for graphics work. They have added even more in version 3 which was just released and its far from just an "end-user photo manipulation" application. Here is a review.
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
I think getting a basic feel for colors and their significance as well as thought that goes into graphic design would help to create decent amateur art. Another quick and fun way is to buy a digital camera and go crazy with the photography! Your knowledge of perspective, beautiful vs. ugly colors, and a lot of stuff will increase dramatically. I had the Canon A70 and then A75 - both quite reputable 3 MP cameras that had quite a few features to play around with.
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
This is absolute crap. I can't speak to Paint Shop Pro but I can speak to Fireworks and you're full of crap. Fireworks is designed for creating web graphics and it excels in that respect.
My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
Who's James Lipton?
Request your free CD of my piano music.
All too many people think that if you have the right "digital tools" amazing Pixar quality art will pop-out.
I think another problem a lot of programmers suffer is that they think because they know how to use all the little features of photoshop and can make fancy looking lightning bolts and gradient backgrounds, they're graphic artists. What they really end up with is an image that contains all sorts of neat elements, but all piled together to make one big photoshop effects ad that overall screams amateur.
Speak before you think
That's what Microsoft would like you to think. While their lawyers may be able to bully the likes of Ebay into dropping such sales, when did you hear of Microsoft winning a court case for such a sale? I thought not.
What the parent was referring to however, was where older software is remaindered when later versions appear.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
I know folks who do abuse Gimp's or Photoshop's filters and effects, that's another good point. But using a rastor program itself is not the problem and in a lot of cases is a perfectly good solution.
Use your graphics programs as tools, not factories. Art doesn't come out of a machine, it comes out of you.
Funny thing about Elements; it has some things that PhotoShop doesn't. The one item, in particular, that I'm thinking of is automagic photo-stitching (i.e., for merging two or more photos into one panoramic view). A couple of friends of mine work in a tissue-culture lab, and one of the things they have to do frequently is stitch together a bunch of images of a histology section into one image for analysis. The lab bought a copy of Elements (in addition to the copies of the full-blown version they already owned) solely to stitch these images together. You load a stack of images and wham, Elements figures out which piece goes where based on the edges of each image. It works great on a 3x3 grid of images (and only a little less great on a 4x4 grid).
MDI is a problem because X11 doesn't have such support. You might see MDI in something like KDE, etc. but it is emulated. In other words, the window manager has no control over it. KDE gets away with it because it is integrated with Qt and what not, GIMP and GTK+ predate KDE and GNOME by a *long* shot. Think twm and fvwm window managers. This is the period of time that GIMP was created. Emulated MDI is even worse than true, Windows-style, MDI. Let's not forget what MDI was designed (badly) to do: remove clutter. Guess what? Grab WindowMaker, create a new workspace and place GIMP in it. Tenfold better than any MDI system. A single keypress can hide all the GIMP windows by moving to a different workspace.
You do realize that asking for the MDI "option" basically entails redesigning the *entire* program, don't you?
And you're demanding that people who are working on GIMP in their *own* time learn about economic constraints and to "fix" their "broken" program? Get back to me when you understand what arrogance is, buddy.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
I work for Elance, but feel compelled to mention it here because it really is a great service to solve specific needs such as this one. One way to get professional artwork at affordable prices is to use ElanceOnline. All you have to do is describe your project, post it on the site, and you will quickly recieve price bids. It's free to post -- but we do ask for a credit card number to help filter out those that aren't serious. Once you receive your proposals you pick the proposal that resonates with you most. You can look at designers' feedback from people that have use the provider before or check out their previous work in their portfolios to help you choose. Designers come from all over the world and you will get a wide range of prices. You may be surprised at the caliber of work you can get in your price range.
OK, looking at that review, what I saw must have been a cut-down version of the same software. It had the same basic user interface, but lacked many of the options. Specifically, it did not have a "layers" palette or menu, which obviously means that 90% of the features of photoshop that are useful for graphic design, as opposed to photo editing, just weren't there.
Is that legal? I know Microsoft software can't be resold.
It's called the doctrine of first sale. It is part of UK & US common law, I believe. Essentially, it means that EULA restrictions that try to prevent resale of the software are legally unenforceable.
Photoshop Elements is priced around the ~$100 mark and some OEMs include it with digital cameras so you might be able to pick it up fairly cheaply.
The price arguement against Photoshop is not as strong as it was before Photoshop Elements came along
"Now you're being unfair, I never said nor did I imply that my work is gods gift to mankind or even that I'm a good artist for that matter. It's when people misappropriate the work unfairly without due credit, regardless if it beautiful or ugly (subjective) - if I'm proud of it of cource I'll get pissed if someone doesn't even bother to ask for permission. I'm not talking about clipart or tiny buttonimages from a webpage, these tend to be extremely generic. No, I'm thinkng more along the lines of wallpapers or such which may have taken many, many hours to make. The artwork I do does in fact usually end up being given away, mostly it's custom stuff for friends etc. I even tend to give them the Copyright if it portrays a unique quality of theirs!"
Now it's here that MY tone was too extreme. All I was really trying to impress is that copyright is not ownership and that the reason for that is that one cannot own a thought. An artist is certainly entitled to be proud of his work!!!
"How about the theory of relativity?"
Not unique at all, hell I myself thought of relativity before ever reading anything by Einstein. Although I can't say I offered the proofs Einstein did. I seriously doubt I'm the only one who independently reached the same conclusions.
"Thus speaks someone who I suspect has not created anything of aesthetic value in his life."
You'd be wrong on that count.
"Anybody who has understands that we let you access/use our output on our terms or not at all. The government may think they write the rules, but if the creators don't release their product, the legislation remains just so much hot air."
You'd be wrong on that one too. Before copyright existed there were no shortage of artists, playwrights, authors, etc releasing their works. Without copyright you realize that all works are part of public domain by default right? EVERYWHERE, under ANY legislature.
My post wasn't opinion, it was fact.
"One could just as easily argue that when copyright expires, actual ownership changes hands from the creator to the public (as it should)."
Without copyright the default is the public domain. While control changes hands, ownership cannot. You cannot OWN an idea, only control access to it and expression of it.
"Without copyright" is nonsense; it exists. The law clearly states that copyright coverage is the default, and that something only goes into the public domain after something happens (e.g. time passing, or the creator declaring it).
Ownership can most certainly change hands. That principle is the bedrock of the entire mercantile system (and accepted in all but the smallest scale forms of communism).
Ideas are not covered in any way by copyright, so you're right that they aren't owned... but the statement has no point.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Seriously. Take a beginner art class. You'll learn much more from having someone (usually the whole class) critique your work than you will from a book or a website. It doesn't have to cost a lot: many communities have adult education art classes, or you can take a non-credit class at a local art school. I did a Printmaking semester (evening classes) at a nearby college for $275 and had a great time. And I am as talentless as they come ;-)
I suggest basic classes as the more professionally oriented ones like graphic or Web art design tend to be expensive and geared towards people with plenty of experience.
Can you maybe provide some pointers on where we could aquire our own female artists?
but be prepared to spend the 3yrs or so to be proficeint in the theory and practice. Then more time on top of that undertaking large projects. For this reason I dont see much programmer/artist overlap
Sure, for immediate results, it's best to hire someone who already has experience under his/her belt
Artists are sometimes born but most of the time are trained. Art and design require application of theory and skills that cannot just be picked up by the layman. It takes *time* to develop them. If you invest the time, sure. How many programmers are going to invest the 3yrs+ ? Then continuosly invest time to do this?
I think the hardest aspect is the medium. You can come up with a design using analog tools (pen, pencil and paper). People have lots of experience with tactile media such as paper, cardboard. But computers are a funny media to work with. With art/design the biggest hurdle is the input, manipulation of the medium. Draw on paper and you control your pencil directly with your hand. Use a computer you have to use a stupid mouse. This is why you see *get a input FOO ... get a output BAR*. This is probably one of the only areas the programmer may have some understanding of. The rest (design process, colour, etc) is just going to be someone scraping the surface and wondering just how those *artists* do it!
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
If you want to stick with Photoshop, that's absolutely fine; it's not like you're hurting the GIMP or the world of graphic design as a whole by doing so.
I find your claim of victimhood arrogant and unconvincing. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of the people who have contributed to the GIMP aren't doing so to compete with Photoshop or to gain users, they're doing it to fulfill a desire for a quality free image manipulation program. If you don't like the resulting software or the way certain things about it work, whatever; apparently other people do. For example, as pointed out above by somebody else, inclusion of MDI would probably require significant changes to GTK and is a profoundly inelegant solution to a problem that should be handled by your window manager. It's just not worth the trouble.
OTOH, if you can point out things that are technically wrong, naive, shortsighted or inefficient (rather than just different from the way you'd like them to be), please share your thoughts so that they can be fixed. Nobody in their right mind would reject things that are objective improvements.
Totally different. Slashdot has an average age of over 15 ;)
You are correct. The average slashdot poster is seventeen years old. Of course they lie and say that they are older, they say that they are in college or that they already graduated college and are now a sysadmin or a programmer. Many of them also lie and say that they are married or have a girlfriend! Well don't be fooled by their lies, the average slashdotter is a seventeen year old spotty faced virgin who works at Frys electronics and lives with his parents.
"Thanks for confirming that you really have no understanding of the topic"
Your post proves the same of yourself.
"just half-baked ideosyncratic notions of maybe how it might work if the world worked the way you want it to."
Again the same.
"Ownership can most certainly change hands. That principle is the bedrock of the entire mercantile system (and accepted in all but the smallest scale forms of communism)."
True enough, it has nothing to do with anything I said, but true enough. But since nobody owns something which is copyrighted (or everybody owns it, however you prefer to look at it) then only the copyright and not the ownership can change hands. Copyright is a far cry from ownership!! Someone who holds a copyright is most definately limited in what they can do, what they can do is explicitly spelled out, and unless they are specifically granted an authority by copyright the default is that authority belongs to the public.
"Ideas are not covered in any way by copyright, so you're right that they aren't owned... but the statement has no point."
All things eligable for copyright are intangibles and therefore ideas. If you create a sculpture the physical object itself is not copyrighted, the intagible idea of the form and colors are copyrighted. If I can look at something, and then walk away and close my eyes, that thing in my mind is what is subject to copyright. If it can be contained within my mind, it's an idea.
So does the major non-free programs - I don't feel a bit comfortable with Photoshop. (I use Gimp's Script-Fu, and Sodipodi's XML-editor, and other weird geek features.)
It's partly a matter of which tool you're used to, and I'm used to the Gimp and Sodipodi (aggravated with the Inkscape fork, and hope one of them can catch up with the other soon - it's annoying that they both have disadvantages over each other. Inkscape has the better UI).
One-on-one reply: Thanks! (Unless you're sarcastic, but you weren't, right?) The design might be simple, but it's all done with free tools and without putting too much time into it.
Right. I use Emacs artist-mode for ascii art, myself (and I love it!), but it's not only about the tools, it's about the effort and the vision.
If that's too much typing for you,(without any spaces put there by Slashdot) yields: http://openclipart.org/
Inspiration Talent Seriously, learning technique is one thing, but learning to be artistic, I'm not so sure it can be taught/learnt. I'd agree programming has elements of creativity, but it's not the same as being artistic. I suspect practice is what will draw latent talent out.
Oh joy, an opinionated troll.
You do realise that "copyright", "right", "ownership", "public domain" are artificial constructs, right? They are only "real" by common consent. Outside of our minds (and hence our behaviour) they do not exist. Quite a few folks in this thread think you are mistaken in your assumptions about that common consent. You seem to think they are "wrong" in "fact".
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
homage is when you steal from someone who is dead,
influence is when you steal from someone who is alive,
plagiarism is when you steal from ME!
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
I know, the free tools do need improvement (but they are constantly improving).
;) (My own website is a bit heavy on the graphics and I have thought about slimming it down for a long time.)
Indeed, I especially enjoyed the gtk2 facelift in Gimp 2.x. I hope it gets to the point where it becomes my tool of choice, but that'll probably take a long time. I have used it - of cource - but never for "advanced" stuff so i guess you could say I've never really given it the chance it deserves. Mostly I think it is that I just can't get passed the GUI, somewhere along the line I got hooked to MDI based graphic apps (Photoshop specifically). Hey you said it yourself - you liked Inkscape's GUI over Sodipodi right? Didn't even know about Sodipodi until now (thanks for the tip btw). I did know about Inkscape though but I had no idea it was a fork.
Don't get me wrong, I do everything in Linux.. except for Graphics and DVD authoring. *sigh* It's sucks to be dependant on proprietary software (and especially when it runs on wintendo).
As for your blog/website. No sarcasm, I liked it and for the very reasons you mention. It has a clean, simple design and it's easy on the eyes due to the simple color scheme. I have bookmarked it so I'll be dropping by once in a while to check out your entries if you don't mind
For being so smart, you programmers are a dumb lot. Learning to design is like learning to ski - all the fancy equipment in the world and a few tips won't successfully get you down a diamond run. You must learn the fundamentals and then practice a lot. I can't believe how much bad advice is being offered in these posts. Here is some advice that doesn't suck: 1. Disregard anything that sounds easy. A bunch of stupid "tips" will only help you to make ugly things, without helping you to understand what you're doing. As a corollary... Software does not make design. Photoshop masters are usually shitty designers. You could receive a very good graphic design education at an art school without every touching a computer. If you can program Java you can learn what you need in Photoshop in about a week of average use. 2. Programming is for machines, design is for people. That being said, people rarely agree on what constitutes "good" design - so err on the side of simplicity until you develop your own informed value system. 3. Study and really try to understand these fundamental aspects of design: a. Composition - how to scale and position different elements of your design b. Color - how to use colors in combination c. Type - how to select a good, appropriate type face 4. Respect Hierarchy. The most important bit of info in your design should have the most prominence. Work your way down from there. 5. Keep it simple. Begin with the least amount of design, at the smallest size necessary to convey your message. Then modify the hierarchy. Then make a pleasing composition. Then color it in. Decorate after that to add flair. Iterate repeatedly until it's not ugly. Once you're happy with it, walk away for a day. Then return, realize that it's ugly, strip it back down to its essentials and start again (this time, as a slightly better designer). 6. Every design decision is important and the process is iterative. This is why the design process takes so long but shows little for it. Even the simplest design can involve hundreds of small decisions, each of which should have some sort of justification (one pixel this way or one pixel that way?) 7. It's very difficult to pre-plan your design process. 8. Experiment a LOT. 9. Develop a personal value-system for design. Do this by being constantly critical of the world around you. Actively decide for yourself if you think the NBC Peacock's tail feathers are the right length, if the lines of the IBM logo are the right thickness, if the space around the holes of your laptop's speakers is wide enough, if the color combinations of those movie theater seats are good, etc. Somebody had to make those decisions, but just because they're out there in the world doesn't make them right. 10. Your design can always be better. Trust the very true fact that your first iterations are almost always ugly. Even if you look at them and think that they are the most beautiful thing ever, hold on to the belief that they are very probably ugly. It's OK, nobody nails it the first time - if they think that they do, they are ignorant and unsubstantial. These are just some points of advice, they certainly are not rules and they certainly do not assume to be a complete education in art. All this stuff about stealing art is worthless. If you see something that you think is good, look at it and figure out why it's good. Maybe it's only good in context. Maybe it's just the color is good, but the design sucks. Maybe it's just the type face, or the relationship of the size of the face to the leading (distance between each line of type). Figure out what is good, then add that to your design toolbox. That's why designers are so obsessed with looking at design - they're constantly stealing ideas and methods - little ones - then recombining them for different uses. Finally, the purpose of the act of design is to make beautiful things. Anyone who disagrees with that statement is a horrible person.
From what I've seen of Inkscape, yeah, I think it seems a bit better. Not because of the MDI issue, it's a couple of small details I like (and big ones, such as layer support). I haven't switched from Sodipodi yet.
I'm of the "every OS sucks" school of thought. I'm used to Debian, and thus a bit "blind to its faults" so that's what I use. I can see how Mac/Windows users can become similarly blind to their OS' faults, or at least used to them.
Feel free to keep reading my (swedish-language) blog, that's what it's there for. don't know ho you are (you're posting as anonymous) so I can't check out your website.
My opinion of clip art is low. I think it would be better for everyone, designers and engineers alike, if there were more automatic icons created by the owners of the information. For example, each museum, person, or collector of any type could have their own icon automatically applied to each image that goes out over the web. It would show copyright but better than a watermark, the icon tracks could help see the diffusion of image use AND would improve the appearance of the icons by having them designed by hand or whatever is neccessary for it to be the right type of icon.
Deborah MacPherson Projects Director,Accuracy&Aesthetics On a Quest for Original Context
Thankyou for reminding me that you are a troll. I won't be responding further to your posts after this.
"You do realise that "copyright", "right", "ownership", "public domain" are artificial constructs, right?"
All words are artificial constructs which exist only by common consent, the only thing in that list which isn't a label for something that exists whether that label is applied or not is "copyright".
Rights are factual, certain rights may be artificial constructs but a right is something which would exist without that label. The "public domain" is the term we use to describe
the state of things without a copyright. Without copyright law, everyone may copy everything and distribute it as they please and are able... and did, copyright is a new idea and doesn't exist everywhere.
Ownership is factual existing thing, no matter what label you put to it. As proof I submit the universal reaching of this concept by EVERY people in every part of the earth before communication between them.
"Quite a few folks"
YOU are 'quite a few'? Your the only one who has responded in the negative to anything I've said in this thread.
'they are "wrong" in "fact"'
As I've just stated, what "they", there is just you. As for being wrong, you are, and you certainly need to check your facts.
Some nouns describe things that have a physical existence, other describe concepts. "Ownership" and "right" are both concepts that have no physical existence. You may think you have a "right" to "own" a given rock. I may: a) laugh at you for being silly b) "steal" the rock from you, depriving you of "ownership" c) hit you over the head with the rock, depriving you of the ability of "owning" anything d) claim that the rock is "public domain" and "owned" by all e) claim that the rock is "owned by the great Ooger-Booger", and that he has instructed me to hit you over the head with it for your blasphemy Each of the above examples has been played out in human history. As to which is "factually" correct, only Ooger-Booger knows.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
You're probably thinking of Adobe PhotoDeluxe or Adobe Photoshop LE.
What, me worry?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
She'll then promptly forget this piece because she could never afford schooling and doesn't even know how to write down music using standard notation.
Musical notation really isn't all that difficult. Heck, with a piano, it's practically a direct transcription. Or if you play on a MIDI keyboard, you can have the music directly exported. Of course, I really don't know the circumstances here, but in my opinion, learning to translate piano music to sheet form is fairly trivial, basically corresponding each key to a specific place on the staff.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
{nods} That makes sense. I've dealt with intuitives in the past. Extremely frustrating, both for you and them, as they often genuinely can't explain where they get their inspiration. Some of them are still close enough to the traditional model that they can learn the rules and use them. As for your friend... those cases are like first kisses. You enjoy them for what they are in the moment, but you know that ultimately, the performance will not be repeated and any recording will lose some subtlety of it. I withdraw my comment about educating your friend. I guess I just deal with so many people who see music as something mystical. The strong natural singers who refuse training in vocal techniques and wind up burning out, either mentally or physically... *sigh* Meh, anyhow, treasure your friend, for all her ephemerality.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.