I guess it’s true that there’s a first time for everything. After years of watching people doing presentations, I finally got to create my own.

I wanted my first time to be special, so I tried to find ways to make sure that mine was not going to be ‘just another boring presentation’. I noticed that most people paid too much attention to data and sacrificed the appearance. On the other hand, there are others who create a presentation that is too ‘flashy’ which distracts the audience from the real content.

The perfect combination would be to use related beautiful images to complement the content of the presentation. Then your audience can digest your content without getting bored.

Creating The Perfect Images

There are many ways to acquire perfect images that go along with the content of your presentation. You can create your own, or find and use somebody else’s.

If you are a good photographer with lots of stock photos, then the first option would not be a problem. But for those whose image capturing skills are below par, the easiest method to create your own image is to make the text itself as the image.

This is a trick often used by one of the greatest presenters out there: Steve Jobs.

The key is minimal use of text and extra time on tinkering with font properties and background. For example, I would like to present the statistic of blogs from Technorati. Some copy and paste routines would give me something like this:

To modify the data into text images, I cut out the fat and deleted most of the text. I also changed the written numbers with real numbers to add some drama.

Then I did a quick change of the font type, size and color using ‘Formatting Palette‘. I assigned white for the title and dark grey for the content.

You can also use the ‘Format – Font’ menu for more comprehensive options.

I added some shadow and reflection to spice things up a little bit.

Centered text is so static and boring, so I moved them around.

And the last step was changing the background using right click and ‘Format Background’

I chose a simple 90 degrees linear gradient color fill from dark to light to further emphasize the text.

I clicked ‘Apply’ and here’s what I came up with.

Be sure to add real life context to the presentation. Using the blog statistic example, I’d show my audience the stunning slides while saying something like this: ‘In 2009, Technorati said that there were more than 130,000,000 blogs out there. That’s as much as all Japanese people in the world.’

Adding Real Images

To take things a little bit further, you can also use real stock photo images. My favorite way to get free to use and free to modify photos is downloading them from Flickr. Just be sure to use the Creative Commons licensed ones.

To find photos within that category, you can use Flickr Advanced Search while ticking on the CC boxes.

Or you can use Quix and ‘fc’ command for faster results.

Use the downloaded image(s) for the background of your slide(s), and you can get something like this:

Using text images (and real images) is just one of the simple and easy tricks that will boost your presentation several levels above boring.

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

Today Adobe Photoshop turns 20. While birthday celebrations for software might seem kind of silly, for a program like Photoshop — which has literally become a verb and has had a huge impact on the world of photography and graphic design — the partying seems justified.

Adobe is going all-out for the 20th anniversary, taking to Twitter and Facebook and holding parties around the globe.

It’s a Photoshop Party

Japan, Southeast Asia and Europe are also getting into the party spirit. Adobe Germany is going to do a 20-hour online marathon, with local experts showing off their favorite tips and tricks. France and India will also be celebrating, with contests to showcase the talents of Photoshop users.

Photoshop 1.0

Maybe the coolest event is Adobe TV’s special anniversary broadcast, which will air tomorrow at http://tv.adobe.com/go/photoshop-20th-anniversary. The original Photoshop team will reunite for the first time in 18 years to discuss their early work. They’ll also be demonstrating Photoshop 1.0 on a rebuilt Macintosh computer. Retro computing — I love it!

Social Media and Photoshop

On Twitter, Adobe is using a #PS20 hashtag to tweet about the anniversary.

A Look Back

(Via Mashable!.)

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

We’ve already talked about using RSS as a business intelligence tool, but how do you choose the right software to get maximum benefit out of your news reading? With a number of options and myriad features on multiple platforms, it can be a daunting task to even get started.

In this article we’ll take a look at some of what you might consider when shopping for a news reader. Do you need cutting edge, up to the second information at your fingertips? You might want to look at ‘ticker’ style applications that scroll new headlines continuously. Or maybe you need to monitor a large number of feeds but are primarily interested in a subset of specific keywords or topics. In that case, you’d want to look for an RSS reader that supports a Smart Folders or Saved Searches feature.

If you need to keep news feeds in sync across multiple platforms, from Mac to Windows or from the web to a desktop or mobile clients, there are solutions out there for you too. Many of these readers also help you share individual articles and posts with your colleagues and collaborators as well. Let’s take a look at some of the options available online, on your desktop and on your phone.

Online

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The reigning king of online newsreaders is currently Google Reader. One of the advantages of an online RSS reader over a desktop version is accessibility: you can use it from any web browser, even if it’s not your primary computer, and all your feeds will be exactly the way you left them. Of course, one of the disadvantages of a web-based newsreader is that you typically need an active internet connection to make use of them, whereas a desktop client can download feed items you can later read offline.

One of the areas Google Reader excels, however, is in its ability to also sync with various desktop and mobile clients. Not only does that give you some measure of offline access to your feeds (as does installing and enabling Google Gears), but it prevents you from having to sort through some of the feeds you’ve already read elsewhere when you switch from your computer to your phone, or even from web to desktop client. We’ll look at some of the desktop and mobile clients Google Reader syncs with in the next two sections.

Another potential option in this category is NetVibes. Though it’s officially classified as a Start Page moreso than an RSS reader, it can import and monitor news feeds along with a number of other apps or widgets designed to bring various types of information into one at-a-glance interface. NetVibes offers far more flexibility and customizability than a straight up RSS reader, but the downside is it’s not the best solution to monitoring a large volume of feeds. Google also has a similar product dubbed iGoogle worth checking out as well.

Desktop

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If keeping news feeds in sync between a Macintosh and a Windows computer is part of your requirements, you’ll want to take a look at two industry-leading news readers on their respective platforms: NetNewsWire and FeedDemon. Both of these readers sync with Google Reader, making cross-platform feed reading a lot more painless. Even if you don’t need cross-platform compatibility, both readers are full-featured and worthy contenders for your desktop feed reading needs. Both offer the ability to watch for specific keywords or set up saved searches that automatically bring up important topics in your niche to the forefront of your news reading sessions.

Another worthy option on the Mac is Shrook a free RSS reader that syncs back to the web to keep your feeds in line whether you’re reading from your Mac, iPhone, or any computer with an internet connection. On Windows, take a look at the free and open source RSSOwl.

For a news ticker type experience on either the Mac or PC, check out Snackr, an Adobe AIR client that continually scrolls headlines from your feeds across your desktop. This type of news reader can be handy for those who want to be able to see stories at a glance without having to switch back and forth between applications or browser tabs.

Mobile

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On the iPhone, Reeder is a solid mobile client that syncs with Google Reader. Newsstand is another iPhone client that does so, along with the ability to easily export or send stories to a number of external sources like email, Twitter, delicious and more. There’s also a special iPhone-formatted version of Google Reader you can simply use in the Safari mobile browser that works quite well.

On the Android platform, FeedR is a great option for reading feeds, with a free demo version and a reasonable $0.99 version that removes certain intermediary dialog boxes. You can import feeds from an OPML file and even cache feeds for offline reading as well. For a solid client that syncs with Google Reader, check out NewsRob.

Palm webOS users might want to see if the iPhone-formatted Google Reader works for your needs; it’s not specifically customized for Palm devices yet still tends to work rather well. BlackBerry users can also access Google Reader in the phone browser, or check out FreeRange or Viigo. Windows Mobile users can also use the browser method to access Google Reader, or try the free NewsBreak Lite or YoMoMedia, which syncs with its own web-based feed reading client as well.

Shop Around

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Don’t hesitate to spend some time shopping around and trying several clients before settling on your feed reader of choice — or even continuing to use more than one at a time. Thanks to the OPML standard, it should be a relatively simple process to export and import your feeds from one client to another. This means that building a master list of news feeds in one client is highly worthwhile, since it can travel with you even if you move to a new RSS reader down the road.

(Via Mashable!.)

There are many aspects of creating a website design. Web designers often have to play multiple roles and be very knowledgeable about building effective and usable site layouts.

Most of the lessons you’ll learn in web design comes from work experience; learning is an iterative process and there is no better way to gain knowledge than to make mistakes (and then and learning from them).

In this article, we discuss 10 essential and general tips that every novice web designer should know.

1. Optimize Web Graphics for Better Page Load Times

Learn how to optimize your web graphics by selecting the proper format and making sure that it’s as small as it can possibly be. Even though people are advancing to broadband connections, there are still quite a few who use dial-up internet connections. Additionally, with the emergence of mobile device technologies that don’t necessarily have broadband-like speeds, having slow page load times due to image file sizes can turn users off.

Here a general rule of thumbs for picking the right file format: images that have solid colors are best saved as PNGs and GIFs, while images with continuous colors (such as photographs) are best saved as JPGs.

There are plenty of tools available at your disposal that will help you further optimize your images and lower their file sizes, check out this list of tools for optimizing your images.

By limiting the number of images you use to the bare minimum, being smart about using images, and reducing file sizes as best as you can, you will significantly cut down page response times of  a web page and improve your web page performance.

2. Keep it Clean and Simple

A good web design is not just one that looks visually appealing, but also one that is user-friendly. A clean and simple web design typically ends up being a high-usability web design that is not confusing to interact with.

By having too many site features and components on a page, you risk the chance of distracting website viewers from the purpose of the website. Make sure each page element has a purpose and ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the design really need this?
• What does this element do and how does it help the user?
• If I remove this element all of a sudden, will most people want it back?
• How does this element tie into the goal, message, and purpose of the site?

Additionally, though it may be super awesome to come up with a new concept or interface design pattern for your website, make sure that the design is still accessible and intuitive to your users. People are accustomed to common interaction patterns, site features, and web interfaces – and if your design is truly unique, make sure it’s not too obscure and puzzling. Be creative, but also keep it simple.

3. Navigation is the Most Important Thing You Will Design

The most essential site feature is the website’s navigation — without it, users are stuck whatever page they happen to land on. With that obvious fact out of the way, we’ll talk about some important points to consider when constructing a navigation scheme.

First, it’s very important to put enough time and a lot of planning on a site’s navigation structure. This is common sense, but it’s still surprising how many web designs take site navigation for granted.

Placement, style, technology (will it use JavaScript or just CSS?), usability, and web accessibility are just some of the things you need to consider when creating the navigation design.

Your navigation design should work without CSS because of text-based browsers. Poke fun of text browsers all you want, but they are still prevalent in many mobile devices. Perhaps more importantly, navigation that works with CSS disabled is accessible (99.99% of the time) via screen readers.

Navigation should be accessible and usable without the need for client-side technologies such as JavaScript or Flash, which users may not have enabled or installed for various reasons such as security or company policy.

It is imperative that you have a good navigation system in place that is located at a highly-visible location. A good navigation is detectable as soon as the web page loads without having to scroll down the web page. This is where keeping it clean and simple plays a major role: a complex and unconventional design can lead to user confusion.

Users must never wonder, even for a split second, ‘Where is the site navigation?’

For sites organized in a hierarchical, multi-level manner, make sure that it is easy to navigate from between parent and child web pages. In addition, it should be easy to reach top-level pages (such as the site’s front page) from any webpage.

The main goal of your site navigation is to allow users to get to their desired content with as few actions and with as little effort on their behalf as possible.

4. Use Fonts Wisely and Methodically

Though there are thousands of fonts out there, you can really only use a handful (at least until CSS3 is fully supported by major browsers). Make it a point to stick to web-safe fonts. If you don’t like web-safe fonts, consider a progressively-enhanced web design that leverages sIFR or Cufon.

Keep font usage consistent. Make sure that headings are visually-different from paragraph text. Use white space, tweak line-height, font-size, and letter-spacing properties to make content pleasant to read and effortlessly scannable.

Perhaps one of the things that web designers often get wrong is font-sizes. Because we want to fit as much text as we can in a web page, we sometimes set font sizes to uncomfortably small sizes. Try to keep font sizes at and above 12px if possible, especially for paragraph text. While many people face no difficulty reading small text sizes, think about older users and persons with low-vision and other types of vision impairment.

5. Understand Color Accessibility

After talking about fonts, we also need to point out the importance of using the right colors.

You  need to consider color contrast of background and foreground colors for readability and for users with low-vision. For instance, black text on white background has a high-contrast, while orange text on red background will make you strain your eyes.

Also, use colors that are accessible to users with particular forms of color-blindness (check out a tool called Vischeck that will help you test for certain types of color-blindness).

Some color combinations work well only when the color is used as a foreground color instead of a background color. Take for example, dark blue text on a pink background versus but pink text on blue background, same colors but different levels of readability and reading comfort. It is important not only to get a good color combination but also to apply it to the right elements on the page.

6. You Need to Know How to Write Code Yourself

With various WYSIWYG editors flooding the market, it has become as simple as 1-2-3 to design a site. However, most of these editors insert unnecessarily code junk, making your HTML structure poorly designed, harder to maintain and update, and causing your file sizes to bloat.

By writing the code yourself, you come out with clean, crisp, and terse code that’s a pleasure to read and maintain; code that you can be proud to call your own.

Knowing how to use a WYSIWYG or an IDE with a visual preview does not excuse you from learning HTML and CSS. You have to know what’s going on in order to create effective, semantic, and highly-optimized web designs.

7. Don’t Forget Search Engine Optimization

A good designer should always remember to keep the basics of SEO in mind when designing a site. For example, structuring web content so that important text are represented as headings (i.e. page title and logo). This is where learning how to code properly comes in handy. Knowing correct, semantic, and standards-based HTML/CSS – you will quickly realize that divs are better than tables for web layouts not only for accurate representation of site content, but also for search engine rankings; you will also know that CSS background text image replacement is a good idea.

8. Understand that People are Impatient

People on an average spend only a few seconds before deciding whether they want to read more or navigate away to another site. Therefore, you as a web designer have to device a way for encouraging users to choose the former option within those precious seconds.

Know that not many visitors will scroll down to view the entire contents of the page if what they see at the top does not interest them. Remember to keep your important elements on the top where they are easily visible, but also do not overcrowd the top half of the page which can intimidate users and turn them off from reading further down the page. Consider the top half of a web design a selling point: be a salesman, make people buy into the notion that they want to see what else is on your site.

9. Learn About (and Be Aware of) Browser Quirks

One of the things you must know as a web designer is that your work operates in a finicky and unpredictable environment: web browsers. It’s not enough that your designs work on a few web browsers, they need to work in as many browsing situations as you can possibly afford. Before production – test your prototypes using tools like Browsershots.

10. Make Designs that are Flexible and Maintainable

A good web designer makes sure that the site can easily be updated or modified in the future. Designing websites that are malleable and easy to maintain is a sign of a great web designer. Make your work as modular as possible by separating style from structure.

Know that our industry is dynamic and still young – things change in a very short amount of time. Keeping this thought in mind will promote the creation of flexible web designs.

(Via Six Revisions.)

More often than not, designers have rightfully been accused of retreating into their cocoons of ignorance as soon as their work of creating a web design is finished, leaving the dirty and more hands-on work of putting it up on the web to developers. This apathy is prevalent not only in the web-building industry, but also in software and game engineering.

The hard truth is that the buck of development should stop with designers. For optimum efficiency, designers should not only be concerned with painting the bigger picture but also building it! In this article, I’d like to share with you some reasons why designers should learn how to code.

Designing Realistic and Doable Designs

With a clear image of how the final product will be actualized, a designer will come up with more feasible and practical concepts. Being an integral part of the development process, they carry the responsibility of ensuring their designs translate well into a web-based medium that takes into account: usability, web accessibility, and achievability. A user-friendly website is not only a picnic to navigate from one page to another in a clear and concise flow of logic, but also provides a user with all the information they need without being too overbearing or cluttered. The only real way to know if a web layout works or not is learning how to build it yourself.

 Easier Communication

Virtually all products designed but implemented by different parties never satisfy both sides’ expectations, especially when it comes to intangible products like websites, software, or games. It normally comes down to a compromise between what it should have been and what, in reality, it can be.  Whereas the general idea is captured, it is seldom replicated verbatim. The panacea: designers should preach water and drink it too!  This avoids confusion, misunderstanding, and misrepresentation.

Convenient Iterative Development Process

A design, in practice, should not be absolute. By this, I mean that it should be flexible and affable to change without distorting its intrinsic essence to meet the systems’ technical constraints. These repetitive and necessary alterations can only be realized by the original designer. A designer slash developer can iterate more quickly where necessary, rather than having a developer resubmit the design to the designer, who is rarely at hand, to implement the alterations. This situation can create friction – and it often does – between designers and developers.   

Better and More Harmonious Results

I often like drawing parallels between software, web, or game development to orchestral music where the designer is the composer and the developer is the ensemble’s maestro or conductor. Imagine if the latter had the composer’s score? Wouldn’t the symphonies be awesome, captivating, and unadulterated? Not only were they crafted by a master craftsman, but conducted by their creator!

Shorter Development Time

The designers doubling up as coders implies that the design and coding processes occur at least sequentially, if not concurrently. This results in a shorter development timeframe – and who doesn’t care about efficiency?

Designers become More Marketable

Modern day designers worth their salt need to up their portfolio, and up their game, if they want to remain relevant; it’s no longer enough to have one set of skills. Oftentimes, we’re required to wear various hats: designer, front-end developer, content writer, and project manager.

By learning to implement what you design rather than leaving it orphaned in the hands of developers – you increase your value. After all, citing design and coding skills in one‘s resume does not hurt. On the contrary, it makes one less redundant and indispensable, a life and death determinant in these financially tumultuous times of corporate restructuring (read: mass retrenchments) and downsizing (read: firing).

However, in so much as designers should also code their innovations, there are downsides to this scenario.

Quoting Lukas Mathis in one of the controversial article about the topic called ‘Designers are not Programmers’¹:

If the designer implements his own designs, he is beholden to two different goals: Clean code and great user experience. These two goals contradict each other. If you have to implement your own designs, you’re bound to compromise for the sake of code quality, which is bad for your interaction design.

‘

Designers who implement their own designs face two issues: They know when a neat new idea will create messy code, and they know about all the existing code that would be touched by a change to the user experience. The two goals are at odds, because the user experience is all about the little details, and those little details all end up being messy bits of code you would rather not have to write.

This aptly summarizes the hard stance taken by web development purists. They are of the old school of thought that advocates for clear-cut lines between design and development.  Apparently, designers create for humans, developers create for computers. Thus, UX designers should design the best possible user interface and leave the developers to make the best possible programming decisions. While this holds some merit as I’ve found myself trying unsuccessfully to abstract my mind from the code when I’m working on a user interface, it is ultimately more convenient to have the technical and usability constraints in perspective.

(Via Six Revisions.)

We’ve shown you how to mount a camera on your bike and construct a DIY camera mount for your car, but Flickr’s Heather Champ details her own dead-simple-but-effective method for mounting a camera in her car.

Her trick couldn’t be easier to pull off (or less expensive): Just flip down your sun visor, grab a couple of hair bands, and strap in your camera. If it seems like an unstable little system, check out her stop-and-go traffic time lapse; it works really well. Hit up the link below for the full step-by-step (there’s not much too it), and check out her trippy time lapse for an idea of how you might use your new DIY mount.

It all started on April 4 2007, when Curtis Melvin—a PhD student at George Mason University—decided to start a little project called ‘North Korea Uncovered.’ Two years later it became the definitive reference for the country’s secrets, thanks to an army of amateur spies.

Curtis describes the project like this:

This Google Earth project offers an extensive mapping of North Korea’s economic, cultural, political, and military infrastructures. Through the topic menu, users of this program have easy access to geographical information on North Korea’s agriculture projects, aviation facilities, communications, hospitals, hotels, energy infrastructure, financial services, leisure destinations, manufacturing facilities, markets, mines, religious locations, restaurants, schools, and transportation infrastructure. In addition to locations of economic interest, this map also displays anti-aircraft locations, the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and Northern Line Limit Line (NLL), incarceration facilities, political monuments, political residencies, military bases, and nuclear facilities.

As you can see, it really includes everything you can think about, from nuclear power plants to military communication towers to ostrich farms to not-secret-anymore prison camps. And of course, all surrounded by all kind of crap and poverty, all courtesy of Kim Jong-il, one of the biggest asses in the history of evil dictators.

How did Curtis get all this info? Easy—and risky: Using his own trips and a network of curious amateur spies who have been visiting the country through these two years. Truly impressive work. [Get it here via Gadling—Thanks Genevieve]

(Via Gizmodo.)

Whether you’re designing an artistic website or searching for images to post on your blog, sites that carry not only free but awesome stock photos may very well come in handy. Utilizing the correct set of photos for any project is key, especially if you’re designing an ad for a client, you should always put in your best effort as well as the best images you can find fit for the job.

Many of the designers I’ve come across like to download most of their images from 2-3 of the largest sites containing stock photos, however as creative artists I believe we should play the mix and match game that allows us to choose from wide variety of stock images instead of the same ‘old’ set of photos we may be fond of.

Giving a project that requires stock images your best should include photos that are not only sharp, but clear as well. Here we’ll have the pleasure to visit a few awesome (25 to be exact) sites that’ll provide all the needed images to fuel any project, job, or site requiring stock photos.

StockVault

Stockvault.net is an image sharing website that allows designers, photographers and artists alike to share their images and photographs with one another. If you’re a designer in need of photos then all you have to do is quickly register and download all of the images you desire for free.

Pixel Galerie

Pixel Galerie is not an English site; however, with its wide variety of free stock images it was only fair to include it within this list. Although it may be a bit difficult to read (if you’re not familiar with the language) it is fairly easy to scroll through the sites archives and download your photos.

Free Range

This site provides high-quality of stock photos for both commercial and non-commercial use. This is all provided for free. Images on Free Range are submitted by talented photographers, shot by the site itself, or taken form a wide variety of archives.

MorgueFile

MorgueFile offers free photos in various archives for the creative. You can also contribute images in any category listed as well as opt create new categories. The free images on this site are easily searchable, trouble-free to find and simple to download.

EveryStockPhoto

This gigantic resource site indexes over 3 million photos. This site leans towards being more of a search engine for free photos. It searches hundreds of sites and allows you to specify the license type in order for you to rule out unwanted images.

Stock.xchng

Stock.xchng is one of the more popular sites for free photos. Searching and browsing through countless numbers of images couldn’t be easier. This site also includes a feature called lightbox; this can come in handy for saving images for later use.

Openphoto

Openphoto groups all of their images by various categories. They also offer easy search functionality while registration is only necessary if you’d like to upload images.

Unprofound

Unprofound is can be classified as an unusual or unorthodox site for free stock photos. This is because this site groups images by color, instead of its corresponding category. There is absolutely no search function; however, scavenging through photos isn’t next to impossible. You can also create and online portfolio and contribute to their collection.

PhotoRogue

Photo Rogue brings something unique and unseen to the online community of free stock photos. This is because they actually take individual online requests for specific images. Their diverse crew of photographers will go out and take your photo for you, all for free!

Geek Philosopher

Geek Philosopher offers a wide range of categories for free. You don’t have to register, although they simply request that you place the correspondent photo credit when you use an image. Along with the free photos, they also offer backgrounds and various wallpapers.

Woophy

Woophy uses an incredible map concept and utilizes its home pages as huge map of the world. Every single dot on the entire map represents a photo or group of photos taken at that specific part of the world. This is a special community for travel photographers allowing them to share their images with the entire world.

PhotoRack

PhotoRack houses a large collection of images in the thousands (over 27,000 to be exact). All of the images are organized in their respectful categories which are broken down into subcategories as well.

FreePixels

This site offers corporate styled images that are usually found on paid registration sites. You can easily and quickly search for photos as well as make full use of the tag cloud found on the site.

Design Packs

Design Packs, a small collection of images, grouped into ‘packs’ of 15 images. These images are each in a pack followed by a common theme, such as Money, Flowers, or Lights. These images should appeal to designers and others looking for ‘abstract’ images for backgrounds.

FreeFoto

Freefoto is made up of 117,600 images with over 150+ sections organized into 3,285 categories. There’s a search function, and usage is completely unrestricted. All you have to do is include an attribution link back to Freefoto.com.

Pixel Perfect Digital

Pixel Perfect Digital has a small but quickly growing collection of numerous images. If you register this allows you to upload to your own personal gallery. The search function allows you to search within one or more category while viewing additional images as well.

Free Digital Photos

Free Digital Photos has a good search function, which is very important when you’ve got this many images under one resource. Photos are nicely grouped into categories for easy and quick browsing.

Public Domain Photos

Public Domain Photos is exactly that: a photographer’s domain for public display, all arranged by corresponding categories. There’s a really good search function available, as well.

Free Historical Stock Photos

Free Historical Stock Photos contains various historical images, including many by Matthew Brady (Civil War) and Dorothea Lange (Great Depression). This site also includes paintings and vintage posters. The images are gracefully categorized and easily findable with the use of a search function.

NationsIllustrated

Nations Illustrated showcases numerous amounts of pictures from all over the world with over 7,000+ photos in its collection. You can effectively browse by city, country, or continent.

Kave Wall

Kave Wall is a great source of professional-quality close-up and great macro photography. If you need a great shot of paper clips or rubber bands, this is definitely the place.

Free Stock Photos

Free Stock Photos can be viewed as a small site that contains good quality photographs in both low and high resolution. Photos are grouped into easily searchable categories. The search function utilizes Google however, which doesn’t work that well for images here.

ImageBase

Photos on Imagebase are absolutely free to use, they are licensed under the Creative Commons license. Images are available in two high resolution (1600 x 1200 or 3072×2048) formats.

Cepolina

Cepolina is an international site that has photo descriptions in over 17 languages and the ability to browse photos using maps of the world, including specific European countries. You can also browse by definite categories, and use their search function.

Abstract Influence

This site requires immediate registration in order to enter it, however once you’ve registered you can upload or download, and participate in all of the forums for free. This is a very community-oriented site.

Image After

Imageafter has over 20,000+ images available. There are two drop-downs (one for textures, one for images) that make it extremely easy to browse desired categories. Imageafter allows you to use their images on printed material for resale as well.

To Conclude

Whether you’re a graphic designer, web developer, or photograph enthusiast there are hundreds of motives on why to use any of these stock photo sites to find absolutely free images for whatever use. Take a few minutes to browse through a couple of these sites and discover interesting and useful photos for a wide range of purposes.

Post from: Tutorial Blog

(Via Tutorial Blog.)

Desktop Wallpaper

Summer certainly flew by and while I occasionally wish we had just one more month to squeeze in, I realized that since my fingers are almost frozen, autumn definitely arrived! P.S. Meanwhile it’s Winter!

Resolutions: 2560×1600, 1920×1200, 1920×1080, 1680×1050, 1600×1200, 1440×900, 1400×1050, 1280×1024, 1280×960, 1280×800, 1280×720, 1024×768, 1024×600, 800×480, 480×272, 320×240.

(Via InterfaceLIFT: Newest Wallpaper.)

Google’s blog is announcing the release of Picasa for Mac at MacWorld. Even though they’ve previously released a Picasa Web Albums uploader and iPhone plug-in, the full-featured free software offers Mac users a way to edit, upload, and share video and images, surpassing iPhoto in feature set and maybe even usability.

You’re probably thinking, ‘I’m already using iPhoto, so what’s the big deal?’ That was certainly my first thought too, but then I downloaded the software to test it out, and I changed my tune a bit. Picasa for Mac pulls in images and videos stored anywhere on your hard drive, lets you edit and tweak, save changes, and of course upload them to Picasa.

Picasa for Mac, which is still a Google Labs application (meaning it’s not perfect), has a feature set that is pretty darn extensive — it would be almost impossible to list them all — but some cool things you might like include the ability to filter by stared images, images with faces, and movies. You can also batch edit photos, create collages and movie clips, publish to Blogger, take video snapshots, one-click upload to YouTube, and a whole lot more.

And even if you’re not ready to chuck iPhoto out the window (I know I’m certainly not), you can still use both tools side by side. In fact, Picasa for Mac lets you run both applications without overwriting changes to your iPhoto library. iPhoto library images, within the Picasa software, are treated as read-only, so any photo adjustments will create a separate copy of the original image.

For more information on Picasa for Mac, watch this short video provided by Google:

(Via Mashable!.)