✨a more aggressive, targeted psa than my past graphics guides✨
STOP CALLING EVERYTHING A BLINKIE. A STAMP IS NOT A BLINKIE. ALL BLINKIES ARE GIFS, BUT NOT ALL GIFS ARE BLINKIES.
RANDOM PIXEL ART DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY QUALIFY AS A BLINKIE.
NOT ALL BUTTONS ARE BLINKIES.
*deep breath*
…also:
Blinkies were originally PIXEL art. Usually made pixel by pixel. I don’t get to decide what does and doesn’t count as a blinkie when it comes to minutiae, but keep in mind that the 3000x400 random photoshopped gif with a blinking border is a few steps away from the original.
also:
I DID NOT MAKE ANY GRAPHICS. STOP GIVING ME CREDIT PLEASE.
bonus hot take:
It’s kind of ridiculous to ask for credit for PNGS. or, like, recolored favicons.
and-
I don’t feel like this is a hot take?:
i’m not giving you credit for something you didn’t make. I will not “reblog to use” if it’s something you stole from somewhere else. bsfr
Anyways!
enjoy these nice lil things i found as a treat for maybe reading this.
Product Review: Pantone Graphics Solid Colors Formula Guide GP1601N
New Post has been published on https://www.designinfo.in/blog/color-management-solution/2018/product-review-pantone-graphics-solid-colors-formula-guide-gp1601n/484
Product Review: Pantone Graphics Solid Colors Formula Guide GP1601N
They say colors are the smile of nature. They have a language of their own. And if you are a designer, branding consultant or a professional who is involved in color consulting and color intelligence, then you know the power of colors and how a single color can make or break the message you are trying to convey.
That’s why, today I am going to share a really great and must have tool for you. A small book of colors called Pantone Formula Guide Solid Coated and Uncoated. It is said that big things come in small packages. This is exactly that. A small handheld fan-shaped guide filled with wide range of 1867 colors. This is world’s most trusted guide for choosing the right shade of color.
The color palette on the book comprises of really beautiful set of primary and accent colors and not just the standard CMYK and RGB Colors. All these color blend beautifully with each other and are really easy on eyes making it a child’s play for you to create new brand colors or illustrations.
You get two sets, one coated and another uncoated. The coated one has a special coating which gives the colors brighter and richer finish than the ones on the uncoated.
Why Pantone Formula Guide Solid Coated and Uncoated?
As I mentioned above it is world’s most trusted and best-selling book when it comes to colors. But that’s not it, there are lot more things that this little beauty has to offer.
Remember, how sometimes when you are about to print a color, it comes out entirely different than it looked on your screen? How frustrating that is? But with this little book, you get the exact color code and ink formulation along with coordinated numbers that actually makes printing the most accurate color, a layman’s job. This is the reason this formula guide is being used in different industries like paper printing, chemical testing, plastics and pharmaceuticals as well.
What do you get along with this book?
The best thing you get is the range of colors. It now has 1867 colors that include the set of 112 colors that were launched in 2016.
You also get a Pantone Color Management software with it. This software makes color sampling really easy and user-friendly. The software allows integration of latest Pantone color libraries into design applications hence making color sampling real simple and time saving for you.
This small book comes in the form of convenient and portable fan like deck which has an index on the back for easy access. It also includes a light indicator tool. This tool actually does the job of evaluating whether current light is suitable for color evaluation and matching.
How to use this guide?
With the access to world’s largest color database that too with ink formulations and number coordinates, you can easily come up with a lot of creative and beautiful color combinations. Whether it’s coming up with new color combinations for branding or designing a new social media project to defining a brand by its logo, everything becomes so creative and actual fun. You just need a bit inspiration and combination of unique colors and that is all it.
Where to buy this guide?
The only trusted place to buy this guide is Design Info. It is the one platform that is made by keeping in mind artists and designers as the souls. They are the largest supplier of fashion magazines in Asia. And have over 45 years of experience. Hence, they know how much colors matters to the designers and artists. Plus you get the original edition of this guide along with the registration code. They are one of the most trust brands across Asia for designers and artists.
What’s so unique about Design Info?
They are not only known for the originality but also for the quick shipping. We all know the pain of shopping online. Whenever we buy anything online we have to wait forever to get our hands on the actual product. It becomes the ultimate test of your patience. But with Design Info, they actually value your time and offer the fastest shipping ever. In most cases, the product reaches you the very next day. How cool is that!!!
Plus they have a user-friendly website that is really easy to navigate and really cooperative customer service. As soon as you land on their website, you will see there is an option of live chat available. Their customer service people are very humble and help you in case you have any doubts. I also got a 10% discount coupon from them. Plus Design Info send you a FREE gift with every product too.
Definitely, consider investing in this bundle of colorful joy to take your creative career to new heights. This small book will bring colors to your life, literally!
Wow your gifs are amazing, how do you make them? :3
[Thank you so much. <3 I only just started making them, so this compliment really means a lot! :D
They are actually pretty simple to make!
First, you’ll need a HD video. You can get that from various sources, but if you have blu-rays (or even DVDs), here is a good tutorial. One note though: If you choose to use handbrake, be prepared for a very long conversion time, and make sure your movie is rendered as MP4 not m4v.
Once you have HD video in a common file format, you are going to want to follow this amazing tutorial. That tutorial is, literally, the one that enabled me to start gifing, since I already had HD video; I could just never find an appropriate media player to screencap frame-by-frame with ease. That tutorial answered that.
Once you have followed that tutorial and you have your gif all loaded into Photoshop (or preferred video editing program, though I use photoshop CS6 only and can’t attest to other methods in other porgrams), the fun part starts. Editing!
I generally crop my gifs to a reasonable and nice size, depending on what I want. 540x250 seems to be a common size on tumblr and many variants around there. 260x190 is my preferred for smaller gifs; good for rping and for gifsets. That too was based off other dimensions I saw here on tumblr.
Once you crop your gifs, you’ll have to play around with how many frames you want per gif and how fast/slow you want them. That all depends on what you want them to look like.
An important note: All gifs must be UNDER 2MB to function on tumblr. If they are, at all, over 2MB they won’t move when posted to tumblr.
You can color, crop, watermark, etc your gifs, and that is the best part. I play around with all sorts of functions to get what I want. Selective color, vibrance, and curves to name the primary ones. You can achieve all kinds of beautiful stuff with those.
So there you go! A pretty quick and basic crash course. I’m just so excited to get to make gifs on my favorite Loki (and Sigyn) stuff, for other’s enjoyment and for rp! :D
Thank you again, and I am so glad you like them. <33]
I don't have Photoshop right now for an assortment of reasons, but I do use a freeware called FireAlpaca. It's a pretty powerful program for what it is.
However, it does have a few downsides. While it can Export .psd files, it doesn't do such a great job importing them, so replicating some of the effects takes creativity.
The interface (without the toolbar up top) looks like this:
I've cropped the image (using the square with an outline in the left toolbar plus Edit+crop from the top toolbar that is not pictured here) that I want to work with, and that's all you can see right now.
--
This image is really dark, so I'm going to lighten it overall. In the Layer sidebar on the right, there's a little button with a few files layered on each other. It's the third from the left. Click that, and then select the top layer. In "Blending" (it's below the opacity on the right sidebar) select "Add."
On 100%, this looks pretty good. If the image appears too bright but you like the add kind of blending, adjust the opacity. I usually have to adjust the opacity, but this time was lucky.
--
An alternative way to get a very similar effect is to paint an entire new layer (which you can get by selecting the first icon at the bottom of the right sidebar) white and then using "Add" blending on that layer.
I've selected the wrong layer here to demonstrate (although I've made it invisible by clicking the little gray circle).
I liked the Duplicated+Add effect slightly better than the white+add effect, so I am going to hide the one I'm not using. If I just want to have enhanced brightness, I could leave the picture as that and be on my way, but it's color playtime.
--
Painting a layer one color and then fussing with the opacity and blending settings is how I end up getting the most dramatic results.
I paint an entire layer a vibrant shade of red and then pick a blending method that looks best for this picture. Screen and Overlay are my go-tos, and Screen looks pretty neat here.
But that's REALLY red and I just wanted to have a different color effect.
There. at 21%, everything looks a little brown, which is pretty neat.
--
Duplicating the main layer and selecting Add works well for pictures that start off dark, but I use Multiply much more often, particularly for pictures with better lighting.
Multiply is pretty powerful, so I rarely can get away with a high opacity. This gives the dark shades some depth, increasing the range of tone in the picture a bit better. Basic color correction is about having as wide a range of darks and lights as possible.
--
I really like the greens in this picture, so I want to make them POP.
I pick a fairly vibrant green and paint a layer.
Blending with a 43% overlay makes the plants look gorgeous, but Troian looks like a space alien.
It's not pictured here (oops) but I use a not-so opaque eraser to get some of the green off of the figure in the forefront.
I did a pretty sloppy job so the green is still in her hair ends, but I could probably have gotten it nicer if I spent more than thirty seconds.
If erasing the green from the figure hadn't worked out at all, I probably would have just made the Overlay even less opaque and called it good.
--
I want to see if I can bring out some more depth of color, so I paint this neat blue-violet in a new layer. Just because I think it'll look nice, and I'd rather draw out the blues than the reds and yellows. It's trial and error.
--
I play around with the Blendings, but like Add best at this opacity since it has a nice vibrant effect.
The green hair is still biting me in the butt, but I like how the blue softens the image a lot.
--
Maybe I just want sort of a monochrome effect instead of this color mess. FireAlpaca can create gradients with the gradient tool in the left sidebar, even if it has no gradient map option. But we're not going to cover that here because I just want to see how the monochrome will turn out.
Let's hide my funky green layer. I select each of my layers with the actual image on them (that's the bottom two), and then go to the top toolbar and select Layer -> Hue. Turn that Saturation all the way down to 0%. Remember to do both to accomplish this as effectively as possible.
Sometimes, when I just want a quick fix and there isn't enough or too much color in the picture overall, I'll play around with the saturation and brightness. Everything's a means to an end, and as I showed in the white layer vs. duplicate+add example, there is more than one way to get to the same result.
--
Each blending method produces dramatically different results, but Screen does a good job of changing everything blue while retaining fidelity to the shades of the image.
--
Switching the blending method, opacity of each layer, or even the order of the layers can produce drastically different results, so I don't have a hard and fast method to anything. There's no great guide to using FireAlpaca on the internet, but it's honestly a really pleasant experience compared to the overwhelming amount of Photoshop tools there are.
REMEMBER TO SAVE YOUR IMAGE AS SOMETHING OTHER THAN THE DEFAULT .MDP. MAYBE USE PNG OR JPG. FireAlpaca files default to that (unless you just hit "save"). .mdp is great if you want to come back to the layers and edit, but they're a pain in the butt when trying to upload an image file.
And no, you can't make gifs in here. I use GifFun for that.
In this guide, I will discuss mostly what my opinions are on graphics and why they are key to making a successful roleplay. As state this an opinionated guide and is not the say all do all when it comes to making a roleplay.
Since majoring in Graphic Design in college, my eyes have been opened to what graphics can do for a product or a campaign or anything really. I had not realized how susceptible we were to the language of images and color until the past couple years.
Which is why since this enlightenment I have viewed graphics as very important to a roleplay. Of course pretty, flashy things always get attention but it's all about the designing aspect of graphics that KEEP people looking through your roleplay and reading all the information.
Now of course, the information and biographies of your characters are important! Without them you wouldn't have a roleplay of course. However, my advice for someone making a roleplay is to first write everything up (if you don't do this already) and then worry about the graphics. Because good design comes from good and thorough research into the subject and audience the company or designer is trying to target.
Naturally, your roleplay will not appeal to everyone in the roleplay community and that's okay! So make sure you know and understand your target audience as best as you can before you go ahead and make graphics. What trends are popular? What new twist do you think you can add into your graphics to make them stand out even more? What do you think will appeal to the roleplayers who you know will be interested in your roleplay? And so on and so forth. Always ask these questions of yourself and then I would definitely advice to ask those questions to friends, strangers, etc. to get a well rounded answer for yourself!
After this it's time to go and pick images and try to think of a concept.
Now, you're probably thinking, 'but Accio this is so much work for graphics I mean people won't even notice'. And that my friends is the point. A saying I keep near and dear to me when designing anything is: "Good design is apparent. But great design is transparent." Yes this may be a lot of work but I assure you it will be worth it. You will subconciously reach roleplayers and entice them in. And here on Tumblr we all know that selling your roleplay and promoting it is one of the biggest and yet hardest things to do.
Believe me when I say that while yes it's a lot of work it will pay off. Graphics and designing isn't something you can slap together in twenty minutes. While yes that graphic may be pretty, ask yourself is it really the most effective way to showcase your roleplay as?
For Frosbite's graphics, I went through about ten variations before I finally settled on a cohesive set from the sidebar to the quirky informational graphics.
Another great example of cohesive and effective graphics in my opinion is Neverlandroleplay. Their graphics just draw me in every time I see them and give me this sense of magic and youth and yet conflict at the same time with the light and dark contrast. While yes they are gorgeous graphics there's more to them than just a face value, they're layered graphics and I think they are extremely effective.
Graphics are the first thing roleplayers will see when they look at your roleplay in the RPG tag or on a dash or anywhere on your page, so make your first impression blow them away and mean something at the same time.
So, long story short, put some thought into the graphics. Ask yourself why you're using this image or that color scheme and will it really get what you want promote across?
The rest will fall in place because the writing is always the foundation, the graphics only sell the roleplay to fellow roleplayers, so take advantage of it!
