Fiesta de la Vida

Comment Power with Customized Avatar Selection

Laura — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 18:56:34 +0000

Your graduated choices for a custom avatar

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I’ve never been a fan of the default avatars available for WordPress from Gravatar. You’d think Gravatar would offer you an option in your account to point to a custom default for those leaving a comment on your blog. Since that isn’t the case I went looking for a WP plugin, and found this nifty option to install in your wp-content/plugins directory. Now I can create custom avatars, and give those leaving a comment the option of choosing one. Granted it’s all my artwork, but it sure beats the bland quilt square, boring mystery man or (not scary) monster avatars. For the moment, my custom avatar choices are limited, but size matters, so comment away. The name of the plugin is Custom Avatars for Comments created by Nicolas Kuttler.

Altered Book: Volume 1: “Inked Sun”

Laura — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:00:54 +0000

Pen and Ink drawing from altered book series.

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On January 1st, friends and I got together to begin an altered book project. The idea was to begin the year by setting a tone for creative fortitude across the next 365 days. The people who attended each picked a book, already full of text, some containing pictures, diagrams, recipes. There were dictionaries, cookbooks, books of obscure science fiction, board books for little hands.
The book I chose is a thin, compact, hardback, bound well, with fibrous, absorbent paper (and kind of pulpy, like coarse, heavy newsprint). I thought it would do well with ink, markers, fat Sharpies and dye. I decided to cut out every fifth page, (thereby removing one fifth of the book), to make space for the addition of glued-in goodies.
I just love simple pen and ink. This drawing was done using a Micron, and quite satisfying to make–lots of simple curves and hatch-marks.

Sparklehorse, CSS3, Layer styles and the Futur= of Now

Laura — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 01:52:26 +0000

Lovely layering of styles, musical, encoded and digitally rendered. Today a preponderance of juxtapositions: intense sunshine and spring rain, a marriage of musical fragments converge: My Bloody Valentine, David Bowie, Built to Spill, Palace Brothers, and The Latin Playboys, merging into a song by Sparklehorse: (yeah a couple actually): “More Yellow Birds“ ”Babies on the Sun” and “Apple Bed.”
Ribbon effects in CSS3 (it is rumored that IE9 will actually support CSS3—imagine!). Brilliant.

New iGoogle theme available for your iGoolge homepage

Topping it all off, my first design submission to iGoogle accepted, called “Fractal Rainbow One” (check it out, try it out). More to come, ‘fo sho’.

X-ray Vision

Laura — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:54:45 +0000

Okay, it was back in the Photoshop sandbox with me. New to javascript, I was chomping at the bit to try this technique first seen on my friend Corey’s blog. I thought it was so unbelievably cool that I spent the better part of a Saturday night tweaking and uploading, and tweaking some more.

The original script is available here from the good folk at Nihilogic Labs. If you love to work in Photoshop, the possibilities are limitless for what you can reveal behind the original image. Clicking on the “Fiesta” image below will take you to my web page so you can mouse around with the x-ray effect yourself. It’s fun, so get out there and play.

Fiesta de la Vida logo with an x-ray effect applied using javascript

What Color is That?

Laura — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:50:33 +0000

On a Mac, there’s a little-known utility that’s installed by default called “Digital Color Meter”, which will show you the current color (in hex, or an RGB tuple) of anything on the screen under the mouse cursor. A nice built-in option for anyone using OS X in addition to the fabulous FF add-on Colorzilla.

In the second screen shot, you’ll see the value of Red, Green and Blue for the light yellow swatch I had the cursor hovering over. Just combine each of the three numbers to get your six digit Hex number. No need to dig around in the CSS or HTML on a page to find the number value of a color you like, and may want to test out in your own digital design.

Locating Mac's Digital Color Meter App on your Computer

RGB Hex Value Demo using Mac's Digital Color Meter App

My Free Moo Cards

Laura — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:56:58 +0000

A screen shot of the images I uploaded to MOO for their free offer.

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Have I mentioned just how much I love Moo Mini-cards? Probably not on my blog. But I’ve done the appropriate amount of squealing, gushing, strutting, and effusing about them to friends, coworkers and strangers who take my cards. (And yes, when I first received them in the mail, there was a happy dance involved in the privacy of my kitchen).

Anyway, I was on the Moo site today, and noticed they had an offer for ten free business cards, so I thought I’d give ‘em a try before ordering a larger quantity. I uploaded eight of my own images, customized the flip side with contact details, and a little banner image across the top, hit the send button, and now twiddle my thumbs in anticipation of their arrival.

Moo’s headquartered in London, but opened an additional shop on the East Coast a few months ago. This is great news for those of us State-side, b/c shipping time will be uber-quick. So here’s a little digital shout-out to Moo. They’re also on FB and have a great blog, – take a gander.