I skipped the Q&A last week in order to get some good questions rolling in the door and to find a good day of the week to commit to the feature post. I’ve settled on Thursdays for the Q&A with GrandmasterB feature; since it allows me to get things caught up over the weekend and more time to put together a clear and concise answer. Don’t forget to send me your questions and if your question is published you’ll get a free linkback from GrandmasterB and 100 EntreCard credits for your bankroll. Now onto the question for this week.

My boy Cuzzy (Cuzoogle.com) wrote me an email the other day asking me the following question:

I have recently started a new blog and want to set up a google site map. I downloaded the plugin and activated it but I am still having trouble getting my site map to work. It says I need to make sure the file is writeable and this was where I got lost. Can you help?

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For awhile now, I have contemplated doing a Q&A feature post that would address questions from my readers. I’ve been compiling some of the questions and answers that I think will help people out of a tight spot. These questions can be on any topic; from Photoshop questions to Wordpress issues, tutorial requests to general banter. I will try to answer each question as best I can and give you resources where you can find more help on a given topic. So without further ado…I give you Q&A with GrandmasterB.

Question From: Jamie
In one of your tutorials it says to place a guide at 400x and 400y. How is this done??? Please help.

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Recently, Cuzzy from Cuzoogle.com contacted me about creating a new banner image for his blogroll post dubbed “Rolling a Blog Joint”. Since the overall premise is a play on the word joint, I thought something with a textured paper background and perhaps a pot leaf image would do the trick. Amazingly, enough there is a company named ‘Pot Leaf’ and their logo was available on BrandsoftheWorld.com, so that will save me a step of recreating the leaf in illustrator. The paper texture for the background will be a combination of a number of paper artwork that I found on Bittbox; which is a great resource for this type of stuff. So, that should be enough background on this project…let’s get ‘rolling‘.

STEP ONE: SETTING UP THE DOCUMENT

The finished size of this image will be 450p wide x 150p high, but I’m going to start with a bigger canvas size. The reason being is that I want to be able to adjust the textured background to fit, and later I will crop it out. So, let’s start out by creating a new document that’s 600×600. From there drag guides to the center at 300x and 300y and then recenter the rulers to make that point 0. After that drag out horizontal guides to +/- 75px and vertical guides to +/-225px. These outer guides will be our bounding box…all of the content will go inside this area. Anything outside the bounding box will be cutoff in the final step, so make double sure everything is inside that box.

STEP TWO: CREATING THE BACKGROUND

I want to make the background a different color from the text and leaf image, so I thought a light shade of brown would be a good contrast and it will make the paper more realistic. I’ll use a light shade (b79573) and a darker shade (7a5f43) and create a radial gradient; which will be the base of the background. Create a new layer and drag out a radial gradient starting a bit above the top guide and down towards the right corner (light to dark). We create a new layer, because I want to have a base layer that’s transparent…this layer will come into play later on in the tutorial. After you’ve made your gradient, rename the layer to ‘Base‘.

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I am usually not too big on picking up graphic design magazines, because a lot of times they’re really not worth the price you pay. Another reason is that for some reason American magazine publishers don’t seem to put many out, that are very helpful. After seeing that one of my favorite design houses, Go Media was being featured in the latest issue of Advanced Photoshop Magazine I figured I would check it out.

I went over to the local Borders bookstore and after walking around the store for ten minutes (it’s a new store and it’s huge), I finally found the magazine rack. My first impression of the magazine was that it’s designed well and definitely gets the readers attention with the bright cover art. The other thing that caught my attention was the sticker price. Each issue of the magazine runs £6.00, but with the markup and the exchange rate it was $15.50 USD. I immediately thought “this magazine is going back on the rack for the next sucker”, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to give it a free browse in store.

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If there’s one thing that I am a big proponent of it is customization…just take a look at my theme! I took the Milk-It Theme that was popularized by one of the better-known Making Money Online gurus and spun it into something of my own creation. I took that same approach when I created the RSS Feed Icon for the site. I didn’t want something that looked like it was pulled off the shelf and slapped on the site…I wanted something that was custom that carried the design of GrandmasterB. So, how did I do it? Well, I’m not a magician so I guess I am going to let this little secret out of the bag. I took the great source files from Feed Icons and morphed it into something of my own.

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