Well, I’m not personally in the newest issue of ACCESS DIRECTV, but some of my work is…

A few weeks ago I eluded to the fact that I was going to have an advertisement that I designed published in the August issue of ACCESS DIRECTV. Well, I have received my copy of the recent issue and there it was in all of it’s splendor planted on page 16 right next to some clown that looks like the spawn of David Hasselhoff.

For those of you that don’t know yet; I am the web designer/developer for the MountainWest Sports Network. We were the first television networked solely dedicated to a college sports conference (Mountain West Conference). The network is now in it’s second year and is going to be available on satellite via DirecTV. We will now be the first college sports network to be covered nationally and this is very big news for us. The network will officially launch on DirecTV on channel 616 on August 27th, just three days before the 2008 Mountain West Conference football season starts.

I am currently working on some top secret stuff for our website at work that will be unveiled on the 27th to coincide with the launch on DirecTV. It should be a very big weekend for us and finally the 2008 college football season will be here with the NFL kicking off the season just a week later. I can’t wait!

~ GrandmasterB

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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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After writing the Photoshop tutorial on Creating Custom RSS Feed Icons, I decided that I should put together a set of icons based on the tutorial for my readers to download. There are a total of eight Feed Icons in this set (pictured above) and are saved in PNG format for you to use on your own blogs. I am contemplating doing another series of Freebies for my readers. If you have any suggestions on future freebies drop me a comment and I’ll see what I can hook up.

Download: RSS-Feed-Icons_Glassy.zip (330 KB)

~ GrandmasterB

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