Develop PHP applications with Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web Albums offers Web application developers a REST-based Data API to manipulate the photos and albums stored on its servers. PHP's SimpleXML extension and Zend's GData Library are ideal to process the XML feeds generated by this API so you can customize PHP photo management and photo sharing applications. In this article, meet the Picasa Web Albums Data API and see how you can use it to retrieve photos and photo metadata; add, modify and delete photos; and perform keyword searches of Picasa's user-generated content.

Vaswani, Vikram. IBM (2008). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>PHP

Forty Beautiful Grunge Photoshop Tutorials

In this collection, we present to you 40 excellent, high-quality grunge Photoshop tutorials. So fire up Photoshop and get ready to get your hands… dirty!

Gube, Jacob. Smashing (2008). Articles>Graphic Design>Image Editing>Adobe Photoshop

Color Universal Design (CUD): How to Make Figures and Presentations That are Friendly to Colorblind People

There are always colorblind people among the audience and readers. There should be more than ten colorblinds in a room with 250 people (50% male and 50% female). There is a good chance that the paper you submit may go to colorblind reviewers. Supposing that your paper will be reviewed by three white males (which is not unlikely considering the current population in science), the probability that at least one of them is colorblind is whopping 22%!

Okabe, Masataka and Kei Ito. University of Tokyo (2002). Articles>Accessibility>Graphic Design>Color

The Sphere of Design

The web design community thankfully seems to be wrapping up the "design vs. usability" argument. In case you missed it, the conclusion was: "Not either/or but both, and it depends."

Hunt, Ben. Web Design From Scratch (2006). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>Usability

Graphic Design vs. Usability

Graphic Design can "hijack" usability efforts if the graphic design team is not "on board" with usability. This is probably why these days more and more graphic artists (like the students at the Art Institute of Portland where I am currently teaching a class) are learning about usability and have a sensitivity for its user-centered intentions.

Spillers, Frank. Demystifying Usability (2004). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>Usability

Graphic Design Plays a Minor Role on the Web

The best websites are highly functional. They are task-focused. Graphic design has an important, though limited role. Don’t try and force the Web to be what it’s not.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2005). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design

Crop Images Contextually

Crop images contextually for faster downloads and higher impact. By cropping maximally and resizing you can convey meaning without slowing down your web pages.

Website Optimization (2008). Articles>Graphic Design>Image Editing

CSS Overlays: Using CSS Positioning to Overlay Web Objects

An overlay is when one web object overlaps another. Overlays are often used to highlight or draw attention to important items on websites to raise conversion rates. This article shows how use CSS positioning to avoid slicing and dicing your overlays and assembling with tables. Along the way we'll look at the workarounds we used to make the technique work with different browsers (most importantly IE5.x Mac and Safari).

Website Optimization (2008). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>CSS

Five Simple Steps to Designing Grid Systems:

Aesthetics can be measured and more importantly can be constructed. If you want something to be aesthetically pleasing there are steps you can take to make sure it is going in the right direction. Now I'm not saying that 'follow these rules and you will create something beautiful'. What I am saying is that by following a few of these guidelines can go some way into creating something compositionally balanced, which will inherently be more aesthetically pleasing.

Boulton, Mark. Mark Boulton (2007). Articles>Document Design>Graphic Design>Methods

Design for Persuasion

Five proven techniques for powerful and effective marketing design.

Blum, Sandra J. Dynamic Graphics (2005). Articles>Graphic Design>Marketing>Persuasive Design

Stepping into Oz: Managing and Delivering Successful Visual Design

How can design teams get to a successful visual design with their clients? Getting to the right visual design can be the trickiest part of a design project. One of the key reasons is that some clients have a hard time saying clearly what they want from the visual design.

Houck-Whitaker, Julia. Adaptive Path (2008). Articles>Management>Graphic Design>Visual Rhetoric

The Joy of Sketch: Explorations in Hand-Crafted Visuals

There’s always been a strong visual element to our work: architecture diagrams, interface wireframes, concept models, system and service models. And we’ve become adept at the computer applications that help us create these things. But there are other tools out there, such as the simple tools of pen, paper and sketching.

Rutter, Kate. Adaptive Path (2008). Articles>Graphic Design

The Sphere of Design

This article introduces the "Sphere of Design", which is a simple conceptual model that illustrates the relationship and trade-offs between 'looks' and 'works'.

Web Design From Scratch (2005). Articles>Graphic Design>Usability

Graphic Thoughts: My Top 10 Photoshop Moves, Part 1

Almost every time I speak to an audience about graphics or Photoshop, I’m asked if I went to school to learn what I know about the application. The truth is that while I spent more than 3 years in an Advertising Art degree program, I ultimately switched gears and got a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in marketing (Mom and Dad were thrilled with this news!), and that was in the early ’90s—pretty much in the infant stages of Photoshop.

Gray, Lawrence. Event DV (2008). Articles>Graphic Design>Image Editing>Adobe Photoshop

Graphic Thoughts: Creating Great Backgrounds in A Snap

Recently, I had the chance to go with my in-laws to City Museum in St. Louis. What an amazing place to get lost in by crawling through inventively designed tunnels that go underground to many stories below the city streets. The most impressive thing to me was how the place was constructed—they used everyday items, such as metal storage bins, bottles, and gears (plus what looked like a million other items) to create elaborate mazes of artwork.

Gray, Lawrence. Event DV (2008). Articles>Graphic Design>Image Editing>Adobe Photoshop

Creating Perspective Shadows

Perspective—it’s one of the first things you learn about in any art class. The basic idea is that it’s the way your eye actually sees something, represented on a flat surface such as paper or a monitor. A simple example is drawing a group of objects: You represent an object in the distance by making it smaller, while making objects close to the viewer larger—make sense? In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to create perspective shadows in Adobe Photoshop CS3. The result is dynamic, but the technique is a breeze!

Gray, Lawrence. Event DV (2008). Articles>Graphic Design>Image Editing>Technical Illustration

Good Designs Have Strong Contrast

Push contrast more than you might be naturally inclined. If you don’t, you end up with conflict. The next time you eat at a restaurant, look closely at the menu. A good menu has a high degree of contrast between sections.

Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2009). Articles>Document Design>Graphic Design

Text Extraction from Graphical Objects During XML Conversion

Materials that include ornamentation and complex design features have long been challenging to convert to XML, even by hand. The problem is two-fold: complex documents usually contain a variety of graphics, some of which may be simple ornamentation, with others actually fundamental to the subject matter. In addition, these graphics can consist of images overlaid either with text that is integral to the image content, or with actual body text. The analysis and extraction of such content into a meaningful order in the converted XML file is not currently possible via scripting conversion tools, and can be time-consuming and arduous to tag manually.

Germann, Ryan. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Graphic Design>XML

So, You Want To Screen Capture, Huh?

Here's a quick tutorial about screen captures, thus the title. If you're not sure what a screen capture is, then think about the pages you've seen lately. Maybe some of them have had specific sections of the desktop or a program made into an image. It was almost as if they captured part of the screen as an image.

Burns, Joe. HTML Goodies (2004). Articles>Documentation>Graphic Design>Screen Captures

Why 2007 I.P.C.C. Report Lacked ‘Embers’

Several authors of the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the projected effects of global warming now say they regret not pushing harder to include an updated diagram of climate risks in the report. The diagram, known as “burning embers,” is an updated version of one that was a central feature of the panel’s preceding climate report in 2001.

Revkin, Andrew C. New York Times, The (2009). Articles>Scientific Communication>Graphic Design>Visual Rhetoric

Four Ideas to Organize Your Technical Document Images and Screen Shots

Most technical writers would include at least a few images to illustrate a point, or screen shots that accompany the description of a certain step-by-step procedure, etc. Organizing such images can really become a problem, especially when you have dozens and hundreds of them. Finding, editing, and importing them can quickly become a logistical nightmare, especially when a technical writer is working under a deadline pressure. Here are four ideas to organize and name your images for higher productivity.

Akinci, Ugur. Technical Communication Center (2009). Articles>Graphic Design>Technical Illustration>Screen Captures

Strategic Numbers: Discussing the Value of Design With Sara Beckman

We’re excited to bring Sara Beckman from the faculty at the Haas School of Business back into the Adaptive Path fold. We first worked with her in 2003 on our groundbreaking report, Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience.

Rutter, Kate. Adaptive Path (2009). Articles>Interviews>Graphic Design>Assessment

Image Optimization Part 1: The Importance of Images

On average, 46.6% of the page weight for these popular sites consists of images, included either inline with tags or via CSS stylesheets. This is a massive percentage and it tells us one thing: There’s huge potential to improve the performance of websites if we can improve the way we handle the image payload. By focusing on images you can make a difference and delight your site visitors with a faster and more pleasant experience.

Stefanov, Stoyan. Yahoo (2008). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>Compression

Fifty Monochromatic Website Designs

Color choice is a key element to the success of any design. It invokes an atmosphere and sets the mood. One method for using color is to use only shades of a color, which is known as a monochromatic color scheme.

Shelton, Michael. Webdesigner Depot (2009). Articles>Web Design>Graphic Design>Color