Category Archives: tiles

New Banner & Background.

I’ll be doing some much needed work to the entire site soon. Doing the 100 Days of Code on Twitter I realized just how dated my design was. I now hate the old design so much, that I’m taking it down while I create a new one! I also thought it was time update the winter theme of the blog.

This is temporary. I was playing around with gIMP and it just felt sort of Easter timey, springy to me. I’ll probably change this up again shortly after Easter. I like the header graphic a lot. The background was just a quick edit in gIMP to try and match the header graphic.

I really like the way the header graphic came out. I wasn’t really trying for this, but it just sort of happened. I like when projects happen by accident sometimes.

This will probably be real temporary. I just wanted something to match the header. Did this real quick, I’ll have to play around with backgrounds when I have some more time.

Create a Watermark In Gimp

Today I want to show you how to create a watermark in Gimp to protect your copyrighted work. For the example I’ll use one of the tiles from my first graphic pack that I put up for sale. I needed a watermark to protect the sample graphics that can be seen here.

This is real simple to do and using Gimp we can achieve this in about 4 simple steps. NOTE: I tried to highlight all the buttons and tools that you will have to use. For the final steps I combined the opacity and rotate tool. If your new though, you can just mouse over the buttons to find out what they are. Just click on images to enlarge.

$bg-fractal-5-space$ First download and load the trippy psychedelic fractal graphic above in Gimp. Once the tile is loaded you want to create a new layer and make sure that transparency is checked. If you like the graphic, click here for information on use.

Now select a font. I chose Sans Bold, I wanted to use something kind of chunky. And change your color to white and make the font size about 60px. Then click on the tile and type Sample. Note: If Gimp creates a font layer for you, some versions will, just delete the unused transparent layer.

Now click on the rotate tool. Then click on the Sample text and rotate till its going across the tile from corner to corner. You may want to use the move tool to center it. Just click on the move tool then click directly on the text and move it into position.

Finally, click on the opacity and bring it down to about 30 or whatever you think looks good. The goal is to make it not look overly annoying and not completely kill the design.

funky psychedelic trippy background tile.

Finished product will look something like this.

That’s it, you’re done ! Click file, save, export as filename.jpg and your sample watermark is finished. You could also use a transparent svg file in whatever color you wanted as the overlay and then slide the opacity for the svg to get the same effect only in a design instead of text. I may do that in another tutorial down the road.

To see this effect in use click here.

Getting With The Winter Season

I wanted to do this way before the Winter Solstice but I just didn’t have time. The holiday season always gets hectic around here, and I just didn’t have time to blog, or even notice that the blog still had an autumn motif. Well, better late than never ! The Design Blog is now decorated for the winter months.

The snowflake tile was created in Gimp 2.8 as was the header graphic. The image for the header graphic was taken at a local park. I should of spent a little more time post processing and getting the snow a bit whiter but I didn’t. If it was for a customer I probably would of spent a little more time on it.

The cute little snowman rss icon was found here.

Feel free to use the snowflake tile for any of your design needs. If you use it and like it, although it’s not necessary a link back would be appreciated. I love leaving web freebies for you guys, and hope the links and free graphics help in your design work. Thanks for checking out The Design Blog.

Create A Seamless Fall Leaf Background Using Gimp

In true Buffalo N.Y. fashion September arrives and the weather starts to change quickly. I woke up this morning to dark cloudy skies, rain, and already the leaves are starting to change from brilliant hues of green to the lovely autumn rusts of fall. It put me in the perfect mood to work on the blog, and make some seasonal changes. I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone and also post a simple Gimp tutorial on making a seamless background for your website, or blog.

The image I’m using for this tutorial can be found here. Image credits go to CarolinaJG at morguefile.com. If you’ve never used Morguefile.com before it’s a great place to find stock photography for your graphic design projects.

O.K. this should be pretty simple to follow. I’m hoping you have a basic idea of how Gimp works. In the future I’ll post some more in depth tutorials on the different tools and functions Gimp has to offer. For now I’m just going to post the basics of how to make a seamless tile using Gimp.

Step 1) Download the image from morgue file, or find one of your own. You’re going to turn the image into a seamless background, so the image should have some sort of pattern to it to begin with.

Step 2) Open the image in Gimp.

Step 3) Now in the toolbox that is usually placed on the left hand side of your screen, click on the rectangle select tool, click on fixed aspect ratio in the toolbox options and then make a perfect square on a section of the image. This can be achieved by clicking on the upper left hand corner of the image and then dragging it down to the lower right hand corner. Click on the center of the square and this will allow you to place the square on the section of the image you want.

Step 4) Now at the top of the screen click on the image drop down and in the drop down click on crop to selection.

Step 5) Now return to the top of the screen, click on the image drop down again, and this time select scale image and resize the image to 250 x 250 pixels.

Step 6) Now again at the top of the screen, click on filters, map, and select make seamless.

That’s it ! Your done. Save or Export the file as a .jpg image depending on what version of Gimp you’re using. You now have a seamless tile that you can use on a blog, website, or pattern fill in Gimp.

Some additional things I did to the image.

At the top of the screen I clicked on Colors and selected the color balance and adjusted the various color levels to bring out the reds, oranges and autumny colors of the leaves. I also changed around the brightness and contrast levels a bit.

Some Cool Tiles For Scrapbooking and Webdesign

Like anything internet or computer related, the best place to start when you’re new to something is the manual. RTFM, is so true with anything we do with tech. Whether it’s setting up that new smart phone, setting up a new blog, or learning a new piece of software, reading the manual always makes life easier. I started right at the beginning with http://codex.wordpress.org/Site_Design_and_Layout.

Now the WordPress codex is some pretty dry reading and as usual I got a bit sidetracked. I came to the part in the manual that explains how to change the background in the 2012 theme that comes pre configured with WordPress. I tried a few tiles I had on my computer and just wasn’t satisfied with the look, so like a high school student with A.D.D, I had to stop what I was doing and look around the internet for that oh so perfect background. That’s when I came across this :

I thought this was a really fun background to start the blog off with. I’ll probably change it down the road with something of my own design, but for now I thought this was perfect. I couldn’t stop there though, I ended up downloading 233 really cool tiles that can be used for web design, pattern fills, or scrap booking. The TOU states they’re o.k. to use for commercial projects, and they politely ask that if you find the tiles useful to please link to them. So here you go, I found the tiles very useful and definitely worthy of a link ! http://graphicssoft.about.com/

If you like collecting tiles this is a really great collection. Take some time and download a bunch. Hey, you can never have enough tiles and they always come in handy ! Enjoy !