Photoshop CS2 Creativity Tour

Spent a pleasant couple of days up in London last week, primarily to go along to the Photoshop CS2 seminar at the Business Design Centre, Islington. I thought the seminar was excellent - far exceeded my expectations. Photoshop is a vast tool and I was wondering at what level the seminar would be pitched and how much they would manage to get through in just a day and was pleasantly surprised. I've been using photoshop for a number of years but know I barely scratch the surface. There are so many methods you can use to get an end result and you kind of muddle through in some instances. It was great to see some approaches in situ that could achieve results that would have been far more painful and time consuming using my methods. Probably aimed more at the illustrator than the photographer as the speaker, Bert Monroy, is that way inclined, but nonetheless, tips for all.

Layer masks have been features that I've never really got to grips with which is ridiculous as they are so powerful and useful. It was so useful to see different results and working methods- has started to click with me now. Other useful stuff was the exploitation of the Layer Style tool, particularly 'Blending Options'. Bert really showed how varied results could be by tweaking and experimenting with the various attributes.

There were some useful workflow tips too. Bert showed an impressive photo-realistic illustration that had involved hundres of hours of work. Each portion of the image was a separate file of multiple layers. This enabled changes and tweaks to be made with minimal disruption and allowed him to re-use elements of the work for other projects.

But above all else, the real message of the day was to experiment with the tools. So many effects have been discovered through exploiting the tools in personal project work. All quite inspirational. Oh and I am now a NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) member. Reminds me - I have a dvd on 'mastering camera raw' to watch...

Display: inline-block

OOh just had a frustratring problem. I won't bore you with the details, but I was creating a horizontal menu via a list set to display-inline. I wanted the 'a tag' to fill the menu bar if you like so that the hover could change the background image that filled the height of the list. No problem, I thought, I'll simply set the 'a tag' to display; inline-block. Fine for IE. However, Firefox kinda ignored it as it apparently doesn't support inline-block. So quick search on the web found me a useful hack - using -moz-inline-block. Alas, Firefox just displayed the 'a tags' as block elements. Sulk. Further searching brought me to this site which offered an alternative to this: -moz-inline-box. Seems to work a treat - so many thanks for this tip!!

Website logos as background images

I've been debating with myself recently about my method of displaying company logos on websites. I tend to create a div that uses a style that holds the logo/topbanner image as a background image. My thinking behind this was that it keeps the page source clean of images, it allows any amendment to the top banner to be made just once via the stylesheet rather than ensuring every page is changed and it won't display if the stylesheet is ignored which adds to the accessibility of the page.

The downside I guess I've been questioning is, that if the stylesheet is ignored, the site is left with no visual branding. Now I think there are pros and cons with this. Overall, I think this is a good thing. Usually if a stylesheet is ignored, its because the visitor is just interested in getting to the text with as little intereference as possible, whether visually or via a screenreader. Losing the height of a top banner image can also help with this. But should you still have some visual cue that brands the site even if the stylesheet is ignored?

An alternative might be to include an image tag to hold a small logo in the top banner div. This could be styled to be hidden so that it only comes into play when the stylesheet is ignored, so a logo would still display regardless. However, this means adding some extraneous code to the page so I'm not altogether happy with that idea. Plus I still am unsure whether visual branding would be appreciated once the stylesheet has been ignored. At that stage, a decision has been made to ignore visual styling and concentrate on the content. So I think I'll plod on with my method unless a different requirement convinces me otherwise.