I am working in Illustrator CS5. I want to select 100 objects (circles) and replace each of them with a 100 other various objects, each circle being replaced by one of the various objects, keeping the size of the originally selected circle. So in steps:
Each selected circle becomes one of the newly selected objects.
How to do this in Illustrator?
I would like to to create the image above. I have tried to make multiples layers of the waves and edit it's opacity but it does not seem to work. I would really appreciate some feedback and guidance. Thank you.
Answer
What I did:
I did it in all of 10 minutes I think. Hope it gives you an idea as to how to achieve it.
I'm designing for content where the taxonomy + metadata have never been put to good use in this subject matter.
I'm seeking inspiration beyond wikipedia: where a curated taxonomy + metadata (not user generated) have richly enhanced the browsing experience of the content.
I'm not interested in the metadata itself, just how its been used in the interface.
Thanks!
Answer
The BBC have been working hard on their BBC Wildlife section for a while - eg see top level section for:
They've been using domain driven designbook over traditional taxonomic architectures, and organizing information by things and their relationships rather than by documents for example.
I'm looking for a real world example of UX which can be used in a short workshop I'm running. I was hoping to find some sort of game where I could split the teams into small groups, give them a time limit to perform some simple tasks, then show the results.
My audience is mainly people who know very little at all about UX. Does anyone know of a simple, real world usability problem which can be described to the audience so they can think in a way related to UX principals? Ideally, I'd like to get them working in teams to highlight the need for collaborative thinking.
All ideas welcome. (Sorry if this question is a bit outside the norm.)
Answer
The game you choose depends completely on your intention with the course.
I would go for this "game":
Why:
It is very important that this is well prepared and well organized. Prepare as much as possible. Have a clear time frame for each step, and test if this time frame is ok (not too tight and not too loose). Be clear about the issues you want to point out in the summary.
So I was thinking about how I could make a responsive menu a better experience rather than just firing it into a drop down on mobile that has a hamburger as an icon.
Would it perhaps be a better user experience to limit the amount of navigation items, for example if you had:
(We'll use this site as an example)
Questions, Tags, Users, Badges, Unanswered and Ask Question...
To perhaps keep the menu visible but only hide the less important navigation items under a drop down called more with:
Questions, More and Ask Question
Or is the hamburger menu the better experience?
Answer
Paddi MacDonnell wrote an interesting article on the hamburger menu and related mobile-first approaches to design a few days ago:
It outlines some of the problems of hamburger menus, and concludes with the observation that the device is something of a way to brush the navigation of a complex app under the carpet of the hamburger icon (my carpet analogy, not hers!).
Facebook’s app famously swapped their hamburger icon for a tab bar, and as a result saw improved conversions. But Facebook have done something far more significant than swap menu designs. Recently they’ve released their Messenger app, and the big deal about that is that they already had a perfectly functional and popular app that they could have integrated the messaging with. Facebook have compartmentalized their functions, by focusing each app’s role they’ve arrived at two simple apps, instead of one complex one. The reduced functionality results in a reduced set of menu options, and less need for a hamburger menu.
Good apps are highly focussed, and they’ve evolved that way through far more rigorous user testing than the Web is subjected to. To create an app-style experience we need to simplify our sites, simplify again, and then simplify a bit more. If necessary, break your architecture down into manageable bite-sized pieces, microsites almost. When we present our users with a simple set of options, the problem of a complex menu never arises.
Making use of the hamburger icon is like slapping a band-aid on an injury: it patches it up, but underneath something is still broken.
As suggested in the question, if you can sensibly break down the architecture of the app/site in such a way that you can supply enough relevant and useful navigational items without having to resort to the hamburger icon, then that simplifies things for the user.
If, superficially it seems impossible to reduce the number of items to a manageable number, then perhaps it may be worth taking a step back and considering what you might have to do in order to make it possible - and whether that chunking or restructuring process would improve the mobile experience overall.
I would add that while reducing the navigation to the point where a hamburger menu is not needed, you should ensure that you still provide the basic navigation needs of being able to go back to where you came from, proceed to a similar item, move to a next stage, and avoid being left down a dead end.
Edit: See also: Why and How to avoid Hamburger Menus by Luis Abreu, where the same conclusion is reached:
The solution is reviewing your information architecture.
Consider the following (idealized) chart.
Now, I have worked with colleagues from every side of this spectrum and have learnt that, unfortunately, it tends to be more like this.
Most "web developers" tend to know very little of design principles while, on the other hand, "web designers" tend to know very little of the technical side of the web. Well rounded "web crafters" are hard to find.
This unfortunate but real scenario makes creating a responsive website for a team of developers and designers a pain. Web designers tend to forget the site should adapt to every possible commercial device and often design rigid layouts that look great on their own screen but are impossible to turn into responsive websites. Developers, on the other hand, tend to make brutal adaptations of the designer's vision trying to achieve responsiveness.
Where should the responsibility of designing a responsive website fall? Should the web designer be expected to provide well thought guidelines for the developer on how to adapt the website for every possible scenario? Or is this an unreasonable expectation?
Please notice I am focusing on the design side of it, not on the developing side of it.
Answer
Any well skilled designer is always going to be interested in implementation to a degree. Perhaps not in an "I can build it" aspect, but at least in a "that's not possible" aspect.
Whether a designer hits the far right side of your graph or not, they should always know what they can and can't do in any given medium. You can't design well for print if you don't understand separations. You can't design well for signage if you don't understand resolutions, etc.
I think any designer responsible for web materials should at least fall into this:
And I don't think it's as lopsided as your second graph.
The days where you can do a pretty mock up in Photoshop and simply hand it off are gone in my experience. In my experience, developers (meaning the left side of your graph) aren't really looking for someone on the far right. They are looking for a designer who at least understands what is possible and the restrictions necessary for designing well. This moves them from the far right, at least one tick left.
Are there still developers that hit the far left, absolutely. Just as there are still designers that hit the far right. However, a more important aspect may be experience. Are there developers/designers that hit the far left/right if they have 5, 8 or 10 years experience? I doubt it. The more experience one has the closer to the middle they get.
So perhaps this is more appropriate:
In a company structure you look for individuals to fill the far right/left position. This provides a solid basis for that desired skill set. However, I'd speculate that the more desirable a candidate is, the closer to the middle two images their skills fall.
Given a stochastic model for the evolution of St, with a given SDE for its volatility, how can you tell if the given model satisfy the sticky delta (or the sticky strike) property? Is it possible to prove analytically this property? Or the only way is to actually compute the prices?
I've always particularly liked poems with very fixed structure (e.g. a Villanelle or Sestina), both to read and to write. However nowadays, I've noticed a remarkable number of poems I come across appear be simply passages of prose with a linebreak inserted every few inches, often without even any metrical consistency. This has set me wondering, there's a pretty clear distinction between structured/unstructured poems, but which format is preferred?
For the sake of precision, I'll clarify the question down to something specific: Given a poem X which has structure, and a poem Y that is "free verse", and assuming both are of equal quality (however that may be judged), is there a bias towards one form over another? Do critics commonly prefer a specific form? Do publishers prefer to publish books of form X or Y? To what degree?
Answer
Let's start with this - what is the purpose of writing in traditional forms and meter? According to Preface to Lyrical Ballads, it is a poetic convention which is fundamentally pleasing to the reader. It is easy for the reader to follow, predictable, and pleasing to the ear.
...the metre obeys certain laws, to which the Poet and Reader both willingly submit because they are certain, and because no interference is made by them with the passion, but such as the concurring testimony of ages has shown to heighten and improve the pleasure which co-exists with it.
I read a recent article that pointed out that, while many leading poets are abandoning meter and traditional forms, the poems that are most popular remain by a huge margin ones written in meter and traditional form. However, it is important to note that by popular this article included many people who don't read poetry on a regular basis, so although these people have read some poetry at some point in the past and can give an opinion on their favorite poem, these people are for the most part not the ones out there buying poetry books and showing up at readings.
So there is, on the one hand, the opinion of a general public who do not vote with their wallets or their time to support poetry in any way, and then the opinion of what The Atlantic in 1991 described https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/gioia/gioia.htm:
AMERICAN POETRY now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. ...
Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell Jacoby's definition of contemporary academic renown from The Last Intellectuals, a "famous" poet now means someone famous only to other poets. ...
Daily newspapers no longer review poetry. There is, in fact, little coverage of poetry or poets in the general press. From 1984 until this year the National Book Awards dropped poetry as a category. Leading critics rarely review it. In fact, virtually no one reviews it except other poets. Almost no popular collections of contemporary poetry are available except those, like the Norton Anthology, targeting an academic audience.
The full article is well worth the read. It goes on to describe the decline of verse (the correlation between how poets used it less and poetry became less popular with the public), the situation today where there is so little attention paid to poetry outside a specific subculture which is increasing introspective, and that there is a very large amount of bad poetry that is getting published today.
Seven years later, in 2009, Newsweek reported that poetry readership had fallen to a new low.
In 2015, the Washington Post reported that:
Some people are still reading [poetry], although that number has been dropping steadily over the past two decades....
In 1992, 17 percent of Americans had read a work of poetry at least once in the past year. 20 years later that number had fallen by more than half, to 6.7 percent....
Some numbers that speak to that point -- since 2004, the share of all Google searches involving "poetry" has fallen precipitously. Today, poetry searches account for only about one fifth of the total search volume they accounted for ten years ago.
Within the subculture that exists, there is a strong opposition to writing poems in form, as this article from Poetry Foundation explains https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/89288/why-write-in-form:
In poetry, one of the best ways to practice technique is to write in traditional forms. But for many writers—and I’ve been guilty of this as well—this notion can elicit not just avoidance but also outright opposition. It’s easy enough to look at the current literary landscape and say there’s no point to practicing these old forms. Most journals don’t seem interested in publishing formal poetry, and though there are some fantastic poets working in form today, they are in the minority. Even when there is a resurgence of interest in form (such as New Formalism), it’s seen as an outlier, even reactionary.
The distaste for traditional poetic form and techniques by some notable writers has influenced other writers not to completely abandon these techniques, but to hide them so they're not so obvious, as explained in this New York Times article on Margaret Atwood http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/03/specials/atwood-oates.html:
... like many modern poets I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.
So, in summary, yes, there is a preference among the subculture, as detailed in the Poetry Foundation quotation above, and that preference is strongly against poems in form (though there are exceptions and some publications which only publish poems in form). At the same time there is an opposite preference among the general public, but they've tuned out.
I have published some story books for kids and I have already bought the ISBN numbers for the same. But I am confused on how to get those ISBN numbers as barcodes on covers of books. What is the cheapest way to do this? Please advise.
I have a code that finds the implied volatility using the Newton-Raphson method.
I set the number of trial to 1000 but sometimes it fails to converge and doesn't find the result.
Is there a better method to find the result? Are there any technical conditions in which this numerical method is expected to fail to converge to the solution?
Here is the C# code:
public double findIV(double S, double K, double r, double time, string type, double optionPrice)
{
int trial= 1000;
double ACCURACY = 1.0e-5;
double t_sqrt = Math.Sqrt(time);
double sigma = (optionPrice / S) / (0.398 * t_sqrt); // find initial value
for (int i = 0; i < trial; i++)
{
Option myCurrentOpt = new Option(type, S, K, time, r, 0, sigma); // create an Option object
double price = myCurrentOpt.BlackScholes();
double diff = optionPrice - price;
if (Math.Abs(diff) < ACCURACY)
return sigma;
double d1 = (Math.Log(S / K) + r * time) / (sigma * t_sqrt) + 0.5 * sigma * t_sqrt;
double vega = S * t_sqrt * ND(d1);
sigma = sigma + diff / vega;
}
throw new Exception("Failed to converge.");
}
public double ND(double X)
{
return (1.0 / Math.Sqrt(2.0 * Math.PI)) * Math.Exp(-0.5 * X * X);
}
Answer
Peter Jaeckel wrote a paper just on how to solve this problem:
By Implication (July 2006; Wilmott, pages 60-66, November 2006). Probably the most complicated trivial issue in financial mathematics: how to compute Black's implied volatility robustly, simply, efficiently, and fast
downloadable from jaeckel.org
In my experience the most important thing is to make sure that you are working with an option out of the money. If the option is in the money use put-call parity to transform to the other case.
I have a client that has some content with pretty intense scientific language. They realize this, and want to offer contextual definitions, on demand.
I can find lots examples of this being done via modal windows and new windows, but I would really rather do it inline so not to lose the broader context of the page.
Are there any ways to give the user a good experience when they are viewing on mobile?
I have a problem calculating VaR with the Monte Carlo Simulation.
I followed the next steps and would like know if it is a right way to calculate VaR or if I need something more?
The steps
Generate random numbers
Define Correlation Matrix
Define volatilities, drift and weights
Perform a Cholesky decomposition of the correlation matrix
Multiply random numbers by the Cholesky matrix
Multiply result of step 5 by volatility and drift
Take the exponent of results from step 6
Take log returns of step 7 results
Create the weighted portfolio returns
Calculate the VaR (use percentile function at right confidence interval)
Calculate the volatilites of your random numbers
Cross-check with analytical VaR
If you take this image: 
Is it possible to make a gradient in Illustrator that follows that path? I made something similar (just not with a single path, but with the pen tool) and I want to have the gradient follow the shape, but instead it just goes either linear (top to bottom) or radial (from the inside out). I want to have the start of the spiral lighter and than the tip in the center to be darker.
Is there a way to place files in Photoshop without scaling (true pixel of image)? They automatically resize to fit screen when I drag into PSD file! For example, when place a 48x48px to 480x480px PSD, it's scaled to 480x480.
My system info: Photoshop CS5, Windows 7.
Answer
I was unable to reproduce this exact effect. And even the setting "Resize Image During Place" seems to only affect images larger than the canvas.
So my best guess is that the both files need the same resolution. Because pasting a 48x48px (72dpi) image and a 48x48px (144dpi) on a 480x480px (72dpi) canvas have different results.
I wish to let my users reorder elements in a grid - not do automatic sorting on a column. They select which element is the first, which one comes after the other, etc.
I thought of and saw some solutions that might work depending on the case:
I am tempted to combine two of these techniques like the index column + drag & drop, but I'm afraid to cumulate the drawbacks of both instead of having the benefits of both.
What are the reordering techniques that have proven to work?
Answer
Netflix combines three methods in their queue. You can drag-and-drop, but also specify a particular row number, or click to move it to the very top:
What I find interesting about their approach is that they have put the "Top" icon (circled in green) right there on each row, as opposed to requiring the user to make a selection and then click somewhere at the top of the page, where most web apps put such icons or buttons.
In your case, I would use drag-and-drop, but would put a gears icon on every row:
This would permit several actions:
The user can drag-and-drop one or more rows
The user can select multiple rows, then click on the gears icon to have a menu drop down and perform any number of things, e.g. move selection to the top or bottom, move selection a specified number of rows up or down (in which case a tiny dialog appears), copy, cut, etc. Virtually no limit.
A regular challenge that I face is balancing two (or more) logos. Whether they need to be equal or one needs to be given priority. Some logos however might be squares, others rectangles, circles, etc...
As a quick sample I snagged a nice high resolution photo from Unsplash and pretend its going to be an advertisement that needs to show some footwear brand logos on it. In this case I used Adidas and Saucony.
This is certainly not balanced even though they're height is the same:
Likewise this is not balanced even though they're width is the same:
So then the question becomes when are they in balance, is this balance:
Maybe a little more adjustment, is this balance:
And in these examples I'm only working with two Black Logos. Factor in color and it can get even more difficult to balance. Another issue being when there's tiny text as part of the logo.
So the question is, other than estimating / eye-balling it, what tips, methods or even tools are there to balance different sized logos?
Answer
Define how much available space you have by creating, placing, and balancing empty elements within your design.
I chose to use the Golden Ratio for the above (100px x 161px) because it's better to work with a horizontal rectangle, than it is with a perfect square based on most logos being wider than they are tall, and the golden ratio is as good a number as any when I don't have a good reason for it. Working with a bunch of particularly wide logos such as typographical ones, I'd probably go with wider canvas.
Set up a canvas the same size as the "available space" you defined earlier.
I usually choose to add some space / bleed / padding on the left and right and create guides to keep the logos away from the absolute edge, but it isn't a necessity.
Find your widest logo and place it on the canvas, before scaling it to fit to the edges of the horizontal guides (or canvas if no guides exist).
Find your tallest logo and place it into the same canvas. Scale it until the main text in it is roughly the same size as the main text in the other placed logo.
Place it onto a separate canvas, vertically and horizontally center it, and then place horizontal guides above and below it.
Now this method is not guaranteed to work with every logo, there's simply too much variation for any single workflow to cover it all. However, adjusting the original canvas (available space) based on the average shape of the logos you're specifically working with can produce better results.
Just keep in mind, the best thing you can do is:
Setting standards, even if they're arbitrary, can help to create a stronger consistency. These consistent invisible boundaries are unconsciously noticed, but still noticed.
I used the guides to produce the Nike and Adidas logos to sit alongside the others. See a live jsFiddle aswell:
I have to confess, after I sized all four, I chose to manually tweak the Saucony logo a touch smaller because it was slightly larger than the rest. This method is useful for creating an overall baseline, and then once you have all logos at roughly the same size, you can select the few that need manual tweaking and finish them by eye at the end.
I’ve been experimenting in GIMP; I didn’t get on so well with Inkscape. I want to get into retro designs in an 80's style. I found this old (closed) question with an 80's text made in GIMP but the grid and perspective tools are still a mystery to me.
I want to make a blue neon grid like in the following pic:
On my computer I just see the grid as white lines that I can adjust but only as “information” and not as an object with color like in the picture with blue squared lines.
I just wrote last week about Sleeping Beauty but a different version of it. (I changed the characters, and the conflict, and mostly everything except the fact that one of the main characters is cursed and must fall asleep, only to be woken by true love's kiss. In this case I made it the guy.)
I want to turn it into a novel, except whenever I try to write novels I get intimidated and I can't seem to do it. But then again, I've never wrote a short story about it beforehand.
What I have to do to turn it into a novel? Obviously, I need to add more detail. But do I add more characters? (There are only 4 in my short story.) Do I make the scenes longer? etc.
I have an image of smoke over a black background. If I set the blending mode of this layer to screen, the image's background is perfectly edited out, however if there isn't another layer below this, the screen mode does nothing. How can I make the background truly transparent, so it is just smoke on a transparent background? Colour Range selection is useless in this scenario, because smoke needs different levels of transparency throughout, and not just a clear cut selection. Thanks
Answer
You don't see the transparency effect if there's nothing below the layer because there's nothing there for Photoshop to calculate (all these blend modes involve calculations based on the values of the corresponding pixels on each layer), so it just shows you the image.
In this particular case (as Farray pointed out while I was writing this!), you can pull an easy trick on Photoshop and make yourself a smoke-filled image with all the transparency intact. It's easy because you already have gray smoke on black, just like a channel.
Here's what you start with: I've taken a "smoke on black" image (Layer 1) and applied it in Screen mode over an arbitrary background (Layer 0).
Step 1. Hide all layers but the smoke.
Step 2. Switch to the Channels Palette and Ctrl-Click (Cmd-Click on Mac) on any of the channel thumbnails ("any" because in this case they're all the same).
What you've just done is load a selection based on the grayscale values in the channel you chose. Just like a mask, white is fully selected (opaque) and black is fully unselected (transparent), with the gray shades between.
Step 3. Create a new, blank layer, set your foreground color to white, and fill the selection. Hide all the other layers.
Step 4. Deselect, turn on your original background, admire the result, and move on to greater things!
Farray's suggestion is very similar. Do steps 1 and 2 then use your selection to create a mask. The advantage of this approach is that you can then and "tweak" the mask in the Masks panel.
I have a few payment brand images that need to go in the footer of a website, the footer is very dark grey, to the point where making the logos grey-scale wouldn't be much of a good idea, especially as we still need the logos to stand out.
For example I took the following logo: 
And changed it to fit with our very dominant red theme:
Is this good in terms of the user's perspective? Is this legal or misrepresenting the brand? If so is completely changing a logo to white acceptable for dark backgrounds?
Answer
In case that wasn't clear: don't do this. Never change colours in a logo of a third party yourself.
Any good logo has alternatives with less or secondary colours, or even a negative (light for on dark background). Use that. As Billy Kerr suggests, many big companies have dedicated download packs with all kinds of alternatives for you to use. They usually don't take kindly to you not following those guidelines and versions.
The only exception I could think of is the use of social media icons, and even that is a grey area. Even those companies would rather have you not use re-coloured versions of their logos, but these are ignored so commonly, that, at least in my mind, it's at least somewhat okay.
Should an identity not have such alternatives, making the logo completely white or completely black is a somewhat less correct but acceptable compromise. In this case, contacting their marketing department might be a good idea.
On some sites when you don't have an account and you are asked: Sign-in with gmail, or sign-in with facebook. When you click and your account isn't found, it automatically signs you up using the selected social network, in other places like stackexchange for example: when you login and you don't have an account: it ask you to confirm like below:
.
I am working on something and I am wondering which one will be the best practice.
Would you use the center of gravity as reference for centering, the plain shape (xmin/xmax/ymin/ymax)? Or any other methods? Maybe centering based on your gut feeling?
Imagine an object like this, you have to center on a poster or shirt:
How does one achieve a sense of balance when mandatory design elements are clearly unbalanced within themselves?
I have a basic question about annualized Sharpe Ratio Calculation: if I know the daily return of my portfolio, the thing I need to do is multiply the Sharpe Ratio by $\sqrt{252}$ to have it annualized.
I don't know why is that, can any body explain?
Is there any evidence which shows whether users are more able to recognise another user's Photo over their Username or vice versa?
I am interested in understanding this from a usability perspective.
Lets say on a site such as this network, a user has both a username as well as a photo/avatar.
Which of these is more recognisable/memorable?1
i.e. If DVK was to change his picture2, would this throw users off (not quickly recognising who the post if from) or would there be more of an issue if Jon Skeet changed his username?3
Answer
Some people have a great memory for words, other people a great memory for faces. Some have both or neither.
Some avatars can be completely generic and difficult to remember, such as Gravatar's autogenerated avatars.
Others can be very unique and memorable. Your DVK example is a good one.
Some usernames can be completely generic, such as this site's "user3216857". Others can be very unique and memorable. This is also very individual, since topics or references that impress me might not impress someone else (e.g. the username Gandalf wouldn't be especially memorable to someone unfamiliar with LoTR, but it's safe to assume that more SO newcomers would remember the name Gandalf than Jon Skeet - which is only memorable because he is Jon Skeet).
People process images faster than written words, even in their native language. Also, images contain more information and they are much more diverse. If you squint a little, all words will look pretty much the same, while you can still tell apart your average avatars. So they're usually easier to identify. This is separate from memorability.
In the logo I'm making, there is a circle which has text wrapped around it on the upper half. I used the warp tool but it distorts the text and doesn't give the desired effect.
I can't use the type on path tool because that is not the effect I want.
I want the individual letters to be straight and the only way I can think of doing that is to mannually edit each letter to sit around the circle. I was wondering if there was another, more efficient way to fo that.
A couple questions about the CAPM model:
If I only know the riskfree rate and expected market return, how do I solve for $\beta$ ?
Given the stock's variance, how do I solve the percentage of it that is due to market risk and how do I interpret this?
I searched this question through google, but I cannot find reasonable answer. Please help me! Thanks in advance for your help.
As a practical matter, aside from what Section 508 states about web documents being readable without relying on an external stylesheet, do vision-impaired users really try to browse the web with css completely disabled? If so, is there a particular browser or add-on that would typically be used?
Most of the tools I've used to disable css in Chrome and IE either disregard css that is dynamically injected, or have to be reapplied on each page load, or both. I can't find a native way in these browsers to disable all css, and using they types of add-on tools I've just described to try and browse the web with css disabled seems both unreliable and painful.
In Firefox you can disable all css via a menu option, but this also turns off support for the html5 "hidden" attribute. Again, this does not seem like a practical way to browse the web.
We have customers who are using IE + the Web Accessibility Toolbar from The Paciello Group to test our apps for 508 compliance. One of the requirements is that all of our pages be usable with css disabled, and we have gotten dinged for having things like modal dialog content and field validation messages show up when css is disabled. Most of our pages are not documents but complex data displays and forms. We have our markup structured fairly well so that the content is grouped nicely with proper headings, we have aria landmarks on the nav and main content areas, etc., and the content itself is pretty readable without css. And then... we also have 3rd-party widgets like the jQuery UI date picker and select2, and the internal components mentioned above like modal dialogs and validators, which are highly dependent upon css in order to make any sense at all.
This article, also from the Paciello Group, clearly suggests using css to hide things because that method enjoys the widest support: http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2012/05/html5-accessibility-chops-hidden-and-aria-hidden/
So the group that suggests using display:none to hide content for greatest support also produces a tool that prompts testers to object to the use of display:none. Which leads me to ask... does anyone anywhere really try to use the modern web with css disabled, or is it much more practical to make sure our app doesn't break if people zoom the window or use their browser options to change font sizes and colors?
Answer
Wow. I can't even reply to comments to my own response until I get 50 rep points? Talk about usability...
@aames, all good questions.
I fully understand the situation with your code base. Having worked at Salesforce in both a UX and Dev capacity, particularly around accessibility, I know what it's like dealing with legacy code and developers who don't know a SPAN from a TD. The only time they started to get caught up with 508 compliance was when they created a new framework and started rebuilding everything with that. That's the team I was on when I ended up leaving for another job. But, yes, you take what you can get.
The "best" screen reader is Jaws. If you had to focus on appeasing one screen reader it would be that one. It's certainly the most popular though NVDA has made leaps in the past few years. At Salesforce we focused Jaws/IE and VoiceOver/Safari for Mac. They don't share the same set of accessibility APIs though they do overlap so a solution for one won't always work for the other. Usually they do though.
jQuery UI has gotten a lot better around accessibility. I'm very impressed with it in that respect and happy to see it evolve. Their tooltip is a wonderful example of good accessibility and I wouldn't hesitate to use that technique. It is 508 compliant and if someone is telling you different I don't think they're fully aware of how the spec works. The only thing I'd do differently is insert the HTML for the tooltip immediately after the DOM element that is triggering it so that it flows more naturally with the content it is relevant to. That's not necessary but it is a little "nicer".
Also keep in mind, 508 is also painfully outdated. WCAG is a much better standard to work towards and is the basis for the revised 508 specifications. But again, the CSS turned off angle is really meant as a guide to make sure the structure and order of content makes sense on its own. If you have a footer don't put it first in the DOM and use CSS to make it look last. That sort of thing. Well, also things like using heading tags not styled DIVs, actual anchors instead of spans styled to look blue/underlined with onClick for navigating somewhere (I've seen it done) etc.
I've always loved to write. Granted I haven't been writing very much these days because of university but I want to publish a book one day. I want to keep writing as a hobby because I want to do more but I've never published anything before and I keep getting discouraged. I'm in a medicine university and I try to write when I'm free but I feel like it's never good enough.
I've been trying to write more on Fanfiction, read more and try to widen my vocabulary but I feel it's all in vain. I feel like something is missing for me to be a better writer. I'm too afraid of actually writing a book. I'm worried that I'm not experienced enough that people will hate it and that it won't be as good as I've always wanted.
Please tell me is there anyone that are writers without a degree here and if there is how did you do it? How did you manage to publish something? How can I teach myself to be better than I am today? I'm still eighteen and I know I have miles away before I can be that writer that really connects to the readers. Just how can I do it? I want to do medicine and I want to write. I want to do both and I'm torn apart. I feel like I've made a mistake and I don't know anymore. I'm really scared for the future so can someone please just tell me please.
If anyone knows a website I can go on to that professionals could actually critique my work and give me helpful advice I would really appreciate it (not whatpad the only genre that matters there is romance).
Answer
You do not need a degree to become a writer; you have the Internet. You can teach yourself what you need to know to become a writer; including some experiences you may not yet have (or may never have), and thus may not "connect" to entirely. Keep in mind that writers often have characters doing things they themselves have never done; murder being one extreme, or engaging in homosexual sex, or being in a sword fight for their life, or kidnapping a child, or a woman killing her rapist or abusive husband, or being involved in an elaborate con, or being a spy.
They did not learn how to make these sound authentic in college, they did research outside of it. Some things (being an authentic doctor or lawyer) may demand a lot of research, but even there: You don't have to actually practice medicine or law to get to something plausible. Just like the actors on TV don't have to be doctors, physicists or lawyers or psychologists in order to make a plausible acting experience.
You can also read what others have written, and emulate that (not copy it).
Further, you can read what published fiction authors have written about writing and how to go about it, like Stephen King ("On Writing") or Orson Scott Card or hundreds of others. Read ten books by different people and get a feel for what a story is.
(Books on writing are heavily biased toward plotting and planning a story. Many of us do not write like that, Stephen King is a "discovery writer", letting his story and characters develop as he goes. I suggest his book as a balance to most of what you will find out there.)
As for being discouraged: Most published authors write a few books before they get one published; or they revise endlessly until their first book gets published (JK Rowling revised and submitted the first Harry Potter for five years, rewriting it several times). This business takes persistence, and the average pay for a first book is around $3000 or $5000. Of course more if it is a blockbuster (like Harry Potter) but don't think you get rich on one book.
Discouragement is part of the journey. If you are writing for the fame and money alone, I don't recommend continuing. If you are writing because you love to write and find the writing and research entertaining, and hope to get published, keep on. Few people regret the time and money spent on hobbies they enjoy, even though their hobbies generate no income. Think of writing this way, with a possibility of paying but not the only reason you do it.
I really like plain text writers, such as Ulysses and the recently found Bear (both Mac). I'm currently writing my thesis and I enjoy styling. However, something that really annoys me is the gap between a plain text writer and InDesign. I can't easily copy over text from a simple writer to InDesign. So I'm looking for a way to minimise that gap.
I noticed that Bear, for example, uses Markdown as an output. If you copy header-1 (i.e. "This is a header") text to InDesign that paragraph will be output like "# This is a header". When you have a header-2 it adds 2 '#' in front and quotes obtain a '>' in front of the paragraph.
With that discovery I was thinking of automatically convert each paragraph to a specific style based on a ruleset, depending on the first character of a sentence.
if rule starts with "#" then apply paragraph style "header-1".
Additionally, that hashtag should be removed, but that could be done with a find & replace (find "# " and replace with "").
But uh.. Is it possible to apply paragraph styles based on certain rules? Preferably automating this thing?
Twitter's official clients on some platforms (iOS, OSX) invert the scroll direction when reading DMs and @replies from a specific person. Is this the best UX in your opinion, or is it just confusing? How should it work?
When reading public tweets, or looking at a list of people who have DM or replied to you, the latest message appears at the top. This model is followed on the Twitter website for DMs and @replies.
On iOS and OSX, when viewing the most recent DMs or @replies from a specific person the latest message appears at the bottom. This differs from the rest of the UI but is familiar from IRC/IM/whatever chat: read top to bottom.
I can understand the arguments for both approaches, but for me it seems like there's a disconnect in the interface when the approach is inverted dependent on platform [1] and app screen.
Discuss :)
[1] I don't know how Twitter behaves on other platforms, but on my Android device's client (presumably official because it has a proper Twitter logo), @replies and DMs are latest-at-top.
Answer
I think its good UI but bad UX.
When you are reading DM it makes sense to have them on the bottom. However, the DM page is part of a larger app and as UX goes the users will be confused. It's so easy to forget we are not designing for ourselves. I have to remind myself daily.
I have an idea for a story, but I realize that many of the idea's elements are similar to another story out there. (The attire of the main character, fighting style and structure of some social groups, and tech gadgets. That last one is not that similar, actually.)
The whole drive of my story is original, but it was inspired by some of these elements, and I decided to modify them. This makes me wonder if it's wrong or not.
That's why I asked this question. In terms of taking reference from some elements of another story, how much reference, or "copying" is enough? (Obviously, a complete copy is out of the question, and I'll never do that.)
You see this often in a store sign, headings in menus, and so on, but small words such as "the" or "and" in a all-caps heading sometimes appear with an underline, an overline, or both, with the affected words set with a smaller font, and the lines filling the space otherwise taken by those words.
What are these called? What are the design principles that give rise to such a design?
(I know I should provide an image, but I was unable to come up with effective search words.)
Answer
Catchwords have always been offered alongside standard alphabets in wood type catalogs and so often appear on posters as a decorative punch that they have become part of the wood type vernacular. Words like 'The', 'And', 'To', 'For', and less common abbreviations could be inserted into a design along with decorative ornaments or stars when space was tight or to add variety in the design.
Full reading in Behance
At the time of the manual typesetting, the characters were placed on a line, one by one and the other way around, following the order of reading. This tedious process forced to create new methods of composition to accelerate the process. This is how the linotype, monotype, and much later photocomposition arose until our days.
But while the system was only to use metallic mobile types and placed manually one by one, some homemade inventions arose.
In 1775 a metal type founder named Barletti has the idea of fusing more than one character into the same metal piece, looking the ease of connection between shapes or the greater number of times a group of characters were used.
Such is the case of the double "f", or the syllable "fi", or the union of "st". To this new metal type that contains more than one character, Barletti gives it the name of logotype (from Greek logos: word) or polytype. These polytypes eventually give way to special types with the initials of the companies or trademarks and short words used very often.
There are fonts with those logo words like hwt-catchwords
And fonts that include catchwords in their designs like Desire from myfonts.com
Google search catchwords
Are there any studies on the use of justified text in web apps? How does justification affect screen legibility?
Example of justified text:
Answer
No,for the simple reason that justified text can often create large blocks of white spaces which breaks the continuity of flow of words. To quote this article found in UX movement
When you use justified text, you’re not only making text difficult to read for non-dyslexic users, but even more so for dyslexic users. Justified text creates large uneven spaces between letters and words When these spaces line up above one another, a distracting river of whitespace prominently appears . This can cause dyslexic readers to lose their place repeatedly
As per this article about justified text in web accessibility,
Browsers are not very good at handling justification and displaying justified text, and one is likely to be presented with text where the spaces between words varies a lot, unlike the more subtle variation in spacing that is achieved in printed text. This extreme variation in the spacing makes the text more difficult to read - instead of the eye being able to move smoothly along the line of text, it has to move in "fits and starts", searching for and jumping to the start of each word.
While someone with no sight problems or reading difficulties might find this no more than a mild aggravation, it can present real problems to anyone using screen magnification software (since the gaps between words are also magnified), and to people with conditions such as dyslexia. Some people with reading difficulties and/or some cognitive disabilities find that the "rivers" of white space which can easily occur within justified passages of text on screen form a more distinct pattern than the actual words themselves, making the text extremely difficult to read and comprehend.
However Justified text does have its place in print since the straight line of each margin can guide the eye across columns of text and the aligned columns help define the different areas of text creating a logical flow of words, thus enhancing readability
Note: I define 'setting' as where and when a novel takes place, as well as what the genre entails. It is the background to the picture of the story.
I realize there are a lot of factors that contribute to making bestsellers become bestsellers, and that the list is by no means limited to writing and setting. My concern is with writing versus setting. I've seen some books (which I will not name, to avoid the inevitable debate), that to me at least, seem to have become bestsellers simply through their setting. They are written well, certainly, but they are often full of mistakes, and the writing in general is not the stuff of greatness.
This raises the question: can a novel become a bestseller (mostly) because of its setting? Can you get away with mediocre writing and still sell because your setting is popular?
Note: I don't want to give the impression that I am trying to get away with mediocre writing. :) I'm actually hoping that the answer to the question above is 'no'; that there is some other reason these novels have become bestsellers.
Answer
It seems you're using the term setting in a non-standard way to mean genre conventions. Given that, I would say that a mastery of genre, including the fulfillment of the expectations of the core audience, can bring short-term popularity, but that only good writing will endure over the long term.
It's also worth noting that the most popular works typically draw on a given genre, but subvert it or transcend it by taking it in unexpected-but-satisfying new directions (that way they not only pick up the core audience, they expand upon it) --and it takes excellent writing to manage that task.
As @what noted, however, the impact of selling can outweigh both quality and genre appeal, at least in the short term.
I auto traced an image and am trying to change the color of all the black lines and sections to brown, but some of the lines I can't change with the Paint Bucket tool (because it fills in a large section of white instead). Is there a way I can change these lines' color? If not, what should I do differently when applying Live Trace so that such lines don't exist?
Answer
Select the art and click the Expand button on the Control bar.
Often reading analyses of books and films, I find that the analytics derive conclusions from the specific food or beverage that a character consumes. The food appears to always be symbolic of something.
Now, I'm not completely oblivious to what food says about a character. But here's the problem: in my fantasy novel, I have people eating fruit, decorating rooms with flowers, using plants in metaphors - I'm giving flora a strong presence, because I want to emphasise the society's strong bond to the earth and the earth's natural cycles. So, I am, in fact, using fruit as a symbol.
But then, exactly because that's how I use fruit, my character might be eating a banana because a banana is what's in season. No phallic subtext intended.
Which leads me to the question - can a banana ever be just a banana? Or do I always need to be aware of all the messages each bit of food brings with it, and write under those constraints?
(This question is not specific to bananas. Freud just made bananas funny.)
Answer
This is a balancing act, but ultimately we're in La mort de l'auteur territory here.
Ultimately, readers are going to... read... things into what you have written. Some are going to read "overly" literally and miss your figurative intent. Others are going to reach for innuendo in everything that you, in your own head, meant literally. Subtext will develop. Critiques will form where random things are picked apart and you're left wondering when you even wrote the passage in question, because you don't even recall using that specific phrasing and certainly not with any intent for a particular interpretation of it.
Art has two sides. Any art. Any act of communication. There is the side of the creative experience. And there is the side of the interpretive experience. The more you try to strangle your art into a narrow existence of precise communication, the more sterile it becomes. This works in certain circumstances, but for fictional writing I find it to be generally detrimental.
You need to chose what you're okay with, in terms of what an audience interprets as how they experienced what they read, versus your intent in what you wrote. And you need to understand that if you're not okay with a specific interpretation, maybe you need to not write whatever you believe will lead to it: struggle all you want, get as explicit as can be, and all you've done is call attention to whatever it is in question.
Consider, if you read a passage where an author went out of their way to try to highlight that a banana was merely a fruit, merely meant literally—in a work with other figurative uses for other objects, no less—don't you think you'd find it significant that so much time was spent talking about bananas? Wouldn't it seem to, in its own way, be an act of emphasis? Wouldn't you question whether the author's narrative acts in regards to the banana might not have aspects of deception, in terms of trying to claim it is only meant to be a banana?
People are going to read what they want to read, and their basis for that is what you put in front of them to be read. Writing is communication, and communication is always interpretive between the parties involved. Language alone is interpretive: we used a shared basis for meaning, but even with supposed authorities we still develop different interpretations of individual words, much less the nuances of those words in shifting contexts.
If you're using an item in a scene which has widely known and widely used alternate connotations, puerile or not, your only even marginally safe road if you are concerned is to remove it entirely, substitute something else for it.
One question I would have is, why is there even, explicitly, a banana at all? Why not just "a piece of fruit"? I love detail, but ultimately you're the one in control of what you write with detail and what you don't: and you can't escape the fact that the more detail you give, the more questions of whether there is a reason for that detail will occur in your audience. You put in the assumed effort and care to write it, why wouldn't someone think there's significance to the specific choices in what you wrote?
Sometimes the best foils for defusing something are your own characters. Rather than refuse the interpretation of readers, acknowledge that it will happen by letting your own characters engage in it.
The easiest way to control a narrative, inasmuch as one can, is to own it.
Many people make phallic metaphors out of bananas. They make jokes about it. They tease each other about it. Some people find this exceedingly juvenile. Some court it. Some are oblivious to it.
So rather than run away from this, use it. Your intent might not be to have your use of bananas have any lingering other meanings, but outside of literature, when has that ever stopped anyone from doing so?
Why do you expect it to be different with what you write?
How would your characters, if they were real people, actually act in this situation? You can still speak through them, at which point it's easy enough to have someone pick up on the metaphoric aspects and run with it—teasingly or more circumspectly—and someone else react, perhaps by becoming annoyed that they can't even "eat a banana in peace" (which would undoubtedly get its own reaction, leading in turn possibly to something like an exasperated facepalm and a request to just drop it or something similar).
If you're making choices in wording or scene that you know readers are likely to read into in particular ways beyond your specific intent in writing them, you need to accept that among other things, this is possibly a warning that your characters would also catch on to these metaphors, and skipping over them, particularly with characters developed in ways that would be more likely to pick up on the common metaphorical aspect and especially turn that into some kind of interaction (joking, etc) may actually draw more attention to that, and it will be in ways where you don't even get to have a say about how you feel in regards to that, through how your characters interact in that circumstance.
As a final note, to fall all the way back to Shakespeare, consider the use of (and then consider the ongoing layers of cultural connotations in relation to):
There are a number of answers that try various approaches in fulfilling your intent through trying to control or expand the surrounding narrative to try to explicitly set it in a non-figurative direction. I would argue that none of them will work with all of your audience, and most of them may actually exacerbate the situation you perceive as an issue, with the readers who are most likely to make this interpretation to begin with. Even my latter suggestion here (which is similar to @Sara Costa's excellent answer) of just letting your characters naturally play with it (*as she winces at her own wording there*) is going to have readers who still run wild with whether there's some further subtext going on about the sexuality of the characters involved or similar questions. That's part of why I worded the heading for it the way I did.
Pick your battles. If you don't want to have a struggle over a banana, don't stick a banana in it to begin with; or accept that, to some people, that banana is going to mean more than just a piece of fruit. Just know that the more you struggle to push that away, the more people will then find other reasons to read into it, and it still won't stop the readers for whom a banana is always a source of amusing metaphor whenever they encounter one in their lives, nor will it stop those who run wild with conjecture about just why a banana, in particular, was put precisely where it got stuck.
But as a final answer to your last question of "can a banana ever be just a banana", I leave you with a question in turn:
As an element of language, what is a "banana"? Actually?
You say it's a piece of fruit.
I say it's just a visual representation (using a set of symbols) of a phonetic structure that is commonly itself used as a symbol to represent a specific "type" of fruit (which in turn varies on how that is interpreted), which has a certain (general) visual to it (however, even the color is not a sure thing), which in turn is similar to other things visually, and of which that visual association is common in certain societies. What makes that phonetic structure a symbol referencing that piece of fruit? Nothing except our common acceptance that it does and further authoritative attempts to declare that this means that it has that meaning. So how does that differ from other symbolic aspects of it? If there's a common phallic association in a given society with a given item for which a given word is associated, how is that not effectively part of its living colloquial definition as a connotative aspect? As humans we run on symbols and patterns, our language (any language) is itself merely sets of symbols: you can't escape symbolic interpretation.
A banana is always just a banana. The error would be in assuming that means it's just a piece of fruit. A banana is always just a banana for however each individual interpreting the word into associated meanings individually perceives it to have meaning. Language is an attempt to form an agreement on the commonality of shared meaning such that intent can be transmitted and interpreted with some small degree of shared basis, but ultimately every piece of language and communication is interpretive based on how we have individually formed related symbolic associations.
It's important, I think, to flip this from a context derived from a conceit of authorial control and perception to being instead about the fact that we are all simply absorbing and interpreting symbols, and therefor as an author your own conception of those symbols is simply that: your own interpretation, individually. Ideally it's at least very close to how many readers will interpret it, but the act of writing is its own individual interpretative act, and even attempts at precision will only go so far, and will carry their own associated interpretations themselves.
For a character that whistles when pronouncing the "s" sound, how can I write in the lisp effectively?
I tried using multiple "S"s, but it reads as a snake-like sound, which I don't want since there are elements of the character being snake-like as well.
How do I make the whistling "s" lisp really stand out?
Answer
How about going with this♪?
Possibly with the note raised as superscript. After an initial description it serves as a reminder to the reader.
What is really the preferred behavior of form validation? When should the validation take place?
Is the preferred way the same on long vs. short forms, wizards and so on? What do you think?
(The form will be on desktop platform only)
I try to do it mostly with words but sometimes have to do it with other things too. How do you equally space out things automatically, I Know how to evenly distribute from the center of every layer/object but not how to have even actual space between those to objects.
This is really not a problem when all the things are of the same width (or height) but as you know words are hardly ever that. So what i do is is make a rectangle of size that i want space to be empty and once done typing i manually drag out that box to the end of the first word, then adjust the 2nd one decrease/increase the space to match the edges of the rectangle and so on for the texts after 2nd..like 3rd,4th...Usually it's Home, About, Products, Contact, etc...
Answer
You can't.
Photoshop offers no "distribute spacing" options out of the box.
The only way I know to do this in Photoshop is via scripting. You can check out the distribute scripts from Trevor Morris here.
I am specifically interested in software that can be used to combine existing sets of images (frames in the animation) into an animation. Having the ability to add transitions/effects between the frames would be a plus. The output format should be something suitable for the web, e.g. GIF, Flash.
Please comment on ease-of-use, number of features, personal user experience, cost of software (free/paid) and which OS it runs on when you mention the programs.
Why do companies let users deactivate or delete their account?
I see this mostly for social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook. Should other sites such as ecommerce let users deactivate their account?
Answer
If you feel that people should have some control over their own information, then you should make it possible for them to delete that information from your system.
Since ecommerce sites (at least as I know in the US) have to deal with tax reporting, and in most systems if you delete an account then all reporting dealing with that account is deleted as well, allowing users to delete an account is likely not a legal option. At least not until the 7 year period for having audits come up has passed.
Based on info in the comments, if you have customers in Europe they have a legal right to have their information removed. One solution to this if you need to keep the account in your billing system for reporting would be to replace all of their information with dummy data. That way their information is no longer stored so you meet your legal requirements, but you don't lose your historical billing data.
Also consider the case of the recent Ashley Madison hack. It was revealed that a number of users were willing to pay money to have their information deleted from the site. That tells you that, at least in some contexts if not all, being able to delete an account is a very important feature. Shame paying money didn't actually delete anything.
I am a firm believer sites should work perfectly fine for people who choose to disable Javascript while browsing any and all of the content.
However, when it comes to higher-level interaction (such as registering or posting things) would it be a step too far to expect users to enable JavaScript if they want to contribute content to a site? In the same way cookies are also required for things like this?
According to Yahoo! the number of users with JavaScript disabled is about 2% in the US.
I still care about the 2% who choose to browse the site with it off, but is it too much to ask them to enable JavaScript if they want to take our relationship to the next level?
I want to convert a JPG to transparent and using GIMP I added alpha layers and transparency same way I make a GIF transparent I converted it to PNG but it doesn't display well when I load it on my template:
The original image is
Why doesn't it look good when it's made into a transparent PNG? Could I have better luck making a transparent GIF? OR is it the blue colors that don't mix well with the black and I could have more luck using some of the other logos:
Thanks
Answer
The main trick, in my experience, to adding smooth transparency to an image in GIMP is using the Layer → Transparency → Color to Alpha... tool. Of course, you have to know how to use it to good effect — on its own, all it does is make your images look all funny and translucent.
If I take the image you posted above, and just run Color to Alpha on it (picking white for the transparent color, of course), what I get is this:
As you can see, this image looks fine on a light background. Unfortunately, putting it on a dark background makes the gray elements vanish completely, and the blue parts don't look so great either:
The problem is that the Color to Alpha tool did what it was supposed to do: it converted all the white in the original image into transparency. This means that the gray lines became semi-transparent black lines, and the light blue became semi-transparent dark blue.
What we really want, however, is presumably that the basic colors of the text and the other elements of the logo should stay opaque, and only the anti-aliased pixels around their edges should become semi-transparent. To fix this, we need to add some white back into the colors. One way to achieve that, for an image like this where the opaque areas consist mostly of single colors, is this:
Duplicate the layer.
On the lower layer, convert the transparency to a mask by doing Layer → Mask → Add Layer Mask... and selecting "Transfer layer's alpha channel".
After transferring the transparency to a mask, make the lower layer completely white (e.g. using the Bucket Fill tool in "Fill whole selection" mode).
You've now added some white to all the colors of the image, but the interiors of the letters and figures still aren't completely opaque. To make them so, we need to normalize the mask on the lower layer — but, since the different parts of the image have different colors and lightnesses, we need to do it separately for each part.
To do that, click on the mask of the lower layer in the Layers dialog to edit it, use the Rectangle Select tool to select each distinct part of the image (the "B", the "NANO" and the drawing above them) in turn, and run Colors → Auto → Normalize on each selection.
After doing all that (and optionally merging the layers), the result should look like this:
If you compare this with the first image above, there's almost no difference to be seen. But see what happens when we put it on a black background:
Now the colors look opaque, but the background is still transparent and the edges are smooth.
Unfrotunately, you can also see some gray fringing around the letters, especially the "B". I suspect this is mostly because the original JPEG image already suffered from chroma loss in those areas due to lossy compression, it just wasn't so apparent on a white background. There are two ways (that I know of) to try to fix that: you can either manually adjust the mask color levels on the white layer to reduce the fringing, or you can try sampling the solid colors from the letters in the original image and replacing the white on the lower layer white those solid colors (Rectangle Select, Bucket Fill). Or you can even try both.
However, all this is really something you should only try if you have no other choice. A much better solution is to try and find the original vector (AI, SVG, EPS, PDF, etc.) files from which these logos were surely rendered — they should have full transparency information, be free of compression artifacts, and be scalable too! Only if it's really impossible to obtain the originals should you even consider working from low-resolution JPEG files like these.
Also, even if you do end up using the bitmaps, you could still get a much cleaner result by redrawing some of the elements — in particular the text, which seems to be simple Copperplate.
I may be way out of league asking this question but is there a way to get the linear length of a letter or words. That is, if you were to take the word "super" and measured the outside border of the letters you'd get a measurement. Is there something out there that would tell me this measurement if I give the font and the font size? I'm a rookie here so be gentle. thanks in advance.
The thing I hear most often about my writing is, "It's too dry." I'm sure this happens to other people too. I'm working on eliciting emotion through writing, and I'd like a critique on some of my first bits.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
I wake up screaming - again.
I’ve woken up screaming at least once a night since it happened. Most nights I’ll wake up three or four times, bathed in sweat.
I can still see her face fading from recognition, each time I awake she’s silently begging me to save her. I see her face twist with the sudden terror as she slips, time slowing as she starts to fall. I feel the look of betrayal, deeper than the deepest ocean, when her fingers barely brush against mine as I lunge to save her. Then...every emotion I’ve ever seen, and so many more I could never begin to describe, all meld together with abject terror as she falls. Those same feelings are ravaging me from the inside, taking my world and ripping it to shreds in the blink of an eye. Pieces of paper, torn apart by a storm.
I couldn’t tear my eyes away; I had to watch it all. A twisted sense of responsibility to her memory, or something. She fell for so long - when her body hit the ground, it was smaller than the ant crawling next to my hand.
I stayed there, on the edge of nothingness, for three whole days. I ate nothing. I drank nothing. I did. not. move. I played all of our mutual experiences over and over again in my head, promising her all the while that I’d never forget her. I knew the first time I’d told her this that I was lying: at some point my memory would fail, or we would grow apart and the memories would be rewritten. I could see in her face that she knew I was lying too. But...we both also knew that there wasn’t any other way to live. That even though we know that nothing can last, we had to act like it could, like it would. Act like we were the immortal fomori of legend, casting linguistic spells on those around us, running circles around people with less-developed minds. Capricious spirits of the wind who nevertheless held such capacity for love and understanding that it overwhelmed us on a regular basis.
I cried in her arms, cried over all the things we could never do nor fix, all the people - who by simple virtue of existence deserve unrelenting love - whom we couldn’t save. People whom we’d never meet, whom we could never help. We grieved together for the people who are too blind to know that they can’t see, who will live forever in self-created misery - people we will never be able to help. We grieved for the people they hurt out of ignorance.
You could argue that childhood abuse coupled with a unique perspective has created martyr complexes. But we didn’t do this for ourselves. We didn’t do this because we wanted others to know who we were. We didn’t do this for praise or fame.
When you realize that we are all just living collections of basic particles, that invisible air is made from the same type of particles, that all things are made up of the same stuff -
When you realize that knowledge, culture, beliefs, and more are all just things we are given -
When you realize that the only objective Truth is that we each have our own subjective experience -
When you realize that the only true knowledge is experience taken in its original context -
When you realize that the world is uncertain - that language is imprecise - that experience is ineffable -
-- you begin to realize what it means to really live - and you would never go back, even if you could.
I hope for you.
I love for you.
I miss you.
I’ll never forget you.
This is not intended to have characters, a plot, or much structure. This is specifically about creating emotion in the reader.
Did it work? Or not? (why not?)
My enterprise logo has the text Job overlapping a bag icon. What I really want to achieve is a white bag logo with the text punched out. That way, on any background the text has the color of that background. Compare the facebook icon with the dark-blue border.
The error it gave me
The bag issue.
Answer
For best results though a bit more complicated:
Type and position your text:
Here's the difficult part:
Note: For a complete "punch out" the text must be pure black. RGB 0,0,0 or CMYK 100,100,100,100 is the best way to ensure this.
Now the text can still be edited at any time without any difficulties:
Finally, to get out of the Opacity Mask you'll want to click the left side in that Transparency Window to go back to the main object. Then you can move it and the hole will be there
Another more common and easier method is to use Compound Path, though it does make your text uneditable:
Select your text then Create Outline (shortcut: Shift + Cmd/Ctrl + O)
Select the text and the bag then Make Compound Path (shortcut: Cmd/Ctrl + 8)
