Design Reviews » JPG

Somerset sunsets

DRMark — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 13:17:58 +0000

The wife and I have just enjoyed a little excursion down to Devon and Somerset but mainly Somerset. We saw some great places and scenes and tasted some fantastic local brews. We highly recommend a tipple at Sheppy’s Cider Farm, which has been churning out lovely cider since 1817. I’ve just noticed you can buy their cider online too, nice…

On the way back from the seaside one evening we managed to shoot some lovely sunset photos. My wife particularly likes these, and she took them all. Her ideal sunset scene has a skeletal tree or two in front of the sunset scene. This time of year is the last chance to get these shots before the trees are all full and covered in leaves.

I’ve chosen the best six and hosted them here, you can open the large versions by clicking on the composite scene below.

The six pictures are all approximately 2Mpix images, they have just been cropped down a little but not too much, so they might be useful for various bits of design work, please feel free to borrow them. The pictures were taken with a Canon camcorder with a good lens, the pictures look nice and crisp in their full size pixel preview.

Chewed pen photographs

DRMark — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 20:46:10 +0000

Dear readers, we recently moved office, I’m talking about my day job here. I had to get my desk ready for transportation, so I got the parcel tape and started taping up all the drawers. I’ve been at this job for two months but, while taping up, I found a very thin upper drawer, a little stationery drawer. As you can see below I had uncovered the melancholic stressed-out remains of my predecessor.

chewed pens

What does this picture make you think about? Is it a little wabi sabi?

chewed pens, alternative angle

Please leave a note in the comments! If anyone wants I can upload the 3MPx original images.

JPEGs and transparency

DRMark — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:07:41 +0000

Today I had to make a web banner, animated GIF, and it needed to be done in half an hour. That’s OK if you’ve got all the “ingredients” and know what you want to do, or have been told what the animation should do or say. I had a problem though, the client wanted a logo on a blue background but they only had a JPG of the logo, it was therefore in a white square because JPG doesn’t support transparent regions. The white background can be erased in photoshop but it’s not always a quick job. Anyway we settled on having the logo on the far left in it’s white space seperate from the rest of the blue backgrounded banner.

The best kind of logo for the studio to have is usually an “.EPS“, it can be scaled to any size and have transparent regions if necessary. Whoever created your logo originally should have supplied an “.EPS”, it’s also essential for print jobs where you might want to scale up the logo to fit the side of a bus, for example…

Various format images of logos placed on a background

In the example above you can see the nasty results in full of an inappropriate file format for a logo! If you work in the design industry you’ve probably been supplied a logo as a JPG someone has pulled off a webpage somewhere. Then the client requires it placing on a complex photo background or enlarging to be printed on the side of a skyscraper. Two other side-effects you can see; washed out colours and rough clipping in Quark (or most programs that can auto-clip images/backgrounds).