| July 14, 2018 |
GeoGuessr
The Internet is not all work and no play. There are lots of fun sites out there that can help make you think and still be fun.
This Week's Case in Point is: GeoGuessr.com a website that tests your geographic skills using pictures on Google Maps.
Website Description
Embark on a journey that takes you all over the world. From the most desolate roads in Australia to the busy, bustling streets of New York City.
GeoGuessr is a geography game which takes you on a journey around the world and challenges your ability to recognize your surroundings.
Take the Hard map challenge against a co-worker or try it yourself and see how well you know geography and terrain.
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| July 7, 2018 |
Avatar Cartoon Creator
Having a cartoon image of yourself is a creative way to use as the profile photo on Facebook, Twitter or Slack. Cartoonify.de makes it easy to create a professional looking cartoon-like image of yourself.
Website Description
With our service you can quickly create a Cartoon of Yourself directly online without any software installs and for free! With Cartoonify you can Cartoonize Yourself. We have more than 300 graphics parts so your avatar will be as special as you are. This is one of the easiest and fastest way to convert your Photo to a Cartoon with our app. You only have to choose between its face, eyes, hair, clothes and even a background. Try our online avatar maker now!
As a result you can download your Cartoon Picture as SVG (vector) or as PNG file which is converted from vector graphic parts and also uploads to Gravatar. Additionally, you can create your avatar as gravatars. This is perfect for sharing with all social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and more! Yes! I want to create my cartoon mini-me. Try our Anime Character Creator Website now and create your own self-portrait.
Watch the video on the "How to Cartoon Yourself?" page to learn how to best use the Avatar generator.
Sample Avatar
A few sample Avatar using the 'random' button.
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| June 30, 2018 |
Cool Text Generator
If your looking for a quick text to graphic generator than Cool Text Generator is the place to go. You can create some neat styles around your text.
There are 31 different styles to use, 800 different fonts and 213 different color palettes. (Got to love some of the Disney references)
Once you pick the style, you can change the color and font. The site is very simple to use. One disadvantage is that you can't save a favorite design to use later.
Website Description
Sometimes we just need a decent stylish text in 10 minutes. We don't have Photoshop, we don't have good design in mind. What if there is a web service for us to browse-and-pick a nice effect, then we just customize x2192 download x2192 use it? And yes, maketext.io is born for this purpose.
Maketext.io is the modern cool text generator that empowers SVG filters and 800+ open-font-licensed web fonts. While there are already numerous similar websites around, we handcrafted maketext.io with the following guideline in mind:
- Make It Quick, Make It Simple
- On the Web, on the Fly
- Easily Customizable
- Vector Based with Raster Support
Some Text Design Samples
Here are some basic designs that were created using Cool Text Generator. Keep in mind there's a lot of ways to be creative around your text.
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| June 23, 2018 |
Text Effect at Oxy
The text effects over at PhotoOxy.com are pretty cool. There are 55 different text effect to select from. They are all unique ways to display a text message against a background. For example, you can have your text appear on a coffee cup, as a scary cemetery gate or as embroidery text.
Website Description
PhotoOxy is an application to bring you a library of hundreds of creative and awesome effects.
Easy creates the brightest picture in seconds without having to use a professional. You can set it up as a contact icon, wallpaper, send a friend, friend or share it with any social network.
https://photooxy.com/logo-and-text-effects-c17
Sample Text Effect Images
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| June 16, 2018 |
Frame Tools at imgonline.com.ua
Imgonline.com.ua is a site that offers lots of tools to help process pictures. You can transform pictures into unique colors and designs.
Website Description
This site is designed for high quality processing of JPEG photos and pictures online.
The trick of this site is that you can, for example, without recompression of image edit EXIF, IPTC, XMP data, view EXIF details online or completely remove EXIF and other information embedded in the JPEG photo, rotate to any angle that is a multiple of 90*, make progressive JPEG. All the above is done without loss of quality. If necessary, you can compress the JPG image to the specified size in kilobytes or megabytes or with standard method.
https://www.imgonline.com.ua/eng/add-frame.php
Add Photo Frame Online
One of the photo effects they have is Photo Frames, which gives you the ability to pick from 29 different frame styles.
The frame effect at tuxpi.com is slightly better since you can add a matt. Imgonline.com is nice because it's fast and has a few more museum-type frames.
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| June 9, 2018 |
Preview Google Fonts
Google Fonts is a great resource for publicly available fonts. They have a large collection of fonts perfect for most designs.
The only problem is what font is right for your tagline, headline? Thankfully, Ultra Zone has it figured out and created a site where you can preview any text in all the fonts in Google's catalog. Simply type in your text, select the font family, and instantly see your font.
Getting the Font
Once you found the perfect font, simply mouse over the name and you click to see additional fonts in the family, or go directly to theGoogle site and download the font.
This process saves a lot of second-guessing and downloading multiple fonts to find the one that works best for you.
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| June 2, 2018 |
3D Blocks Text Effect Maker
Picture to People is a site that offers Photo Editing tools, generated Text Logo Makers and so much more. There's a lot of creative ideas that can help find that perfect style for your photo or text.
Hidden Feature
While not totally hidden, but could be easily overlooked, is the Text Logos style. You can have the ability to create different styles and colors, in fact, there are more than 1,350 text logo makers using 35 different themes. There are lots of previews to help figure out which style is perfect for you.
Best part, its all free to create and use!
Description from their Website
Picture to People (P2P) is a huge development project that offers the world's biggest collection of free online photo effect editors, free online text generators and much more. Here everything is developed from scratch, so there always are new fresh creative, innovative and exclusive graphic design software being published online. If you are a new user, please visit the How To Use section to get started.
Despite we think initiatives like Creative Commons are a good idea, here you are not limited to that kind of license. Any text effect, banner, header, logo, word art, photo effect, image manipulation or graphic design drawn by using our online graphics generator applications is totally free.
http://www.picturetopeople.org/text_generator/others/3d/realistic/professional_text_effects.html
Sample Designs
Here are some sample designs that I created in just a few minutes. The whole process was quick and easy. The hardest part was finding a style to match the text. It's very helpful that image designs are broken down into categories.
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| May 26, 2018 |
Frame Effect at Tuxpi
Occasionally there's a need to add a frame surrounding a picture. Fortunately there's an online tool to make it easy with lots of customize options - Tuxpi a simple Online Photo Editor.
Website Description
60 Photo Editing Tools
- Change colors, create montages and add text to pictures.
- Crop, rotate and resize pictures with ease.
- Edit photos with many different effects.
- Add picture frames and borders.
- Online photo editor - works directly in your web browser.
https://www.tuxpi.com/photo-effects/wooden-picture-frame
There's plenty of cool special effect and features in Tuxpi, but the Wood Frame feature is something that isn't offered anyplace else online - at least I haven't been able to find anyone else offering it. There are 18 different wood textures to pick from. Oh, and if the wood frame look isn't your style, there's solid color and 16 other different Frame and Border styles to pick from. For example there a Fruits frame with 9 different textures to pick from.
Sample Frames
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| May 19, 2018 |
Talos Intelligence
If you ever wanted to find a source of an IP address, talosintelligence.com is the place to go. (Formally senderbase.org) Simply put in the IP address and instantly you'll get critical information about where the IP address is located and if it's been tagged as being a security risk.
The site is a great place to read up on the latest Vulnerability Reports. Find out where vulnerabilities are happing from man vendors and analysis.
Website Description
Cisco Talos Intelligence Group is one of the largest commercial threat intelligence teams in the world, comprised of world-class researchers, analysts, and engineers. These teams are supported by unrivaled telemetry and sophisticated systems to create accurate, rapid and actionable threat intelligence for Cisco customers, products and services. Talos defends Cisco customers against known and emerging threats, discovers new vulnerabilities in common software, and interdicts threats in the wild before they can further harm the internet at large. Talos maintains the official rule sets of Snort.org, ClamAV, and SpamCop, in addition to releasing many open-source research and analysis tools.
https://talosintelligence.com/
Some Notes
Great site to use when your looking at your logs and trying to figure out why someone is currently hitting your site.
The Reputation lookup is great to use, you can learn a lot from an IP address.
Great Comprehensive Threat Intelligence. Get the inside track on what's going on before your site gets hit.
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| May 12, 2018 |
Photopea
There are a lot of online photo editors available, what makes Photopea stand out is the ability to open up different graphic formats - especially Sketch format.
I discovered Photopea when I found some Sketch templates from Facebook developer site. Since I already invested in Affinity Designer and Omnigraffle, I didn't want to have purchase another Graphic application.
Description from the Website
Photopea is an advanced image editor, which can work with both raster and vector graphics. You can use it for simple tasks, such as resizing images, as well as complex tasks, such as designing webpages, creating illustrations, processing photographs and more.
The Free online design editor supports PSD, XCF, and Sketch formats. (Adobe Photoshop, Gimp and Sketch App)
Create a new images or open existing files from your computer. Save your work as PSD or as JPG/PNG/SVG. Our Goal is to create the most advanced and affordable photo editor.
Note about Sketch to PSD Conversion
You are limited on when you can convert Sketch files to PSD. Certain times during the day you may encounter this message:
To get money for our development, Sketch to PSD conversion can be used only during the first 30 minutes of each hour.
The conversion is pretty good, in my test I found that it creates a near copy of the original Sketch document. I was able to open the PSD file in Affinity Designer with no problems.
Another option is to just use Photopea as the editor instead of exporting the Sketch document.
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| May 5, 2018 |
Word Cloud
Sometimes when blogging it isn't easy to come up with a good graphic to go with an article. That's when using Word Cloud can help - highlight some of the most common words in a story in a nice attractive graphic. It catches everyone attention and makes the article stand out a bit more.
https://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/
There are several different services but I found that ... jasondavies.com/wordcloud/ to have a nice simple way to create a good looking Word Cloud. to have a nice simple way to create a good looking Word Cloud. There are all sorts of design options and a chance to customize the layout and colors to your needs.
Honorable Mentions
- TagCrowd.com
- https://www.wordclouds.com/
What's nice about jasondavies.com version of Word Cloud is that you can have different cloud shapes, so the graphic stands out even more. The other thing that's nice is that each word is a different color.
Couple of Examples
George Washington farewell Address
Standard Disclaimer of a 5K Race
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| April 28, 2018 |
YouiDraw
YouiDraw is a cool online vector tool. There's plenty of template designs to inspire you and get you started. The food thing is that its HTML5 base - not Flash. So you can use Chrome or Chromebook to create your designs.
Website Description
Online Vector Graphic Design by html5 and SVG effects! It's like Illustrator but works on the cloud with google drive.
Create stunning vector graphic design with YouiDraw. It's like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw but it works in the cloud with Google Drive. So there's no software to download and you can access your work anytime, anywhere. Suddenly, your creativity is unleashed!
Whether you're getting started or an experienced designer, Drawing tool is a powerful graphic design solution on the web. With vector graphic design in various environment, you have everything you need to express your style and creativity.
Free for Basic Use
The basic plan allows you to create your own graphics and save the graphic to your computer or in the cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive etc..)
There is a Monthly Plan which cost $9.99/mo and gives you SVG / PDF File Export, No Watermark, and allows you to use the graphics for Commercial use.
Good Place to Learn Vectors
I think this is a great tool for people learning about vector graphics- especially kids. This is better than having them play with Affinity Designer or Illustrator because they won't mess up any application settings.
Affinity Designer
I think, in the long run, your better off buying Affinity Designer. YouiDraw is good for those times when you need a graphic design but doesn't have any tools installed on the computer. (Internet Cafe or Sharing a computer. )
Certainly worth checking out YouiDraw, doesn't cost anything to see how it works.
Sample Designs done in YouiDraw
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| April 21, 2018 |
Snappa
YouTube is all the rage right now. If you own a YouTube Channel you know how important it is to have an updated graphic header. It's critical to have a cool looking header so that people will know that your serious about the videos that you have on your channel.
Fortunately you don't need to be an expert in graphic design, Snappa helps make YouTube headers in a snap!
Website Description
Create YouTube channel art on the fly with Snappa
- Save time by starting with the ideal image dimensions for YouTube channels
- Start with one of many professionally designed templates to throw together eye catching YouTube channel art in seconds
- Customize templates, graphics, and text to create on-brand channel art
- Access 500,000+ of high-res, totally not cheesy, 100% royalty-free stock photos from our library
- Add the polish typically reserved for professional graphic designers with customizable graphics, shapes, and text
- Download your channel art as a web optimized JPG, high-res PNG, Retina JPG, or Retina PNG
- Repurpose YouTube channel art for your other social media profiles and vice versa in a couple of clicks
https://snappa.com/create/youtube-channel-art
Snappa isn't just for YouTube, you can use it to create designs for all your favorite social media networks. The good thing about using Snappa is that you don't have to worry about the current design standards. They are up to date on the latest sizes - no more second guessing if it's the right size..
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| April 14, 2018 |
MockPhone
There are lots of choices when it comes to using mockups to showcase your design. The nice this about MockUPhone is there's a lot of device options including TV screens.
Website Description
MockUPhone is a free tool that helps developers, designers, project managers and consultants wrap app screenshots on different mobile devices. Developers and designer can use the provided PNG files to make mobile screenshots and mockups for mobile application websites or advertisements. While project managers and consultants can embed the screenshots in keynote for their client projects. MockUPhone right now supports iPhone mockup, iPad mockup, Android mockup and TV mockup.
If you want to create screenshots for App Store submission, you can also check out one of our developer suite - ShotBot (http://shotbot.io/). ShotBot is screenshots makers for iOS platform. It helps you wrap screenshots and implements screenshot device art effortlessly.
Five Things I learned Using MockUPhone
- You have to use an image, there's no pointing to an existing URL for the image to rendered by the device.
- In order to get the final image you have to put in a valid email and then download the file from the email link
- The mockup images are in PNG format with transparent backgrounds.
- MockUPhone have a lot of designs and will tell you the best format to use.
- You get a preview of one of the layouts, to see if you want a final version.
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| April 7, 2018 |
Glitter Text
GigaGlitters.com is a cool way to add some glitter to text. Simply put in some text and select the style that you want and then share the GIF file. You can use various GIF tools to combine the text.
Description from their site
GigaGlitters.com is super easy and fun tool to create glitter texts. It is FREE! With GigaGlitters you can instantly create glitter texts! Start right now, just enter the text you want to glitter. Place your glitter text anywhere you like: MySpace, Friendster, Bebo, Facebook, HI5 and many others.
Some tips/tricks
- Text can only be 15 characters long.
- There are 176 different glitter colors/styles to select from. You get a preview of all the styles.
- There are 101 different fonts to pick from. The only problem is that you don't get a nice popup to show the different font styles, you pick it based on the name.
- If your unsure, or in a rush, select the 'random' button and a style/font will be selected with your text. Keep clicking randomly until you find the perfect match!
- Once you find the perfect match, you can drag and drop the style to your desktop, or use the various code text provided.
Example Images
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