QA Graphic
June 30, 2018

Cool Text Generator

Create Awesome Text Graphics quickly

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

Cool Text Generator
https://maketext.io

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.

Game Night Text

Good Morning Champions Text

Release Day Text

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June 23, 2018

Text Effect at Oxy

Cool text effects at PhotoOxy.xom

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.

Oxy Display
https://photooxy.com/logo-and-text-effects-c17

Sample Text Effect Images

Neon Color

Same Player Play Again

This Fall Serious

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June 16, 2018

Frame Tools at imgonline.com.ua

Generate Museum Quality frames 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.

I M Online
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.

Natick Frame

Disney Imgonline

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June 9, 2018

Preview Google Fonts

Find the best Google Font for your text

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.

Ulta Zone Computer
https://ultra.zone/web_fonts

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 the

Google 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 offers a lot of creative Text designs

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.

Picture To People
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.

Quality Text

Release Day Text

Gluten Free Text

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May 26, 2018

Frame Effect at Tuxpi

Generate frames around your images

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.

Tuxpi Frame
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

State House Frame

Boston Frame

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May 19, 2018

Talos Intelligence

Find out information about the IP address that is hitting your site

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.

Cisco Talos Monitor
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

Online Sketch file converter

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.

photopea_website
https://www.photopea.com/

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

Lots of choices on Word Clouds.

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.

daviscloud
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 Word Cloud
George Washington farewell Address

5 K Word Cloud
Standard Disclaimer of a 5K Race

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April 28, 2018

YouiDraw

Online Vector Tool to make cool graphics

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.

draw Mockup
https://www.youidraw.com/

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

Youi Draw Example

Youi Draw Example2

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About

I will highlight a fun Internet site every Saturday. The basic premise is to highlight sites that I regularly visit for a variety of reasons. All site recommendations are mine and are unsponsored. By highlighting these websites, I hope to provide value to those who may not know of the sites or who might be interested in visiting the sites. I also want to share the sites that I find valuable in the hopes that others will find them just as beneficial.

Check out all the blog posts.

Schedule

MondayMedia Monday
TuesdayQA
WednesdayNew England
ThursdayGluten Free
FridayMacintosh
SaturdayInternet Tools
SundayOpen Topic