Review: Slicetige-G takes the pain out of designing your Google profile

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Several months ago, Google changed its profile pages to include cover photos. Not unlike Facebook's, these cover photos are wide and short, and integrate with a profile picture of your choosing. Unlike Facebook, though, these cover photos require rather weird dimensions: 940 x 180 pixels. In a recent attempt to create a new cover photo, I found it very hard to find anything that would fit these dimensions properly. In addition, Google profiles don't come with a preview feature, which brings a lot of trial and error and repeated resizing into the mix, and in the end, my results were less than desirable. One way to solve this annoying yet common problem is Slicetige-G ($2, free demo with watermarking).

You can control every aspect of your buttons including size, color, icons, text, shadows and positions.

A younger sibling to Slicetige-T, Slicetige-G was made specifically for these stubborn Google profiles. With surprising simplicity, it lets you design a cover photo with just the right dimensions, slice your profile picture from it or add one from file, and even add extras such as buttons, text, images and QR codes. The results, as you will see, are rather impressive.

The first step of using Slicetige-G is selecting your cover photo, which is your base layer. This can be an image you load from file, a solid or gradient color, one of the dozens of templates that come with the program, or even self-generated polka dot or bokeh patterns. Once the cover photo is in place, you can drag it around, resize it, rotate it, and even apply some basic filters.

One thing you can't do it crop it, so fitting it in Google's appropriate dimensions still requires some work. For your profile picture, you can load a different avatar from file, or even better, slice your avatar straight from your cover photo. You can create some pretty unique and original effects this way.

Use Slicetige-G to create your own personalized polka dot or bokeh backgrounds.

You can now start adding some extras, such as customizable buttons to point your followers to your other profiles, styled text in any color or font, and even QR codes. The QR codes are generated by a third-party Web app called ZXing Project, and can contain a URL, contact information, text, etc. Using the QR code feature is not very intuitive; after generating it, you'll get to either embed it or download it. Embedding won't do you much good at this point, so you're left with downloading. You can then insert it to your cover photo as an image layer, but note that any adjustments and resizing will have to be done in an external image editor.

Each element you add to your template is a layer in itself, and you can move it around separately, control its opacity, or delete it. This generally works well; just make sure to select the layer you want to edit using the layer menu on the right. After adding everything, you should now have the perfect cover and profile picture combination, and you're ready to upload it to Google+. And this is where you're going to encounter some minor bugs and issues.

First and foremost: the watermark. Although the program's page states that the free version comes with a watermark (the only current limitation) the watermark does not appear in Slicetige while you work. So imagine my surprise when I exported my hard work for upload, and discovered the watermark right on my QR code. In addition, some layers did not appear on Google+ exactly as they did in Slicetige; for example, my text layer ended up in a slightly different position, which affected the overall layout. To top it all off, my profile picture, which was exported as a PNG file by default, has sprung weird white dots, and was generally blurry. This can be easily fixed by applying a Sharpen filter to the avatar and by exporting it as JPG, but it's another step you need to perform.

The finished product on a Google profile.

Slicetige-G is no professional graphics tool; in fact, if you can use Photoshop, you're probably better off using that. If, on the other hand, you don't own a license or just don't know how to use it, Slicetige-G is the perfect solution. It's not completely bug-free, but even the slight issues you'll encounter are easily fixable, and the interface is intuitive enough, even if you've never used graphics software before. You'll have to put in some work to get a perfect result, but you can still get one in a matter of 30 minutes. For $2, you can have the watermark-free version—a worthy investment in your Google public face.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
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Best colors for Web design

There are many web design tutorials which cover the Web color in detailed scientific terms. However, for our goals, briefly discuss color Web and how it will be used in the Web portfolio. You will develop a set of colors for your pages to the portfolio. This means that you will specify colors for your background of the page, the type used on the page and all the other static elements in the page. There are two types of color that can be used in Web graphics. Colors can be associated with Web graphics files formats refer us to: GIF and JPG. GIF

GIF files use the colors of the index. Index color is composed of 216 common colors found on all screens in all Web browsers and computer. These common colours reside in a Web palette. The Web color palette is available in Macromedia Fireworks and Adobe Photoshop, and they can be used in the design of Web displays without color difference when the pages are on the Internet. In addition, the Web palette is the standard color palette in Macromedia Dreamweaver and Macromedia Flash. This allows us to achieve color consistency across Web applicationstent and Web browsers.

We use Web colors for:

o a text/HTML Web text

Web page backgrounds o

Web page colors o used for table or layer backgrounds

o Web links

o GIF JPG files

JPG files using red, green and blue (RGB) color of the chart. RGB color is also known as the color name. Full color sections include graphics bitmap or photographs. We want to use the photographs as much as possible within a portfolio of Web to add to the Visual rhetoric and the story we are trying to present. Use of photographs, including their manipulation programs like Adobe Photoshop, require a brief description of the RGB color model. RGB color is known as additive color because of all the colors, red, green, and blue are added together in their full intensity which would create a pure white. Mixtures of the relative strengths of these colors, "create millions of colours may show the computer monitors" (Kimball, 2003, p. 95). The strength of these colors is set in from 0 to 255 with zero being less intensity and 255 being the highest intensity. When red, green and blue are combined with zero intensity, the result is black. At full power, high-intensity, where the values are set to 255, 255, 255, the result is pure white. To remember, here is a simple metaphor. Think of the red, green and blue as switches. Each switch of light using a cursor has a range from 0 to 255. When all white switches are set to zero, the room is dark. That all switches are set to 255, the room is lit at full intensity. Once you start to use applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia fireworks image editing, you start exploring the color of the computer in your graphics and photographs. When talking about use of colour, full or colour RGB is present in the photographic JPG files and other works of art created. Images full color should not be saved as GIF files because of the limited number of colors. By limited color, the color image will represent real colors using the existing Web palette of 216 colors.

This creates a poor, raster, ugly image. This is why it is very important to use the right file for each specific graphic format. When the conversion of the images printed on the Web, it is important that you do not use the color model CMYK for what anyone including graphics. The CMYK model is not a friendly monitor color space. CMYK graphics cannot be considered in CMYK on the Internet. They can only be represented by the RGB color model or Web safe (indexed) color model. Here are the rules for the color of the Web.

photos and full o (palette RGB) colour images are saved as JPG.

o flat graphic (Web 216 palette) with limited color are saved in GIF format.

o for Page backgrounds using the Web (Web 216 palette) safety palette in all applications of Web development, computer graphics and multimedia. Now, to discuss graphic size and the Web page. Size

Web pages are measured in pixels. Pixels are the unit of measurement of the screen. A Web page can be literally any size. Usually, the standard Web pages fit in a few sizes:

oW × H

o 600 × 800

o 640 × 480 (Dreamweaver default value)

o 1024 × 768.

w 550 × 400 (default Flash)

The page sizes default Web provided in the Web applications user-friendly and above are an excellent place to start. You will probably use a small, custom size for the pop-up Windows. The size of the Web page that you choose depends on you. Don't forget to use the real space of the Web page effectively so that conattempts is nearby appropriate to the user's browsing habits. Web page size affects how users move on Web pages and website portfolio. Only one rule: choose a size for all main screens and stick to it.

Consistency of page size r must be used on each level of the organizational structure of the Web portfolio design. You must understand the size of the image when you expand screens and editing Web graphics. We must keep our graphics on the page guidelines size otherwise they will extend the Web browser and the user will need to scroll see them. That is not a good thing and will disable permanently the user. When you look at the Web screens and graphics in an application such as Macromedia Fireworks or Adobe Photoshop image-editing, you can see the exact size that will occupy the image on a monitor when the view is set to 100%.

This means that you can get a clear sign of the preview a page before going through the process of making a HTML Web page. This helps the design and production. It helps eliminate guess them work, then develop-ing pages. Size also depends on the resolution. Then discuss resolution.

Read more web design related articles by visiting our Web site.