Not only is it so easy to find fonts to add to my collection, but it really is a special feeling to find just the right font for that application which actually brings me to my problem. As most of you surely have found, inside of software like word and photoshop there’s really no good way to search through your fonts in any intelligent way. Enter Myfontbook.com. This is a free online application which allows you to view your installed fonts, preview them in editable contexts, and also tag them so that you can organize an otherwise chaotic space.

It’s not really a huge thing, but it is yet another resource to which you can point your customers to learn about tats. Venture over there sometime, participate in a poll, write a comment, or at least sign the guestbook.

Please take a look Squidoo.com/tat.

Squidoo is basically a free web page service. However, their focus is definitely on information. They really remind me of fan pages, but Squidoo well predates facebook fan pages. They also offer some really cool tools that you might not find everywhere else. In my opinion, Squidoo really shines because of it’s ease of creation. Each lens (their special name for page) is constructed with discreet and powerful modules which makes it very, very user-friendly – especially if those users are computer-allergic. Feel free to venture over there and make your first free Squidoo lens.

I’d like to extend a huge thank you to Ellyn, our recent superhero, for putting this up for us. (Make sure to comment on her Wednesday Spotlight this week.)

I wanted to show you a great example which was implemented over on TatStore.com by our great tech team recently. Ellyn, who writes our awesome Wednesday spotlight pieces, was adding cross-links from our Power Systems to the products that it includes. However, Brad realized that there was a better way to do it, and I am really proud of their result from a usability perspective.

Check it out here and check out the details tab.

Recently they launched their newest tool called Talon. Talon is not as amazing as some of their other tools, but what it lacks in razzle-dazzle it makes up for with handy. Talon’s function is screen-capture markup, and it is very, very good at it. It allows you to take a screenshot of any webpage, and then write all over it, circle things on it, highlight it, draw stick figures, and then produce that for email or whatever you would like.

I thought this would be a valuable tool for this crowd because, the process of taking screenshots and produce them into usable jpg’s has come up on this blog several times, so I thought it would be a great accessible app. Also, it’s a great way to be precise when communicating with your design guy if you have someone who handles your webpage for you. Check out their handy firefox extension which takes Talon everywhere with you on the web.

These choices that you make are very important to your overall business success and different customers of ours have some pretty good ideas. We can however notice that there are surely some awful ideas. For example, I hope no one would be tempted to lay out their stencils in a pile on a table and hope that their customers are motivated to look through them. Yet, it is somehow more tempting to do exactly this on your website. Just like in real life, you are going to benefit greatly from keeping your sales message and merchandise organized. For example, most sites have different sort by options for product lists which are large enough that customers might find them unwieldy. It’s even better if you can arrange your materials, such that they can be divided into some sort of categories. In the same way that posters can help ease the buying decision in brick and mortar locations, so too can smaller, more focused categories on the web.

It is Google’s stated mission to digitize and index all information on the planet. They seem to get closer every day.

I’m not sure when this feature was released, but I just noticed today that you can now filter your Google image results by color. I apologize if I am way behind the times here, but that is pretty cool. Once upon a time, most of us thought that pictures were untouchable. Google and the other search engines had proximal tools like surrounding context and alt tags, but as far as the actual content of a picture was concerned, well, that was just too much to ask.

Now, I understand that mining color values from picture files is probably not the most groundbreaking adventure ever as flickr interfaces have been doing that for years, it’s the force behind the technology that makes me tingle. Google is trying harder than ever to actually index the information present in a picture directly. They will not settle, and it seems they will not sleep until it’s done. That means look for maybe a checkbox for “includes people” or what’s even more exciting: being able to search by uploading pictures. I know, sounds impossible, but I’m sure that’s where they want to be, and they will get there.

Yes, that’s still a long way off it seems technology wise, but I’m just saying it’s exciting. What does all this mean for us as tat artists and business owners? Well, you now have a new search criteria which might grab some traffic for your site. For example, it’s possible that an individual can now make a search for butterfly pictures, and filter to only see results containing a large amount of orange. Well, if you have a picture on your site that you think might be a great result for a search like “orange butterfly” but your picture is full of green grass in the background and is zoomed out so that the butterfly tat is very small, maybe you will miss that opportunity. So I guess all I am saying is two things. One, Google wishes that it could physically look at every picture in the world and know exactly what is in it so that they can point people at it. This includes video, sound files, pdfs, and every other kind of file on this planet or others. So remember that as you build your site. Two, make sure you take good pictures, because the better Google gets at the above goal, the more rewarded you will be for taking them. (Regardless of Google, please take good pictures. They pay for themselves in sales every time.)

PS: the picture for this article came from a orange filtered Google image search for “google.” There’s a little ff, a fun fact.

As you know I am unapologetically enamored with Google so I jumped on their player, although to be fair I also put the Yahoo! player on there too, as a backup, as I could not get the Google one to work with the canonically backwards Internet Explorer. I’m serious, if Google were a rockstar, I would be a groupie. If Google could read love letters, I would write them. If Google could autography my hard drive, I would have them. Really… I’m considering the Google logo as a tattoo (which would be stupid, get a tat!).

This example has not yet been integrated into the GIMP, but I hope soon will be. A layer style affects the content of the layer without polluting the content of the layer. For example, If I were to want to color text in photoshop with a gradient, it is just a matter of double clicking the layer, which brings up the layer style dialog, selecting gradient, and editing the settings. Then I can change it as many times as I want, change the text, add an additional pattern overlay, and add a bevel effect. Then, I can turn it all or any of it off, reverting back to the original image. If I were to do this in the gimp I would have to rasterize the text, and then apply the gradient. This is actually changing the layer and cannot be undone by anything except the clunky undo function. Try it, live it, love it.

Non-destructive editing, as the name implies, means editing that does not alter the original work. The payoff to us is that it is work that can be undone or change, and redone. The most basic delivery of non-destructive editing may be the simple addition of layers. Instead of drawing a black line directly on the digital image, forever obliterating those sacred pixels which once there resided, one might create a new layer and draw the black line on that which can now be removed, changed, or made invisible, all the while leaving the original image unaltered.

Here’s the rub though. Non-destructive editing takes more time, more finesse, and more creativity, than does its ruthless counterpart. Most of the time it’s not as reflexive as adding a new layer, nor as obvious. Take for example a simple size change. Objective: Remove red-eye from a digital portrait and downsize it to be sent quickly in an email. Once you have removed the red eye and you approach the home stretch it might be easy to simple go for the image size adjustment, save it the size you need and leave. However you would have perpetrated an enormous blunder. The proper procedure would be to edit the red-eye (hopefully with layers), save that project (layers and all), shrink, save as a copy, and then decline to save changes to the original. In this way, you have retained maximum raster data at minimal cost, in fact only the tiny bits of time, mental focus, and hard-drive space (for which prices are currently free-falling nearly through the floor). Now I would hope that the benefits are self-evident, but maybe are not convinced… What if you decide after all that you left a distracting and now illegible billboard blob in the background? What if you decide you made it too small to be printed at 5×7 size? Now these minimal costs seem like a bargain when your data is lost. Hopefully you saved the original, so you can repeat all your editing to get it just right. And this was an incredibly mundane example. Imagine your examples, your logo, your website, your business cards. Non-destructive editing should be a constant pursuit for anyone who works with pictures.

Fortunately for us, non-destructive editing is the way of the future. Things like layers, adjustment layers, layer masks, layer properties, blending options, layer styles, smart objects, and paths all make it easier to change your mind. So next image you are working on try to do one extra thing in a non-destructive way, and then make it two… It will change your editing world.