Friday, January 22, 2010

Glass Web Icons As An Independent Icon Style

Glass web icons can be considered an independent icon style.Nevertheless it is logical to assume that glass style is just one of the types of the shiny, glossy design.

Other types of the glossy web icons design that can be marked out:

  • glass icons;
  • metal icons;
  • glass-metal icons;
  • transparent icons.

Transparent and half-transparent glossy icons can be aqua, crystal, plastic etc.

Glass icons are often depicted with reflecting. It is one of the standard features of the "Web 2.0" icons. Creation of vertical reflection effect for web icons is certainly simple in addition you can find a great amount of tutorials on the web teaching how to do this.

It is the effect when icons are like images placed on a shiny, reflecting surface or tower above the water surface.

The crisp and pure look of glass icons makes navigating through the website pages eye-catching and playful. If you wish to create such neat web icons it is simple to find hundreds of tutorials on the Internet.

Creation of glass web icons.

Adobe Photoshop is the number one software for creating web icons. Photoshop is becoming steadily more and more flexible software for design. Originally it was rather an image editor and nowadays it allows to produce almost all visual effects used for the graphic design. Plenty of the great web icons designs were created with a help of this software program. The main feature of the latest Photoshop versions is the ability to combine pixel painting with vector tool for creating glass icons, buttons, characters etc.<\p>

The simplest way to design Glass icons is to make the "glass" layer overlap the image, not the whole image but the most of it. By using the "eraser" tool it will be possible to build an empty diagonal line through the image. You are supposed to proceed using eraser for making adjustments to the glass layer until the moment when the glass effect repeats the contour of the icon. As a result it should create a kind of the glass haze in the opposite sides. The moment this procedure complete the further adjustments should be applied.

Professional site designers should use this effect carefully and remember that glass-fever may look ridiculous . Glass icons really should be combined with taste so that the web page style could remain professional and reserved.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Ever Thought About Choosing DreamWeaver Website Templates?

You can use these templates to create web pages that have a common structure and appearance. Dreamweaver Themes are also useful if you want to make sure that all of the pages in a site share certain characteristics. You are able to change information effortlessly on the group of pages by editing the web template and then reapplying it to those pages. While unique elements to each page, such as text or graphics stay unchanged, common theme elements, such as menu bars and links - are updated on all of the pages that use the template. For example, if you change the copyright info in the Footer of the web template - Dreamweaver will instantly amend the footers for you automatically. As you can see this is the greates tool to save your time!

Today it is possible to easily discover a great variety of Dreamweaver Templates to any taste over the Internet. But first of all you should decide what kind of theme you want to have: free Dreamweaver Template or premium one. Free template can be a very good choice if you want to save your pennies. But if you want to have exclusive design and extra quality - you should look for premium Dreamweaver Templates. Anyway you have a great opportunity to redesign your site in no time.

So at the end I can definitely claim that Dreamweaver templates are aimed to save your valuable time and money. Templates are a great way to maintain consistency across your web site. Don't panic if you have some problems - 24 hour support teams always glad to help. You can also use step by step web design online course or tutorials. Make a present to your website - redesign it using a new Dreamweaver theme and attract more visitors right now! Use this unique chance to be on the crest of the wave of Internet world.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

3D Icons And 2D Icons Fight

2D and 3D icons design - what's the big difference?

Speaking about 3d Icons we need to point out that the source of light plays a very important role for creating authentic three-dimensional images. Certainly the using several light sources in web site design nowadays is more effective but bear in mind that they should follow basic rules of physics and be truthful. So if you would like to make 3D web icons look softer and more realistic - use several lights.

Both 2D and 3D icons represent the volume found in the three-dimensional world but use different means of creating this illusion. 2D Icons can surely represent volume to less extent than 3D Icons. More often the images are flat and show just one perspective. To this disadvantage you can also add one more - detailed highlights and imperceptible soft shadows are missing. The shades usage is limited as well.

3D web icons can be proud of all these features instead. But 3D is mathematical replication of the data which anyway limits its usage. Sometimes you can easily replace 3D Icons by 2D ones or by the videos with the sounds - but all this depends on situation. The sounds give some extra dimensionality to the videos that actually use 2D images.Software used for 3D modeling allows to make that 3D dimension. Bear in mind that 3D icons need to be depicted in correlation with the other objects and the environment they're placed into.