Branding with Favicon & How to Create a Favicon in Photoshop

Favicon is short for 'Favorites Icon'. Favicon reflects the look and feel of the web site or the organization's logo & create a strong online branding. Within any browser the favicon is displayed on the address line and as well as in the Favorites menu. It creates a more customized appearance within a visitor's browser. It’s an image of 16 pixels by 16 pixels in size.

All you need to add a Favicon to your site is a Windows Icon (.ico) file called name.ico that you upload to the main directory of your website

Download the Plugin
You'll need the Windows Icon (ICO) file format Photoshop Plugin to export to the .ico file format. You can download the plugin from Telegraphics. The plugin reads and writes ICO files in 1, 4 and 8-bit Indexed and 24-bit RGB modes, and also reads and writes 32-bit "XP" icons (with 8-bit alpha channel). Make sure to install the plugin before you begin the design.

The Design
If you already have a logo, Start works in a 64x64 Pixel canvas. Once you finalized the design you should reduce it to the 16 x 16 size. Always try creating a simple design that incorporates colors from your website's palette. You have to try & try to give a good look for your favicon.

Saving The Custom Icon
Go to File>Save As and make sure you name the file favicon.ico. Under Format you must choose Windows Icon (ICO) from the pulldown menu. This format will only be available in Photoshop after you download and install the plugin. In the next step you'll need to upload this new file to the root folder of your website.

Uploading The Favicon.ico File
Connect to your server and upload your Favicon.ico file to your website. You must place it into the same directory as your home (index) page, and leave it loose, making sure not to put it in an images directory or other folder.

.ico plugin forPhotoshop: Telegraphics

How to add a Favicon to your site: W3c.org

How to write creatively?

The deep desire of every author or writer , is to be able to write in a creative manner. Some thing which is unique and springs from the depth of the heart; just like a good song sung from the depth of the heart, touches everyone. So creative writing touches everyone deep
down under and one is tempted to read that masterpiece, again and again.

The term often misunderstood is that creativity is linked to the mind or intelligence, but this is a myth and has been proved wrong. Research has shown that most creative people are those, who are sensitive and act from their heart, rather than their intellect.

So to be a good creative writer, you need to improve your quotient of emotional intelligence, i.e .intelligence governed by the heart. How can this be done? We hereby endeavour to tell you to follow some guidelines in this regard.

We all know that there is a super natural power, which created this universe .He is master creator and we never stop admiring his creation. So if we some how , try to establish a connection with that super power, through meditation or some other means; the latent
creative powers in us will get invoked and the inherent creative juices will start to flow from our system., as water gushes out from a spring.

We have a physical body outside but we also have a subtle body inside us. Though we take great care to nurture our outer body and mind, we generally neglect our subtle system. There are three veins in our system, called Nadis; namely Ida, Pingla and Sushmna. Then we have seven chakras or energy centers in our body, starting from Mooladhar, Swadishtan to the crown chakra called Sahastrar.

There are different deities reigning on these chakras and there is a dormant energy, called Kundalini, an energy sleeping in three and a half coils, at the base of our spinal cord. All meditations , pujas and other rituals; simply aim at awakening the kundalini through different means. The objective is for it to reach Sahastrar and obtain a union with the all pervading divine power. When this happens, the spirit gets enlightened and we experience a state of complete thoughtlessness , bliss and relaxation. Now we start getting the blessings of different deities, of different chakras.

For creativity, meditating upon the second chakra or swadishtan chakra as it is called,is specially useful. The reigning deities of this chakra are Braham dev and Saraswati. Since Saraswati is the goddess of learning and reativity, by getting her blessings, we invoke the latent creative
powers within us, Our creativity takes a quantum jump and we naturally become a more creative person. Whichever field you are engaged in whether writing, music, sports or whatever, you become a more creative person.

Besides becoming more creative, when your spirit gets enlightened, you not only become a more creative person but also a good person full of compassion ,with a golden heart.

This is write up by Sarabjeet a Sahajayogi Indsyogi

For more details on Meditation, you may log on to www.sahajayoga.org

Changing photos with classic palettes

Adjusting your photographs to get the color 'just right' can be a chore. Think about this: The Old Masters of painting spent years of their lives learning about color. Why let all their effort go to waste on the walls of some museum when it could be used to give you a hand with color correction?

When Photoshop entered the CS series it included a new tool called 'Match Color.' This tools was made so that you could match a series of photos to one another.

But there is another thing you can do with 'Match Color' that is much cooler: You can match the colors in your photos to those in famous paintings.

See how to do it with Photoshop CS2

Yahoo Mail designed a destructive animation while loading!

The new Yahoo mail comes up with a lovely interface. Good use of technology & design. I just love it! The application runs a small animation while loading the mail.

The latest animation is a destructive one. In this world we see lots of destructive thoughts transformed in to a large scale of destruction! The latest animation is a thought comes from a destructive mind.

The animation tells a story like this...
A small child is playing with a ball jumper suddenly a huge monster killed the child!

What message yahoo wants to spread! Yahoo mail is used by millions of people, This animation is a good platform to spread the message of love & harmony & not destruction!

Designing Social Software - A New Field

“The goal of user interface design is to help the user succeed, the goal of social interface design is to help the society succeed, even if it means one user has to fail.”

Social interface design is still a field in its infancy. I’m not aware of any books on the subject; there are only a few people working in the research side of the field, and there’s no organized science of social interface design. In the early days of usability design, software companies recruited ergonomics experts and human factors experts to help design usable products. Ergonomics experts knew a lot about the right height for a desk, but they didn’t know how to design GUIs for file systems, so a new field arose. Eventually the new discipline of user interface design came into its own, and figured out the concepts like consistency, affordability, feedback, etc., which became the cornerstone of the science of UI design.

Over the next decade, I expect that software companies will hire people trained as anthropologists and ethnographers to work on social interface design. Instead of building usability labs, they’ll go out into the field and write ethnographies. And hopefully, we’ll figure out the new principles of social interface design. It’s going to be fascinating… as fun as user interface design was in the 1980s… so stay tuned.

Check these sites:

Joel on Software

Autistic Social Software Supernova Conference

Clay Shirky's writing about the Internet

What is Web 2.0?

“Web 2.0″ refers to a recent rebirth of sites that focus on user empowerment and open-source applications online. There is a loose set of criteria that bind these sites together and creates the synonymous language that web mavens like Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), John Battelle (BattelleMedia) and Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Network) have adopted. In many ways, these elements can be thought of as the formative definition of Web 2.0:

- User generated and/or user influenced content
- Applications that use the Web (versus the desktop) as a platform, in innovative ways
Similar visual design and shared functional languages
- Leveraging of popular trends, including blogging, social tagging, wikis, and peer-to-peer sharing
- Inclusion of emerging web technologies like RSS, AJAX, APIs (and accompanying mashups), Ruby on Rails and others
- Open source or sharable/editable frameworks in the form of user-oriented “create your own” APIs

Check the web 2.0 awards announced in March 28, 2006 by seomoz team, where over 300 web 2.0 sites in 38 catagories rated, ranked & awarded. Read 21 interviews done with
founders of winning sites.

Go to Se0moz site ...

Joy of Making Indian Toys

Today, children are inundated with expensive toys. Parents seem to be in a hurry to buy the latest toys with flashing lights and sounds.

Pedagogic learning is now associated with gloss and gleam. Children play with such toys for a while and then they throw them away. Instant gratification, instant forgetfulness seems to be the norm.

Children need large chunks of time to play and mess around with things they like. This is how they construct their own knowledge patterns.

According to Rabindranath Tagore, the best toys are those which are innately incomplete and which a child completes with her participation.

As a child, my daughter was gifted many expensive toys. But she was happiest playing with spoons and pots in the kitchen.

Whenever we broke a coconut to make chutney we would preserve all the pieces of the hardwood in the washed plastic milk bag.

This article recently published in The Times of India about the Joy of Making Indian Toys and the book of the same name – especially those of you who have small children:

This is the website of the author