Here is a pretty cool, monochromatic brush set of old year book photos. It is under the vintage category from Centric Studios. This brush was just put up on brusheezy in October 2009 and the brush already has over 13,000 downloads. Now, if you will read a little further you will also notice that if you send the designer a contribution … they will send you 175 PS brushes … not found anywhere else. Pish Posh you say … that’s a deal. Here is the link for the deal. Here is the link for the download. 

What does it mean for something to be monochromatic?

For an image, the term monochrome is usually taken to mean the same as black-and-white or, more likely, grayscale, but may also be used to refer to other combinations containing only tones of a single color, such as green-and-white or green-and-black. It may also refer to sepia displaying tones from light tan to dark brown or cyanotype (“blueprint”) images, and early photographic methods such as Ambrotype, Tintype and Daguerreotype, each of which may be used to produce a monochromatic image.

In computing, monochrome has two meanings:

* it may mean having only one color which is either on or off,
* allowing shades of that color, although the latter is more correctly known as grayscale.

A monochrome computer display is able to display only a single color, often green, amber, red or white, and often also shades of that color.

In film photography, monochrome is typically the use of black and white film. Originally, all photography was done in monochrome until the invention of color film plates in the early 20th century.
Monochrome anaglyph image stereogram rendered in red and cyan
3D red_cyan glasses recommended for your viewing pleasure

In digital photography, monochrome is the capture of only shades of black by the sensor, or by post-processing a color image to present only the perceived brightness by combining the values of multiple channels (usually red, blue, and green). The weighting of individual channels may be selected to achieve a desired artistic effect – if only the red channel is selected by the weighting then the effect will be similar to that of using a red filter on panchromatic film. If the red channel is eliminated and the green and blue combined then the effect will be similar to that of Orthochromatic film or the use of a cyan filter on panchromatic film. The selection of weighting thus allows a wide range of artistic expression in the final monochromatic image.

For production of an anaglyph image the original color stereogram source may first be reduced to monochrome in order to simplify the rendering of the image. This is sometimes required in cases where a color image would render in a confusing manner given the colors and patterns present in the source image and the selection filters used (typically red and its complement cyan).

source: wikipedia

Snowy 1.0 by vectoroom is available for your downloading pleasure today. Put up on brusheezy just a few short days ago — Dec. 15, 2009 … it already has 7028 downloads. If you are a mind to create some snowy looking stuff these days … then by all means give it a download.

How is snow made? I mean real snow!
from this article.

High up in the sky clouds begin to form. Clouds are made of water vapour. The temperature is cooler up in the clouds than it is on the ground as a general rule. However, the temperature is not constant throughout the clouds. There are different layers or zones of temperature. These different temperature zones play an important role in the forming of a snow flake or crystal.

The water vapour in the clouds is being blown around by winds through the different temperature zones. Typically liquid water will freeze at approximately 0°C. However, for water to become solid (freeze) the water molecule (H2O) needs to slow down and to touch something solid. By touching something solid and slowing down the water molecule can, under normal circumstances transition from a vapour/gas to a liquid to a solid, or from a vapour to a solid directly. But up in the cloud there is mostly water vapour (very few solids) and lots of movement. So the water molecules continue to cool while still in a vapour form. This is called super-cooling.

When a water molecule is in a super-cooled state it can go from a vapour/gas to a solid quickly and directly. So what it mostly needs now is something solid. The “something solid” is called a nucleator. Most commonly the nucleators found in clouds are dust. The nucleators are very, very small. Small enough that the winds can lift them high into the sky. Small enough that you can’t see one with the naked eye. The job of the nucleator is to start the snow crystal. Once the crystal is started then other water molecules can join onto this crystal.

Eventually after blowing around for a period of time a water molecule will join with a nucleator. The process of building a crystal has started. Other water vapour molecules in their super-cooled state will find this crystal. Some of these molecules will join the crystal and some will not. The process of building a crystal is slow.

As the crystal builds the base shape is a flat six-sided (hexagon) crystal. This is a three dimensional (3-D) hexagon. The flat parts of the six sides/edges are called prism faces. The other two sides are called basal faces. In total there are 8 faces (top basal, bottom basal, and prism faces 1 through 6) The base hexagonal shape is a result of how the water molecules connect together. The faces of the crystal are the smoothest parts and thus the most difficult parts for additional molecules to attach to. It’s much easier to attach to a rough surface or at an edge. As it happens the crystal has 18 edges: 6 bordering the top basal face, 6 bordering the bottom basal face and 6 where the each prism face meets another prism face. So crystal growth will occur the fastest at the 18 edges and slowest on the 8 faces. The growth faces are often refered to a facets.

The crystal faces will grow evenly so that they always remain smooth (it’s a property). The faces will not really increase in surface area because on the faces the new molecules will be laid down something similar to a sheet. This arrangement is called a crystalline lattice.

The growth at the edges happens differently than with the faces. These growths are refered to as “dendrites”. Commonly these are often refered to as “snowflake arms”. But we’ll always refer to these grows as dendrites.

How a crystal grows is determined mostly by the amount of water available (the super-saturation level of ice relative to water in air; we’ll call this the “SSL(I)” for personal typing sanity) and the temperature with an influence by the atmospheric pressure and (it seems) possibly the electrical charge. Once the crystal starts it is still subjected to the same forces that the water vapour molecules are subjected to. The crystal is blown around throughout the cloud through a variety of different temperature zones. The crystal can continue to be blown about for tens of minutes to hours before falling to the ground. At different temperatures fresh water molecules will attach to the crystal at different locations. In other words the crystal will “grow” differently at different temperatures. Since the crystal is being subjected to a variety of temperatures and humidities as it is blown about, the crystal will grow differently at different times.

SSL(I) in a cloud is strongly tied to the saturation level of water, “SL(W)”. Usually when the threshold of SL(W) is met this marks the upper level for SSL(I). This threshold is low at 0°C and rises as the temperature drops. The thresehold is not a perfectly linear releationship. So at -10°C the SSL(I) is about 8% while at -25°C the SSL(I) is about 25%. At 0°C the SSL(I) is 0% and at -35°Cthe SSL(I) is about 40%. But the threshold can be exceeded because of the nature of what is happening in the clouds. Remember all of the blowing is moving the crystals around. This effectively raises the limit of the SSL(I). Exceeding the threshold opens the opportunity for a greater variety of crystal growth types. Above the threshold growth types have the opportunity to vary from growth types below the threshold. This allows for a greater variety of crystal end shapes.

Some of the crystal growths go by the names plate dendrites, needles, hollow, plates, thick plates and sector plates. There are more types we won’t bother listing. There are textbooks that you can reference if you want to delve more into the growth types. But for our end goal of understanding for skiing it’s not critical. These various growth occur as the snow crystal is blown through different temperatures and different SSL(I)’s. This growth can happen over minutes or hours before it begins to fall to the ground. While falling crystals can bump into each other damaging each other and/or joining to make a larger snow flake.

The snow flakes are now on the ground piling on top of each other. The weight of the upper snow flakes will press down on those underneath packing the snow. With all of the crystal shapes initially the snow pack contains a lot of air. Over time the snow pack will compress making it denser. There is a myth that 10cm of snow equals 1cm of water when it is freshly fallen. The truth is that the density of freshly fallen snow can vary widely depending on the type of snow crystals that have fallen and the air temperature at ground level. The density can range from as high as 5:1 to a as low as 20:1 with the same snowfall due to wind, ground-air temperature and ground heating.

Source: skiwax.ca/tp/snow.php — you can catch the rest of this article on how they make man made snow as well.

Here is a great set of Mountain’s … dark and cloudy. Photoshop Brushes of course. Free of course. By the designer 00AngelicDevil00 and found at psgalaxy.com. Here is the download link. Follow the instructions and the terms of use. Here is a link to the designers website as well.

Here is a great article or tutorial for creating your own photoshop brushes.

The Early History of Photoshop –

In 1987, Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This program, called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an Industrial Light & Magic employee, who recommended Thomas turn it into a full-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with his brother on the program, which had been renamed ImagePro. Later that year, Thomas renamed his program Photoshop and worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner; a “total of about 200 copies of Photoshop were shipped” this way.

During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Both showings were successful, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988.[4] While John worked on plug-ins in California, Thomas remained in Ann Arbor writing program code. Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 for Macintosh exclusively.

Source: wikipedia.org

I don’t know about you … but I am always looking for a head start on a web design. Here is a set of 468 X 60 psd banners. Not bad for free … provided to us by Nicholas Hall and distributed by freepsd.com and ready for your download here.

What is a .PSD file? You may ask –

The .PSD (Photoshop Document), Photoshop’s native format, stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. These include layers with masks, color spaces, ICC profiles, transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths, and duotone settings. This is in contrast to many other file formats (e.g. .EPS or .GIF) that restrict content to provide streamlined, predictable functionality.

Photoshop’s popularity means that the .PSD format is widely used, and it is supported to some extent by most competing software. The .PSD file format can be exported to and from Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, and After Effects, to make professional standard DVDs and provide non-linear editing and special effects services, such as backgrounds, textures, and so on, for television, film, and the Web. Photoshop is a pixel-based image editor, unlike Macromedia FreeHand (now defunct), Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, which are vector-based image editors.

Photoshop can utilize the color models RGB, lab, CMYK, grayscale, binary bitmap, and duotone. Photoshop has the ability to read and write raster and vector image formats such as .EPS, .PNG, .GIF, .JPEG, and Adobe Fireworks.

This information is readily available on many places on the web.

This source: wikipedia

I am a bit of a font snob. I really don’t just download any free font … plus I am really, really picky about the ones I pay for. Wouldn’t you. You do buy fonts … right? If you are a serious designer … I know you will. I love this font by Flavia Bocco … stabled over for download at dafont.com. It is a font called “vintage” and it meets the bill for my taste. Love the weird little serifs.

More info on typography? Glad you asked!

What is a glyph?

A glyph (pronounced / glif /) is an element of writing. It is a slightly vague term, but a more precise definition might be an individual mark on paper or another written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written there. A grapheme is made up of one or more glyphs.

In most languages written in any variety of the Latin alphabet the dot on a lower-case ‘i’ is not a glyph because it does not convey any distinction, and an i in which the dot has been accidentally omitted is still likely to be read as an ‘i’. However in Turkish it is a glyph, because that language has two distinct versions of the letter ‘i’, with and without a dot.

In Japanese syllabaries, a number of the characters are made up of more than one separate mark, but in general these separate marks are not glyphs because they have no meaning by themselves. However in some cases, an additional mark or marks fulfil(s) the role of a diacritic, and differentiate(s) two different characters. In this case the additional mark(s) constitute a glyph.

In typography, a glyph has a slightly different definition: it is a property of a typeface. It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language, which could be a grapheme, or part of a grapheme, or sometimes several graphemes in combination. If there is more than one allograph of a unit of writing, and the choice between them depends on context or on the preference of the author, they now have to be treated as separate glyphs, because mechanical arrangements have to be available to differentiate between them and to print whichever of them is required. The same is true in computing. In computing as well as typography, the term character refers to a grapheme or grapheme-like unit of text, as found in natural language writing systems (scripts). In typography and computing, the range of graphemes is broader than in a written language in other ways too: a typographical font often has to cope with a range of different languages each of which contribute their own graphemes, and it may also be required to print other symbols such as dingbats. The range of glyphs required increases correspondingly. In summary, in typography and computing, a glyph is a graphical unit.

Most typographic glyphs originate from the characters of a typeface. In a typeface each character typically corresponds to a single glyph, but there are exceptions, such as a font used for a language with a large alphabet or complex writing system, where one character may correspond to several glyphs, or several characters to one glyph.

So there you have it! That’s what a glyph in typography is!

Most of this information is widely known all over the web. This information is commonly available here.

Source: wikipedia.org/wiki/typography

A new font for me at nerfect.com called Heavyweight … yes, it has that whole “boxing” screen printed poster feel to it. I like it and I like some of the other fonts that this designer has. You should take some time and peruse their stuff. Of course he has some pay fonts on his site as well … that’s their living.

More info about typography?

Typography traces its origins to the first punches and dies used to make seals and currency in ancient times. The first known movable type printing artifact is probably the Phaistos Disc, though its real purpose remains disputed. The item dates between 1850 BC and 1600 BC, back to Minoan age and is now on display at the archaeological museum of Heraklion in Crete, Greece.

Typography with movable type was separately invented in 11th-century China. Modular metal type was first invented in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty around 1230. It was independently developed in mid-15th century Europe with the development of specialised techniques for casting and combining cheap copies of letterpunches in the vast quantities required to print multiple copies of texts.

Most of this information is widely known all over the web. This information is commonly available here.

Source: wikipedia.org/wiki/typography

Here’s a new font I found that is pretty cool. It’s from the exljbris Font Foundry. They have some other really good stuff … but I really liked this font in particular. Here is the page with the download.

Just in case you didn’t know: is the art and technique of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing), adjusting the spaces between groups of letters (tracking) and adjusting the space between pairs of letters (kerning).

Typography is performed by typesetters, compositors, typographers, graphic designers, art directors, comic book artists, graffiti artists, and clerical workers. Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Digitization opened up typography to new generations of visual designers and lay users.

Most of this information is widely known all over the web. This information is commonly available here.

Source: wikipedia.org/wiki/typography

Gig Poster – Metal Empire

Originally uploaded by redroofventures

I found a bunch of these posters that we had done last year for a local venue. We printed small quantities of 11 X 17, 18 X 23, 24 X 35 … smaller quantities are a little more pricey per piece … but at least you don’t have to buy 500 of each to be able to get your posters done. Digital files are the only thing required for us to print these. Photoshop files okey dokey.

Vintage Discipleship Weekend

Originally uploaded by redroofventures

Here is a shot of a vertical banner layout we did for a Discipleship Weekend last year. Vibrant colors on a black background. Of course you can hang these on a wall, grommet the corners and hang them or they make an x stand that you can throw them up in a hallway right in front of the students so that they can’t miss it. (They could still miss it though). Banners are quoted by the square foot. Our banners are very inexpensive compared to going down your your local kwinkoos or sign a doodle chain stores.

youth retreat poster

Originally uploaded by artsyiman

Here is an awesome youth retreat poster created by artsyiman . This poster is part of one of the groups I belong to on flickr. It’s a great use of color and direction. If you want to see more of this designers stuff … just click on the pic or the link of their name. Kudos artsyiman. Plus, if you were looking for a designer … you might ask if they do freelance work.