Enlargement software for digital images

There are a range of Photoshop plugins to assist with enlarging image files. Attached Mac User article article discussing the most recent versions of these plugins. The conclusion to draw is the type of enlargement software used, really depends on the file you start with. The plugins mentioned make a noticeable difference to enlargement of web-graphics.

Packaging Styles, Templates for boxes and packaging

key book: Structural Packaging Designs Forms, Folds and Sizes: All the Details Graphic Designers Can Never Find but Need to Know Chapter 9: Packaging Styles (PDF) iStockPack http://www.korthalsaltes.com/ http://designerstoolbox.com/designresources/ http://www.selfpackaging.com/ http://www.livesurface.com/ http://www.nicepapertoys.com/profiles/blogs/1905839:BlogPost:6188 http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/    

Colour Laser Printing at UCL

Colour Printing Colour Printers are Located in the following cluster room areas: (Cluster Room Map) Christopher Ingold (G20, Ground floor, 20 Gordon Street) Cruciform (B12 and B.1.3, Basement, Cruciform, Gower Street) DMS Watson (Ground floor, Science Library) Foster Court (B24, Basement, Malet Place) Torrington Place (Room 113, 1-19 Torrington Place) It will cost you 25p per page to print in colour. You’ll need to choose print queue “ClusterColour”.  

eBook conversion tools

gut or txt2html for text -> html. PHP-PDB for Palm Doc. Pyrite Publisher. (might be gone – seeFreshmeat project page for some information.) Plucker. iSilo386. makedoc. rbmake for RocketBook format. makeztxt for ztxt format. htmldoc for HTML -> PDF conversion. HTMLtidy for fixing up the automatic HTML generated by “gut”. TCR. makelrf 0.3 makebook for eReader format. methods originally developed by Daniel Durisfor iPod Notes conversion. Apple’s textutil command for RTF. Desktop Connection Library for Newton Paperback format. Mobigen.exe for Mobipocket format. Wine to run mobigen.exe on OS X. Componnents of mjBook for cellphone “.jar” files HAWHAW toolkit for the WAP sitehttp://mnybks.net. Calibre for Read more

ManyBooks.net – catalogue of free eBooks

Browse through the most popular titles, recommendations, or recent reviewsfrom our visitors. Perhaps you’ll find something interesting in the special collections. There are more than 29,000 eBooks available for Kindle, Nook, iPad and most other eReaders, and they’re all free! If you still can’t decide what to read you might want to browse through some covers to see what strikes your fancy. Or try the Recent Additions to the library, with genre filter. Many of the etexts are from the November, 2003 Project Gutenberg DVD, which contains the entire Project Gutenberg archives except for the Human Genome Project and audio eBooks, due to size limitations, and the Project Gutenberg of Read more

3D modeling for everyone – SketchUp8

What makes SketchUp great? Learn about new features in SketchUp 8. Edges and Faces: That’s all there is to it  Every SketchUp model is made up of just two things: edges and faces. Edges are straight lines, and faces are the 2D shapes that are created when several edges form a flat loop. For example, a rectangular face is bound by four edges that are connected together at right angles. To build models in SketchUp, you draw edges and faces using a few simple tools that you can learn in a small amount of time. It’s as simple as that. Push/Pull: Read more

Everything you need to know about buying a camera

Cameras! It’s almost impossible to get away from cameras nowadays, yet most of us use them with the bare minimum of knowledge required to snap the nearest tweet-worthy scene. That’s not because we don’t care about truly pretty pictures — even casual observers know the difference between good and bad photography — but have you tried to make an educated choice between cameras lately? Spec sheets are laden with alien terminology like ISO and F numbers, and once you manage to get a grasp of what those mean, you’re still confronted with a spectacular variety of options. To help you Read more

O’Reilly Safari subscription

A Safari subscription gives access to a huge library of technical books and videos. This is invaluable to someone learning a new programming language or trying to write the next big iPhone game. Safari’s monthly subscription cost is less than the price of a single printed programming book. I’ve had access to Safari at a few jobs, and the large selection of searchable books made jumping into a new project much less daunting. Price: $28/month (Link)  

VPS Hosting – Linode

We’re a VPS hosting company built upon one simple premise: provide the best possible tools and services to those that know what they need — better hosting. A Linode VPS means freedom. You get everything from the kernel and root access on up. All managed by our simple yet very powerful control panel. Discover why Linode may be right for you. Features Full ssh and root access Guaranteed Resources 4 processor Xen instances Out of band console shell Dedicated IP address, premium bw Six datacenters in the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific HA and Clustering Support Bandwidth pooling Managed DNS with API website: http://www.linode.com/ Read more

Walters and Walters (markers and chalk)

Walters & Walters Ltd. We are the UK’s only factory dedicated to the Manufacture of Industrial Crayons including WWL Warehouse Crayons for general marking, WWT Timber & Metal Crayons, also for Lumber, Stone & Masonry and Street and Road Marking, WRL Rubber Crayons for all Rubber Surfaces including Tyres,  WGL Glass Crayons and WRB Heavy Duty Crayons for all surfaces. We are also the main UK Importer of Engineers French Chalk Sticks and Flats (Welders Chalk) and Distributors of Markers and Marker Pens for all surfaces.  We supply most brands but you will find the entire range of Edding Markers, Read more

Typography Tutorials

Step-by-step methods for getting the most out of your fonts and graphic design software. FontBook, A New Way Of Combining & Comparing And Sharing Typefaces A little tutorial to get you acquainted with the new functionalities of the new FontBook app for iPad. Tutorial: Glowing letters Use this Photoshop technique to create electric glowing type sprinkled with pixie dust. Tutorial: Festive Engraved Type This tutorial shows how to create delicate shadow lines and shaded engraved type. Tutorial: Photorealistic Perspective Sometimes, flat just doesn’t cut it, and we need to find other, more attractive ways to present designs to our customers. Read more

Typography Basics

Refresh yourself with the terminology and fundamentals required for sound typesetting. Learn How To Kern Like A Pro With KernType An online game in the Method Of Action series aims at showing the importance of balanced distribution of space between characters. Figuring Out Numerals – The Sequel In this sequel to “Figuring Out Numerals” we look at some special cases. Figuring Out Numerals In this first instalment of our examination of numerals we look at the different figure sets available in OpenType fonts. Making Books In The Days Of The Linotype A vintage short documentary produced by Encyclopædia Britannica Films Read more

HOWTO keep your data safe at the US border

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a new guide, “Defending Privacy at the U.S. Border: A Guide for Travellers Carrying Digital Devices,” which explains how the law, good technology choices, cryptography and backups can be combined to keep your data safe while you travel, especially when crossing into the USA, where customs officials reserve the rights to search your laptop and mobile phone without a warrant and keep whatever they find. “Different people need different kinds of precautions for protecting their personal information when they travel,” said EFF Senior Staff Technologist Seth Schoen. “Our guide helps you assess your personal risks and Read more

EMS Xtreme4vs – run many displays from one mac

EMS Xtreme4vs Introducing the new Xtreme4vs Dual/Single-Link DVI Video Wall Controller/Splitter Stand-alone unit with up to 4K x 4K input source Inputs: DVI/HDMI, Outputs: 4x DVI-D or VGA   The EMS Xtreme4vs is a stand alone display wall controller that accepts a single-link 1920×1080(DVI-D or HDMI) or dual-link DVI input up to 4K x 4K and can flexibly display this across four output monitors. Each output can be driven as DVI or analog RGB and can represent an arbitrary crop region of the original input image.  The output resolution and frame rate does not need to be related to that of Read more

Tools to Make, Manage and Publish Your Creative Portfolio Online

Tools to Make, Manage and Publish Your Creative Portfolio Online Presenting your work online—be it art, design, photography—can be tough. Equally tough is building and updating your online portfolio. Here’s a starter list of tools that help creative practitioners share their work with ease: 4ormat Behance ProsSite Carbonmade Cargo clickbooq Coroflot Portfolios design:related Fluid Galleries Gallerytopia A Good Portfolio Icompendium Parade PopSlice Qfolio Tank Tasty CMS The Web Therapist Viewbook Virb   Weebly is a San Francisco, California based company that was founded in 2006 with the mission to help people put their information online quickly and easily. We enable Read more

Adobe Kuler: Explore, create and share color themes

Discover Adobe® Kuler® — the web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community. DID YOU KNOW… Adobe Kuler is now available as a tablet app The Adobe Kuler app, an extension of the full Adobe Kuler service, enables you to generate and view color themes on the go. Initially available for Android only. Kuler is available online at no charge Explore, create, and share color themes. Try Kuler now Kuler is accessible from your favorite Read more

Fuel RCA – developing an art or design related career

Our Basics section covers some of the most common issues that you might come across while developing an art or design related career, from gaining confidence to sorting out your taxes. We’re expanding this section all the time so keep checking back. The articles here are intended as informal guidance, giving you an overview of some important topics. For in-depth advice, always consult a lawyer, accountant or other relevant professional. You can also get one-to-one guidance from our free helpline service, Fuel Line, plus there are lots of helpful books on business matters and career development in the FuelRCA library collection. Website: http://fuel.rca.ac.uk/

Roland iModela iM-01 Affordable 3D Hobby Mill

Roland iModela iM-01. Incorporating 25 years of Roland’s proven 3D milling technology, the iModela is an inexpensive, easy-to-use desktop device that mills wax, foam, balsa wood and plastic materials commonly used in craft and hobby projects. web: http://www.rolanddg.com/news/nr111005_im-01.html

Puredyne is the USB-bootable GNU/Linux operating system for creative multimedia

Instant USB-bootable creative desktop Puredyne is the USB-bootable GNU/Linux operating system for creative multimedia. Puredyne is a live distribution, you don’t need to install anything. Simply boot your computer using the live USB or CD and you’re ready to start using software such as Pure Data, Supercollider, Icecast, Csound, Fluxus, Processing, Arduino and more. Read more   One tiny USB provides you with the complete puredyne GNU/Linux system including all software, and extra space to store your files. Ideal for workshops, installations, or super lightweight travelling. For who? Puredyne is developed for artists, by artists. It’s used for live music, installation art, hardware hacking, teaching, Read more

Learn HTML and CSS – book – Jon Duckett

A NICER WAY TO LEARN ABOUT HTML & CSS A book about code that doesn’t read like a 1980’s VCR manual… It’s not just for programmers, it’s written and presented to make it easy for designers, artists, bloggers, content and e-commerce managers, marketers to learn about the code used to write web pages… Learn how to: Read and write HTML5 and CSS3 Structure and design web pages and sites Prepare images, audio and video for the web Control typography and layout You will also find lots of helpful hints and practical advice alongside the code A NICER WAY TO LEARN Read more

Web fonts – Jonathan Hoefler

An excellent 26-minute talk by Jonathan Hoefler of the Hoefler & Frere-Jones about how they think about designing typefaces and webfonts in particular. Today, as webfonts are buoyed by a wave of early-adopter enthusiasm, they’re marred by a similar unevenness in quality, and it’s not just a matter of browsers and rasterizers, or the eternal shortage of good fonts and preponderance of bad ones. There are compelling questions about what it means to be fitted to the technology, how foundries can offer designers an expressive medium (and readers a rich one), and what it means for typography to be visually, Read more

How To Remotely Control Your Mac Using Simple AppleScripts

If you’re lucky to have two or more Macs in your home or office, you no doubt find occasions where you would like to remote control a Mac either from another room or from another part of the country. You probably know that you can use the Shared feature to remotely control another Mac on the same network. But by creating some simple AppleScript commands you can control a remote Mac much faster, alleviating the need to open the Shared screen feature. If you have never worked with AppleScript before, don’t fret. The following Mac remote control scripts are very Read more

Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire

a major new website examining the celluloid legacy of British colonialism. The website, www.colonialfilm.org.uk, houses over 30 hours of newly digitized films drawn from the archives of the British Film Institute, the Imperial War Museum, and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. It is made freely available, worldwide. The project research team sifted through thousands of records to extract a comprehensive list of any and every film that contained footage, however brief, of a British colony before independence, and from this pre-existing but unsorted data a new joint catalogue was assembled, and is presented on the website in a fully Read more

Art Website Sales Contract – Rafaël Rozendaal

Art Website Sales Contract is a document that I use to sell my websites. I think in moving images, and I don’t think moving images are objects. I place these moving images in domain names. Each URL is the title and the location of each art piece. These websites are public, their ownership is exclusive. Domain names are one of the internet’s few scarcities. They are unique, they can’t be forged or copied. This contract explains the rights and duties of the artist and the collector, to make sure the work remains intact as long as possible. It was drafted by Read more

Digital preservation – Rafaël Rozendaal

More and more I hear people talking on the subject of the preservation of internet art. It is a new medium and no one knows what exactly will happen. Will we still browse the web in 15 years? Will information be injected straight into our mind without any screens? Art works should last a long time. I love seeing old art, and I think it’s not until an artist dies that we get the big picture of their work. Many media came before the internet. Lots of those media were lost, and some were saved. Paintings, sculptures, books, celluloid, vinyl, Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Game art: theory, communities, resources

Like all digital media, video-games can be designed, produced, deconstructed and re-appropriated within the context of art. Even though the history of video-games is relatively short, it is already rich with examples of artistic experimentation and innovation. Unlike film or video, games still represent a fairly immature medium, slowly evolving to locate itself in mainstream culture. The majority of games often present simplistic or crude visions of interactivity, narrative and aesthetics, but the mediumoffers unique potential for the creation of exciting new forms of art. Like any digital medium the evolution of art/games is  closely tied to the development of Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Hardware hacking: open hardware and stand alone objects

That’s a broad title. Building your own hardware can mean a lot of different things. To narrow thescope a bit, this article talks about embedded Single Board Computers (SBCs) and microcontrollersfrom birds eye view. An embedded SBC is anything that is complex enough to comfortably host astandard operating system, while a microcontroller is too small for that. PDF: Digital Artists Handbook: Hardware hacking: open hardware and stand alone objects

Digital Artists Handbook: working with others

It is of course a truism, often repeated, that the Internet has been the basis for a revolution in (remote) interpersonal communications, collaboration and data sharing. It is probably safe to say that there would be very few of the Free/Libre and Open Source (FLOSS) projects that exist today without the collaboration technologies the Internet supports. One of the many effects of the powerful tools FLOSS has put in to the hands of creative people is that it has potentially made them more independent. No longer are they reliant on specialists with access to expensive software and hardware to carry out Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Software Art

The term ‘software art’ acquired a status of an umbrella term for a set of practices approaching software as a cultural construct. Questioning software culturally means not taking for granted, but focusing on, recognising and problematising its distinct aesthetics, poetics and politics captured and performed in its production, dissemination, usage and presence, contexts which software defines and is defined by, histories and cultures built around it, roles it plays and its economies, and various other dimensions. Software, deprived of its alleged ‘transparency’, turns out to be a powerful mechanism, a multifaceted mediator structuring human experience, perception, communication, work and leisure, Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Working with digital video

Working with digital video is part of many artistic disciplines. Besides single screen narratives, video productions can range from animation, multiple screen installation to interactive work. Still, many aspects of digital video can be traced back to the history of film. The interface of a timeline editing software such as Cinelerra shows a multitrack timeline, a viewing monitor, a bin for clips; echoing the setup of a flatbed table for editing celluloid. PDF: Digital Artists Handbook: Working with digital video

Digital Artists Handbook: Licensing: copyright, legal issues, authorship, media work licensing, Creative Commons

In this article, we will cover a few questions and principles of open content licensing. We will discuss why to use a license and how it helps to give a stable legal background to start a collaboration. As choosing a license means accepting a certain amount of legal formalism, we will see the conditions required to be entitled to use an open license. Using the comparison of the Free Art License and the Creative Commons, we will try to give an accurate picture of the differences that co-exist in the world of open licensing, and approach what distinguishes free from open licenses. Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Publishing your work

Self publishing is not a new phenomenon. It is the publishing of all media by the author/artists of those works rather than by established, third party publishers. Although self publishing has been around since the beginning of publishing , it has seen a huge increase in activity with the advancement of publishing technology and the World Wide Web. PDF: Publishing your work

Digital Artists Handbook: Blender: Working with 3D

Once upon a time to work with 3d software you’d need a small fortune to get you started – a few thousand Euros for the software, and a few more to partake in a premium rate course or two to learnthe basics. Or you could save your pennies and buy a mute tutorial book, which would invariably goout of date as newer versions of your program would surface, and keyboard short cuts, terminologyand layout would change.   Now the world of 3D computer graphics has opened up and its anyone’s game. Blender potentially replaces the industry standards of Maya, Cinema4D and Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Working with graphics: Processing

You might have come across the ‘made with Processing’  hyperlink on the internet or heard ofProcessing before. Over the past six years it has become a real phenomenon, allowing creative mindsto access the digital world. Based on a rather simple syntax and minimal interface, Processingsmoothly drives beginners into the scary world of programming.This article is not a tutorial, but rather an attempt to give you a global idea of what the programmingenvironment is, looks like and why it was created. Should you decide it is the tool you need, thisarticle will hopefully provide enough pointers to online and offline resources Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Graphics

Image reigns supreme. From the thousands of films churned out each year from Nollywood, to the persistent recording of images by security cameras in London to the scaling of windows on your desktop computer, you are already a pixel pusher. But, how can you reign supreme over images? How can you become an active participant in the creation of graphics and move beyond passive consumption. While the distinction between amateur and professional is erased in the Youtube-record-a-video-get-rich-generation, the focus upon high-quality content controlling tools is key. What is the point of mastering verion 3.5 of Killer Graphics App 97’s fuzz Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Pure Dataflow – Diving into Pd

This article introduces the possibilities of the software Pure Data (Pd), explains a bit why it’s so popular among artists and shows what Pd can be used for. The goal is to help artists decide if Pd is a tool for their own work. Pure Data, or PD for short, is a software written by mathematician and musician Miller S. Puckette. It  has become one of the most popular tools for artists working with digital media. Originally conceived in the late 90s as an environment to create sounds and to compose music, it was soon extended by modules to work Read more

Newspaper Club – getting your short run newspapers printed

We’re here to help you make your own newspapers. You can use our online tool to upload and arrange your words and pictures or you can use the site to send us a PDF. We print on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and you’ll get your papers in about a week. web: http://www.newspaperclub.com/ the help section gives you all the info for successful printing: http://www.newspaperclub.com/help

Zine Wiki

Zine Wiki: Lots of info about Zines, including Libraries who collect them   web: http://zinewiki.com/

Free Computer Science courses from Stanford University

Stanford University offered three of their most popular computer science courses to the public this fall, online for free. The courses were so popular that Stanford’s doing it again in January. This time they’re offering 7 computer science courses: Computer Science 101 http://www.cs101-class.org/ Machine Learning (one of the offerings this past fall) http://jan2012.ml-class.org/ Software as a Service http://www.saas-class.org/ Human-Computer Interaction http://www.hci-class.org/ Natural Language Processing http://www.nlp-class.org/ Game Theory http://www.game-theory-class.org/ Probabilistic Graphical Models http://www.pgm-class.org/ Cryptography http://www.crypto-class.org/ And two entrepreneurship courses: The Lean Launchpad http://www.launchpad-class.org/ Technology Entrepreneurship http://www.venture-class.org/ No tuition, no textbooks, no set class times (students get a week to complete the assignments).

File Preparation for 3D printing at the Bartlett DMC

Basics The way you process your three dimensional data will depend on the 3D program you are using to model in. Different programs utilise different approaches to modelling, however, the following points need to be considered independently of your software type: Ultimately the data you supply needs to be in .STL format.  The three dimensional geometry created in your 3D program can be converted to this file format typically under the File–Export menu of most programs. All geometry to be 3D printed must be in three-dimensions. Any two-dimensional geometry will not be processed or built by the 3D printer. All Read more