Can't really explain why shiny is better than not shiny. Maybe its some latent thing, some treasurehunting instinct that hangs in there. All I can say is shiny is awesome. Shiny coins, glossy cars, slick glass. Something about just catches the eye and draws me in.
So, I had to know. How the heck do graphic designers create those gorgeous icons and badges you see all over the internet? I thought, man that's got to be hard. I mean those things are designed by professionals. I'll never be able to do that.
So, I Googled it. I found a website that had a list of tutorials on how to make everything shiny.
What was great was, the guy was using Macromedia Fireworks. This is the very software I use for the snobby reason that it was free to download.
Even if you don't use Fireworks, you can apply the same concepts to any graphic software you're comfortable with. Read to tutorials
here.
Or you can just enjoy looking over my obsessive learning process.
The first one doesn't have any shiny in it. It's just the original concept before I discovered how exciting and easy shining it up could be.
The second one is my first pass at making shiny icons. The tutorial I read showed how to make round ones so I made round ones too.
This has reflections. I'm gettin' fancier.
This is the last one I made before I realized I was getting on my wife's nerves by begging her to look at what I made now. Very shiny.
So, that's pretty much how I spent my Sunday off. The wife said she liked the first one best (the one that's not shiny at all...I know, right?). Incidentally, this is my first attempt to post images from a Picasa account so if everything doesn't display correctly I apologize. I can only get better, right?
This is my first post in something like ten weeks. I've had a lot to think about and I tend to think in silence. At the end of December last year, I was introduced to a series of sermons by David Platt of Brook Hill Church. Mr. Platt is a young pastor of a large church in the are of Birmingham, Alabama. Beginning with his family, and taking the lesson out to his church and then the Christian population as a whole, Mr. Platt has asked people to do something radical. He wants us to read the gospel of Jesus and accept every word as true. I believe the Bible is the inspired word of God. I have tried to apply it to my life and live according to its principles. Yet, hearing the passionate words of this pastor convicted me of the truth that I have lived a me-centered Americanized brand of Christianity that minimizes certain teachings of Christ that would be uncomfortable to accept. I have gone back to the scriptures and re-read them for myself. What Mr. Platt is teaching is not a new interpretation or his own twist on the scripture. It is a call to take Jesus's words exactly as they are given and resist the temptation to make them say something they do not.
