One of my products made Today’s Best on Zazzle! Yea! Here it is:

Cosmopolitan
by
NikiNicole

Get this custom magnet at Zazzle

Don’t worry, I’ll have more drink recipes coming soon!

by Nicole | 1 Comment »

Yea! I finally have a decent layout up and it is all valid! There will definitely be more tweeks and additions (the footer still looks a little sad), but my blog has moved from embarrassing to acceptable.

Here are some sites that helped me get here:

The End Of Magic Blog’s Semi-Transparent Div article helped me get a transparent div that even Internet Explorer liked!

htmllite.com helped me write out my rollover images for my navigation with their Rollover Tutorial. Tip: To make it valid code, make sure not to use capitals (change onMouseOver to onmouseover)

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Recently Adobe introduced Photoshop Express, a free online version of photoshop where anyone can create an account and edit their pictures. You can only edit your own pictures if you create an account, but it is free so why not. If you just want to check it out, there is an option to test drive the feature. But not only can’t you use your own images in test drive, but you can’t save either.

After you choose to take a test drive, click on ‘My Pictures’ to choose a photo to play with. Just double click it and you will be able to edit it. It’s really easy to get started, just click something on the sidebar on your left, play with the options that appear on top of the picture, then click the green check mark to modify your photo. You can also choose the orange undo arrow to undo changes or the red ‘x’ to cancel changes. After taking a quick look you will see that Photoshop Express is no replacement for the full Photoshop version, but it seems like it will be great for non-designers to quickly edit their pictures without any technical training needed. It seems perfect for MySpacers to add artsy effects to their self-portraits and for Moms to do simple photo retouching to family pictures.

But back to the test drive. Here is a runthrough of the features and what you can do with them:

(more…)

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I just discovered Coudal Partners’ Layer Tennis this week and it is awesome.   Layer Tennis is a competition of two artists.  It’s basically sending an image back and forth and changing it.  It’s starts with a ’serve’ image then continues for 10 ‘volleys’.  They have 15 minutes to return the volley and it has to either have something to do with the same theme as the last image (or movie.  Layer Tennis is also played with Adobe Flash and After Effects) or use the same imagery.  Then at the end of the competition a winner is announced.

Two of my favorite artists played this week, Cindy Li and Veerle Pieters.  A winner won’t be announced until Monday, but I’m thinking it’s going to be Veerle.  We will see.

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If you are working with block elements in CSS, you need to know about margins & padding. Margins are the space on the outside of the border and padding is the space on the inside. The most common block elements are divs <div>, but you can also use the display property to make other selectors block elements such as your links. Like this:

a {
display: block;
}

This is way useful to make imageless SEO friendly CSS buttons, but that can be a topic for another day. Now, margins and padding can be measured in the usual ways: pixles, inches, points, ems. Just make sure you remember that you can’t just write the number (margin: 5;) you must include the unit of measurement (margin: 5px;). You can use margin-left: or padding-top: to effect whichever side of the box respectively. You can also define all 4 sides under the margin selector if you’d like, just remember the sides go clockwise, starting at the top then right, bottom, and left.

Here is an example: (more…)

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This is the first post of my career.

I just graduated from the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale last week with an Associates Degree in Web Design & Interactive Media. At first I wasn’t thrilled with graduation happening at the same time as the Christmas holiday, but I’m changing my mind. 2008 is just a little over a week away and what better time for a new beginning than the new year.

In January I plan to start my own design company. I have a ton of stuff to do, create a business plan, register a name, decide on a name. I knew I needed and wanted a blog, and I figured it should be my first step. I want to make my mark on the internet and this will be my home base. I plan on posting about recent work, progress in creating my own company, and hopefully some useful tutorials.

This is my first WordPress theme built from scratch (I’ve only modified existing themes before). I want to say a big huge thank you to Small Potato at wpdesigner.com for his ‘So you want to create WordPress themes huh?‘ tutorial. I would have been lost without it.

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