I had an email today from Barry (have a look at Barry's personal site to see some of the projects he's involved in) about the caricature image I created for my header. I created the cartoon image of myself using befunky.com. BeFunky.com allows you to transform any image into multiple styles of artwork with the click of a button. There's no need to download any application as everything is done online and it's also done very quickly!

photo credit: Drew and Didi

After I created the cartoon image of myself I edited it in Photoshop to create the desired effects and also split the image into 2 pieces one for my header and one for my hand clasping over my nav bar.

What I've done is by no means brilliant but with a bit more work on Photoshop I'm sure you could come up with something very good. I did follow some youtube tutorials on creating a caricature image of myself but none of the outcomes looked anywhere near what I was able to produce using BeFunky.com in a couple of minutes.

It's great to get someone asking about something relating to something on my blog or indeed get any kind of feedback, as at least I know someone is having a look about on here

Updated: See a more in depth post on using be funky here.

I've been wanting to get started on designing some graphics for this site for a while now. I've never really had to go beyond MS paint for anything that I've needed to date. However, if this site is going to move on as I want it to, I'll have to look at designing some better quality web graphics for it so I had my first look at Photoshop CS4 today!

I've never used Photshop before so the first place i went was to YouTube to look for a tutorial on creating a logo. There's loads available but the one I went for was Create a 3d Logo in Photoshop in just 5 minutes. I'd definitely recommend this tutorial for anyone starting out with Photoshop for the first time as I found the instructions easy to follow and there's good use of techniques to give a very good understanding of designing a basic logo. Here's the result of my first attempt:

I missed the last part of the tutorial to add the rustytexture.png texture as the texture image was unavailable, but by that stage I'd got a good enough feel of Photoshop that I added my own texture to the logo using the filter >> Texture menu. It look me a lot longer than 5 minutes (about 45 minutes) but if I was to do this again I'd be able to do it in 5 no probs! If you follow the instructions, you'll get a clear understanding of all the techniques used and that's why I started of with this tutorial.

I'm happy with the logo that I produced, I could have gone ahead and used the same techniques and tried to design my own custom logo but I wanted to keep it simple so I copied the tutorial as closely as I could. The next step for me now is to try a few more easy to follow tutorials and learn the basics this way, before coming up with my own designs. I'll also try to find some free resources to give me a more general understanding of what I can do in Photoshop.

After this, there'll be no excuses for not creating a custom design for this blog. I can also look at doing a customised background for my Twitter page. I'll try to get some more stuff churned out in Photoshop over the next week and get it up here as a sign of progress