I’ve just returned home from a week vacation in the Mexican Mayan Riviera, and now I want to store my pictures on my netbook so my wife can look at them, and easily share them with friends. An probably post them to my Flickr account!

The problem is, my 8 mega-pixel camera generates images that are 3296 x 2472 (that means 3296 pixels wide and 2472 pixels tall) but the screen on my netbook (an Asus eeePC) is only 800×468.

Storing them directly on the netbook takes up a lot of storage space as each image is 2.01 MB  in size, and viewing them in the slideshow method is very slow since the images are so large and are being rescaled to appear on the small screen.

The way to fix this is to resize all the pictures to make them smaller (screen-wise AND according to the amount of space they take up on the hard drive) and keep those on the netbook.

I’ve chosen Photoshop CS4 to do this. I’ve just downloaded the 30 day trial version from Adobe.com (its Photoshop’s 20th anniversary!). If you have a different version of Photoshop on your computer, try the methods and see how far you can get… it might still work!

To start, store all your pictures in a folder on your computer, such as My Documents\My Pictures\Vacation.

Then:

1. Open Photoshop
2. Click File -> Scripts -> Image Processor
   1. If you don’t see the Scripts option, click “Show All Menu Items”



3. Click the Select Folder button in area (1) and browse to the folder where your images are stored, then click OK.
4. In area (2) Select Location to save processed images, you can choose a new location. If you leave it as Same Location, your images will not get overwritten.  A new folder will be created and the modified images will be stored there.
5. Choose your file format (your options are JPEG, PSD or TIFF) and also you can set the Resize to Fit option… which is what we want! I’ve specified 800×600 as it is a standard size, and the netbook will scale it rather nicely.
6. Make sure you set the Quality setting to 10 or 12 (the default was 5), as 12 is the highest level of JPEG compression you can have.  This process will cause a bit of a loss of image quality, but by setting the quality to 12, you probably won’t be able to notice with just your eyes when viewing the image on a computer screen. People concerned with printing high-quality images will probably use TIFF instead.
7. In area (4) at the bottom of the dialog, you can even add some copyright information for your images if you want. This appears in the advanced properties of the file, and is not written onto the image.
8. When you are done setting things up, click the Run button in the top, right corner of the dialog box!

Photoshop will then open every photo individually, make the change, and save the modified photo (with its original name) into the new folder. Since I chose JPEG, folder named JPEG was created. All the images will be modified and have their original file names, but will be stored in the new folder. In my case all the images were JPEG to begin with. If you decide you want all your pictures to be PSD or TIFF, the new folder will have that name instead.

Now with my camera I can take some movies as well. There was a movie file stored in the folder along with the other images, so at the end of the process I received a message saying that the .AVI file could not be processed. All other images were modified… and they look great.

Now I just have to through and crop them all!

Added Bonus:

• My 2.10 MB pictures are now 282 KB each with a Quality setting of 10.
• I re-ran the process again with a Quality setting 12. Each images is now 510 KB but I cannot detect any noticeable difference in quality when viewed on-screen.
• The second run of the procedure didn’t delete the first batch of photos, it renamed them with an _1 at the end of each file name.

Admittedly not the greatest example of hand typography, but dang funny at the right time:

I have a few other items posted on my Flickr page, so check it out!

I’m now in a mood to really get something creative done, and it is strange that the creative urge gets to me sometimes so strong that I have to do SOMETHING and I have to do it NOW… even if it means the results are poorly done, not thought through, and shoddy. But regardless, here is a new post and some new inspiration for you.

I just became a member of IconBuffet, and I’ve already received 1 free icon set for joining, and you get one every month. Also, you can trade Icon Sets and collect all you want! There is an incredible community of really sharing people, and a need system involving tokens, stamps and awards. I was also given a set just for asking! Or come to think of it, it was offered freely by a total stranger.

So I put this together in Word once I got home from doing the evening running around:

The wreath is just word clipart (but I’m happy about the drop shadow) and those are some pretty sweet icons! Wait till you see how the story ends

On the topic of icons, there is also a tonne of other free sets out there if you are willing to look. Some pretty sweet ones I just came across today were:

Free Hand-Drawn Web Icons: http://camp.woothemes.com/2009/07/hand-drawn-social-media-icons/

Some samples:

(I added the lines since I don’t want to be share without permission, go to the site and download them yourself).

WooThemes Ultimate Icon set: http://www.woothemes.com/2009/02/wp-woothemes-ultimate-icon-set-first-release/

I love icon sets almost as much as I love fonts, so maybe I’ll try my hand at creating them when things aren’t so busy at work.

If you have any favourite icon sites, post a comment below. Or, send an email and I’ll invite you to IconBuffet… that way I’ll get more icon sets to tell you all about!

As time goes on I’m learning more and more about Google Analytics, and how I can use it to fine-tune my web site.

I’ve recently found a feature called a Site Overlay, which is a tool that lets you see what parts of your site visitors click on when they visit it. After the redesign of my navigation tabs a few days ago, here is what the click patterns look like now:

Click to view larger.

Before the change I had noticed that 25% of my visitors clicked the heading of the blog to get to the main page. 25% also clicked the Home navigation tab, but that was the only tab I had at the time.

Now that I have identified different “content groups” that I have written about in the past, I can now measure which areas of my site are the most widely read. Now this data is still from less than 100 visitors, but over time I will be able to see what articles are gaining the most interest. Not surprising, the Typography category of posts is receiving the most attention, most likely due to the way I am marketing my blog currently.

To see your site overlay:

1. Log in to Google Analytics.
2. click on View Report for the site profile you want to see the overlay for
   - Click content in the left menu
   - Click Site Overlay

   Click View Report for the site you are interested in. Click on Content in the left hand menu and you’ll see the Content options:
   

3. Click Site Overlay (you can also find it in the middle of the screen).

At this point a new browser window will open up and you can see your very own site overlay with click percentages!

Other sites of interest:

• Alternatives to Site Overlay when Site Overlay has shortcomings
• A short overview of the Overlay
• It sounds like something Jakob Neilsen would recommend, but here is a link on how to improve site usability which is really the goal

Enjoy this new found power, and use it to improve your site for your readers / visitors. If you have any tips related to site overlay or usability, drop me a comment or send a Tweet.

Alright I’ve waited long enough. Friday is my birthday and I plan on celebrating in style. I’m going to buy Marko Saric’s Twitter Marketing e-book.

I’ve taken a few days off work and I’ve completed almost all of the house chores, so its time to start some blogging! Actually, I’ve got about 4 blog drafts waiting to be finished, and a score more things to write about.

But what I’m finally going to do is buy Marko Saric’s Twitter Marketing e-book. It’s like a birthday gift for myself!

I’ve done my best with Twitter so far to help drive traffic to my blogs. It definitely works. When I tweet about a new post, I get a bunch of hits from Twitter and then it dies off. I’m doing OK with some SEO just by having well formed post titles, URLS and meta keywords, so you could say Twitter is the only other way my site gets marketed. I’m small and I’m still growing my readership.

I’ve split my time between a number of Twitter accounts and I’ve been tracking how well some posts get attention. My @typegeek account has a small number of followers, but all tweets are targeted to this site and deal with graphic design or typography. The clicks per followe is quite high, compared to my other account @rickhenderson which is more general, more internet marketing, more health and wellness stuff. I have over 100+ followers but when I tweet about stuff for this site the clicks per follower is quite lower since its just not targeted. I use HootSuite because it allows me to track the clicks on shortened URLs and I have not found a Twitter client that does the same yet. I am trying Twirl again at work, and may install Tweetdeck and give it one more try to see if I can add my favourite people to a “Friend” list and not have to weed through all the garbage that comes from some people’s accounts. I’m sure you know what I mean.

Until now, my main method of gaining followers was finding topics in Twitter search, then adding people who were talking about it. I have very rarely deleted people who didn’t follow me back, but I have once or twice unfollowed people who posted too often about irrelevant material. That’s just the way I am.

So that’s my experience up until now. I’m buying Marko’s e-book and perhaps if time allows I’ll write posts about how well his techniques work.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

A few weeks ago I finished reading The Non-Designer’s Type Book by Robin Williams and have been interested in smart quotes ever since. Using smart quotes makes your documents and web pages look more professional, and here’s how to create them.

It’s important to remember that the book itself is aimed at non-designers, so full-time designers will probably find her writing annoying and possibly offensive (in a design-geek sort of way) but for beginners it is a really great book and I’ll probably review it in detail in the future.

Regarding “smart quotes”, they are the curly quotation marks that should be used when quoting a word, phrase or statement that has been stated by another person, or sometimes when something is meant to be said in an ironic sort of way. The quotation mark key on your keyboard doesn’t actually make smart quotes. See a problem here? At the beginning of this paragraph I have used quotation marks incorrectly, but at least I used the proper quotation marks.

The book discusses how to use smart quotes in desktop publishing software but does not mention word processing software such as Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect. Although both (and probably all major) word processors have the ability to turn on smart quotes and convert them automatically, this doesn’t always work, and can cause problems.

When using Word, whenever I want a set of smart quotes I am getting into the practice of inserting them using the ALT key in combination with their ANSI/ASCII representation. For example, in Word holding down ALT+0147 will give you a left smart quote, and ALT+0148 will give you a left smart quote. You can try this in Word or simply use the text area below:

Try putting smart quotes around something.

This will work in word processors (Word, Wordperfect, Google Docs, OpenOffice…) as well as web pages and commenting on blogs.

However, when writing HTML you might be safer to use the SGML/XML method. In HTML there are character codes such as   and á (displays as á) for displaying special characters. There is also “ and ” but its recommended that you don’t use them because they are not cross-platform enough.

Instead, use “ to get the left double curly quote like this ( “ ) and ” to get the right double curly quote ( ” ). Remember, this only works if you are editing HTML tags directly.

Now the only thing that ticks me off about using smart quotes is how they are rendered by certain fonts. Verdana is a very popular web font, but to me the smart quotes look awful. As well, Microsoft Office 2007 has switched the default font to Calibri which has better looking quotes than Verdana (at least they are curly) but are still horrible looking IMHO. Check them out, click the image to see its fullsize glory:

When using quotation marks in pull-quotes, I especially like the way Georgia looks… although Adobe Caslon Pro is a close second but they look better large and appear to render badly in MS Word, but I could be wrong.

For more details, Font.com has an excellent article on Smart Quotes. To learn how to use quotation marks properly within a written work, you might want to check this guide and this guide at the OWL at Purdue University (Online Writing Lab).

So there you have it. A short look at smart quotes. Did you know about using smart quotes? Let me know if you’ve had any experiences or if you found this post helpful.

In celebration of my 1 year wedding anniversary, I wanted to revisit something that completely blew my mind, and renewed inside me my love of typography, font design and letter shapes – my visit to Dublin, Ireland to see the Book of Kells.

One year ago today my wife and I travelled to Ireland for our honeymoon. I really could go on and on about how great it was, and how we wish we were back there even now, one full year later. Perhaps especially now as the weather here is very similar to the weather there last year. But before I digress too much, I wanted to talk about the Book of Kells.

You’ll have to find examples on the sites listed below, but the illustration and illumination of the Book is simply incredible. There is such precision and fine mathematical detail that scholars are still unsure exactly how a 7^th century scribe (or three) could have created the works. The image here shows a page that was never completed… over 1200 years ago. You can see some text through the page on the other side. The image illustrates how a complex illuminated manuscript page was laid out.

I didn’t get to see the Book of Kells until much later in our journey when we returned to Dublin around June 18th, 2008. But when we were in Knowth I picked up a copy of George Bain’s Celtic Art – The Methods Of Construction.

This book *completely* floored me. George Bain is said to have been responsible for the resurgence of celtic inspired art beginning in the early 50’s. Celtic Art contains an entire chapter on Lettering and an incredible collection of copies of the letters and ornamented capitals from not only the Book of Kells, but also the Book of Durrow as well as the Lindisfarne Gospels… two other famous illuminated manuscripts. I counted more than 5 different versions of the letter A! All hand-drawn by George Bain from copies of books as well as stonework he had seen while travelling the countryside.

There are chapters on knotwork, including the use of knotwork for use in clothing, metal and stone carving. There is also a chapter on zoomorphics, which is the inclusion of animal images within the shapes of the letters themselves (like this one) as well as anthromorphs, where images of humans are tied up in the letters such as the ones in the corner shown here.

Bain’s book really is an incredible achievement, and it gives an amazing taste for the type of design found in the Book of Kells. If you want to create celtic art, you NEED Bain’s book Celtic Art.

Ok that’s enough for me. Its late. I could keep writing but I think I should get some sleep

References for this post:

• Book Of Kells DVD - http://www.bookofkells.com – I bought it, its FANTASTIC.
• Kells Travel Info – http://www.myguideireland.com/kells
• History of the Monastery - http://www.heritagetowns.com/kells.shtml
• An article by Michelle Brown of the British Library - http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/c-d/celts07b.html
• Dunn, J. (1910). Book of Kells. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.Retrieved June 11, 2009 from New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08614b.htm
• Wikipedia contains some excellent images and far more references and resources –  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_kells
• Review of the facsimile edition, 1958: http://www.jstor.org/pss/2865000 – man, I would LOVE to have a facsimile of this. Article starts at the bottom of that page, but you’ll need access to JSTOR to read all of it.
• Location of Facimilies – University of Rochester (acquired 1952): http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=2457, University of British Columbia: http://www.library.ubc.ca/spcoll/kells.html (Yay a Canadian copy!)
• Another book about the Book of Kells

Actually, here is a list of the top 10 searches via Google that people used to find my blog. I got this idea from Marko over at HowToMakeMyBlog as he recently wrote an interesting article on funny searches that lead people to his blog.

Here are my top 10 searches for my first Typegeek blog, mainly because I haven’t advertised this one enough to make it worthwhile… and I don’t have Google Analytics installed yet. Here goes:

font used by google (Wow! I’m the Number 2 listed page for this Google search right after the Google blog!)
free hand drawn fonts
free star wars fonts
chrome default font
cannot load thesis-design-options 1.4.2
font used in google chrome
fonts used by google
hand drawn fonts
chrome default fonts
chrome fonts

So it looks like people were really interested in what fonts the Google Chrome web browser uses.

For interest sake, I got 80% of my traffic from search engines, 13% from referrals, and 6.7% from direct traffic. If you prefer seeing data visually like normal people, check this out:

Chart of Traffic Sources

Using these numbers you can see who is visiting your site and where they came from. It can also help you determine which keywords you should be using or help you edit your keywords if people just aren’t searching for them.

I was also able to use it to check on my competitors in that keyword space. For example, I just found out I am in the number 2 spot for the search “fonts used by google” by entering that phrase into Google (amazing isn’t it?). I’m not particularly after those specific keywords, but it shows how you can literally unknowingly hit the number 2 spot for searches without paying a cent.

Yep, I decided to add Google Analytics to this site, even though the site design isn’t finished yet, but now I can start keeping track of visitors.

I saw this and just had to share it:

And now… for some beautifully kerned Helvetica. Ok just kidding. I don’t have Helvetica installed! I know, its a crime. I’ll have to track one down.

Image of Arial created in Adobe Illustrator with some tracking applied.

I suppose either Arial or Verdana can both fight for the spot of “the new Helvetica”.

Check out XKCD for social commentary… but mostly jokes for computer and tech geeks.

Not much here today, but I had found these links in the fall and didn’t want to lose them, so I’m posting them here for you and for me:

Good CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) Tutorial:
http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/six_keys_to_understanding_css_layouts/

Colour Tools for Graphic and Web Designers at AllGraphicDesign.com

Technical Colour Schemer – because we can’t get enough of colour scheme builders can we?

20 Web Design Generators

Adam Kalsey’s Button / Badge Generator ( it made this: )

Being Canadian, I will almost always insist on typing it as “colour”.

Oh and PS! I just bought a new domain so I’ll finally be hosting a WordPress / Thesis blog instead of this old Blogspot thingy! Dang you domain squatters!