FeaturePics Blog

FeaturePics Web services provides programmatic access to the FeaturePics Image Collection.

You can enhance your web site by retrieving images from FeaturePics Image Collection by subject and showing them in layouts suitable for your site design.

FeaturePics supports the XML/HTTP Protocol. As a variant, the Response can be formed in JSON format.

http://www.featurepics.com/API/SearchJSON.aspx

http://www.featurepics.com/API/Search.aspx

 

"Cut" and "Paste" examples:

http://www.featurepics.com/API/CutAndPaste.aspx

 

Brush sets for Illustrators

Mujka Illustrator brush sets are a great source for Stock Illustrators. A total of 78 brushes for backgrounds and grunge designs. You can download 1 brush set for free.

You can find additional info about these great brush libraries at Brush Sets


The Brush set selections include:

• 20 Floral (Basic Plant images)
• 12 Circular (Detailed flower petals)
• 12 Grunge Halftones (Grunge Halftone dot effect)
• 5 Halftones (Halftone dot effect)
• 11 Abstract Lines (Crossing parallel lines)
• 10 Abstract Shapes (Crossing parallel lines)
• 8 Crazy Dots (Splash of dots on various shapes)

You can see the complete brush sets at Entire Brush Set

More about Mujka Brush Set

Google Inc. announced its critical first steps toward a universal search model. The company will incorporate information from a variety of previously separate sources – including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites – into a single set of results. Ensure that you are fully taking advantage of the images on your site.

Backgrounds in the hands of experienced designers can result in outstanding productions.
Visit these examples to see how background textures impact website design.
Check out examples of background textures that will open up many interesting visual design possibilities.

If you are using images that provide important information (not just design elements), insure that there is sufficient contrast to allow the visitor to discern that information.
Reveal how your images may appear to users with a variety of color blindness conditions.

A script makes any image appear dull before the mouse moves over it; as the mouse moves over it, the image gradually changes to its original appearance
The good old "Gradual Highlight" image effect seen on many web pages, is an old one, but it can still be used in image galleries. It is useful for navigation buttons as well.

This tab content script uses Ajax to let you display a selection of external content on your page inside a DIV and via CSS tabs!

Fetch and display an external page (from the same domain) inside a container when a tab is clicked on.

Find the full source code at: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex17/ajaxtabscontent/

Implement your image galleries using Ajax Tabs Content script

Most designers, if not all, treat color as a major tool to establish a look and create a pleasant appearance for the entire web site.

You have heard this saying before: "The main color of the site should be sage". As a designer, you know sage can be "sage green", "paramount sage", "pastel sage", "colonial sage", "dull sage", and many more.

As a computer-literate designer, you also know that 256x256x256 RGB color systems will give a choice of 16777216 colors and your "sage" may become 100% different from what your client asked for. Often coloring options, such as school colors or corporate logos have little tolerance for change. What does one do when the client asks about "Deep Claret 19-1840" or "Verdant Green 19-6026"? Recently while browsing the Internet, I found references to Angela Wright. After reading this article, I made an attempt to visualize the color values mentioned there .

Colour Psychology, Colors and their keyword values

Free Images and Photos, Useful Resources for Designers by Peter Mautsch, FeaturePics.com

http://www.featurepics.com/Gallery/Gallery2663_710.aspx

Golden Gate Bridge

Sales

Solar Energy

Happy Children

Golf

Business

DVD

Happy Eastern

 

Van Gogh used colors to express moods and emotions—or as he said, "to suggest any emotion of an ardent temperament." Vincent's Room, Arles 1888; Vincent Van Gogh Foundation, Amsterdam It is one of my favorites. I used http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/ to generate the pallete. And I love it!

Oh, MiGod, not pink again!

Women and men have different aesthetics. If you know you are designing for women - what graphics would you use?

The subject of this article is image framing on your web pages.
Add emphasis and visual interest to your pages without increasing the page loading time.
Check examples for image frames using CSS border & background-image properties.

Our tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of keywords, image name, and image caption used to describe images in the Weather category.

 

It is still "winter" and "cold", a lot of clouds and rain, but summer weather is coming!

Check Local weather conditions at FeaturePics.com -- tag cloud

No matter what images you have chosen for your production or your web page design, if they have been selected based on your color sense and experience, you can't go wrong.

Male subjects tended to assign higher ratings to pages designed by men.
Men responded better to dark colors and straight, horizontal lines across a page.
Men were more pleased by a three-dimensional look and images of "self-propelling" rather than stationary objects.

This is a javascript based image gallery that displays larger versions of thumbnail images dynamically when the mouse hovers over them.

With AJAX you can update the content on your pages automatically every day and every hour without changing the page itself.

The heart of Ajax is a small javascript function that retrieves data for your page. You can keep your data in the database, xml file, even in a text file. When you find out how trivial this javascript call is - the word AJAX will start to sound not so "hi-tech". (actually I like "call back" - it is what we called this technique before "web2.0"! ).

The example in this article is just a starting point in AJAXing your site. Suppose you have a web page with a photo story about Africa. And you want to show your visitors a new photograph every hour.

Congratulations! You have accomplished 90% of the task! You have formulated it.

AJAX your site