Gary Bouton's Xara Stuff

[Gare]

This is a little weird sharing these designs here, but also a sense of appropriateness is in the front of my pinhead, too. I was asked several times about updating the look of Xara Xone when I was working the site. Unfortunately, the video tutorials usually took up so much of each month producing, it was going to be "either/or", and content won over new layout.

I did have a second look for Xara Xone, but never had the time to publish it; WordPress isn't as simple as clicking File>Publish Website! :)

The original paradigm was a scrapbook, and it played well with some, not so well with others. I came up with an American Supermarket paradigm for the unpublished design: we have little shops within a supermarket, each with its own identity, but a cohesive theme is needed, "all under one roof", so to speak. The Home page...



The Tutorial page is harmonious with the top page:



The Giveaway page was as far as I'd designed. Two things I wanted to accomplish were to get the sales icon links out of the margins and into the page, with a "soft sell" tag of copy with them. I also had an idea to show a different extruded shape each month for the inline advertisement for Xara 3D, or whatever it's called now:



And the section headers were finished I spent a lot of time with fonts and looking at kiosk signs in malls to get a sense of what a "little shop", a boutique would look like:



I think my limitation comes from years in visual communications. I try to put a message in graphics, and that is not a good fit for a commercial website.

[Ron Duke]

Your creativity and talent has no limits!

[Boy]

Nor your productivity!

[Gare]

Thank you, Boy and Ron,

It's "Yo-Yo" theme today. Later, I'm going to listen to Yo Yo Ma play the cello.



My other entry is a tribute to Leonardo of Vinci, a very funny guy once you get to know him, in the Gary's non-Art Xara Gallery, here

[wizard509]

When I was a kid, a Duncan Yo-Yo champion came to my home town. if you took your Yo-Yo to him, he would carve your name and some design on the Yo-Yo, they were beautiful. Wish I still had it. Thanks for the memory Gare,

[Gare]

Hey, Larry—

I'm totally with you on the Art of Yo-ing. I bought a wooden one, all organic you might say (!) about 3 years ago from Lee Valley and am trying to re-learn all the moves from 40 years ago! Oh, there's a nifty ball-bearing one there, too.

I needed to design something, in the World of Bitmaps, to demonstrate a selection technique called "select by color", and so I did this illustration/render form a model, but was thinking about you, Larry:




My Best in both ups and downs,

Gary

[Gare]

There's a little standalone that I use in modeling, called Shader Map Pro, tat does a much better job of generating a bump map/displacement map than merely blurring the original image. I did this piece, and you can see the progression here, by first drawing the logo, sending it to ShaderMapPro, previewing ithe result image on a cylinder, exporting the bitmap, and then fooling with it a little with the 3D Bump Map filter and a wood texture in Transparency mode (I think Hard Light worked well after goofing with the Levels command on the wood image).



It's $50 now, I got it for $30 a while back, but if you do this stuff for a living—making textures look carved or logos carved out of stuff—this and Xara Designer might be your ticket.

Oh, and there's a command line version that's a PITA to use, but it's free, as is a working Demo version.

-g

[Gare]

I went for simplicity here. Just a dimensional, 2 point perspective X, lit correctly.

[Gare]

it's 100% a drawing, based on a 3D extrude. I created the shape first, extruded it, tried to get an eye for a different color for the sides just using good judgement and a small bulge on the extruded side, and mirroring with a blur and transparency fall-off.



At smaller sizes—and occasionally full-sized—I use it a lot in email replies.

-g

[Gare]

This is for when you don't have the energy or charity to sincerely wish someone a nice day:



-g