So… I finally found a background image for my website Division X Design. It took me awhile to figure out what I wanted and I must have racked my brains looking for “the image”.  I guess I needed to stop thinking too hard about the idea and just keep my mind open as to what I might find…

So I did find it… a metal surface that is the top of my filing cabinet. I looked at it and thought it could the job. I set up my camera last night and took a few shots. But the lighting was not quite right and some areas where brighter than other areas. It was because of the lamp. I decided to hold off until the next day and use a timed exposure setting on my camera to capture the surface using only the ambient daylight from outside… and that did the trick! I went to photoshop and tweaked the colors to near grayscale because I didn’t like the rust color too much but I wanted emphasize the corrosion and etchings on the metal. Then I imported the image to my webpage and looked at it on the browser… and that is what I wanted. Well almost!

My logo on my homepage just didn’t fit in anymore and I had to figure out a way to make it “fade” into the background somehow.  When I created it initially there was no gradient and then I put one in as I developed my first site.  Now the image with the gradient was not flowing with the page at all. I needed to make the top part of the gradient transparent so that you can see what’s behind it but how??? I know you can do this in photoshop but this was an Illustrator document. So I googled it and found a way to do it here. I had to read it a few times to understand it but still after 4 tries I got the logo to fade to transparency… at least in Illustrator. After saving the image I previewed it on my webpage and alas… it still looked the same! I scratched my head. I tried saving as a .gif and got nowhere… then I went back to the settings in the save for web dialog box and clicked on the option “interlace” (with the caption “download in multiple passes”). I saved it again.
After refreshing the page I got it! Hot Damn!!!

I must have spent about 3 hours from setting up the camera and editing the logo to get the end result… I’m back baby!

Yours,

Xavier F