New v5 Blog Update Posted!
Ignore this.. it’s an autopost from the P2L news forum… update is below.
P2L v5 Update – Newsletter, Forums, MarketPlace and Previous Feedback Discussed!
I’m back from a visit to the first Bulk Barn to open in Quebec and I am back home with roughly 30 pounds of sugar and gelatin based products, with roughly 10% of that already coursing through my veins… and what do I love to do when I’m jacked on 3 pounds of sugar? WATERSKI of course! But seeing as it’s -30c outside, we’ll just have to go with posting a new v5 update! After all, I did promise to get down to business, so lets get biddy wit it!
I have a few items I would like to cover tonight, and in between these points I want to address comments that you guys posted on the first v5 blog posting. Thanks guys for taking the time to post your comments and feedback, I hope you continue to share your ideas and welcome more questions and comments both pre and post release.
Newsletter Update
The current newsletter is a dead duck… a moldy one.. a moldy dead duck that’s been lit on fire, run over and thrown in to a very, very deep hole. And then cement was poured over the hole and a very large building was erected over said hole, never to be revealed again. Needless to say the newsletter was not anywhere near what I wanted it to be, so the current incarnation of this feature is not being pursued at all. For whatever reason, the current newsletter’s readership is somewhere just over 13,000 subscribers… and when I send out a newsletter, I usually get a staggering ZERO responses to it and overall conversion on both P2L and advertised products was virtually non-existent. Why you ask? Well, apparently 12,000 zombies subscribed to the newsletter and don’t actually read it due to rotting eyeballs and the other 1000 are junked automatically by Hotmail’s fabulous spam filters that we can not be white-listed on.
Are you seeing what sugar does to me yet?
So we are going to revamp the newsletter system with a new authoring system, sign up system and a visually more appealing newsletter in your inbox. I am also going to completely nuke the readership database and start everything over from scratch. We’ll be changing to a double opt-in system so the non-readers and spoofed emails will be automatically removed and hopefully those that sign up ensure they white-list us on Hotmail, MSN and all the other places that delete our emails due to the volume of emails our server sends out. This means that once the new version goes out, you will need to RE-SIGN UP for the newsletter, which you can do with the sexy new sign up form or you can enable right in your account settings:
Told you I would start to show more screenshots! OK granted, small, hard to read screenshots…
FORUMS
Ah… the forums. We all love to hate the forums and you can tell by both the comments on my last post here as well as the feedback left on the forum itself, it is impossible to make everyone happy and we get completely opposite ideas on a weekly basis. We need less sections, we need more sections, we need better moderation and should be more strict, our mods are too strict, we need to reorganize, don’t touch the forums they’re great, the forums are devil spawn, the forums are touched by the kiss of God, you suck, you’re awesome etc. And seriously, aside from the kiss of God part, all that stuff is real feedback we’ve received. So let me address a few things I intend to change or add, but of course this list may (read: WILL) change as we get closer:
1. The entire area for posting tutorials will be removed and people will be asked to use the Publishing System for posting their tutorials. Right now people are posting tutorials in the forums AND in the Publishing area, and this doesn’t make an sense. Not only that, but the tutorials posted in the forums are not even being included in our index. PLUS I should also mention we’ll make it worth your while to use the Publishing System instead of the forums.
2. The tutorial request area will be expanded upon… I think the idea of having an area where people can post tutorials they would like to see if a great idea for webmasters that are constantly asking “What should I write about? All the good tutorials are already done!”. I honestly think everyone would benefit if this area was developed and supported a bit better.
3. affenmunkEY is going to have a cow if I don’t address the questions and comments about the graphic services and all that good stuff. This too will be moved away from the forums and become part of our MarketPlace area. All the sales areas for services, websites and such will all be moved to our MarketPlace as well as a bunch of new categories we think are relevant to the community (feel free to share your ideas). There will also be an area for volunteering and free work etc. Please see further down for more details on MarketPlace.
In terms of getting feedback on designs and such that you post, I can’t force people to post… make it interesting and I’m sure people will post feedback if they want to. We really need to focus on what our site is about, and that’s tutorials. Obviously critiquing and feedback go hand in hand with learning and tutorials, but there is no real way for me to force people to post on the forums… you have to be careful how this is handled because forum posting incentives tends to lead in to spam. I’d rather have no feedback than lemmings all passing through posting “Great Job” *click* Neeeeext.
Honestly though, I believe with the increased community involvement and forum exposure that you will find more people posting in all areas of the site. At least, that’s what we’re aiming for!
4. In terms of adding new areas, I don’t believe there are any new areas that need to be added… actually I think further diluting the posting members would only make matters worse. But I am open to suggestions for new areas on the forums, so feel free to suggest.
5. You will be able to jump to a specific tutorial category directly from the forum without having to go to the main page first via a jump menu in the forum header… sneaky peaky below:
That’s about all I want to touch on for the forums for now, but again, if you want to suggest a new area we should add please do by leaving a comment right here on the blog.
MARKETPLACE
To help support P2L and to fund cool prizes (you’re going to see TONS of cool loot up for grabs on the site on a consistent basis), we will be setting up a well organized MarketPlace for pretty much all sales and professional services our users want to offer or buy. All users will be able to post items in the Market Place for a small fee (think $1.95 small) and you will be able to post ads for the following:
1. Websites for sale
2. Domains for sale
3. Templates for sale
4. Design or programming services
5. Freelance jobs
6. Looking for volunteer work
7. Selling miscellaneous items
8. Link exchanges and advertising offers
9. Web hosting
10. and more!
This area won’t be ready for the release however, but it will be the first site update to v5 after the initial release… basically we’re going to release v5 and while we fix bugs and the inevitable issues that crop up with a new release, we’ll be attacking the marketplace for release. We hope that you guys will appreciate a nice organized place to advertise or purchase items and services for a very minimal expense, and depending on it’s success will be a big factor on how much advertising we need to put on the site to fund operations. The more money we can generate with our internal services like the MarketPlace and our Ad System, the less network ads we need to ram down your throats at every turn. Believe me, it would be AWESOME if our internal systems negated the need for external ad networks completely, how cool would THAT be?
I should also mention that active members will be able to purchase MarketPlace placements without having to pay any monetary fees… and you will see why fairly soon! So that’s my little introduction to the MarketPlace for now, we’ll have more on that guy in the near future.
IRC
A P2L Chat room that integrates with the forums is a distinct possibility on the new version… we shall see. I’m hesitant because chats tend to be like a shiny new toy that is fun to play with for a week or two and then gets forgotten about once the novelty has worn off. Maybe you guys can convince me otherwise!
That’s it for me tonight guys, need to run down and get me some more gummi bears! Please be sure to click the comment button below and leave me your feedback/suggestions/comments and we’ll see you on the next update!
Thanks,
Dan
Pixel2life.com v5 Update Blog in Full Effect!
Hello everyone! With v5 development coming close to it’s 1 year finish line (a year already?! How did THAT happen??) I think it’s time we started filling everyone in on what’s been going on, what’s coming up, and to get some user input as we start to put on the finishing touches and polish the chrome. So today my blog is the official v5 update information center for anyone looking for the latest news on the release of the latest version of Pixel2life.com and it’s continued development post release.
Just so [cliches] everyone is on the same playing field and all the cards are down [/cliches] I have obviously noticed the slow down in community involvement on P2L and obviously the lack of participation on the forums compared to a couple of years ago as have many community members have noticed themselves. While tutorial submissions are as high as ever, it seems like overall participation of the traffic is lower and I am looking to address this and bolster the overall traffic and coverage the site receives. Basically this update has two primary goals from my point of view:
1. Increase traffic and user/community participation
2. Increase revenue
Increase Revenue:
Now, before everyone starts screaming about my corporate greed and my blood-lust for money and power and all other worldly possessions, I would like to give everyone a little dose of reality. I have seen people complain about the ads on P2L, complain that I already make a TON of money (apparently I swim and sleep in an in-ground pool filled to the brim with greenbacks), so let me tell you… I WISH! The fact is P2L makes very little money, and this past year has been especially bad with revenues NOT MAKING ENOUGH TO EVEN PAY FOR THE SERVER! That’s right… the server that P2L runs on costs $434 a month, and my last check from Tribal-Fusion was $300 and change. Pixel2life is in fact my FULLTIME job, but obviously with the piss-poor revenue I have had to focus on other things to pay my bills as it’s a tad hard to live on $300 a month. Some months are obviously better when advertising is purchased through the site, but it’s still nothing near what it needs to be to justify committing full-time hours to this project any more.
So how do I plan to address this? More ads? Pop-ups? Bank Robberies? None of the above (well… side)! In fact, we’re going to be going with less ads, especially at launch and I have been looking very hard in to alternative ways of monetizing the site OTHER than hammering people with banner/google ads. Combining these new ideas along with a minimal amount of traditional advertising with solid increases in revenue should turn things around effectively. To tell you the truth, it had better or you might find P2L for sale over at Sitepoint lol! I am no marketing guru and have to admit I know very little in the way of raking in ad money from a site, but I’ve been studying very hard the last few months and have found a number of effective methods that I think will be acceptable to everyone. Not only that, but we are putting together something for our community where YOU will be rewarded for helping us generate revenue and assuring our continued survival. I know it’s a little cryptic at the moment, but it will all be clear in the coming weeks. I am of course always open to ideas on generating revenue, so if you have some tips other than the obvious, please let me know.
But, I can tell you the following in regards to our earning efforts:
– We will NOT be increasing the amount of ads per page in the new version… in fact it will be less in many areas such as the main page and category pages.
– We will NOT employ the use of pop-ups for revenue purposes
– We will be drastically REDUCING the costs of purchasing advertising through our in-house advertising system. For example, all PPC purchases will be a flat rate of 5 cents a click for any campaign size.
– Participating community members will have the opportunity to try our advertising system for FREE with no commitment of making a purchase, no CC information etc. FREE = FREE
Increase traffic and user/community participation:
Due to the waning income and participation on the site, my interest in the project has dropped just short of me packing up shop and moving on to bigger things. The huge delay in releasing v5 hasn’t helped matters and up to now, and you very rarely saw a forum post, news entry or blog post from me… I just haven’t been in to it. I want everyone to know that as we near completion and I get more involved in the daily process with Nick, I am getting more and more excited about this and that I am fully committed to making this the biggest and best release of P2L. I am gearing up for the hard work and campaigning I used to do that got us in to magazine articles, TV show mentions and many other forms of media. I am going to go out there and sell our brand, get us badass prizes and get involved with the community that has made us so successful in the last 5 years. The more I started to think about closing up shop, the more I wanted this refresh, this evolution of the site to be completed so we can show the rest of the tutorial community why we are the best and will always be the best tutorial portal for graphic artists and programmers. P2L has a KICKASS fan base and dedicated staff, it would be stupid to give all that up when you all deserve more than that.
Bottom line here is that I am going all out on this release and the months ahead and you will be seeing my ol’ face a HECK of a lot more than you’ve grown used to in the last year.
We are also working on some exciting new ways of getting the members involved in the community, be it the forums or the tutorials themselves. A brand new reward system will be in place, where you can earn the opportunity to advertise your site with us or take home some awesome loot just for being active on the site! We’re going to be bringing in some hilarious content and goodies of our own for you guys to check out and overall I think you’re going to find the site is “fun” again, rather than a simple list of tutorials with no face attached to it all.
Version 5 is without a doubt our biggest undertaking yet here at P2L and I hope you will join fellow P2L members and keep up to date with the blog updates and I urge you not to hesitate to post any of your comments below by pressing the comment button and using the form to share your thoughts. In fact, if you have any last minute ideas for the site, please go ahead and start sharing them RIGHT NOW, it’s not too late to have them added to the site or to the queue of additional upgrades we want to add to the site after release.
I plan to have news and updates for you guys every few days, so be sure to check back here a couple times a week or grab our RSS Feed.
Thanks!
Dan
New Tutorial – Create Amazing Grunge Textured Wallpaper Artwork with GoMedia Vector Packs!
Hello everyone! Today I am going to show you how to put together a pretty badass looking grungy wallpaper background without having to go nuts with brushes and filters… we’re going to use nothing but the EXTREMELY cool Go Media Arsenal Vector Packs, and some object layer styles. I’ve been seeing people use these gorgeous vector packs and we advertise them on Pixel2life.com, but I’ve never had the chance to play with them until I recently picked up Arsenal Pack 12. If you have no idea what I am talking about, a company who makes some fairly insane artwork for guys like Ozzy Osbourne, Pepsi, Metallica and a ton of other very high profile names. GoMedia also sells gorgeous artwork, templates, textures and more in their custom shop, known and the GoMedia Arsenal Shop, and one of their biggest sellers are the Vector Packs. As I write this, they currently have 13 sets, with a 14th on the way fairly soon.
If you want to check out all their packs and other design goodies, check them out at www.gomedia.us and you’ll find plenty of gorgeous artwork to drool over. The beauty of these packs is that they are all vector EPS files, so you can work with them in any graphics program, including Corel products, and I am going to show you how these packs make it so simple to create killer pieces in a matter of minutes. In fact, the piece that I did for this tutorial took about 5 minutes to make tops, it’s honestly that simple!
WARNING: For this tutorial, I am going to be using the Line Work 2 set and East Asian Folkart set from Pack 12, as well as Watercolor Textures 1 from their Textures series. You can see the Pack 12 as well as the other Packs by clicking HERE and you can check out the Texture Series by clicking HERE.
Step 1: Shall we begin? Let’s start off with an 800 x 600 pixel image, doesn’t matter what we use for a background color… I went with white:
Step 2: The first thing we want to do is establish a base background, and one of the easiest ways to do this is grab an image, ANY image and slice a colorful part of it up and stretch it right out to cover the entire size of our background. For this tutorial, I’m going to just grab a thumbnail of a product box right off the GoMedia website… Looks like the Wings Set is the lucky winner:
Step 3: I only want to keep the nice yellow and indian-red colored lines, so I’ll just use the rectangle mask tool and cut away the extra bits I don’t want from the sides, top and bottom… once I’m done chopping that all off, I’m left with a nice little image ready for a good stretch:
Step 4: Now all I do is drag the transform points on the object (Those little squares on each corner and the sides of the object) until my background is completely covered, and then I’ll go ahead and blue it to soften up the lines and distortion. I went with a 25 pixel gaussian blur on this one:
Step 5: ALRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHTY THEN! The foundation of our background is in place, it’s time to start adding some textures and make some magic! Let’s start with some watercolor textures from the GoMedia Watercolor Textures pack, starting with a nice blue and green one. I just paste this right over top of my yellow background and resized it until I found a look I liked:
Step 6: Now comes the fun part… clik on the object in the object docker and then start scrolling through the object layer styles and you’ll find all kinds of cool looking effects with the click of a single button! It’s amazing how much easier you can create really sweet digital artwork like wallpapers and collages by simply learning to fiddle around with the layer styles. So with this watercolor texture, I decided to go with the Texturize style:
Here’s how it looks:
Step 7: Next up I want to add more dramatic coloration to the piece, something like bright blood red or a similar tone… I found this sweet watercolor texture and pasted it right on top:
Step 8: Once again I played around with the layer styles for this texture and found that the Color Burn style looked really cool:
This is starting to look pretty cool… see how easy this is?!
Step 9: OK, time to get down to serious business, let’s start working with the GoMedia Vector Packs… when you purchase one of these packs, each set is actually an EPS image file, so you will need to import this in to Photopaint and tell the program how big you want the images to be. Photopaint is not a vector application, so it needs to convert the EPS to a raster graphic. I’m going to start with the Line Work 2 set, so I go ahead and open the file with Photopaint and I am presented with the following box:
Step 10: The default size is way too small, so I always boost up the size of the image… for large wallpapers the like, I go with 10,000 – 12,000 pixels wide at least. It depends on how many images are in the pack, so you have to mess around until you find a size that is the correct size for you to work in. Remember it’s always better to have an image that’s too big, rather than not big enough! So let’s go with 12,000 pixels and click OK. The EPS file will now open and you will see all the images that are in the set on an object layer separate from the background:
WARNING: Resizing your EPS file when you initially open it requires a lot of processing, so bear in mind that the bigger you make the image, the longer it takes to open. On my Quad-Core Intel with 8BG of RAM, opening the Line Work 2 EPS file and converting it to a 12,000 pixel raster image takes about 8 – 10 seconds. So large resolutions on older machines could take a little bit.
Step 11: I’ll go ahead and zoom in a bit and select one of the images in the set that I want to use in my wallpaper. You can use a masking tool to select the image you want, in this case I’ll mask off this nifty shape using the Freehand Mask Tool:
Step 12: Once I have it masked off, I simply hit Ctrl-C to copy the selection to clipboard, go back to my wallpaper project and paste it using Ctrl-V in to my project:
Step 13: It’s a tad too huge, so I’ll go ahead and resize it until it fits in nicely:
Step 14: Once again, we can play with the object layer styles to find a cool effect to apply to our nifty little line shape… in this case, I decided to go with Overlay, it blends in very nicely with the rest of the textures:
Step 15: I’ll go ahead and add a little drop shadow to the shape we added, just to make it pop out a little bit more and add a slight 3Dish element to the wallpaper. It’s a little tricky with layer styles though because you can’t just shove a blurred dark shape under the object that you want to have the drop shadow on due to the fact that the layer style is forcing the object to interact with whatever is under it. To correct this problem, we’ll need to mask off the shadow layer at cut away anything that isn’t part of our “shadow”. You’ll see exactly what I mean in the next few steps, it’s not really that hard to understand once you see what I am talking about.
Start off by copy/pasting an additional copy of our line object… just click on the line object, hit Ctrl-C and then Ctrl-V and you will now have 2 copies in your object docker like this:
Step 16: So if we look at the object docker, Object 30 will be our “shadow” object and Object 8 is our original line shape that has the nice overlay effect. The first thing we need to do is change Object 30’s layer style to Normal instead of Overlay, so go ahead and click on Object 30 in the docker and then set the layer style to Normal:
Step 17: Next up, apply a Guassian Blur effect to the shadow object layer, I’ll go with a 1.5 pixel spread (The bigger the image, the bigger you should blur it):
Step 18: We’ll need to move the shadow a bit so it shows up inder the main line image, so just click on it and move it over a couple of pixels and I will then drag the shadow object under the main line graphic object. You’ll notice that when you do this, you no longer have that cool overlay effect, all you see is the black shadow. This is why you have to mask off the shadow and cut away the part you don’t want… the overlay is making the top object blend with the black shadow object under it instead of the red and yellow background.
Step 19:OK, with that all in place, we now need to mask off the parts of the shadow that shouldn’t be visible, and we’re going to use the main overlay object as our stencil. So click on the overlay object and then hit Ctrl-M to generate a mask from it like this:
WARNING: Make sure you have the OVERLAY object selected for this step, not the shadow layer object!
Step 20: Once the mask is created, you need to click on the shadow object in the docker:
Step 21: And now simply hit delete and VOILA! The extra area of the black shadow is gone and you now have a nice little shadow under your Overlat object:
WARNING: Make sure when you hit delete that you currently have a mask tool such as the rectangle mask tool as your current tool type, not the object picker. If you do not have a mask type tool currently selected, the entire shadow layer will delete, rather than just the area you have masked off!
Step 22: Hit the remove mask button or Ctrl-R and here’s how it looks:
Step 23: It looks cool, but I find the shadow is too prominent, so I’ll lower the opacity to give it a more subtle effect:
Step 24: OK, now with that all done, let’s add more symbols to the background… I’ll go ahead and open the EPS for the East Asian Folkart set and import it at 12000 pixels wide again… I’ll zoom in and pick a symbol, in this case a sweet looking dragon. Repeat the same steps as last time, mask it off and copy/paste it in to our project.
Step 25: Once again, play with your layer styles for the dragon and find something you like… I like the Overlay again, so we’ll go with that:
And here’s how it looks now:
Aaaaand we’re done!
At this point, I really love the background and I think it’s time to start adding our foreground elements, or just leave it as is! I went back in to my East Asian Folkart set and grabbed a cool looking idol object and worked that in to my drawing. I basically colored it a bit and added some stone and crack textures. You can see how that’s done by reading my cracked rock texture tutorial located HERE.
Here’s what I came up with after a few minutes:
So that concludes this tutorial on using GoMedia Vector and Texture packs to create awesome designs in minutes with Corel Photopaint. If you want to pick up some of these packs to try them out, they are VERY reasonably priced so anyone can afford them and you can scope them all out on the GoMedia Arsenal page by clicking HERE!
Please use the functions below to share and comment this tutorial!
Dan
Pixel2life Adds Windows 7 Category to the Tutorial List!
Hey all! Just a quick heads up that we've added a new category for the upcoming Windows 7 operating system from Microsoft. A few of you have requested this category in the last couple of weeks so obviously it's time to open this one up… You can find the category at http://www.pixel2life.com/tutorials/windows_7/ so you can start submitting right away and I'm sure we'll have some tutorials in there within the next couple of days.
Enjoy!
Dan