[Cialug] Meeting this week - Graphics Challenge

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 1:05 PM, Josh More
<MoreJ at alliancetechnologies.net>wrote:

> We have a meeting this week.  Unlike previous months, we actually have a
> planned event too!
>
> One of our group is a professional graphic artist (yay).  However, he
> mostly uses closed source tools (boo).
>
> We we're all gonna race him.
>
> We'll come up with some basic images from the Internet that need
> alterations (if you have photos of your boss / buddy, bring them in).  We'll
> each have 10m to do the changes in gimp, and he'll use Photoshop.  We may
> even cripple him by making him use RDP or VirtualBox to get to his stuff.
>  :)
>
> Maybe we'll do Inkscape vs Illustrator too.
>
> Start thinking up fun challenges.  The games begin Wednesday at 7:00.
>  Source images will not be chosen until then, to avoid premature completion.
>

Hi, I'm comfortable on both sides of the fence so here are some chances to
make each tool shine:

Create a button with a small drop shadow, a slight inner bevel and two
states (normal and active). Export the button with 4 different labels: Home,
About Us, Contact, Pricing - each button should have alpha-transparent
background.

Using a picture of four people create a navigation that lets you click on
each person and have it target a region on a web-page that tells about that
person. One way to do that is with an image map, another way would be to
slice the image.

Taking a photo with some solid, blocky text (helvetica/arial bold) overlayed
and use each tool to optimize it as best as possible for use on a web-page.
Choose a photo-realistic image that works best as a jpg and choose text big
and blocky enough so that jpeg can realistically produce usable results.

Something that is not easily tested in a short demo is how well a tool
supports the artist doing repetitive tasks. For example, does the tool
remember folder paths so that when you're saving optimized images you don't
have to browse to the project folder from your home directory each time?
(spoiler, GIMP's "save for web" always starts you in your home dir)

By the way, there are some additional plugins for the gimp that I consider
essential. In Ubuntu they're in the packages gimp-plugin-registry
and gimp-data-extras.

My personal opinion after having used both GIMP and Photoshop for years:
With each day of using the GIMP I hate it more with the user interface
accounting for 95% of my dislike. The quality of it's output is high,
though, so you can definitely use the tool to produce great work.

Interestingly enough, comparing Inkscape to Illustrator I have the opposite
response. I can't stand to use Illustrator now that I've used Inkscape.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin, identi.ca and twitter

"Never stop learning" –Robert Nuzum (My dad)
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