Home    Archives    Sign Up    Contact Us   Privacy Statement  Sound Bites Coaching Newsletter December, 2006      Issue# 35  By subscription only! Welcome to your next issue of "Sound Bites Product News". Sound Bites is a division of MSIncome.com. You are receiving this newsletter because you requested a subscription or purchased one of our products. This newsletter is only delivered once a month. Unsubscribe instructions are at the end of the email we sent you. Coaching for this month is Graphic and Text   IN THIS ISSUE   Contents 1. Thought of the Week - (Tim Gill) 2. From the Editors Desk - (Quentin Brown - What Are You?) 3. Special of the week - (Free RSS Fetch Script)  4. Coaching - (Graphics) 5. Tips and Tricks - (Launch Forumla) 6. Feature article - (How to Use Text)  7. What's New - (Graphics) 8. Joke of the week - (Simpsons)  THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK     An entrepreneur can become moderately successful doing the same thing that everyone else does. But if you want to be wildly successful, you have to do what no one else has done.  WELCOME FROM QUENTIN and the STAFF of Sound Bites & IM Training   Welcome to another issue of Sound Bites From the Desk of Quentin Brown Date:  - Reference: What Are You?   I was just going through all my old information and cleaning up my computer ready for my big move to Thailand and found this short story that I remember impacted me greatly when I was starting. Coaching for Success - Carrot, Egg or Coffee Beans? A young woman went to her mother and told her about her life and how things were so hard for her. She did not know how she was going to make it & wanted to give up. She was tired of fighting and struggling. It seemed as one problem was solved a new one arose. Her mother took her to the kitchen. She filled three pots with water and placed each on a high fire. Soon the pots came to a boil. In the first, she placed carrots, in the second, she placed eggs, and in the last she placed ground coffee beans. She let them sit and boil, without saying a word. In about twenty minutes she turned off the burners. She fished the carrots out and placed them in a bowl. She pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl. Then she ladled the coffee out and placed it in a bowl. Turning to her daughter, she asked, "Tell me, what do you see?" "Carrots, eggs, and coffee," her daughter replied. She brought her daughter closer and asked her to feel the carrots. The daughter noted that they were soft. She then asked her to take an egg and break it. After pulling off the shell, the daughter observed the hard-boiled egg. Finally, the mother asked her daughter to sip the coffee. The daughter smiled as she tasted its rich aroma. Then the daughter asked, "What does it mean, mother?" Her mother explained, "Each of these objects has faced the same adversity -- boiling water -- but each reacted differently. The carrot went in strong, hard, and unrelenting. However, after being subjected to the boiling water, it softened and became weak. The egg had been fragile. Its thin outer shell had protected its liquid interior, but, after sitting through the boiling water, it's inside became hardened. The ground coffee beans were unique, however. They changed the water." "Which are you?" she asked her daughter. "When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond? Are you a carrot, an egg, or a coffee bean?" Think of this: Which am I? Am I the carrot that seems strong, but with pain and adversity, do I wilt and become soft and lose my strength? Am I the egg that starts with a malleable heart, but changes with the heat? Did I once have a fluid spirit, but after death, breakup, financial hardship, or some other trial, have I become hardened and stiff? Does my shell look the same, but on the inside am I bitter and tough with a stiff spirit and a hardened heart? Or am I like the coffee bean? The bean actually changes the hot water, the very circumstance that brings the pain. When the water gets hot, it releases the fragrance and flavor. When things are at their worst, do I get better and change the situation around me? How do you handle adversity? When the hours are the darkest and trials are their greatest, do you elevate to another level? What gives you the greatest opportunity for long term happiness? That is your highest choice. May you be blessed and bless others. By always making your highest choice. This is my life! Quentin Coaching for Success MSI Foundation  PS. If you would like any subject covered just drop me a line.      SPECIAL OF THE WEEK - Affiliate Classroom   Click here for your free copy   RSS is a format for delivering and receiving syndicated information and content from any site that is providing the service, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, Podcasts, personal weblogs and even plain old websites. Basically it is a simple text file (RSS or XML extension) that acts similar to a webpage and is updated either automatically by server enabled software or can be updated manually.  If you want to see samples of different feeds then be sure to look at our sample pages to see the latest in feed pages. Feeds used to be just headlines but now people are getting inventive and you can se audio, video, comics and graphics, full articles and so much more.   COACHING - Graphics and Text Hello and welcome to this weeks coaching. A special welcome to all our new members.  This month we look at adding graphics. Obviously adding graphics can range from very simple to complex designs. Likewise software can also range from quite simple to complicated. In this session we will look at some simple software to do most of your simple graphics. Adding graphics to your page is a simple task once you learn how. Throughout this site you will find an abundance of sights that will allow you to use free artwork. Some sites even allow you to create your own. In this session we will teach you how to make your own. To do this part of the workshop you will need Paint Shop Pro 4 which you can pick up here free. While it says it is a 30 day trial this software never runs out..      Open the program, use the file menu and choose new. Make sure that you have the following properties selected. Just use the arrows or type in the relevant information. Width: 200 Height: 200 Background Colour : Change to white Image Type: 16 million colours Click OK Before we enter any text we will need to choose a colour for the text.                     On the right hand side you will see a colour chart. There are two overlapping boxes. The top box is the colour of your text and the second box is the colour of the background of your graphic. Just click on the top box and this new window will open. This window allows you to choose all the different colours available. You will notice in the bottom right corner you have all the different levels you can use. Hue and saturation plus colour mix. This is very useful if you are given specific colours for logos etc. In this workshop we will use the generic colours and we want to choose a brown colour. Click ok when you have selected the appropriate colour. Now use the "A" on the toolbar and this will allow you to type in some text. Once you have clicked on the "A" move your cursor over the window where we are going to put the text and you will notice the cursor changes and then left click. In this section you can choose the font you want to use and the various effects available. Use the values below. You can come back and play with this program later. Font Name: Verdana or Arial Style: Bold Size: 24 Enter Text: Widgits Now type in Widgits and choose OK. The video will help you in this section. On the top left of the tool bar you will see a magnifying glass. Click on the tool and click once on the text. This will magnify your work. This is especially useful if you want to do some fine editing. You will also notice that there are some blinking lines around the text. This means it is available for editing. Lets add a shadow to this text while we have it on our screen. On the menu at the very top of the screen there is a text menu called Image. Click on this and in the drop down menu choose Special Effects. In this drop down menu choose Add Drop Shadow. In the differnet options add the following attributes. Color: Black Opacity: 100 Blur: 20 Vertical: 4 Horizontal: 4 And click ok Now we need to trim this graphic so that we can use it. Click on the selection tool on the tool bar. It is the one that looks like a rectangle with dots. You can see it in the video. Now use the tool to draw a rectangle as close as possible around the graphic making sure not to cut off any of the shadow.. Use your Ctrl + C to copy the selection and then the Ctrl + V to paste into a new window. You now have made your first graphic. Choose the "save as" in the file menu and choose to save it as a gif by using the save as Type area. Name the file widgit and save into your web folder that we set up before. To insert this graphic into your web page we now need to open up our composer again. Open the index file and in the white area move the text down and then reposition your cursor to the top and we will now insert this graphic we just made. On the menu choose the insert function and find the file we just created called widgit.gif and choose OK. You have now inserted your first graphic. You can do this with any graphic file. Just remember to always use JPEG's or gif's. If you look in your folder to see how big this file is you will notice that it is only about 2kb. This won't slow down the loading of your page too much. Add this graphic to each page. By clicking on the graphic you can centre etc by using the toolbar format tools. Coloured background Now say we wanted to insert this graphic over the orange section on the left. If we use this graphic you will find it has a background of white so we have a problem. Go ahead and try it using the above method. We can fix this easily by changing the background colour. Open PSP again and choose new with the above values that we used before. To change the background colour we need to also find the file we downloaded before. Go to the file menu again and this time choose open rather than new. In the look in section find the file bg-bu.gif that we downloaded earlier. And choose ok. Use the magnifying glass icon to increase the magnification. Just move the magnifying glass over the graphic and click a couple of times. Now use the eye dropper icon to choose the colour we want to copy. Move the eye dropper over the orange section and you will notice the colour in the colour chart on the right will change to the orange colour. By using the flood tool you can now change the background in the main window we set up previously. It’s the window with the white background. Mover the paint flood tool over this window and click and the whole window will change colour. We can now add the text as before and add the drop shadow. Crop the image and use the copy and paste function. This time save the graphic as widgit1.gif and insert into the web page on the left hand side. As you can see we have made a nice merged graphic. There are a lot of different effects and tricks you can do with Paint Shop Pro and I encourage you to look at the various tutorials online to generate some great effects. You can also do this online and here are some sites that will let you do the same thing while online. Alternative sites 3d text maker - is an excellent online 3d graphic generator. . Banner Creator - offer one of the most powerful graphics creation capabilities on the web. You can create graphics of all sizes, and in various formats, inc. Logo's, Banners, buttons, graphics etc. Flamming text and so much more - At this site you can create cool, custom images for FREE, to use on your website, or in your e-mail. Cooltext - Great place for making really cool logos, lots of font choices, variety of sizes and some very interesting effects. You have now inserted your first graphic. You can do this with any graphic file. Just remember to always use JPEG's or gif's. If you look in your folder to see how big this file is you will notice that it is only about 4kb. This won't slow down the loading of your page too much. Add this graphic to each page. By clicking on the graphic you can centre etc by using the toolbar format tools. Relative links A relative link is one that is activated directly from within your file, eg.  you inserted a graphic called widgit.jpg. This means that the browser will search your files for the link to widgit.jpg. If the link was at another site it would be called an absolute link and so would usually have the http://www before it. A trap for beginners is that sometimes the link will be to your hard drive and so when you publish the pages the link to the graphic won't load up because it will have an extension something like e:/mywebpage/widgit.jpg. To change simply go to your editor and change the html by getting rid of any extensions. Right click on the "widgit" graphic and choose "image properties". Make sure it is  a relative link. You will also notice in this menu some other formatting functions such as how text will wrap around the graphic etc. Lets say you would like to make text graphic for the links on the left hand side of your page. If you want to make the graphics for the "about", "products", etc., you will need to choose a little different configuration. Don't have shadow ticked and do have transparency ticked. It will also need to be a gif and not a jpg file. If you don't do this, then it will be white on the background. You could try to match the background, however, it can be a bit tricky at times. The beauty of text graphics is that if you link them they do not change, so it produces a nice clean effect. Linking Nearly everything on a web page can be a link and this includes graphics. When you click on the graphic in your composer you will notice it highlights. Go to the links tollbar and follow the same process as for text. Use graphics wisely and you won't have any problems. A few graphics here and there are great and they  add to the experience. Photo Graphics  You can use all the same effects for photos and in the ebook section we will also go into how to use cut outs. Here are two photo style graphics. One is flat and the other with shadow. Also you can rotate for a little added dimension. We've covered some of the highlights in this article, but there's lots more, so please spend some time exploring this website. Use the navigation devices at the top of this page and in the left column. Taken from our popular ebook My Web Site Manual Have fun, Expect Success Quentin Brown Streaming Media Made Easy http://www.beststreamingmedia.com PS: A great Color combination Palet for you.   TIPS AND TRICKS - Launch Formular   At last a single marketing product incorporating the most complete marketing business model known to man. A business model designed to produce a marketing list, a residual income and a source of never ending traffic to any site you ever produce.   More Information     FEATURE ARTICLE - Text    Designer's Guide to Text Treatments by Michael P. Hill With so many options for stock images and backgrounds, it is easy to overlook one of the most important tools designers have for getting a message across: text. Fortunately, there are some fast and easy ways to find fonts and formatting that go beyond simply typing text. Understanding a few font factors will allow you to create professional text treatments with the best of them. FINDING YOUR FONT There are thousands of fonts available, ranging in price from free, to a few dollars, to hundreds of dollars. Whatever your budget, there are some important points to remember when selecting a font: Serif or Sans Serif?: In typography, serifs are the little "hooks" or "feet" on the end of letters. Times New Roman is an example of a common serif font. Sans serif fonts, on the other hand, lack the hooks on the ends of the letters ("sans" is Latin for "without"): a good example is Arial (Figure 1). Figure 1 Serifs, indicated by the red circles, are the little "feet" or "hooks" on the edges of the letters. Fonts with serifs are typically used for large blocks of body text. Sans serif fonts do not have these hooks, and are often used for titles and headlines. Times on top and Arial on bottom. It's usually best to set large blocks of text, such as articles or descriptions, in a serif font. Studies have shown that people can read and comprehend serif typefaces better. On the other hand, headline and display text can be set in either serif or sans serif fonts. It's quite common, however, to use a heavier, sans serif font for headlines and a serif font in body copy. Match the font to the message: Font's have their own "feel" or "personality." The style of a given font may make it better suited for certain uses. Let's say you're producing a logo for a day spa, you'll want a font that matches the personality of the spa. In this case, you might select a script font for a clean, smooth typeface. Most likely you'll want to avoid anything too heavy. Figure 2 It's important to match your font to your subject matter.The script typeface and light, airy font (top, Script is Shelley Allegro; lighter font is Helios Light) make a great logo for a day spa. However, the heavy, bold font (middle) doesn't seem appropriate for a relaxing spa. The blocky font is more at home for a body shop logo (bottom, font Letterman solid). On the other hand, a heavier typeface would work better for more industrial applications, such as an auto shop (Figure 2). Avoid too much of a good thing: As a rule of thumb, it's generally best to avoid using more than two or three fonts in a single project to maintain consistency. If you're looking for more variety, however, look for a font that has multiple weights or styles, such as condensed or extended. You can get a good mix using variations while still maintaining the same basic look. Readability first: It can be hard to resist using the cool font you just discovered, but don't let that get in the way of the legibility. After all, your project won't do any good if the text is too hard to read. Branch out: Avoid overused fonts such as Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica or Comic Sans. There are plenty of great alternates that have a similar look, but are different enough to add some uniqueness to your project. For Times-like fonts, try Minion, Garamond or Century Schoolbook. Arial look-alikes include Helios and Franklin Gothic. TREATING YOUR TEXT Once you've selected your fonts, you need to format your type to create eye catching design elements. Text as a design element: Instead of overdoing it with art, try turning a few key words into an eye-catching, stylized typographical component that becomes a dominant artistic element of your project (Figure 3). Figure 3 The typographical design of this poster uses the interesting and elegant font, Trajan, to emphasize the word "Shine." The text is the dominant element of the project. This works great for budgets that don't allow for photography or when you're looking for something a little different. You can blow the text up fairly large and use fonts that have interesting serifs or flairs. This type of technique works very well with a subtle background, such as those in the Juice Drops library. Picture perfect: If your design includes photographs or illustrations, try layering text directly over the image in the negative spaces of the photos (Figure 4). Figure 4 Negative spaces in photos make great places to place text, especially when combined with a drop shadow or glow effect. Headline and body copy in Minion.   It's usually best to avoid covering the main subject in the photo, but areas such as grass, sky or water often make great places to place text, especially when combined with the next tip. Add some glow: When placing text over photos, add a drop shadow or outer glow effect to the text to make it stand out (Figure 4). If the photo you are using is light, black shadows and glows usually work best. Over darker photos, you can use white or gray instead. To add a shadow or outer glow in Photoshop, create a text layer and right-click on the layer. Select Blending Options, then select either Drop Shadow or Outer Glow and then experiment with adjusting the various settings. Tuck your text: When writing headlines for ads or other layouts, trying breaking the words into two or three lines and tuck the words into the spaces created naturally by some letters (Figure 5). Figure 5 Tucking your text creates a professional look and feel.The words 'the seas' are tucked nicely into the space next to the descender of the letter 'g'. You can also try varying type sizes or running some text in all capital letters. Maybe take a key word or phrase from your headline and make it bold, change the color or increase the size. Another tip that works well in multi-line layouts is to let a shadow or glow overlap other text elements. This gives the layout a unique sense of depth. Hand style it: Try adjusting the letter spacing of your text to crunch the characters closer together or spread them out for interesting artistic effects. You can also adjust the space between the lines (leading) to create different effects. Instead of using your layout or design program's built-in small caps feature, try adjusting the smaller capital letters yourself: preformatted small caps effect often don't have the optimal proportion between the large and small capitals. Michael P. Hill is a marketing assistant and Web specialist at FX Group, a broadcast news set design, fabrication and installation firm in Orlando. He also runs a small graphic design agency, Clearhill Creative.     WHAT'S New - Graphics Site     Lots of people ask where I get my images from so let me give you my secret place. These images are free to use in many places. This site has grown over the last couple of years and now provides just about every photo I could want. Just sign up for a free account. http://www.sxc.hu   JOKE OF THE WEEK -  Simpsons   Simply Amazing....Someone has filmed the opening of the Simpson's with real actors.     COPYRIGHT   MP3 Sound Stream - Sound Bites a division of MSIncome.com Published: Brisbane Australia ABN: 22 230 452 354 Subscriber base: 10,000 (25-oct-06) Copyright: MSIncome.com 2006 Sites: http://www.beststreamingmedia.com  http://www.mp3soundstream.com http://www.msijukebox.com http://www.msiwebvideo.com http://www.hifiaudiostream.com http://www.msiprompt.com http://www.mywebsitemanual.com http://www.msivideotraining.com http://www.msifoundation.com   ATTENTION: You are receiving this Newsletter because you requested a subscription or purchased one of our products. If you don't wish to receive any further issues please see the bottom of your email for removal instructions. Our subscriber list is NOT made available to other companies or individuals. We value every subscriber and respect your privacy. 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