Aspect Ratio Calculator
Make sure that your images are the right size.
Aspect Ratio is critical to making sure that your image looks good no matter how it displays. The 16:9 format is the most common format for images on the web.
One way to know that your using the right ratio size is the Aspect Calculator. It's a simple tool that can help make sure that your blog or social media post will look good.
Website Description
This little tool will help you calculate aspect ratios and dimensions for your videos or images. This can also be used to check if you are working at the correct resolution.
Aspect Ratio of 16:9 ("Sixteen-by-Nine" and "Sixteen-to-Nine") which is also known as High Definition (HD) became a leading aspect ratio since the start of the 21st century. It is the international standard format of HDTV, non-HD digital television and analog widescreen television PALplus. Today many digital video cameras have the capability to record in High Definition format, and it is the only widescreen aspect ratio natively supported by the DVD standard.
https://aspectratiocalculator.com/16-9.html
SVG Calendar Templates
Great Calendar to get you started to plan events and holidays
This time of the year people are updating calendars for events and holidays. It's hard to find a decent calendar to use as a template.
Mensch Mesch put together a website that generates a calendar in three formats - Block, Horizontal and Vertical. These are available in Scalable Vector Graphics format, which means these can be created and edited with any text editor, they are scalable and can be printed with high quality at any resolution.
Website Description
With my free SVG Calendar Tool you can create different types of SVG Calendar Templates (Scalable Vector Graphic) for all Affinity products.
https://svg-tools.mensch-mesch.com/calendar/
I like the block format as it's a good starting point for recurring event format.
PermalinkWhatTheFont
Quick find the Font Name on any Graphic
Have you ever encountered a font and wondered what it was? Wouldn't it be great to use it in your design?
WhatTheFont takes the guesswork out of figuring out the font. Simply upload an image with the font and in a few seconds, you'll get the best matching font. You can then buy the font right away.
Website Description
How it works: WhatTheFont uses deep learning to search our collection of over 133,000 font styles and find the best match for the fonts in your photo. It even works with connected scripts and when there???s more than one font in an image. Just upload an image, click the font you want to identify, then check out the results.
For best results, upload a good quality image, and make sure the text is horizontal. We???ll detect the text in the image automatically, then you can click the font you want. You can draw a manual crop box if you want, but be sure that you only draw it around one line of text.
Happy font hunting!
https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/
Some Tips
For the best results, use a high-quality scan of the font.
If you don't want to buy the font, you can always Google the font family name and see if anyone may have a free version available.
However, If you're going to use the font for business, you should purchase it.
There are other websites that offer similar services, but what WhatTheFont better is that they have a very large database to select from.
PermalinkBuzzfeed Generator
A Buzzfeed title generator for creative blog posts
Buzzfeed is famous for the attention grabbing headlines. They try to make any "typical" story into something that is worth reading.
Ravi Parikh figured out a pattern to how buzzfeed create titles and created a page that would generate a "fake" Buzzfeed headline.
Website Description
There's a bunch of common patterns in Buzzfeed titles so it was fairly easy to identify these and create this title generator. I also had some fun by switching out the noun/verb/etc word banks with words that are "themed" so we can see fake Buzzfeed titles with a different flavor.
http://www.ravi.io/buzzfeed-title-generator
What's fun about this is that you can use this to create titles for testing and to come up with creative blog topics.
PermalinkTuxpi.com
Lots of great photo effects!
Photo Effects can really help make the most out of a dull picture. Tuxpi.com has a lot of cool effects that can help brighten up a picture.
This is a good site to use since the effects are very simple to apply and you can mix effects up to add a more dramatic effect.
Website Description
60 Photo Editing Tools
- Change colors, create montages and add text to pictures.
- Crop, rotate and resize pictures with ease.
- Edit photos with many different effects.
- Add picture frames and borders.
- Online photo editor - works directly in your web browser.
Sample Photo
I added the "Photo to Painting" and Focus effect to a photo.
Simple Frame effect
Sticky-Note Generator
A free tool to create awesome sticky notes for images and websites
Sometimes a message stands out on an image with a sticky note. The Sticky-Notes Generator over at Webestools makes it easy to do that.
The Sticky Note Generator has 12 different styles and 59 fonts to make your style unique. It takes a bit to properly fit the image on the note. I found that I had to play around with the Horizontal and Vertical positions to make the text-align perfectly on the image.
Website Description
This generator lets you create free sticky-notes online. First, you have to choose the text, the font, the size, the position, the text color and the background color(can be transparent). Finally, you have to choose the sticky-note style from the following sticky-notes gallery. When you will finish filling the form, you have to preview the result by clicking on the "Preview" button. If the result looks good, you can download the sticky-note by clicking on the "Download" button or you can create a permanent image by clicking on the "Get the URL" button.
Examples
Random Binary Number Generator
Create random numbers to use for graphic designs
The Random Binary Number Generator is a fun way to generate numbers. You can use this as part of a background or design for a blog or social media post.
You can generate a very large set of random binary numbers so the image pattern looks unique.
Website Description
5000 random binary digits. Reload the page (F5) to reset the numbers. Or try the other memory training scripts.
https://artofmemory.com/3.1415926/t/binary.php
Sample Designs Generated
Here are a couple of sample designs that were generated using the Random Binary Number Generator and Affinity Photo and Photoscape X.
Affinity Photo
PhotoScape X
Top Internet Tools of 2019
Great internet tools that were featured this year.
This year we featured a lot of cool internet tools - many of them free. There were some great graphics tools to internet utilities.
It was difficult to pick the right tools to feature for the annual end-of-year wrap-up. But the following tools are selected based on popularity and practicality.
Top 9 Internet Tools Worth Checking Out
- PhotoVisi - A great online collage tool with lots of templates
- BBC Sound Effects - Great sound effects for your Video Collection
- Password Generator - Random Password Generator to help create secure passwords
- clipboard2markdown - An easy way to convert your Clipboard content to Markdown
- Ugly Sweater Generator - Easily create an Ugly Sweater design in minutes.
- Blog Title Generator - Creative tool to help attract audiences to your blog post
- Kapwing Meme Maker - Create cool memes using different layouts and YouTube clips
- Space Type Generator - Create Cool graphics with your text
- My Birthday Hits - Find Out the Number one songs on your birthday
What's New for 2020?
Next year, I'll focus more on a category each month. For example, in January, Internet tools featured will be for creating Blog graphics. February might be internet tools for the home office.
If there are any tools you like to feature here, leave a comment below.
PermalinkUgly Sweater Generator
Easily create an Ugly Sweater design in minutes.
Ugly Sweaters are now all the rage. Companies are having Ugly Sweater contests just to spice things up in the office.
Thanks to Coco Bongo, you can generate an online graphic version of the Ugly Sweater.
The site is fun, and you can come up with a lot of crazy ideas. The images are the perfect size to announce the Ugly Sweater contest on Slack.
Website Description
You are Christmas lover? Or you hate it? Anyway, here is our personal experiment for these Christmas where you can generate and customize as you like your ugly Christmas sweater.
We have created a pixel editor that combines animations, patterns, typographies, and colors, resulting in more than 200M different designs. A GLSL shader transforms each pixel into a sewing knot and thus achieve the most realistic look possible. Finally, we can export the WebGL canvas in animated GIF format to download and share.
The CocoBongo team wishes you a Merry Christmas! ???or not.
Sample Gif
ReSmush.it
Fast Free Image Compression that really works
Compress images is critical for any website project. One of the most popular services is ReSmush.it.
ReSmish.it is a viable replacement for the old Yahoo Smush.it.
This isn't an online drag/drop feature at reSmush it. It's actually integrated into other services such as Wordpress, Drupal, Magento and other CMS tools. The most popular access is via JSON Webservice calls.
If you don't have those services, you can download the command line client from GitHub. It's a quick command line install. However, if you're not familiar with Homebrew, it may not be for you.
Website Description
reSmush.it is a FREE API that provides image optimization. reSmush.it has been implemented on the most common CMS such as Wordpress, Drupal or Magento.
Moreover, reSmush.it is the most used image optimization API with more than 2.7 billions images already treated, and is still totally Free of charge !
Our competitors are Kraken, ImageOptim or ShortPixel, but they're not free :(.
Notes on Testing
The CLI client install from GitHub was very easy. Any missing libraries files were auto-installed - as I didn't have the latest curl or jq. After installing, I moved the resmushit-cli.sh file to /usr/local/bin so that I could run the command everywhere.
The `resmushit-cli.sh` doesn't support HEIC format and files have to be less than 5MB. This is a free service, so I am not complaining.
I am working on writing a Python script for Dropzone so that I can just drag and drop images to be compressed. Once completed, I'll upload the Action here.
PermalinkAbout
I will highlight a fun Internet site every Saturday. The basic premise is to highlight sites that I regularly visit for a variety of reasons. All site recommendations are mine and are unsponsored. By highlighting these websites, I hope to provide value to those who may not know of the sites or who might be interested in visiting the sites. I also want to share the sites that I find valuable in the hopes that others will find them just as beneficial.
Check out all the blog posts.
Blog Schedule
| Tuesday 18 | QA |
| Wednesday 19 | Pytest |
| Thursday 20 | PlayWright |
| Friday 21 | Macintosh |
| Saturday 22 | Internet Tools |
| Sunday 23 | Misc |
| Monday 24 | Media |