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- Vector Magic: The coolest thing since sliced bread?
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There are many tools reserved for the lucky few who have the luxury to afford and use Adobe’s Creative Suite. One of them is the livetrace tool in Illustrator. Using livetrace a photograph does not always work out quite that well, it also eats up all of your system resources to perform traces on highly detailed images. To that point, when I first saw Vector Magic, a project from Stanford University, I didn’t think much of it at first. But after using it I can’t help but highly recommend it!
Here’s why
- It’s completely free.
- The software is web based so there is no installation and more importantly the processing is done remotely from my machine.
- It’s incredibly easy, the process is straightforward and the UI guides you through every step clearly.
- Most importantly it works GREAT! I think it can trace photos better than illustrator’s livetrace.
You can even share your images if you’d like. I tried it on one of my photos. You can see the results of a photo I took last week at Harvard Square.
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- Is Flare9.com the Affordable Website Machine for the Small Business Without a Budget?
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If you work as a designer or a developer you might be frequently bombarded with requests from potential clients that go nowhere. The conversation starts out promising, but you soon realize they want to you to spend a couple weeks to develop a custom website for a measily $500 budget. When you return with a realistic number above $500 to say the least your point of contact lets you know “they’ll get back to you on that.” And that’s that. A rather passive aggressive manner of parting ways. The price they can afford is not worth your time, the value you offer is not conducive to what they can afford. What win/win solution can you create in a situation like this?
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- Extra Tasty Drink Recipes
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I recently became aware of extratasty.com; a website that is basically the flickr equivalent for drink recipes. The best part about the site is how well done and professional it is. The company developing the site, skinnycorp, has done an extraordinary job illustrating how you can create an extremely valuable resource for pretty much any topic of content matter.
My favorite part about the site is the quote in the top right corner: “You’re watching skinnyCorp make this site LIVE! Email us with your wtf’s.” That’s classic.