tech tools

Veerle Pieters has a fantastic step-by-step tutorial on creating Header Backgrounds in Photoshop. She proves that inspiration can indeed be found in photographs as she creates an awesome header graphic by applying some Photoshop magic to an existing photo. By the way don’t let the formatting of this tutorial confuse you-there is no text on the first page of it, and you have to click through using the “next” link and continue to subsequent pages. Despite this navigational hiccup the tutorial is quite good as it emphasizes a visual explanation process for creating header backgrounds, and it is very easy to follow for that reason.

FreeMind is an interesting piece of free mind-mapping software that is open source and cross platform. Mind mapping is a process of recording your thoughts and ideas and representing them as a diagram. FreeMind is a tool that easily faciliates this process. If you are unsure as to whether or not mind mapping might be useful to you check out this long list of what FreeMind is good for. If you are a person who likes to organize things visually rather than by making lists you really should take a look at mind mapping software generally but especially this Freemind version.

I’ve been playing with it and I think I’m actually going to use it for some tasks that don’t lend themselves very well to a simple list full of bullet points, i.e. more complex jobs that require “nodes” of effort or input from me to get the job done. Go check out the site and you’ll quickly understand what I mean: mind maps are incredibly intuitive.