Man On A Street

Make your own flag overlay for profile pics using Inkscape (Part 2) In 2015, flag profile pic overlays were very popular for virtue signalling , especially when tragic incidents happened (French flag for Charlie Hebdo , Syrian flag for the civil war). I was not satisfied with the readily available overlays offered by Facebook because most of them darkened the colors. So I made my own using Inkscape (version 0.48 back then) and posted a howto (which I later reposted here in Blogger). My earlier method was to use overlay colored shapes with 'lighten' blend mode (and lowered opacity for the light-colored areas). That original method also involved cutting out parts of the underlying colored areas if the overlying parts are white or light-colored, otherwise the white will be tinted with the underlying color. Here's the newer method that does not involve tinkering with blend modes, opacity, and cut outs. Step 1. Import your profile pic Preferably one with dramatic lighting (hi...

A friend requested a logo for her home quilting business named QuiltDat! (The spelling, I was told, is a Louisiana thing.) No color specified, no style specified. I like this kind of design challenge – you're basically free to come up with your take on the business name and no pressure for perfection (no time limits, although I think they wanted this quick). The risk, though, is that those who requested it may not like your design. Collaboration is still the best way to design a logo since the ones who will end up using the logo know their business and usually know what they want (or, at least, will have no one else to blame if the design turns out bad since they were in on it). Here's the logo (no color decisions yet – they like the yellow one over gray, although I meant for this to be like Japanese family crests or kamon/mon , where it's usually white or light colored over a darker colored background): It represents a "sunrise" letter 'Q' using q...

I have been reading the medieval Japanese-inspired novel series by Lian Hearn, the Tales of the Otori on Calibre eBook viewer. But I don't care much for the existing covers I can find on Google. They're too ... elaborate for my tastes: I needed to make my own eBook cover for Across The Nightingale Floor . My idea was to have a single emblem—​the heron kamon (family crest) of the Otori as the main decoration on the book cover and graphic accents on the virtual "spine" (changeable to other crests and color motifs relevant to the story for the remaining books). But first, I had to find a heron kamon. The Japanese word for "heron" is "sagi" . I googled for "heron crest" or "heron kamon" or "sagi kamon", hoping to find a suitable and authentic emblem to include in the cover. I found one , a triple-heron done in the paulownia (kiri) leaf style: I wanted the round look of the crane crests like the one seen on Jap...